Dogma and History in Victorian Scotland

Todd Regan Statham

Faculty of Religious Studies McGill University

Montreal, Quebec

February 2011

A Thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

© Todd Regan Statham

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Table of Contents

Abstract v Résumé vii Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations x Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Scottish Presbyterian Church ‘in’ History 18 1.1. Introduction 18 1.2. Church, Scripture, and Tradition 19 1.2.1. Scripture and Tradition in Roman Catholicism 20 1.2.2. Scripture and Tradition in Protestantism 22

1.2.3. A Development of Dogma? 24 1.3. Church, Doctrine, and History 27 1.3.1. Historical Criticism of Doctrine in the Reformation 29 1.3.2. Historical Criticism of Doctrine in the Enlightenment 32

1.3.3. Historical Criticism of Doctrine in Romanticism and Idealism 35

1.4. Church: Scottish and Reformed 42 1.4.1. The Scottish Church and the Continent 42 1.4.2. Westminster Calvinism 44 1.4.3. The Evangelical Revival 48 1.4.4. Enlightened Legacies 53 1.4.5. Romantic Legacies 56 1.4.6. The Free Church and the United Presbyterians in Victorian

Scotland 61 1.5. Conclusion 65 Chapter 2: William Cunningham, John Henry Newman, and the Development of Doctrine 67 2.1. Introduction 67 2.2. William Cunningham 69 2.3. An Essay on the Development of Doctrine 72 2.3.1. Against “Bible Religion” and the Church Invisible 74 2.3.2. Cunningham on Scripture and Church 78

2.3.3. The Theory of Development 82

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2.3.4. Cunningham’s Response 87 2.3.5. Newman and Cunningham on Revelation 89 2.3.6. Summary 93

2.4. Cunningham’s Historical Theology 94 2.5. Cunningham on ‘Calvin and Calvinism’ 100 2.6. Conclusion 104 Chapter 3: Oxford—Erlangen—Edinburgh: Robert Rainy on the Historicity of Church and Doctrine 109 3.1. Introduction 109 3.2. Robert Rainy 112 3.3. Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine 115 3.3.1. Church, Doctrine, and the History of Doctrine 116 3.3.2. Doctrine in the Old Testament 118 3.3.3. Hofmann and Heilsgeschichte 120 3.3.4. Doctrine in the New Testament 125 3.3.5. The Formation of Doctrine 129 3.3.6. The Development of Doctrine 135 3.3.7. Confessing Doctrine 139 3.4. Conclusion 143 Chapter 4: A. B. Bruce and the Ritschlian Critique of Doctrine 155 4.1. Introduction 155 4.2. A. B. Bruce 159 4.3. Ritschlianism and Scottish Theology 162 4.3.1. Ritschlian Keynotes 162 4.3.2. Ritschlianism in Scotland 168 4.4. Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of Chalcedon 170 4.4.1. The Humiliation of the Christ 170 4.4.2. ‘Back to Christ’—Revelation and History 174 4.4.3. Doctrine and Confession 182 4.5. Conclusion 195 Chapter 5: James Orr: the Logic of the History of Dogma 201 5.1. Introduction 201 5.2. James Orr 204 5.3. “Hegeling” and Dogmengeschichte: Three German Examples 206 5.3.1. Kliefoth 206 5.3.2. Thomasius 209 5.3.3. Dorner 210 5.3.4. Conclusion 212 5.4. The Progress of Dogma 214 5.4.1. History and Dogma 214 5.4.2. Religious Foundations 220

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5.4.3. Orr’s Response to Harnack’s Theory of the Rise of Catholicism 221 5.4.4. God 225 5.4.5. Humanity 229 5.4.6. Christ 230 5.4.7. Soteriology I 232 5.4.8. Soteriology II 234

5.4.9. Confessionalization 235 5.4.10. Eschatalogy 237

5.5. Conclusion 242 Conclusion 251 1. Introduction 251 2. Scripture and Tradition 253 3. Jesus Christ 260 4. Church 263 5. Confessing the Faith 268 5.1. Foundations 268 5.2. Fundamentals 271 Bibliography 275

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Abstract

That the study of the history of Christian doctrine and dogma had its

heyday in nineteenth-century German Protestantism is well known. What is

not well known is that theologians in two Presbyterian denominations in

Victorian Scotland, the Free Church and the United Presbyterians, made the

most concerted attempts in an English-speaking Protestant tradition to account

historically for the genesis and progress of doctrine. This dissertation recovers

this half-century of Reformed theological labour and neglected chapter in

Victorian church history through close analysis of how prominent theologians

in these evangelical bodies wrestled with the new, disconcerting idea that

doctrine develops in history.

The story that emerges tells of Scottish Presbyterian theology in the

period c. 1845-c. 1900 coming to recognize that church doctrine was not

simply the repetition of biblical teaching. Doctrine was the church’s

confession of God’s truth—and the church was in history. Nonetheless,

because the historical spirit was far from monolithic in the nineteenth century,

the manner in which theologians from this tradition negotiated their Reformed

and evangelical doctrinal inheritance with the claims of history was markedly

diverse.

William Cunningham (1805-61) rejected John Henry Newman’s

groundbreaking An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) by

reiterating the classical Protestant doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture.

Although subsequent theologians also held this belief, their understanding of

revelation was being historicized. Robert Rainy (1826-1906) drew upon a

concept of “salvation history” then current among conservative German

theologians to argue that doctrine was not deposited in Scripture as

Cunningham assumed; rather, it formed as the church interpreted God’s acts in

history. Rainy’s tacit admission that doctrine, being historically conditioned,

was also historically conditional was radicalized by A. B. Bruce (1831-1899).

In concert with the influential Ritschlian critique of dogma, Bruce urged

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evangelical theology to tear down the “scholastic” dogmas of yesteryear to

rebuild anew on the witness of the historical Jesus. In firm opposition, James

Orr (1844-1913) creatively deployed philosophical idealism to show how

orthodox dogma had developed over centuries as the rational unfolding of

Spirit in history. Accordingly, the system of doctrine maintained in

evangelical Protestantism was largely inviolable.

Along with summarizing some themes common in the diverse handling

of the problem of history and dogma by Free Church and United Presbyterian

divines, the concluding chapter tentatively suggests where their labours

intersect contemporary ecumenical interest in the issue of the historical

development of doctrine.

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Résumé

Il est bien connu que l'histoire du dogme et de la doctrine chétienne a

connu son apogée au sein du protestantisme allemand du dix-neuvième siècle.

Ce qui est moins connu c'est que des théologiens de deux dénomination

presbytériennes de l'écosse victorienne, la Free Church et les Presbytériens

Unis, ont fait le plus d'efforts concertés, au sein d'une tradition protestante

anglophone, de rendre compte historiquement de la genèse et du progrès de la

doctrine. Cette dissertation couvre ce demi-siècle de travail théologique

réformé, un chapitre négligé de l'histoire de l'église, particulièrement par une

analyse attentive de la manière dont d'éminents théologiens des deux corps

évangéliques sus-mentionnés ont lutté avec cette idée que la doctrine connaît

des développements dans l'histoire. Le récit qui en émerge rend compte de la théologie presbytérienne

écossaise dans la période débutant dans les environs de 1845 à 1900 venant à

reconnaître que la doctrine ne se cantonnait pas seulement à rèpéter les

enseignements bibliques. La doctrine était la confession de l'Église Par rapport

la vérité de Dieu – une église située dans l'histoire. Mais parce que l'esprit

historique du temps était loin d'être monolithique, la manière dont les

théologiens ont composé tant avec leur héritage doctrinal réformé et

évangélique que les revendications de l'histoire fut marqué par la diversité.

William Cunningham (1805-61) a rejeté le document innovateur de John

Henry Newman, An essay on the ChristianDoctrine (1845) en rehitérant la

position protestante classique sur la suffisance de l'Écriture. Par contre, même

s'ils partageaient cette position, des théologiens ultérieurs avaient une

compréhension plus historique de la révélation. Robert Rainy (1826-1906)

utilisa le concept « d'histoire du salut » alors en usage chez les théologiens

conservateurs allemands pour faire valoir que la doctrine n'était pas contenue,

proprement dit, dans l'écriture comme le suggérait Cunningham, mais plutôt

elle prit fome à mesure que l'Église a interprété l'inetervention de Dieu dans

l'histoire. Cette admission tacite de Rainy, à savoir que la doctrine étant

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historiquement conditionnée était aussi historiquement conditionnelle, fut

radicalisée par A.B.Bruce (1831-1899). De concert avec l'influente critique

Ritschlienne du dogme, Bruce a poussé la théologie évangélique à mettre en

pièces les dogmes « scholastiques » d'hier afin de reconstruire à neuf sur le

témoignage du Jésus historique. Complètement à l'opposé, James Orr (1844-

1913) a, de manière créative, déployé un idéalisme philosophique afin de

démontrer comment le dogme orthodoxe a pris forme à travers les siècles

comme le dévoilement rationnel graduel de l'Esprit dans l'histoire. Par

conséquent, le système de doctrine maintenu dans le protestantisme

évangélique était en grande partie inviolable.

Tout en résumant certain thèmes communs dans le maniement du

problème de l'histoire et du dogme par les théologiens de la Free Church et de

l'Église Presbytérienne Unie, le chapître final suggère prudemment les lieux

où leurs travaux croisent l'intérêt oecuménique contemporain dans la

problématique du développent historique de la doctrine.

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Acknowledgements It is remarkable how many people had a part in a work that bears my name alone on the title page! With pleasure I acknowledge the considerable debt to the family members, friends, colleagues, and institutions that have helped me out in diverse ways over the course of my doctoral studies. Research was undertaken in several cities across several countries, and the library staffs at The Presbyterian College (Montreal), the Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek (Emden), New College (Edinburgh), and the Department of Protestant Theology at the University of Hamburg were especially helpful. I’m thankful too to Prof. Anselm Steiger of the Fachbereich Evangelische Theologie der Universität Hamburg, who kindly welcomed me as a guest researcher. A number of scholars generously gave of their time to read the thesis proposal or draft chapters of this dissertation. For their comments, criticisms, and encouragement, I’m very grateful to: Torrance Kirby, James MacLeod, Peter Erb, Kenneth Stewart, Michael Honeycutt, and Barry Mack. My father, James Statham, proofread the final draft for spelling and grammar. I wish especially to thank my Doktorvater, Douglas Farrow, who promptly returned draft chapters to me well marked up by corrections and not a few thought-provoking comments. Just as important, the subject matter of this study owes to his challenge to me during my doctoral comprehensive exams that Protestants do not take seriously enough the role of the church in the formation of doctrine. The Stanford and Priscilla Reid Trust, the Cameron Doctoral Bursary Fund of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University contributed financially to my doctoral studies. Their generosity is most appreciated and was very necessary. It was also a pleasure to spend a summer undertaking preliminary research at the Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek in Emden, Germany, as a sponsored Stipendiat under the kind oversight of Herman Selderhuis. Finally, I’m deeply grateful to my parents and family, as well as my in-laws in Germany, for their moral, spiritual, and practical support over the past years. One of my daughter’s very first sentences was ‘Daddy arbeitet books”—delivered with her face squished up against the glass window of the office door. But Sophia and Mio were usually pretty good about leaving me to my books even when there were clearly more fun things at hand to do. And I can hardly express how grateful I am to my wife Annika Völtz for her selflessness, patience, and strength over the past six years. Suffice to say that my doctoral studies could not have been completed without her.

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Abbreviations

C of S Church of Scotland C of E Church of England FC Free Church of Scotland UP United Presbyterian Church UFC United Free Church BDE Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals DDCD Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine DSTCH Dictionary of Scottish Theology and Church History ED Evangelium und Dogma LThK Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche PD The Progress of Dogma. PRRD Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics PT Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century RGG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart TRE Theologische Realenzyklopädie

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Introduction

Dogma, History, and Presbyterian Theology in

Victorian Scotland

“History”—according to Wolfhart Pannenberg—“is the most

comprehensive horizon of Christian theology.”1 But it was not always so.

There was a time when history did not dictate how we may seek to view God,

Bible, church, and world.

Scholars debate and dither over when to date history’s victory over the

western consciousness. There is much to be said for Karl Löwith’s claim that

it was (ironically) the French Revolution, “with its destruction of tradition,”

that exerted a massive “historicizing effect upon the consciousness of its

contemporaries. Thenceforth the time of the present, in contrast to the entire

‘past’, views itself expressly as belonging to the course of history, looking

toward the future.”2 This places the Victorians (c. 1835-1900) and their

American and Continental contemporaries among the first generations to

consciously perceive themselves as “belonging to the course of history.”

Indeed, while popular perception nowadays often holds the Victorian era as “a

stiff, rigid-backed, whale-boned, chin-up, aspidistra age,”3 the Victorians held

themselves as living in an age of unprecedented change and dizzying

development. “It might be difficult to lay one’s finger on any half-century in

the world’s history during which changes so rapid, so profound, so fruitful,

and so permanent have taken place,” summed up a Scottish New Testament

professor in 1889. “Every department of human thought and activity has felt

1 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Redemptive Event and History,” in Basic Questions in Theology, Vol. 1, trans. George H. Kehm (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 15. 2 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Columbia UP, 1964). 3 Horton Davies, “Liturgical Reform in Nineteenth-Century English Congregationalism,” in Scholarship, Sacraments and Service, ed. Daniel Clendenin and David Buschart (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), 105.

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the touch of the new influences.”4 Even that department of thought that

handles eternal matters could not keep aloof from change.

Yet perhaps nowhere else was the “triumph of history” so bitterly

contested as in Christian theology.5 There, history’s eventual victory left many

sore losers. Scholars have often visited the nineteenth-century battlefield sites

of Protestant and Catholic theology: the Bible, where the rise of an historical

consciousness challenged its credibility and changed its interpretation; Jesus,

whom the historical criticism of the gospels made more comfortably human to

some believers but disconcertingly less divine to others; worship, as many

churches came to rediscover (or in some cases imagine) liturgical roots in a

common catholic soil or, alternately, update venerable prayer books and piety

in the name of relevant religion; confessions of faith, as church courts,

periodicals, and seminaries hosted hot debates over how to speak “the old, old

story”6 in an age of bewildering newness.

The churches’ understanding of doctrine was also transformed in the

matrix of historical understanding. As Jean Daniélou has argued, Christianity

came of age under the dominant worldview of Hellenism, where divine truth

was held to consist “in the unmoved eternal order of Ideas.”7 As such,

traditional Christianity—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—has considered

its doctrines to be timelessly true and permanently valid. By the nineteenth

century, however, not only were historians’ vastly improved critical tools

proving beyond any doubt that orthodoxy had a long and painful gestation, the

whole classical mindset was being overthrown by the historicizing of

consciousness. Truth was not static but living, and to be alive was to change,

and to remain faithful to the living truth was to change often.8 Accordingly,

the study of the history of dogma and doctrine found its heyday in the

nineteenth century, especially on the Continent. Efforts then to scrutinize the

4 Marcus Dods, Recent Progress in Theology. Inaugural Lecture, New College, Edinburgh, November 6th, 1889 (Edinburgh: MacNiven & Wallace, 1889), 6. 5 The phrase comes from S. J. Case, The Christian Philosophy of History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1943). 6 A. Katherine Hankey, “Tell me the old, old story” (1866), http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/t/e/tellmoos.htm. 7 Jean Daniélou, The Lord of History, trans. Nigel Abercrombie (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958), 1. Cited in Malcolm Yarnell, The Formation of Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2007), 168. 8 Paraphrasing John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed. (1878; reprint, Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1989), 40.

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origins and development of Christian doctrine have been continually revisited

by scholars to observe their unsettling effects on their own age as well as, in

the case of truly epochal works by Ferdinand Christian Baur, John Henry

Newman, Adolph von Harnack and others, for their value for every age in

either helping the church to distinguish yesterday’s confession of the gospel

from what needs to be most said today or to hear the common chorus in the

church’s proclamation of the gospel over the ages.

A neglected part of this particular nineteenth-century religious

‘battlefield’ finds theologians in two smallish, evangelical Presbyterian

denominations in Scotland, the Free Church [FC] and the United Presbyterians

[UP] (which united in 1900 as the United Free Church [UFC]), making the

most concerted and impressive attempts in an English-speaking Protestant

tradition to account historically for the genesis and progress of doctrine.9 That

they balanced strong affirmations of ‘the faith once delivered’ (Jude 3) and

firm commitment to the central tenets of their Reformed and evangelical

inheritance with an increasing openness to the historical spirit, and that most

kept this balance with assistance from conservative German theology, makes

their engagement with the problem of history and dogma worthy of closer

study. This dissertation retrieves this significant half-century of theological

labor. True, historians have long noted the evangelical Presbyterian tradition’s

frequent appearance at the Victorian flashpoints of conflict between vested

theological positions and the new claims of history. The last decades of the

nineteenth century especially saw controversies over biblical criticism, creedal

revision, and changes to the auditory and monochromatic worship of the

Reformed tradition.10 But as yet no study has examined this tradition’s

9 Peter Toon, The Development of Doctrine in the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), xiv. Toon first turned my attention to this period. 10 On the Bible see especially Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Biblical Higher Criticism and the Defence of Infallibilism in 19th Century Britain (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1987); Richard Riesen, Criticism and Faith in Late Victorian Scotland (Lanham: UP of America, 1988); Gerald Parsons, “Biblical Criticism in Victorian Britain: From Controversy to Acceptance?” in Religion in Victorian Britain, Vol. 2: Controversies (Manchester: U of Manchester P, 1988), 238-257; Timothy Larson, “Bishop Colenso and His Critics: The Strange Emergence of Biblical Criticism in Victorian England,” SJT 50 (1997): 433-458; A. C. Cheyne, “The Bible and Change in the Nineteenth Century,” in Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), 123-138; Iain D. Campbell, Fixing the Indemnity: The Life and Work of Sir George Adam Smith (1856-1942) (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2004). On the confessions see especially A. C. Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious Revolution (Edinburgh: Saint Andrews P, 1984), 60-87; Kenneth R. Ross, Church and Creed

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confrontation with the problem of the historical genesis and development of

doctrine.

This is regrettable on several counts. Firstly, as long as the most

serious attempt among English-speaking Protestants to wrestle with the

problem of history for dogma remains unexplored, our understanding of

modern Protestant history remains incomplete. Indeed, the missing piece

might just prompt historians to look again at the whole picture of Victorian

Protestantism. To say, as one student recently has, that “[t]he issue of doctrinal

development was not of great concern to evangelicals during the nineteenth

century” suggests visiting the children’s sin upon their parents.11 Secondly,

focusing attention on the topic of doctrinal development not only complements

existing scholarship on the nineteenth-century historical criticism of the Bible,

debates over confessional standards, changing patterns of worship, etc., it

integrates it. This is because of the nature of dogma as a window to an entire

religious system. As will become very clear over the course of this study, a

given church tradition’s position on a host of fundamental theological topics—

revelation, authority, ecclesiology, even soteriology—is tangled up in how it

accounts for continuity and change in Christian belief, i.e., whether it admits

or denies doctrinal development.12 This study of the problem of doctrinal

development in the context of Victorian-era Presbyterianism and

evangelicalism in Scotland provides a broad theological vista in which many

of the other profound challenges to Christianity in the nineteenth century can

in Scotland. The Free Church Case 1900-1904 and its Origins (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1988); Peter Matheson, “Transforming the Creed,” in Scottish Christianity in the Modern World: In Honour of A. C. Cheyne, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), 119-131; James Lachlan MacLeod, The Second Disruption: the Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000). On worship see especially Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk, 88-109; Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, Vol. 2 (1961; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); Charles C. Cashdollar, A Spiritual Home: Life in British and American Reformed Congregations, 1830-1915 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2000); Douglas Murray, “Lay Attitudes to Liturgical Change in the Victorian Church in Scotland,” in Frömmigkeit unter den Bedingungen der Neuzeit, ed. Reiner Braun and Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele (Darmstadt and Kassel: Verlag der Hessischen Kirchengeschichtlichen Vereinigung, 2001), 293-300. 11 Steven Oldham, “Alister E. McGrath and Evangelical Theories of Doctrinal Development,” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 2000), 6. 12 Modern German theology has paid such close attention to the topic of the development of doctrine—in sharp contrast to Anglo-American theology—in part because of its absorbing interest in theological foundations [Fundamentaltheologie] and method. See further Matthias Petzholdt/Werner Jeanrond, “Fundamentaltheologie,” in RGG4 3, 426-36.

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be seen as diverse responses to a single challenge: the rise of an historical

consciousness.

Why did a story of such potential interest to the study of modern

Christianity end up in the dustbin of church history? The answer lies with the

interpretative grid typical of the history of modern theology that routinely

over-invests liberalizing trends. When the historiography of nineteenth-

century theology takes as its parameters the publication of Schleiermacher’s

Speeches on Religion in 1799 and Harnack’s lectures on The Essence of

Christianity delivered exactly one hundred years later, what else is to be

expected than the sort of conclusion one commonly reads? “Most historians

would accept the verdict of B. M. G. Reardon that liberalism was the

characteristic Christian theology of the nineteenth century.”13 This simply is

not true. The history of modern Protestant thought is lagging behind the

church history of modern Protestantism. My project converges with a

revisionist reading of nineteenth-century church history that does not put

foremost processes of secularization or liberalization but rather the story of the

dominance of a confident, internationally focused evangelicalism.14 By

revisiting the theological labors of the evangelical Presbyterian tradition in the

Victorian era—the FC and the UPs were consciously and exclusively

evangelical bodies in a manner that the broader Church of Scotland, despite

having a large evangelical constituency, was not—a tradition then at the

13 Fisher Humphreys, Nineteenth Century Evangelical Theology (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1983), 12. Accounts of nineteenth-century theology and church life that reflect this plotline include almost all the standard texts: Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vol. (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966-1970); Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vol. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1972-1985); B. M. G. Reardon: Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: A Survey from Coleridge to Gore, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1995); James Livingston, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: Challenges and Reconceptions (New York and London: Continuum, 2007). My criticism in no way implicates the quality of these excellent works! 14 Signal contributions include Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Ulrich Gäbler, ‘Auferstehungszeit’: Erweckungsprediger des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: C. H. Beck, 1991); Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1991); Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997); David Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2005); John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of More, Wilberforce, Chalmers and Finney (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2007).

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vanguard of international evangelicalism, this dissertation is retrieving an

important component of mainstream modern church history.

This faulty interpretative grid wields a particularly tenacious grip on

Reformed scholars because of Karl Barth. The massive dogmatic system of the

great Reformed doctor ecclesiae so overwhelmed the churches of his tradition

as to silence prior theological agendas. Many Reformed scholars read the

history of nineteenth-century theology with neo-orthodox lenses as the

liberalization of theology culminating in Barth’s revolt during the Great War;

anticipations of Barth are sought among earlier theologians; his theology is

wielded as a measuring stick.15 But the “Barthian captivity of the history of

modern Christian thought” poorly serves Reformed Protestantism in Victorian

Britain.16 The University of Hamburg theologian Hermann Fischer notes that

the Great War was an Epochenwende only for German theology, and even

then really only for German Protestant theology; he adds that the grid that

finds all nineteenth-century roads leading to Barth has been crumbling for

some time among historians of German Protestantism.17 This project, then,

reflects the work of scholars who eschew a conveniently clean break between

nineteenth-century “liberal” Protestantism and a “conservative” post World

War 1 theology.18 It wishes to listen to nineteenth-century Reformed theology

to hear its own voices speaking to the present rather than for the echo of Barth.

15 E.g., A. I. C. Heron, A Century of Protestant Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980); Thomas F. Torrance, Scottish Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999). Notable exceptions to this are Brian Gerrish and Bruce McCormack. 16 I came across this phrase in Michael Aune, “Discarding the Barthian Spectacles, Part I: Recent Scholarship in the History of Early 20th Century German Protestant Theology,” Dialog 43 (2004): 223-32. 17 Hermann Fischer, Protestantische Theologie in 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2002), 13. 18 E.g. Hendrikus Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); Jan Rohls, Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit, 2 vol. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997); Eckhard Lessing, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen evangelischen Theologie von Albrecht Ritschl bis zu Gegenwart, 2 vol. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology without Weapons (Louisville: WJK, 2000). Among English language theologians Alan P. F. Sell has especially influenced my approach, e.g. Theology in Turmoil: The Roots, Course and Significance of the Conservative-Liberal Debate in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986); Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some Scottish Examples (Exeter: Paternoster, 1987); Testimony and Tradition: Studies in Reformed and Dissenting Thought (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005).

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My dissertation tells the story of how “the category of the historical”

challenged and changed the understanding of the form and function of church

doctrine in the evangelical Presbyterian tradition in Victorian Scotland.19 It

does this by examining attempts by select theologians to write historical

accounts of the origins and/or transmission of doctrine during the period

bookended by William Cunningham’s bald rejection of John Henry Newman’s

An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) and James Orr’s

popular The Progress of Dogma (1901). The theologians have been chosen not

only on account of their Victorian stature, but also because each uniquely

represented a “typical” nineteenth-century response to the challenge of history

for church doctrine. The mind of each theologian thus helpfully opens a

window of sorts upon the wider theological, ecclesial, and intellectual context

in which his generation wrestled with the problem of history and doctrine.

The story that emerges tells of Presbyterians coming to recognize that

church doctrine was not simply the repetition of the teaching of the Bible.

Doctrine was the church’s confession of God’s truth—and the church was in

history. As the current of history was felt to quicken and purl with every

passing decade, it was hotly debated whether orthodox and Reformed

doctrinal standards were anchors holding them back from genuine doctrinal

progress or a steadying rudder for treacherous waters. Marcus Dods, professor

and principal of the FC/UFC’s New College, may have wagered that “[t]hose

of us who have been…inculcated with Calvinism are not likely to take much

injury from contact with modern thought,”20 but, in fact, the historical spirit

was forcing Presbyterians to question precisely what aspects of their Calvinist

identity should be maintained for present Christian witness and what were

better left in the past.

The analysis is especially sensitive to three things. First, because “the

category of the historical” in the nineteenth century was itself ambiguous—it

might reference, e.g., the gothic imagination of romanticism, idealism’s march

19 The phrase comes from Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine (London: Hutchison and Co., 1971). 20 Dods, Progress in Theology, 12. However, The Later Letters of Marcus Dods, D.D. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911) poignantly reveal a soul deeply injured by modern thought.

8

of Spirit in history, or simply pragmatic investigation of historical fact21—the

attempts by Scottish Presbyterians in this period to reckon with doctrine under

this rubric were also fraught with ambiguity.

Second, pace the assumption that Newman’s brilliant Essay provided

the touchstone and target for this tradition’s wrestling with the problem of

doctrinal development,22 my study locates the main interlocutor across the

North Sea in the Heilsgeschichte [salvation-history] theories and

Dogmengeschichten [histories of dogma] of German Protestant theology.

Admittedly, the religious historiography of Victorian Britain has preferred to

channel German theology into the emerging biblical criticism in Britain or

liberal movements like Broad Church Anglicanism.23 But once freed of

Barthian lenses, we can clearly see the many Scottish Presbyterians who

studied in Germany during this time with theologians of conservative repute

and note the voluminous translation of pious German theology by the FC-

connected T. & T. Clark publishing house.24 Throughout the Victorian era,

evangelical Germany was providing evangelical Scotland with constructive

resources for recasting and renewing doctrine through history.

Finally, if there was “no North Sea” after the mid-nineteenth century as

far as international evangelicalism was concerned (as Nicholas Railton

recently contended), then the North Atlantic should be considered similarly

21 G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, 1928); Walter Nigg, Die Kirchengeschichtsschreibung: Grundzüge ihrer historischen Entwicklung (München: C. H. Beck, 1934); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1973); Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998). An important work in church historiography that overlaps my study, albeit one limited to America, is Henry W. Bowden, Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1876-1918 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1971). 22 As in Toon, The Development of Doctrine in the Church. 23 E.g. Ieuan Ellis, “Schleiermacher in Britain,” SJT 33 (1981): 417-452; Robert Morgan, “Historical Criticism and Christology: England and Germany,” in England and Germany: Studies in Theological Diplomacy, ed. Stephen Sykes (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1982), 80-112; John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984). My hunch is that the general lines of this interpretation were set as early as Otto Pfleiderer’s The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825 (London: Sonnenschein, 1890). 24 I have documented this in “‘Landlouping Students of Divinity’: Scottish Presbyterians in German Theology Faculties, c. 1840 to 1914,” ZKG 121 (2010): 40-65. For T. & T. Clark’s importance see James Harvey, “The Publishing House of Messrs. T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh,” ET 51 (1939): 10-13.

9

shrunk.25 So even as this study generally moves within the small borders of

Scotland, it keeps worldwide English-speaking evangelical and Reformed

connections in peripheral view as churches in America and the Empire

struggled with the same problem.26

Presbyterians in Victorian Scotland wrestled with the problem of

history and doctrine not in the isolation of theological academia but in the

church—its pulpits, courts, and colleges. They were aware that if dogma did

historically develop, the fact of it would burst old beliefs about revelation,

Scripture, church, and confession. As such, discussion of doctrinal

development within this tradition usually took place in explicit connection

with matters of foundational theology. For this reason, the story starts not in

the nineteenth but rather in the sixteenth century: the old debate between

Protestants and Catholics over Scripture and tradition. The first chapter

explains how the very notion of doctrinal development that Newman tabled on

the agenda of Victorian theology in 1845 was at first resisted and rebuked by

Presbyterians as the latest chapter in Rome’s ongoing attempt to undermine

25 Nicholas Railton, No North Sea: The Anglo-German Evangelical Network in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2000). See especially Mark A. Noll, David Bebbington, and George Rawlyk, ed., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990 (New York: Oxford UP, 1994). Also useful in this regard are Marcel Pradervand, A Century of Service: A History of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1875-1975 (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew P, 1975), and Ian Randall and David Hilborn, One Body in Christ: A History of the Evangelical Alliance (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001). 26 The Scottish Congregationalist A. M. Fairbairn (1838-1912), principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, wrote an important critique of Roman (including Newman’s) and Anglican theories of religious development in Catholicism: Roman and Anglican (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1899). In this regard see Adam Stewart, “John Henry Newman and Andrew Martin Fairbairn: Philosophical Scepticism and the Efficacy of Reason in The Contemporary Review Exchange,” forthcoming in Newman Studies Journal 7 (2010). The C of S’s William Hastie’s The Theology of the Reformed Church in its Fundamental Principles (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1904) was also an important contribution to the topic. Significant contributions by Americans include: W. G. T. Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 2 vol. (1863; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998); H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1884); Hugh M. Scott, Origin and Development of the Nicene Theology (Chicago: Chicago Seminary P, 1896); George Park Fisher, A History of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1896); the multifarious contribution of Benjamin Warfield; Augustus H. Strong, Systematic Theology, 3 vol., rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Judson P, 1907). Relevant secondary literature includes: William Stoever, “Henry Boynton Smith and the German Theology of History,” USQR 24 (1968): 69-89; Henry W. Bowden, “W. G. T. Shedd and A. C. McGiffert on the Development of Dogma,” JPH 49 (1971): 246-265; James S. McClanahan, Jr., “Benjamin B. Warfield: Historian of Doctrine in Defence of Orthodoxy, 1881-1921,” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1988); Grant Wacker, Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (1985; reprint, Macon: Mercer UP, 2005).

10

the sufficiency of Scripture to provide church doctrine. If the whole counsel of

God was contained in Scripture, as the Westminster Confession of Faith stated

(I. 6), what need was there to posit a supplementary source for doctrine in

revealed (oral) tradition—as in the old Catholic theory at Trent—or in a

developing tradition—as Newman’s novel theory posited?

Another Reformed foundation explored in this first chapter is

ecclesiology, particularly how the Protestant doctrine of the “visibility”’ of the

church bred what has been called “the divided mind of Protestantism about the

ecclesiastical past.”27 A sketch of Protestant church historiography and its

Dogmengeschichtsschreibung [writing of the history of theology or dogmas]

finds Protestants sometimes tracing the origins of evangelical doctrine back

through the darkness of the Middle Ages to the relative purity of the early

church, sometimes parachuting those doctrines directly over the history of the

lapsed church into the New Testament itself. Generally speaking, the tension

between a “reformed” or a “repristinated” church reflects a distinction

between the magisterial and pietistic streams of Protestantism. But it is

important to note that even for the former, the historical visibility of church

doctrine was sporadic at best, depending on how faithfully the church in any

given age cleaved to Scripture as the singular and sufficient source of doctrine.

The Protestant habit of mind—magisterial or pietistic—was to hear something

negative in the word “tradition” and to think the development of doctrine

could only be pathological.

As it were, nineteenth-century evangelical Presbyterians drew from

both streams. This tradition was thus highly vulnerable to the challenge of

doctrinal development. On one hand, it had an abiding concern for a

doctrinally precise expression of Christian faith—a sixteenth-century source

described the gathering of the Scottish church for worship as “convening to

doctrine.”28 On the other hand, its understanding of how the church was

historically visible in history was ill disposed to the concept of the historical

27 Kelley, Faces of History, 162. It is not difficult to see how the radical Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone could damn church tradition as just another expression of an invidious synergism. See George Vandervelde, “Justification between Scripture and Tradition,” ERT 19 (1995): 128-148. 28 “1560-61 First Book of Discipline,” in Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1970), 130-31.

11

development of church and doctrines that confronted Presbyterians first in

Newman and then later in the German histories of dogma and doctrine.

And yet, when this chapter turns at last to look at relevant aspects of

the history of modern Scottish Presbyterianism, a few peculiar historical

circumstances come to light that should temper our surprise at finding Scottish

evangelicals at the frontline of this major theological conflagration. First, there

were long-standing political and ecclesial contacts between Scotland and the

Continent that would serve as bridges for various forms of conservative or

mediating German theology to penetrate Scotland and wean Presbyterians

away from their Biblicist ecclesiology and timeless confessions of faith to a

greater appreciation for church tradition and historical contextuality. It needs

to be remembered, second, that the modern alignment of social and political

conservatism with evangelical religion did not reflect Victorian reality. The

eminent intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has well described

Victorian evangelicalism as a “conservative revolution.”29 When even an

ironclad Calvinist like William Cunningham could endorse the “able and

consistent advocacy of liberal principles on ecclesiastical and political

matters,” could the doctrinal status quo remain untouched by the progressive,

ambitious, and questioning minds of this evangelical tradition?30

With this theological-historical foundation laid, the dissertation

proceeds chronologically. The second chapter analyzes and assesses the

response made by William Cunningham (1805-61) to Newman’s An Essay on

the Development of Doctrine. Newman’s theory of doctrinal development has

come to be universally acknowledged as a work for the ages, praised by no

less than the present Bishop of Rome as a decisive contribution to the renewal

of modern theology.31 But most nineteenth-century Christians, Catholic or

Protestant, found Newman to be a disturber of cherished theological

certainties. Cunningham, founding professor of church history at New

College, Edinburgh, and a classical Calvinist divine of no mean ability, 29 Himmelfarb, “The Victorian Ethos,” in Victorian Minds (London: Weldenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 284. 30 William Cunningham, “The Errors of Romanism,” in Discussions on Church Principles: Popish, Erastian and Presbyterian (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1863), 2. 31 Presentation by his Eminence Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the First Centenary of the Death of Cardinal John Henry Newman (Rome, 28 April, 1990), http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/ documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19900428_ratzinger-newman_en.html.

12

attacked Newman on grounds that would have been commonplace in the

seventeenth century, namely, the nature of revelation and the sufficiency of

Scripture. But was Cunningham tilting at windmills? Were the categories of

Reformed scholasticism at all appropriate to Newman’s paradigm-shifting

argument?

The stark Scripture or tradition shape of post-Reformation polemics as

maintained by Cunningham against Newman provided contours in which fresh

questions of the relation of doctrine to Scripture and, therefore, the historical

development of dogma would be set, and against which they would chafe.

This becomes explicit in the third chapter, which considers the thought of

Robert Rainy (1826-1906), a larger than life FC leader hailed in 1895 by

Gladstone as “unquestionably the greatest living Scotsman.”32 Rainy is best

remembered—and not always fondly33—for carefully sailing the FC through

the shoals of biblical criticism and confessional revision in the latter decades

of the century. However, he was also an able historian, and his Delivery and

Development of Christian Doctrine (1874) remains an important investigation

of the nature, genesis, and development of doctrine that discloses the ideals

behind this man of action. It is notable especially for the doctrinal and

confessional implications of his insistence on revelation in history. Rainy drew

upon a concept of Heilsgeschichte then current among some conservative

German theologians to argue that doctrine was not God’s truth deposited in the

church but rather the church’s interpretation of God’s mighty acts in history.

This was a tacit admission that doctrine, being historically conditioned, was

also historically conditional—although Rainy was quick to insist that the

clarity of revelation in history ensured the basic continuity of dogma and the

essential shape of the Presbyterians’ venerable Westminster Confession.

The tenor of the story changes sharply in the fourth chapter.

Alexander Balmain Bruce (1831-1899), FC pastor and professor of

apologetics and New Testament in Glasgow, bolted past Rainy’s cautious

affirmation of revelation in history. Bruce was listening attentively to the

clarion voice of late nineteenth-century Protestant theology: Albrecht Ritschl.

32 P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, Vol. 2 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), 163. 33 E.g. Alexander Stewart and J. K. Cameron, The Free Church of Scotland 1843-1910 (Edinburgh: The Knox P, 1910).

13

Already in The Humiliation of the Christ (1876) Bruce had agitated for

evangelical theology to rebuild from the ground up—the ground being the

historical evangel. His subsequent career as a Presbyterian provocateur finds

him eschewing “scholastic” dogmas of yesteryear to focus afresh on the Jesus

of history, and ripping down the “Church-woven veil” of old confessional

doctrines that was preventing his contemporaries “from seeing the true Christ”

revealed in the gospel testimonies.34 In arguing thus, Bruce essentially aligned

himself with the Ritschlian critique of catholic dogma as the intellectualization

of what had been a largely ethical Christian belief and the dogmatization of

what had been an inner, spiritual faith. And yet, despite burning bridges on his

way ‘back to Christ’, Bruce believed nevertheless that the fundamentals of

evangelical belief would be reaffirmed and strengthened by the historicizing of

doctrine—that is to say, the return to the Jesus of history.

James Orr’s deceptively simple case for the progress of dogma

occupies the fifth chapter. Orr (1844-1913), professor of church history at the

UP Divinity Hall in Edinburgh, then professor of systematic theology at the

UFC College in Glasgow, was an internationally respected theologian whose

corpus, seen in its entirety, was a fresh and forceful commendation of

orthodoxy to an age that seemed increasingly wary of traditional doctrine. A

key aspect of his defence of evangelical orthodoxy was the argument that, “so

far from the history of dogma being the fatuous, illusory thing that many

people suppose, there is a divine law and logic underlying its progress, a true

divine purpose leading and guiding in its developments…”35 We today might

find it somewhat incongruous that Orr utilized philosophical idealism to argue

that orthodoxy had developed as the rational unfolding of Spirit in history, but

such Hegelian-orthodox hybrids were common in conservative Protestant

thought of that era.36 Fascinating too is how both Bruce and Orr reflect the

remarkable doctrinal shift that occurred during the latter half of the century

whereby the incarnation supplanted the atonement as the fulcrum of

evangelical reflection. Both men sought to connect the humanness of the

34 A. B. Bruce “Theological Thought. The Historical Christ and Modern Christianity,” The Thinker 3 (1893): 31. 35 James Orr, The Progress of Dogma (1901; reprint, Vancouver: Regent College P, 2000), 9. 36 Jan Rohls, Philosophie und Theologie in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 489-90.

14

church to the humanity of Christ in such a way as to recast the issue of history

and doctrine Christologically. But which Christ? The “high” Christ of the

Chalcedonian dogma (Orr) or the “low” Christ of the synoptic gospels

(Bruce)? So then, theological pre-commitments like the doctrine of the

incarnation affected the shape of the category of the historical even as they

themselves were historicized.

A final chapter draws some conclusions about the problem of history

and doctrine for Scottish Presbyterians in the Victorian era. But Barth’s

warning has been taken to heart.

Anyone who is occupied today with the theology of the nineteenth century…needs to be warned not to suppose that he can settle it and be rid of it… An explicit judgement, the feeling that for better or worse we can be ‘finished’ with this or that, always means the closing of a door what ought to remain open, the silencing of a voice that ought to continue to speak, and that is not only to our detriment, but also to the detriment of the Church.37

Anyone who is occupied today with the churches of the Reformed tradition—

as the author of this dissertation is—is uncomfortably aware of the nineteenth-

century problem of history and dogma as unfinished business. Contemporary

Reformed Protestantism in the West is relentlessly negotiating its theological

inheritance with a violence that sunders churches. Even fundamental doctrines

are being restated or rejected amidst loud—and by no means compatible—

pleas for the church’s greater openness to modern thought and experience.38

Denominations are wracked by internecine warfare between ‘progressives’

and ‘traditionalists’.

What is profoundly troubling is that Reformed churches appear to lack

the means to adroitly negotiate their doctrinal inheritance—to be both

critically appreciative and properly suspicious of the role of church tradition in

the genesis of doctrine; to avoid idolizing their confessions of faith or ignoring

them; to root identity in past expressions of faith yet be relevant to their own

time and place; to be orthodox and modern. What is needed, simply put, is a

theory of doctrinal formation and development. But such a theory is possible

37 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Bowen (1959; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 9. 38 The Assembly debates of worldwide Presbyterian churches are helpfully tracked at http://blog.gajunkie.com/.

15

only when the horizontal (i.e., the historical) dimension of the covenantal

relationship between God and humanity is taken with the utmost seriousness.

For reasons that shall be partially explained in the first chapter, amply

illustrated over the course of this study, and revisited in the conclusion, certain

deep-seated convictions on the nature of revelation, Scripture, soteriology, and

church have kept (and keep) the Reformed tradition from being, as Newman

put it, “deep in history.”39

“Reformed theology has gifts to bring to the church catholic,” stated a

noted ecumenist. “It has gifts to receive from it as well.”40 One such charism is

historical thinking. This gift can be critically received from the Catholic

Newman, or nineteenth-century German Lutherans, or perhaps even the

Victorian Presbyterians who feature in this study. It would be detrimental to

refuse to listen to past voices as they struggled—whether successfully or not—

to discern continuity in their doctrinal tradition without minimizing the fact of

historical disruption and change, and to maintain doctrinal integrity without

becoming redundant. So, without offering anything so ambitious as a

programmatic guideline for the development of doctrine in today’s Reformed

churches, by giving a forgotten period a new hearing, this study still hopes to

provide some ‘food for thought’ for the faithful formation and reformation of

doctrine in our contemporary context.41

Some brief notes on terminology are in order here, since several of the

key words in the theological vocabulary of this study do not carry univocal

meaning. Dogma, doctrine, creed, and confession are nuanced by church 39 Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed., 8. 40 Gabriel Fackre, “Reformed Ecumenics,” Bulletin of the Institute for Reformed Theology 2 (2000): 1. 41 As such, it complements a small but growing number of recent studies by Protestants of the nature of doctrine. The defining modern study is George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984). Surprisingly, most recent Protestant studies of doctrine come from the evangelical tradition: Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 1984); Alister E. McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine: A Study in the Foundations of Doctrinal Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); I. Howard Marshall, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004); Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: WJK, 2005); Anthony Thistleton, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); Malcolm Yarnell, The Formation of Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2007).

16

affiliation (Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant); ancient, medieval, or modern

usage; and even language—e.g., the German word Bekenntnis covers both

creed and confession. While contemporary ecumenical concerns have

motivated theological discourse to distinguish the few venerable creeds of a

church catholic from the many confessions of a splintered Christendom, the

figures involved in this study reflect their own ecclesial time and place in

interchanging “creed” and “confession”. They also share in Protestantism’s

habitually imprecise use of the term dogma.42

Modern Roman Catholicism defines dogma very precisely: truths

directly contained in revelation—Scripture and tradition—or standing in

necessary connection to those truths, which have been determined by the

magisterium as necessary for Christians to believe.43 What is important to note

here is not only the indispensable role of the magisterium in defining dogma,

but also that dogmas are themselves part of the deposit of divine revelation

and, once defined, are irrevocable. Rome, as one her greatest modern sons,

Karl Rahner (1904-84), summarized, “understands her doctrinal decisions not

just as ‘theology’ but as the Word of faith—not indeed as newly revealed but

as the Word which utters Revelation itself truly and with binding force.”44

Protestants generally hold a dogma to be a doctrine, i.e., a teaching based on

the revelation recorded in the Bible, which a church considers to be a

fundamental belief and, therefore, urges it upon its members as necessary. The

emphasis falls on dogma as the church’s response to divine revelation rather

than as a part of the revelation itself. As such, magisterial Protestantism has

often correlated dogma with confessions of faith. While “dogma” is not part of

traditional Scottish Presbyterian parlance, their confessional doctrines should

be considered as equivalent.

42 Gerhard Kittel, “Dogma, dogmatizo,” in TDNT 2, 230-32; George Lindbeck, “Dogma,” in Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, ed. Nicholas Lossky et al. (Geneva: WCC, 1991), 305-307; Avery Dulles, “Dogma,” in Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 173-175; Eilert Herms, “Dogma,” in RGG4 2, 895-99; idem, “Lehre, II. Systematish-theologish,” in RGG4 5, 201-205; Wilfried Härle, “Bekenntnis, IV. Systematisch,” in RGG4 1, 1257-62. 43 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 88, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM; Decrees of the First Vatican Council, “On Faith and Reason,” 13 -14, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum20.htm#Chapter%204.%20On%20faith%20and%20reason. 44 Karl Rahner, “The Development of Dogma,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 46.

17

For all the Protestant vitriol directed against the Roman understanding

of dogma as mixing up what God says with what the church says, it must be

admitted—and this will become clear especially in the first and second

chapters—that certain Protestant views on the nature of revelation have tended

to conflate their doctrines with revelation, even if the formal distinction

between revelation in Scripture and doctrine is loudly professed. Moreover,

although Protestants have also criticized the Roman concept of dogma for

binding believers’ consciences to the church, when and where Protestant

confessions of faith have enjoyed civil sanction the end effect has not been

very different.

Protestants have written histories of dogma consistent with their loose

use of the term.45 Sometimes the history of theology, the history of doctrine,

and the history of dogma are interchangeable. Usually, however, the latter is

distinguished from the former two as handling the fundamental doctrines of a

given church tradition, even where it is admitted that those fundamentals or

dogmas might not be frozen or final. This ambiguity will be reflected in this

dissertation as Presbyterians in the nineteenth century rethought what was

truly central to the faith and what was peripheral.

Although some recent Protestant Dogmengeschichten second

Harnack’s limitation of dogma to the first centuries of the church—this time,

however, on ecumenical grounds46—the trend among historians is to de-

sacralize the concept of dogma for a social definition as an identity-defining

communal belief. This widens the field of the history of dogma to include

those Christian beliefs that have come to take on a sine non qua status within

some churches (e.g. episcopacy in Anglicanism, pacifism among Mennonites)

as well as entire traditions (e.g. Anabaptist, Charismatic) that have fallen

outside the scope of the conventional histories of dogma.47

45 Good overviews of recent Protestant histories of dogma are Bernhard Lohse, “Theorien der Dogmengeschichte im evangelischen Raum heute,” in Dogmengeschichte und katholische Theologie, ed. Werner Löser et al (Würzburg: Echter, 1985), 97-109, and Wolf-Dieter Hauschild “Dogmengeschichtsschreibung,” in TRE 9, 116-125. 46 Karlmann Beyschlag, Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte, Bd.1: Gott und Welt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987); Wolfgang A. Bienert, Dogmengeschichte (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1997). 47 See Ulrich Köpf, “Dogmengeschichte oder Theologiegeschichte?” ZThK 85 (1988): 455-473; idem, “Theologiegeschichte/ Theologiegeschichtsschreibung,” in RGG4 8, 315-322; Alister E. McGrath, “Dogma und Gemeinde: Zur sozialen Funktion des christlichen Dogmas,” KuD 37 (1991): 24-43.

18

Chapter 1

The Scottish Presbyterian Church “in” History

“The doctrine of what the church is, in one shape or other, has been the most

vexed one in the ecclesiastical history of Scotland.” - John MacLeod1 1.1. Introduction Dogma, maintained Karl Rahner, is “God’s truth heard, believed and

formulated in human, historically conditioned terms by man in this world.”2

And as the dazzling plenitude of historical reality—climate and geography,

culture and language, herd-mentality and personal idiosyncrasy, lex naturalis

and human freedom—affects how man in this world receives, confesses, and

transmits God’s truth, so too does it impinge on this present study of an

episode in the scholarly investigation of that truth’s historical reception and

course. The examination of the historical origins and development of doctrine

by Victorian-era evangelical Presbyterians simply cannot be comprehended

apart from its broad historical and ecclesial context. The theological minds

analysed in this study were steeped in a Reformed confessional tradition,

evangelical piety, and Scottish nationalism. Yet “God’s truth” was heard

differently over the clang of machinery in industrializing Scotland than in the

parish kirks of a more serene age; “God’s truth” was comprehended by minds

still skittish from 1789 and 1815, yet expanding from ideas fresh to their age;

“God’s truth” was being proclaimed in pulpits and from classroom lecterns by

free churchmen who were ambitious and hungry for recognition. Context

helps us to understand why, of all church traditions excepting Lutheranism, it

was evangelical Presbyterians in Scotland who took up most concertedly the

implications of historical reality for church doctrine, at the precise time when

they did so, and how their investigations were undertaken.

1 John MacLeod, Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History since the Reformation (Edinburgh: The Publications Committee of the Free Church of Scotland, 1943), 290. 2 Karl Rahner, “History of Dogma,” in Sacramentum Mundi, Vol. 2, ed. Karl Rahner (New York: Herder, 1968), 102.

19

In this chapter three points of reference will be established and

elaborated to provide context. The points are salient, not exhaustive. The first

pertains to how Scottish Presbyterians understood the relationship of Scripture

to tradition. For a Reformed church, this issue was not tangential to the

problem of doctrine and history but partially constitutive of it. The word

“development” entered the nineteenth century creaking under centuries of

accumulated Protestant-Catholic debate, the categories of which impaired the

initial evaluation of Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Doctrine and

German histories of doctrine. Second, what was the state of the formal study

of the history of doctrine when William Cunningham took up quill against

Newman, thereby initiating formally the issue as a problem for Presbyterians?

Of course, certain prerequisites to studying doctrine historically already

existed among Presbyterians: a frank admission of the church’s ability to err

and of the potential for discrepancy between Scripture and church tradition, as

well as the marshalling of patristic sources to buttress claims to catholic and

evangelical continuity were staples of Reformation and post-Reformation

polemics. But considered as a discipline, the historical investigation of

doctrines was an impertinent child of the continental Enlightenment. It had,

thus, a particular agenda and, upon permeation with a romantic historical

consciousness, carried unprecedented momentum when it penetrated Scottish

theology just before the mid-century mark. The third point of reference is a

sketch of relevant aspects of the churchly ethos of Scottish Presbyterianism,

inclusive of the tradition’s dogmatic heritage and philosophical proclivities, as

well as the eighteenth-century rise of an evangelical movement in the C of S

which begat the UP and the FC. This chapter, which weaves together the

Wirkungsgeschichte of the formative aspects of evangelical Presbyterianism in

Scotland with the eighteenth and nineteenth-century contingencies that

provoked the tradition to engage the historical “embeddedness” of the church

and its teachings, is impressionistic; it is hopefully not recklessly so.

1.2. Church, Scripture, and Tradition

It taxes the limits of sympathy to remove from our ecumenical climate

to the sometimes frigid, sometimes heated Protestant-Roman Catholic

relations of an earlier, fiercer age. Yet a regress to the sixteenth century must

20

be taken along one of the cracks in western Christendom, the relationship of

Scripture and tradition, even as contemporary Protestants and Catholics are

recognizing strengths in each other’s position.3 This issue commands attention

because it constitutes the original problem of the development of doctrine,

even if the notion of development was not what it would become when aerated

by the nineteenth-century rise of an historical consciousness.4 The relationship

of Scripture and tradition was hammered into unyielding shape by

Reformation and post-Reformation polemics; handed down to Presbyterians in

Victorian Scotland as part of their churchly birthright, it provided the lens

through which the “new” development of doctrine would be first assessed.

[1.2.1] Tony Lane has worked out a useful classification scheme for the

various positions interrelating Scripture, tradition, and church found within

church history.5 The “coincidence” view is exemplified by ante-Nicene

theologians like Irenaeus and Tertullian, who, against heretics’ appeals to

secret apostolic tradition and their maverick interpretations of apostolic

writings, insisted that the church possesses the full apostolic kerygma in its

Scriptures as authoritatively proclaimed by the apostles’ successors—the

bishops. Tradition in the sense of extra-scriptural revelation was the

prerogative of heretics.6 What was primarily an historical argument of the sub-

apostolic church—namely, that church teaching was in full agreement with the

apostolic writings being gathered into the New Testament—became a

theological axiom in the fifth century in Vincent of Lerins’ famous

formulation of the coincidence view. The Vincentian canon insisted that since

heretics too can quote the Bible, the church must determine the correct

interpretation of God’s word according to the consensus of the fathers: quod

ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.7 This was a highly

3 For a survey of the field after the Second Vatican Council see Ellen Flesseman-Van Leer, “Present Day Frontiers in the Discussion about Tradition,” in Holy Book and Holy Tradition, ed. F. F. Bruce and E. G. Rupp (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1968), 154-170. 4 See Joachim Drumm, “Dogmenentwicklung,” in LThK3 3, 295-298. 5 A. N. S. Lane, “Scripture, Tradition and Church: An Historical Survey,” VE 9 (1975): 37-55. I prefer Lane’s scheme of coincidence/supplementary/ancillary to the widely used one of Heiko Oberman, “Tradition 1” vs. “Tradition 2”, which he developed in “Quo Vadis? Tradition from Irenaeus to Humani Generis,” SJT 16 (1963): 225-255. 6 Note that Lane, 41, distinguishes between doctrinal matters and ceremonial matters. 7 Oberman, “Quo Vadis? Tradition from Irenaeus to Humani Generis,” 227-29; Richard J. Bauckham, “Tradition in Relation to Scripture and Reason,” in Scripture, Tradition and

21

significant development. Not only must Scripture and church teaching

coincide, the former needed the latter to be understood.8

While the breakdown of the coincidence view is sometimes blamed on

late-medieval nominalism,9 Christian antiquity does disclose a

“supplementary” or two-source theory of the relation of Scripture to tradition,

indicating that the apostolic writings were not able to carry the whole weight

of the mushrooming lex credendi and lex orandi. Basil the Great’s treatise On

the Holy Spirit conjured up the “silent and mystical tradition” of the apostles

as an authority for various practices and beliefs not found in Scripture.10

Basil’s use of supplementary tradition worked its way into canon law, but it

was Augustine’s musings on the practical priority of church authority over

Scripture in the ordo salutis, and his habit of importuning extra-biblical

revelation to validate contemporary church practice that were perhaps of far

greater influence.11 Tradition as a supplementary second-source of revelation

came to plug the gaps between Scripture and church belief and practice.

Indeed, due to a lack of historical perspective the church became the de facto

source of tradition—i.e., what the church teaches or does must reach back to

apostolic times. The supplementary view came to be dominant, and was held

by the majority of the delegates at the Council of Trent (1545-63), and was

reaffirmed at the First Vatican Council.

Now this supernatural revelation, according to the belief of the universal church, as declared by the sacred council of Trent, is contained in written books and unwritten traditions, which were received by the apostles from the lips of Christ himself, or came to the apostles by the dictation of the Holy Spirit, and were passed on as it were from hand to hand until they reached us.12

Reason: Essays in Honour of R. P. C. Hanson, ed. Richard Bauckham and Benjamin Drewery (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), 120. 8 R. P. C. Hanson, Tradition in the Early Church (London: SCM, 1962) 105-8. 9 E.g. George H. Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church: The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation (1959; reprint, Westport: Greenwood, 1978), 22-43. 10 Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 27:67, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (1890; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). 11 Oberman, 234. 12 Decrees of the First Vatican Council, “On Revelation,” 5; http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ ecum20.htm#Chapter%202%20On%20revelation. Debate exists as to whether Trent allows a coincidence view even if the supplemental view came to dominant Tridentine Catholic theology. See Joachim Drumm, “Tradition, IV: Theologie- und dogmengeschichtlich,” in LThK3 10, 153-55.

22

Parrying Protestant attacks on prevailing Roman doctrines and

practices, Tridentine Catholic theology denied any discrepancy between

Catholic dogma and Scripture and affirmed Rome’s unbroken continuity with

the apostolic witness found in Scripture cum oral tradition.13 The position

taken at Trent thus obligated learned theologians to peer hard into the early

centuries of the church to find Tridentine Catholicism reflected there; their

counter-attacks forced opponents to peer equally hard into the intermittent

centuries for alibis to Protestant doctrines and practices. A two-source view of

Scripture and tradition could yield an effective—if historically superficial—

apologetic: the great bishop J.-B. Bossuet’s Historie des variations des églises

protestantes (1688) coaxed not a few into the Roman fold (including a young

Edward Gibbon) by exploiting Protestantism’s discordance as proof that its

variations equalled change ergo error, in sharp contrast to Rome’s upholding

semper eadem the traditions of the early church.14

[1.2.2] Building upon important medieval precursors, the Protestant

Reformers tended to an “ancillary” view of tradition to Scripture whereby

deference to tradition was no longer owed until earned by congruence with

God’s word.15 This stance is fittingly described as the “deparentifying” of the

church fathers and mother church.16 Contrary to the assumption by its foes

(and not a few of its friends), the sixteenth-century battle cry sola scriptura

did not seek to jettison church tradition. Rather, it demanded tradition be sifted

and judged by Scripture, the norma normans of belief and practice, divested of

its quasi-divine status, and put to work as a helpmate for the interpretation of

the Bible and the ordering of church life. Article 20 of the Scots Confession

(1560) declares:

As we do not rashly damn that which godly men, assembled together in General Councils, lawfully gathered, have approved unto us; so without just examination dare we not receive whatsoever is obtruded unto men, under the name of General Councils: for plain it is, that as

13 Wilhelm Dantine, “Das Dogma im tridentinischen Katholizismus,” in HDThG 2, ed. Carl Anderesen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 425-436. 14 Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 1-20. 15 Lane, 42-45. 16 Scott H. Hendrix, “Deparentifying the Fathers: The Reformers and Patristic Authority,” in Auctoritas Patrum: Zur Rezeption der Kirchenväter in 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Leif Grane et al. (Mainz: Philipp von Zorn, 1993), 55-68.

23

they were men, so have some of them manifestly erred, and that in matters of great weight and importance. So far then as the Council proveth the determination and commandment that it giveth by the plain word of God, so far do we reverence and embrace the same. But if men, under the name of a Council, pretend to forge unto us new articles of our faith, or to make constitutions repugning to the word of God, then utterly we must refuse the same as the doctrine of devils…17

Sixteenth and seventeenth-century Protestants were confident that their

“new” doctrines and teaching were really just the teachings of the fathers

dusted off from the accretions of the church’s Babylonian captivity.18 But it is

important to note (especially in future regard to how Victorian Presbyterians

assessed Newman) that Protestants not only rejected supplementary apostolic

tradition, they shattered the ecclesiology at the heart of the coincidence view.

“The essence of the coincidence view is the assumption not just that Scripture

and tradition have the same content but also that this content is found in the

teaching of the church,” explains Lane. “Unlike the coincidence view sola

scriptura did not involve the unqualified acceptance of any tradition or of the

teaching of any church and Scripture remained, formally as well as materially,

the ultimate criterion and norm.”19 According to Protestants, the coincidence

view threatened the Bible’s authority and sufficiency by making church

tradition its mediatrix. The true church, reminds the Scots Confession, “always

heareth and obeyeth the voice of her own Spouse and Pastor, but taketh not

upon her to be mistress over the same” (19). The supplementary view,

similarly, treated Scripture as deficient to convey the full knowledge of God

and his salvation, thereby making the church lean upon a foundation other

17 Reformed confessional documents are taken from www.creeds.net/reformed/creeds.htm. Compare to the 1577 Formula of Concord, 1: “We believe, teach, and confess that the sole rule and standard according to which all dogmas together with [all] teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and of the New Testament alone….” Lutheran confessional documents are taken from www.bookofconcord.org. 18 Robert D. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism: A Study in Theological Prolegomena (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1970), 254-62, 303-4; Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, Vol. 1. Prolegomena to Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 28-34, 50. 19 Lane, 43. See also Bauckham, 123. Oberman, 240-41, errs in thinking that Reformation theologians wanted to revive the coincidence view (“Tradition 1”), even as he rightly warns against uncritically swallowing Protestant rhetoric against wastrel tradition.

24

than God’s word for its life and doctrine.20 Thus, any statement or

interpretation of the church’s councils, doctors, or popes “repugn to the plain

word of God written in any other place of the Scripture” makes explicit that

the church’s teaching does not cohere with the Holy Spirit, the first and

greatest doctor ecclesiae (18).

[1.2.3] That Protestants variously assessed how much authority

catholicity, antiquity, and consensus should carry, and frankly admitted that

even the most crucial church councils were liable to mistakes, even “the purest

Churches under heaven…subject both to mixture and error” (Westminster

Confession, 25.5), did not entail that true doctrine was in any way

contaminated by history. Vera ecclesia ac religio sunt perpetua held for

sixteenth-century Protestants as for Roman Catholics—the difference was over

the norma normans.21 The line of debate drawn at the Reformation over, on

one hand, Scripture’s normative and intrinsic sufficiency and, on the other

hand, the historical and theological integrity of tradition, was subsequently

carved deeper. Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and Gabriel Vãzquez (1549-1604)

were among a school of Spanish Thomists who sought to mute Protestant

accusations of the corruption and change in church tradition through the

sophisticated utilization of a notion of logical development.22 Inferential

development, in which a necessary consequence implicated in or explicated

from revealed premises was deemed as certain as its premises, justified the

church’s role in declaring new dogma without threatening either a fixed

depositum fidei or the immutability of tradition.23 On the other hand, the Jesuit

20 On the lynchpin doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency in classical Protestantism see Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 309-15; Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, Vol. 2. Holy Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 310-22, 340-70; Gregg R. Allison, “The Protestant Doctrine of the Perspicuity of Scripture,” (PhD diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1995), 1-160. 21 Ekkehard Mühlenberg, “Das Argument: ‘Die Wahrheit erweist sich in Übereinstimmung mit den Vätern.’- Entstehung und Schlagkraft,” in Auctoritas Patrum II: Neue Beiträge zur Rezeption der Kirchenväter in 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Leif Grane et al. (Mainz: Philipp von Zorn, 1998), 153-169. 22 For analysis see Georg Söll, Dogma und Dogmenentwicklung, in Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte, Bd. 1: Fasz. 5, ed. Michael Schmaus et al. (Freiburg: Herder, 1971), §6; Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 21-48. 23 The First Vatican Council’s apparently blanket condemnation of doctrinal development should be understood as allowing the logical development of doctrine. See especially Decrees of the First Vatican Council, “On Faith and Reason,” 13-14.

25

Francisco de Suarez (1548-1617) was among the first to concede that the

scholastic notion of logical development was overstrained to account for the

genuinely new in the tradition’s history, or for doctrines that appeared to lack

revealed premises.24 Indeed, Tridentine Catholicism increasingly made the act

of church definition a proxy for an absent revealed premise or shortfall of

historical evidence in an occurrence of development. After Trent “something

new was implemented in a double sense,” suggested Wilhelm Dantine:

A progress of dogma was factually recognized (even if strife exists until today if it should and can be appraised as substantial or just accidental). Second, the church’s teaching authority plays the decisive role in this, and does so increasingly in a unique position of monopoly… Not only does ‘Mother Church’ have an absolute monopoly on the authentic interpretation of Scripture, as the trustee of apostolic tradition she authenticates new manifestations of revelation through the infallible Spirit’s aid.25

The tendency to logical—not historical—development of doctrine was

complemented by the church fathers’ plummeting reputation in the

seventeenth century. Ironically, the slide began in France where medieval

schoolmen had been habitually slighted for patristic studies. The polemic

between Protestants and Catholics (and also Jesuits and Jansenists) over who

“owned” the early church provoked an efflorescence of antiquarian historical

labour. French Benedictines of the St. Maur monastery, Jesuit Bollandists, and

the great Port Royal historian Louis de Tillemont (1637-98) collected

documents from libraries across Europe, prepared critical editions of the

fathers and more accurate chronologies of early church history, and purged the

Acta Sanctorum of legends and inaccuracies.26 Improved documentation

provided ready ammunition for Catholic apologists, proving that their

contested doctrines were embedded deeper in church history than Protestants

cared to admit; but by evidencing a far from homogenous early church,

appeals to the fathers became dangerous. With refined historical technique

showing that the early church fathers were often traitorous to Reformation

24 Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 41-48. 25 Dantine, “Das Dogma im tridentinischen Katholizismus,” 436. See the similar conclusion by Drumm, “Tradition,” 154. 26 Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London: Methuen & Co., 1977), 159-162.

26

doctrines, many Protestant theologians recoiled to a more naked sola

Scriptura.27

Is this process detectable in the mid seventeenth-century Westminster

Confession of Faith, which became the pre-eminent Presbyterian confession

(see 1.4.2)? Drawn up by learned divines intimate with the fathers, the

schoolmen, and the reformers, the Confession nevertheless forwards a fairly

stark sola scriptura. In accord with many Reformed confessions, the locus of

Scripture as the principium cognoscendi is placed first, and the Bible’s

authority for doctrine and church polity is granted wider scope and application

than in other churches of the magisterial Reformation.28 This then seems to be

sharpened by the seventeenth-century Protestant adjustment to sola scriptura.

“Of the Holy Scripture”, the masterful first chapter of the Confession, exalts

Scripture as the singular source of redemptive truth, whose authority depends

solely upon the Spirit as its author and not ecclesiastical testimony (1:4). The

“whole counsel of God” is explicit in “or by good and necessary consequence

may be deduced from Scripture (1.6).” Nothing shall be added to revelation by

supplementary tradition or contemporary revelations of the Spirit because

nothing needs to be.29 As the traditions of the church, understood especially as

the great creed-making councils of the early church and Reformation era

synods, can and have erred (31:3), they may be of assistance in articulating the

rule of faith and practice but cannot stand as that rule. “The supreme judge by

which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of

councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are

to be examined; and in whose sentence we are to rest; can be no other but the

Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture” (1:10). Hence, a sharp disjuncture is

made between a sufficient, self-interpreting Bible and a besotted church

tradition (1.9). Such is the human proclivity to sin and such are the powers of

the church’s diabolical adversaries that the church’s visible continuity in

history is stretched thin, preserved only by the promise of God (25:4-5). 27 Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 74-83. Chadwick observes the effect was even stronger among latitudinarians, who disliked the fathers’ dogmatism and their credulity toward the miraculous. 28 Regarding Scripture’s practical scope note the contrast to the more conservative magisterial Reformation traditions in the Augsburg Confession, 15, and the Thirty-Nine Articles, 20. 29 This conviction still allowed for a sort of development of the church’s understanding of doctrines of Scripture, as will be examined in 2.5.

27

The Westminster Confession’s strong ancillary view of the relationship

of Scripture to tradition characterized subsequent Presbyterian theology. Pitted

against the supplementary view upheld in Tridentine Catholicism, a stalemate

ensued in the debate over Scripture and tradition that was, in fact, only

intensified by the subsequent rise of critical historical scholarship among

Protestants and developments within Catholicism that magnified papal

authority. Thus, nineteenth-century evangelical Presbyterians monitored

Roman Catholicism, feared it, even conceded the lure “majestic, abiding,

undeceivable power” of infallible authority and immutable tradition held for

their doubt-wracked age,30 but did not constructively engage Catholic

theology. Here we have a case of new wine into old wineskins: the venerable

debate between Protestants and Catholics over Scripture and tradition would

set the terms by which the new wine of Newman was first received, as well as

the more potent vintages of German origin, but would prove incommodious to

the historical consciousness applied to the church, revelation, and doctrine

which underlay such theories. Yet, might not the Ritschlian-inspired return to

the Jesus of history from a decadent dogmatic tradition among some late

nineteenth-century evangelical Presbyterians (chapter 4) witness to the

resilient legacy of this earlier debate? And finally, this debate guaranteed that

the notion of doctrinal development would never be of merely academic

interest for Presbyterians but, true to its Reformation-era roots, would

implicate an entire ecclesiology.

1.3. Church, Doctrine, and History

Glasgow FC College professor Thomas Lindsay’s 1875 address surely

startled students, many who would be avidly learning German, and droves of

whom would embark on study-semesters in Leipzig, Berlin, or Erlangen.

Because the university context of German theology estranged it from the

church, “Germany has well-nigh done all the work it can for theology in the

meantime,” he declared. He added: “Germany has failed in a sympathetic 30 E.g. “The Appeal of Romanism to Educated Protestants,” in History, Essays, Orations, and Other Documents of the Sixth General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, Held in New York, October 2-12, 1873, ed. Philip Schaff and S. Irenaeus Prime (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874), 449-66; W. G. Blaikie, “Revival of Romanism,” RARC 4 (1897): 176-78.

28

construction of the development of dogma, just because dogma stands in the

closest relation to the common life of the Christian Church or the Christian

people, and so cannot be sympathetically apprehended or cultivated apart from

that life.”31

Lindsay’s provocation (besides hinting at the clash-to-come in the

1920s between Barth and Harnack) sets up well the following sketch of

Theologiegeschichtsschreibung or Dogmengeschichtsschreibung. First,

Newman aside, the study of the history of doctrine was a German enterprise

until Scottish Presbyterians took up the task. As such, it initially suffered

opprobrium in a time when Britons tended “to smell rationalism in the dots

over the ü.”32 Second, Lindsay’s verdict makes explicit a challenge inherent in

approaching this subject. It would be misleading for me to sketch—as

Germans still do—the history of the discipline of the history of doctrine or

dogma.33 Dogmengeschichte may have been a self-standing discipline in

Germany since the Enlightenment, often pursued with abandon in a country

where confession was prescribed but university theology generally left

untrammelled, but it was not in Britain, nor was it an endeavour of pure

Wissenschaft. Scottish Presbyterians were, of course, affected by the

challenges to Christianity and changing intellectual patterns that drove the

German study of the history of doctrine, but their wrestling with the subject

matter was typically mediated through the church not the academy, and

consequently bore a highly practical rather than theoretical tone. It was stirred

by things like confessional revision and reflection on the mission of the church

in a secularizing society, or was an ad hoc response to a specific challenge to

traditional positions. 31 T. M. Lindsay, “The Study of Church History [1875],” in College Addresses and Sermons (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1915), 85. 32 Georgina Max Müller, The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, Vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1902), 241. F. Max Müller made this remark in 1860. Ulrich Köpf, “Dogmengeschichte oder Theologiegeschichte?” KD 85 (1988): 455, remarks: “One would not be saying too much to maintain that through the whole nineteenth century, and even well into the twentieth century, Dogmengeschichte was a German and Protestant affair.” 33 A format followed by the overviews I am using: F. W. Kantzenbach, Evangelium und Dogma: die Bewältigung des theologischen Problems der Dogmengeschichte Protestantismus (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1959) [hereafter abbreviated as ED]; Gerhard May, “Dogmengeschichte/ Dogmengeschichtsschreibung,” RGG4 2, 915-920; W.-D. Hauschild, “Dogmengeschichtsschreibung,” TRE 9, 116-125; Joachim Drumm, “Dogmengeschichte, Dogmengeschichtsschreibung,” in LThK3 3, 298-301; less so Ulrich Köpf, “Theologiegeschichte/ Theologiegeschichtsschreibung,” RGG4 8, 315-322.

29

For my purposes, then, the path that the critical, historical study of

church doctrine took up until it broached British divinity around mid-century

should be viewed as an assemblage of factors rather than as a chronicle of an

emerging Wissenschaft, although there is, of course, overlap. As in the

preceding section, the ecclesial location of the topic is of the utmost

significance, despite being given often only glancing attention in typical

surveys.

[1.3.1] Scholars date the origins of the historical accounting of church

doctrine from the Enlightenment, when something like a distinct discipline of

the history of doctrine or dogma arose, with a token nod back to the

Reformation. To assume a tacit recognition of historicity as an essential

ingredient to the study of the history of the normative beliefs of the church is

to slight pre-Reformation church history since, then, the church’s doctrine was

like its Lord: the same yesterday, today, and forever.34 Even the Reformation

was an unwitting watershed for considering church and doctrine within the

bounds of history. The flurry of creeds and confessions from this era leave no

doubt that the Reformers and their scions pursued a purified dogmatic

Christianity, including, in contrast to the medieval church, a steep expectation

of a fides explicita among the faithful. Further, the Reformers’ push ad fontes

of the early church and Scripture betrays a historically “closed” worldview

where authority lay in a past golden age and historical existence was flattened

into universal types.35 Roman Catholics and Protestants both claimed to

34 See Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine (London: Hutchison and Co., 1971), 1-32; Karlmann Beyschlag, Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte, Bd. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 1-4; Wolfgang Bienert, Dogmengeschichte (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1997), 11-14. Recognition of the historical transmission of doctrine can be found in the early church (as in Irenaeus’ view of episcopal succession) as can allowance for incremental progress in the understanding of church teaching through a dialectic of truth and error or the exegetical teasing out of allegorical meaning. But in the early church, only heresy was historical. Even the “history of heretics” [Ketzergeschichte], as F. C. Baur described early Christian historiography, typically flattened all heresies to variations of an original abomination. When changes or gaps in past church teaching were detected—as they often were during the Middle Ages—solutions were found outside history: past thinkers were either made accountable to current orthodoxy or, as in Abelard’s sally against the ubi, semper, and omni of the Vincentian canon in his Sic et Non, the issue was made to be logical contradiction not historical change. 35 Eckehart Stöve, “Zeitliche Differenzierung und Geschichtsbewußtein in der neuzeitlichen Historiographie,” in Geschichtsbewußtsein und Rationalität: Zum Problem der Geschichtlichkeit in der Theoriebildung, ed. Enno Rudolph and Eckehart Stöve (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 16-17.

30

maintain apostolic teaching in unbroken continuity with the consensus patrum

et doctorum. The Reformers loosened the historical spirit for polemical

purposes—but this spirit, as Jaroslav Pelikan wryly noted, remained to lay

waste the polemics of both sides.36 This loosening first hastened a refinement

in historical method and, second, wrung out of theologians a concession of the

church’s historicity.

The deployment of historical “proofs” to show that Roman or

Reformed beliefs did (not) correspond with the early church inadvertently

spurred on historical scholarship: university chairs in controversial, i.e.

historical, theology were erected, patristic sourcebooks assembled, and a

sketch of historical pedigree was made requisite to any treatment of a

dogmatic locus. Of greater importance, however, was the refinement and

standardization of method in partial reaction to the lacuna caused by the

Reformation’s unsettling of churchly authority and former religious

certainties. The rise of empirical science, the repression of religious liberties

by absolutist Catholic monarchies subsequent to the Thirty-Years War, a

rapidly expanding world map which undermined the contours of the traditional

worldview all played a role in making Protestants, especially, suspicious of

assertions of certitude which rested on bare ecclesial or dogmatic authority.37

In the pursuit of a universal religion and morality whose grounds were not

subject to church autocracy nor encumbered by sophistic dogmas, English

deists sifted Bible and church teaching through the sieve of human reason,

often progressing from an attempt to harmonize revelation with reason to

doubting outright the very necessity of revelation for a rational religion.38 The

recrudescence of scepticism toward traditional authorities threatened claims to

historical reliability, profane and sacred—Descartes belittled history for its

inability to guarantee self-evident truth—and compelled methodological

reflection on the historical craft to counter such criticism.

36 Pelikan, Historical Theology, xxi. 37 Margaret Jacob, “The Enlightenment Critique of Christianity,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1600-1815, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 265-67. 38 Brian A. Gerrish, “Natural and Revealed Religion,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Vol. 2, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 641-52.

31

As a result, here in the seventeenth century critical, impartial analysis

of sources, proper documentation, and cautious, probabilistic judgement find

their canonization. The remarkable effusion of antiquarian history among the

monks in St. Maur and the Bollandists exemplified this trend (see 1.2.3).

Concern to establish the reliability of human testimony and the possibility of

an historical epistemology in reaction to seventeenth-century scepticism was

taken into the Enlightenment: David Hume and Edward Gibbon are sterling

examples of such critical history, where questions of testimony and reliability

according to universal norms are prominent.39

Further, even if the Reformers believed that true doctrine floated above

historical change, they conceded that the church did not. It was tainted.

Luther’s famous bonfire of medieval canon law in 1520 expressed his

conviction that the apostolic testimony maintained by the early church had

been polluted by mere human teaching over the course of the church’s history.

A student of Robert Rainy recalled a facetious quip made during church

history class that according to the Reformation view of church history

“everything started off well until ‘the Devil shot in rubbish’.”40 Indeed, an

ancillary view of Scripture and tradition is inextricably bound up with a “fall”

theory of church history: the church lapsed from original purity at the point

(according to the rather quivery line drawn by early Protestants) when the

papacy’s ascendancy was undeniable. The result was an ecclesiastical

historiography that, while affirming of its most ancient past, had to cobble

together evangelical continuity from among Christ’s persecuted disciples who

lurked in the shadows of medieval Catholicism.

A concession of the church’s historicity was the sine non qua of the

historicizing of church doctrine. At the same time that deists were whittling

away the dogmatic husk of Christianity by extracting universal truths of

reason and morality from its corrupted historical manifestations, a challenge

arose in Germany of similar effect. Pietism, a movement of renewal within

Lutheranism, blamed the church’s spiritual stagnation on its surfeit of

39 See Dario Perinetti, “Philosophical Reflection on History,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, 2: 1108-17. See also W. H. C. Frend, “Historians Remembered: Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) and Early Christianity,” JEH 45 (1994): 661-672. 40 Robert Mackintosh, Principal Rainy: A Biographical Study (London: Andrew Melrose, 1907), 72.

32

doctrine.41 The institutional, dogmatic churches of the magisterial

Reformation, charged pietists, were not in continuity with early charismatic

Christian communities. Gottfried Arnold’s learned Unparteiische Kirchen-

und Ketzer Geschichte von Anfang des Neuen Testament bis auf das Jahr

Christi 1688 (1699-1700) pushed the church’s fall back behind Chalcedon and

Nicaea, and held out Christ’s simple message of faith and love as still awaiting

rediscovery by Catholic and Protestant alike.42 Pietism de-idolized the

Reformation and the static Augustinian amillennialism that lay behind the

ecclesiology of western Christianity. From the Bible it derived an

eschatological Heilsgeschichte that found reflection in the pilgrim’s progress

of believer and church—individual sanctification and the growth of God’s

kingdom on earth should be considered as the first stirrings of a concept of

organic historical development.43 In Pietism, the church was an historical

wayfarer somewhere in the wilderness between the pure church of the New

Testament and the future triumph of God’s kingdom. This forward-looking

view of history was bequeathed to Enlightenment views of secular progress as

well as Pietism’s immediate theological heirs, evangelicalism and the early

nineteenth-century Awakening [Erweckungsbewegung] on the Continent, as

was its stance toward classical Christian doctrine.44 Both will obviously

require attention later in my study.

[1.3.2] The origins and rise of the study of the history of doctrine is,

therefore, inconceivable apart from the confluence of refined historiographical

canons and the positing of a disjuncture between doctrine and religion by

orthodoxy’s malcontents, pietist or deist. Two consummate examples of this

confluence in the German Enlightenment are the Göttingen historian J. L.

Mosheim (1694/5-1755) and the neologist Halle professor J. S. Semler (1725-

41 For a succinct treatment of Pietism see Johannes Wallmann and J. S. O’Malley, “Pietismus, I. Kirchengeschichtlich,” in RGG4 6: 1341-49. 42 Walter Nigg, Die Kirchengeschichtsscheibung: Grundzüge ihrer historischen Entwicklung (München: C. H. Beck, 1934), 75-76. See also Franklin H. Littel, The Anabaptist View of the Church: A Study in the Origins of Sectarian Protestantism (1958; reprint, Paris, AR: The Baptist Standard Bearer, 2001), 57-78. 43 See the brilliant article by F. W. Kantzenbach, “Vom Lebensgedanken zum Entwicklungsgedanken in der Theologie der Neuzeit,” in Geist und Religion der Neuzeit, Bd. 2 (Saarbrücken: Dadder, 1991), 57-90. 44 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Geschichte/Geschichtsschreibung/Geschichtsphilosophie VIII. Systematisch-Theologie,” TRE 12, 660-666.

33

91). The temperately orthodox Mosheim is often regarded as the father of

modern church history because he set it apart as a distinct field of study, and

because his Institutiones historiae ecclesiasticae antiquioris et recentioris

quickly established itself as definitive.45 Mosheim’s masterpiece proceeded by

way of what was then called the “pragmatic” method, seeking to “connect

each event with the causes from which it proceeds, and the instruments which

have been concerned with its production” according to standards of natural

reason and without recourse to divine interventions (1:10). Despite a claim to

supra-confessional impartiality, his theological position is explicit:

Christianity is commended in the beautiful simplicity of its religion, and its

history reconstructed not according to dogmatic authority but the authority of

the sources (1:13).

Semler, a pioneer in the historical criticism of the Bible, famously

made a distinction between the word of God and the Bible as its rough vessel

clearly indebted to dichotomies of letter and spirit, doctrine and religion, from

a pietist upbringing he never quite shook off, and which he later applied to the

study of church doctrine.46 Semler countered the flippant dispensing of

revelation by rationalists with a notion of progressive, historical revelation.

Free scrutiny of the historical contexts of divine accommodation allows the

recovery of the gospel from its conditioned forms, be it Bible, creed, or

confession. Here is pietism with an edge: highlighting the divergence between

Scripture and dogma, and then the historical variability of dogma and doctrine,

allowed withering criticism of restrictive church doctrine while leaving

Christ’s religion unscathed and the fact of historical revelation vindicated.

Enlightened Christians like Mosheim and Semler were typically

seeking a via media between implacable orthodoxy and radical, revelation-

denying criticism in such a way that ecclesiastical and theological authority

45 J. L. Mosheim, An Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern, 2 vol., trans. Archibald Maclaine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1871). Mosheim was recommended in the Proposal for the Foundation and Formation of Libraries in the Manses of the Free Church of Scotland; with a Catalogue of Books, Revised and Recommended by the The Rev. W. Cunningham, D.D., Principal, and The Rev. J. Buchanan, D.D., Professor of Theology, New College, Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Neill and Company, 1849), a ‘best books’ list intended for circulation among congregations to elicit gifts of books FC ministers could otherwise not afford on their stipends. 46 I am drawing upon Friederike Nüssel, “Semler, Johann Salamo,” RGG4 8, 1204-1205, and Colin Brown, Jesus in European Protestant Thought, 1778-1860 (1985; reprint Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 10-16 [hereafter abbreviated as Jesus].

34

was swapped for a procedure of historical verification.47 But this defence of

Christianity and the factuality and necessity of revelation against base

rationalism worked as a solvent on traditional church doctrine. “The study of

the history of dogmas has its particular and strongest impulse in an anti-

dogmatic tendency… All history of dogmas research has to deal with this anti-

dogmatic tendency, and it is an open question if that tendency does not yet

keep the upper hand.”48 An emancipatory trajectory runs from neologism—

itself heir to a critical posture toward doctrine and a notion of historical

progress found in both deism and pietism—through Lessing and Kant to

Harnack and the neo-Kantian critics of traditional Christianity. It can be

summed up in David Strauss’ famous claim that “the true critic of dogma is its

own history.”49 Hard-nosed historical analysis of cause and effect and the

changes incurred through environment and time, against the backdrop of a

developmental philosophy of history that awaited a future consummation of

truth, would liquidate church doctrine so as to free Christ’s religion.

This point must be belaboured because it set the tone for how

nineteenth-century Britain first encountered the field of study. Manifestations

of this critical stance to church doctrine and a profane approach to the history

of Christianity—related, of course, to its similar effects on the study of

Scripture—raised the hackles of British Protestants against “infidel” German

theology in the first decades of the nineteenth century and prejudiced them

against the study of the history of doctrine.50 In fact, British Christians

typically lost the subtle distinction between German rationalism and

47 See M. A Lipps, Dogmengeschichte als Dogmenkritik: Die Anfänge der Dogmengeschichtsschreibung in der Zeit der Spätaufklärung (Bern: Peter Lang, 1983). 48 Karl-Gerhard Steck, “Dogma und Dogmengeschichte in der Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Das Erbe des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher (Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann, 1960), 27-28. 49 D. F. Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre, Bd. 1 (1840), 70. Cited by Kantzenbach, 185. 50 By no means was this limited to theology, as the unsettling effects in Britain of German classical scholarship indicate. See Norman Vance, “Niebuhr in England,” in British and German Historiography 1750-1950, ed. Benedikt Stucktey and Peter Wende (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 83-99. For the early reception of German theology into Victorian Britain see Ieuan Ellis, “Schleiermacher in Britain.” SJT 33 (1981): 417-452; Peter C. Erb, “Pietism and Tractarian Oxford. Edward Bouverie Pusey, Evangelicalism and the Interpretation of German Theology,” in Rezeption und Reform, ed. Wolfgang Breul-Kunkel and Lothar Vogel (Darmstadt und Kassel: Verlag der Hessichen Kirchengeschichtlichen Vereinigung, 1993), 399-412.

35

neologism.51 Yet, it was not the sole path the study of the history of doctrine

took in the nineteenth century.52 Only the existence of a second trajectory

makes comprehensible how and why evangelical Presbyterians could

overcome initial antipathy to constructively engage the problem of the

historical origins and development of doctrine.

[1.3.3] The concept of history inherent in romanticism and idealism

permitted a re-founding of the history of doctrine as a positive theological

science. It did so by breaking the habit of mind spanning Christian antiquity to

the Enlightenment that considered truth as in the world but not of the world. It

is axiomatic that one of romanticism’s chief traits was the central place

accorded to history.53 The Enlightenment fascination with meta-history was

retained but transformed. Rejected: models of simple linear progress, quasi-

mechanical laws of development, and the tendency to treat history as a mere

vestibule for truth.54 History is an encompassing organism, each moment of

which is intrinsically valuable, the free evolution of which incites awe not

quantification—“that class of cause-and-effect speculators,” crowed Thomas

Carlyle in the 1830s, “have well nigh played their part in European culture”—

the interpretation of which demands empathy not haughty judgement. 55 If

there was a “law” of history according to the romantics, as a slightly befuddled

reviewer in the FC-influenced North British Review noted in 1854, it “is that

there can be no life without free development.”56 The God who cranked

history’s engine, then left it to its own momentum was also rejected. God was

not a static substance but the living presence filling all things as infinite source

51 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Vol. 1 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966), 530. 52 Friedrich Mildenberger, Geschichte der deutschen evangelischen Theologie in 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1981), §7, suggested to me a twofold track of the study of the history of doctrine. 53 B. M. G. Reardon, “Romanticism,” in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 573-579. A good account of nineteenth-century historiography is Donald Kelley, Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003); a classic account is Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1968). 54 Stöve, “Zeitliche Differenzierung und Geschichtsbewußtein in der neuzeitlichen Historiographie,” 30-37. 55 Thomas Carlyle, “On History,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. I (Boston: n.p., 1866), 222. 56 [Anonymous] “Review: Hippolytus and His Age, by C. C. J. Bunsen, 4 Vol. London, 1852,” North British Review 19 (1853): 49.

36

and power. In the romantic view of reality as a totality [romantische

Totalitätsanschauung] God and world history cohered as the incarnation of

Spirit.57 Wilhelm Maurer found a profound “incarnationalism” at the centre of

the romantic view of history: “the incarnation of God—not as a one-time act,

rather as an underlying event—is the meaning of history. That it happened

once in Christ is only a typical case.” As such, God’s creating and redeeming

word could only be heard within “the sound of running history,” as George

Adam Smith (1856-1942), the eminent UFC Old Testament scholar, put it.58

Even though Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) never wrote

church history, the stimulus he gave to the historical study of the church

should not be underestimated. In consummate romantic fashion,

Schleiermacher charged the church to “know thyself”, a task that entailed

retrospection and introspection of the church as a particular woven into the

whole fabric of reality. From his early Speeches on Religion to his mature and

more explicitly church-oriented The Christian Faith, where the church’s

historical existence is an extension of the divine life, history is a hierophant.

Clear application of Schleiermacher’s orientation to history is perhaps seen

best in the programmatic Brief Study of the Outline of Theology, where

exegesis, church history, and dogmatics are all handled under the rubric of

historical theology, i.e. the critical examination of the church’s past and

present faith with an eye to the articulation of the church’s living faith.59

Church doctrines were particular to their own context yet knit to the past

through the agency of the Spirit, for the church received revelation not as a

deposit but in the historical continuum of the presence of Christ himself.

Clinging to antiquated doctrines asphyxiates Christ’s Spirit.60 Indeed,

Schleiermacher considered the study of the history of doctrines to be an

57 Wilhelm Maurer, “Das Prinzip des Organischen in der evangelischen Kirchengeschichtsschreibung des 19. Jahrhunderts,” KD 8 (1962): 265. 58 The phrase is often cited in Iain D. Campbell, Fixing the Indemnity: The Life and Work of Sir George Adam Smith (1856-1942) (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2004). 59 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, trans. W. Farrar (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1850), 26-27. Richard Crouter, “Shaping an Academic Discipline: The Brief Outline of the Study of Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 111-128, is a very helpful assessment. See also Maurer, “Das Prinzip des Organischen,” 266-271. 60 Schleiermacher, Brief Outline, 205.

37

avowedly Protestant enterprise, since they alone took seriously the fact of

historical flux.61

On many counts, Schleiermacher would have been a strong draught for

evangelical Calvinists to swallow had he not been diluted. Philip Schaff

(1819-93), perhaps the greatest promoter in America of this “liberal

evangelicalism” or “mediating theology”,62 lauded “the immortal name of

Schleiermacher” whose “near approach to a truly evangelical theology”

animated an entire generation of theologians to root more deeply his Christ-

centred, church-serving programme in the Bible and the catholic and

evangelical confessions.63 Schleiermacher was mediated in two ways relevant

to my study, both of which will receive elaboration in later chapters.

The first pertains to Schleiermacher’s understanding of the church as

an historical organism sharing in the life of Christ. Of exceeding importance

was a Hamburg Jew, J. A. Neander (1789-1850), who converted to

Christianity under Schleiermacher’s aegis, joined him in 1813 on the faculty at

the University of Berlin, and thereafter established himself as the premier

church historian of his time.64 Pectus est quod theologum facit, Neander’s

motto and key for unlocking the history of Christ’s kingdom, indicates his

affinities both with his great colleague and the Awakening in Germany.65

Because Neander focused attention on individuals who leaned their hearts

upon the redeemer, his historiography was amenable to evangelicals; at the

same time he rejected a “fall theory” through an organic and incarnational

concept of the historical development of the church. He welcomed back into

the fold of the church all who looked to Christ as their saviour—popes, ante-

Nicene heretics, medieval monks—as links in the continuous growth of

61 The remark is found in Martin Cordes, “Der Brief Schleiermachers an Jacobi,” ZThK 68 (1971): 195-212. 62 On Schaff’s mediating program, see especially Gesine von Kloeden, “Philip Schaff- Vermittler zwischen den Welten,” in Reformierte Retrospektiven, ed. Harm Klueting and Jan Rohls (Wuppertal: Foedus, 2001), 219-29; Klaus Penzel, “Philip Schaff: A Centennial Appraisal,” CH 59 (1990): 207-221. 63 Philip Schaff, Germany; its Universities, Theologians, and Religion (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1857), 154-57. Such a sentiment can be found in many of his works. 64 Joachim Mehlhausen, “Neander, Johann August Wilhelm (1789-1850),” TRE 24, 238-42. Born David Mendel, Neander (“new man”) became his name at baptism. He was esteemed for his methodological rigour but especially because he recaptured church history as a theological discipline from cool pragmatists like Mosheim. 65 August Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church, Vol. 1, trans. A. J. W. Morrison (London: H. G. Bohn, 1850), viii.

38

Christ’s kingdom. All Christian history was commentary on Christ’s parables

of the mustard seed and the leaven: slow, inexorable, unpredictable growth of

the gospel in history as the power of Christ himself, which must “purify,

enlighten, reanimate...all which is not born of the Spirit.”66 Sharing in the

divine-human life of its founder, the church leavens the world as the presence

of God, overcoming the opposition between humanity and divinity, grace and

nature.67

Schleiermacher’s vision of the organic historical development of the

church and its doctrines through the enlivening life of Christ in it was

effectively “evangelicalized” by Neander. International students of evangelical

persuasion, among them the American Presbyterian Charles Hodge and John

Cairns, the future leader of the UP, sought out Neander as a “safe” (though by

no means beyond criticism) point of access to German divinity.68 Neander was

not only the most widely read church historian in nineteenth-century

Germany, he was recommended reading for FC students.69

Second, Schleiermacher’s focus on the experience of faith shifted the

ground and source of doctrine away from past revelation to the present church.

Dogma or doctrine described the church’s faith. This too was not easy for

evangelical Presbyterians to surmount: if his conception of the church as

Christ’s historical existence dangerously suggested ecclesiastical apotheosis,

this second aspect seemed to be historically relativizing.70 Yet it too was made

palatable via mediation and put at the disposal of more traditional expressions

of theology, such as by the so-called Mediating school [Vermittlungstheologie]

66 Neander, Light in the Dark Places: Or, Memorials of Christian Life in the Middle Ages, trans. J. McClintock (New York: Lane & Scott, 1851), 152. 67 Neander, General History, 1: 5. 68 E.g. John Cairns, Principal Cairns (London: Oliphant Anderson, 1903), 56-57; A. R. MacEwen, Life and Letters of John Cairns (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1895), 155-58; H. C. Alexander, Life of Joseph Addison Alexander (New York: Charles Scribner, 1870), 1:323-37; A. A. Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge, (New York: Charles Scribner, 1880), 164-66, 181-84. 69 See the Proposal for the Foundation and Formation of Libraries in the Manses of the FC of Scotland. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (1890; reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002) 1:37, notes Neander’s extremely wide circulation among evangelical Protestants. 70 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. 1/ Part 1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), 257-60, likens this “fatal doctrine of the spirit of the Christian community” to the Roman teaching office: both divinized the church and muzzled the free Word of God. An illuminating study is Alasdair Heron, “Barth, Schleiermacher and the Task of Dogmatics,” in Theology Beyond Christendom, ed. John Thompson (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1986), 267-284.

39

and the conservative neo-Lutheran party.71 The Zürich mediating theologian

Alexander Schweizer (1808-88) provides a good example of the turn from an

objective dogmatics to a Glaubenslehre—literally, “the doctrine of faith”—

whereby doctrines are depicted through the experience of faith.72 Schweizer’s

Die Glaubenslehre der evangelisch-reformierten Kirche (2 Vol. 1844-47)

unfolds doctrines from the root consciousness of utter dependence upon God.

Yet, as chapter 3 in particular will document further, mediating

theologians and neo-Lutherans, in accord with the nineteenth-century turn to

the subject, often started from “below”, that is, from the historical experience

of faith, but sought an objective and normative form of doctrine in its

developmental apogee in the classical creeds and Reformation confessions.

That this conservative mediation combined traditional attachment to

confession and Bible with a pietistic yet very modern attention to the believing

subject rendered it intelligible to and important for evangelical Presbyterian

thinking about the historical nature of doctrine, as well as seeming to waylay

some of history’s more bumptious claims.

The philosophy of absolute idealism was also a mediated stimulus for

nineteenth-century Presbyterianism’s awakening to the historical nature of

church doctrine. While romanticism and idealism shared much in common,

theologians and historians indebted to idealism were uncomfortable with the

Schleiermacherian school’s treatment of doctrine as exterior to the religion of

the heart, and with the romantic hesitancy of historians like Neander to impose

order on the chaos of historical plenitude. On the contrary, History may be a

free development but freedom takes concrete form as Absolute Spirit, and that

Spirit is Mind.73 F. C. Baur held Neander in the highest regard, but faulted his

historiography for refusing to let the Idea penetrate into reality apart from

converted hearts.74 Neander, charged Baur, cannot know “if the history of the

71 Hauschild, “Dogmengeschichtsschreibung,” 117-19. 72 On this shift see Dietz Lange, “Glaubenslehre,” RGG4 3, 993-94, and especially Brian Gerrish, “From Dogmatik to Glaubenslehre: A Paradigm Change in Modern Theology?” in Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 239-248. 73 Nigg, Die Kirchengeschichtsschreibung, 197-202. 74 F. C. Baur, Die Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtschreibung (1852; Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962), 201-32. On Baur’s history of dogma labours see Steck, 41-48; more generally

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Christian church is the movement of the idea of the church” or just haphazard

development.75 A church historiography or ecclesiology in which doctrines

and institutional forms were treated as external flounders in the error of

docetism. Indeed, Baur and idealist thinkers raised church history and the

history of dogma to dizzyingly objective heights: “the doctrine of Jesus is not

just the content of Dogmengeshichte, it is, too, the form of its historical

development.”76 The church is the Christus prolongatus: the history of its

constitution and dogmas recount the absolutely necessary stages of the divine

becoming.77

After the mid-century breakdown of Hegel’s thought into various

wings, the conservative wing proved a great ally of the study of the history of

doctrine, certain of doctrine’s importance and confident of its unfolding

progress in the thought of the church.78 It would be of no little importance for

evangelical Scots like James Orr (chapter 5). There are grounds for Harnack’s

grumble that Hegel would always be the ally of theological conservatives!79

Certain features within romanticism and idealism permitted the study

of the history of doctrine to be re-founded as a constructive discipline in the

nineteenth century. This must be emphasised over against the fact that the first

trajectory of the study of the history of doctrine sought to liberate Christianity

by obliterating its doctrines and dogmas. The rejuvenators’ often notorious

reputations as the scourges of faith among many nineteenth-century Anglo-

Saxon Protestants obscures the debt owed to them by some of the very same

theological conservators who tried to defend church doctrine from the

criticism of history (trajectory one) by vindicating it through history

(trajectory two). The liberal-conservative paradigm employed in much

theological historiography misleads, despite a kernel of truth. It should be

remembered that Schleiermacher was widely acclaimed in the nineteenth

see Horton Harris, The Tübingen School: A Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F. C. Baur, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990). 75 Ibid., 248. 76 Kantzenbach, ED, 117. See Baur, Die Epochen, 251-52. 77 Baur, Die Epochen, 252-260. 78 On Hegelian parties see Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Columbia UP, 1964), 53-135. 79 Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. 1, trans. Neil Buchanan (London: William & Norgate, 1894), 35.

41

century, even by conservative theologians who looked askance at many

aspects of his theology, for driving a stake into rationalist religion’s dry heart,

and for renewing interest in ecclesiology and doctrine through his passion for

Christ and emphasis on the church living in history.80 His fingerprints show up

in surprising places.81 Similarly, conservative theologians in Germany and

Scotland who were influenced by idealism saw the Spirit of God unfolding in

the religious consciousness as dogmas and doctrines, which, though perhaps

not fixed and final, were indispensable. A surprising anecdote suggests that

despite significant differences, as far as the issue of the historical origins and

development of church doctrine is concerned, Schleiermacherian romanticism,

Hegelian idealism, and eventually many evangelicals were in cahoots against

the older, rationalist historical criticism of church doctrine. At a farewell

dinner in the 1820s for the University of Berlin Dozent and leader of the

German evangelical movement [Erweckungsbewegung] August Tholuck

(1799-1877), newly promoted to professor ordinarius at Halle, he was feted

by his colleagues Hegel, Neander, and Schleiermacher. “Hegel had called out

to him at the farewell dinner: ‘You go out and give a pereat to that old Halle

Rationalism!’”82

Within a very short span of time, nineteenth-century Presbyterians

encountered two ways of approaching the study of the history of doctrine.

Both were critical and thoroughly historical. Each, however, assumed a

80 E. g., August Tholuck, “Evangelical Theology in Germany: Survey of my Life as a Teacher of Theology,” in History, Essays, Orations, and Other Documents of the Sixth General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, 85-89; Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (1872-73; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 303; Vol. 2: 440; Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1, trans. John Vriend, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 120, 289; Henry B. Smith, System of Christian Theology (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1884), 48; John MacPherson, Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898), 35-36; Eduard Böhl, Dogmatik. Darstellung der christlichen Glaubenslehre auf reformirt-kirchlicher Grundlage (Amsterdam: von Scheffer, 1887), xxiii-xix. 81 Schleiermacher’s implicit influence can be illustrated from two examples from the resolutely traditional ‘Old Princeton’. A. A. Hodge (1823-86) employed the “feeling of absolute dependence on God” in the section on the proofs of divine existence in his Outlines of Theology (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1877), 31. In his important 1908 article “Calvinism”, reprinted in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, Vol. 5 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 353-66, B. B. Warfield (1851-1921) resisted a systematic definition, insisting instead that Calvinism be understood foremost via the religious consciousness as an apprehension of divine majesty. 82 Leopold Witte, Das Leben D. Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck’s, Bd. 1 (Bielefeld and Leipzig: von Velhagen & Klasing, 1884), 451. The Prussian monarchy, at that time heavily influenced by Pietism, had parachuted Tholuck into Halle to counter-balance the prevailing rationalism.

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different understanding of history, and therefore of the historical nature of the

church and doctrine. Both would figure prominently in how evangelical

Presbyterians considered and assessed the historicity of church doctrine.

1.4. Church: Scottish and Reformed

[1.4.1] Through the charismatic leadership of reformers like John Knox

(c.1505-72), a Reformed confession and liturgy and books of ‘discipline’

advancing a largely Presbyterian polity were approved by Scotland’s

parliament in 1560 and again in 1578, but the Scottish church was finally

Presbyterian only in 1690.83 After the threat of Roman Catholicism faded with

the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, Scotland’s church seesawed for a

century between Presbyterianism and Episcopacy. Despite a shared

Protestantism and Scottish king, James VI, who ascended the English throne

as James I (1603-25), the Scottish and English churches inclined to different

centres of the continental Reformation. Already with Knox, Scotland was

linked personally and theologically to the bold reform of Geneva, with its

whitewashed worship, tearing down of time-honoured traditions for the sake

of a church reformed according to the Word of God, and, especially after

Theodore Beza, confident ius divinum Presbyterianism. The protracted

establishment of Scottish Presbyterianism impinges in no small way on my

study.

James, who had been reared by Presbyterians, found the English

church settlement more amenable to his increasingly preening assertion of

divine-right monarchy—“no bishops no king” became his opinion—and a

collision course was set with Scottish Presbyterians equally confident of

divine backing. Through royal ministrations, episcopacy was strengthened in

Scotland, Anglican liturgical paraphernalia introduced, and the Presbyterian

General Assembly suspended. Charles I (1625-49) lacked his father’s tact but

none of his divine-right pretensions. When he rashly sought to further

anglicize the Scottish church, a nation-wide backlash was triggered. Taking

83 This section is derived from J. H. S. Burleigh, A Church History of Scotland (London: Oxford UP, 1960), 188-257; M. H. Dotterweich, “Melville, Andrew (1545-1622),” BDE, 422-424; idem, “Knox, John (c.1514-1572), BDE, 345-349; Andrew Pettegree, “The Spread of Calvin’s Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 207-224.

43

advantage of Charles’ domestic quandaries, a “Solemn League and Covenant”

was declared “for the preservation of the Reformed Religion in the Church of

Scotland, in Doctrine, Worship, Discipline and Government, against our

common enemies.”84 The General Assembly reconvened and clawed back the

Stuarts’ ecclesiastical policies as Parliament marched an army south to support

the English Parliament’s grievance with the king. Oliver Cromwell’s eventual

triumph in the civil war allowed fleeting Presbyterian ascendancy in the C of

S, rescinded upon the return of Charles II (1660-85) from exile. Against

trenchant opposition, Episcopacy was violently imposed; subsequent decades

entered Scottish history and lore as “the Killing Time”, the blood of their

martyrs reinforcing Presbyterians’ primitivist ecclesiology. Only when

Charles’ Catholic brother James II abdicated in 1688 did the C of S become

securely Presbyterian.

An antagonistic relationship to its greater southern neighbour and its

established church was an outcome of the conflict-ridden establishment of

Presbyterianism. England and Scotland, ancient political and cultural

differences notwithstanding, partook of a common church prior to the

Reformation. But Scotland’s early predilection for Genevan reform set it on a

divergent track, and subsequent Scottish theology looked to the Continent for

inspiration and only rarely south.85 When George Hendry asserted in 1937 that

“Scottish theology has to find its true affinity with the theology of continental

Protestantism rather than with that of England and America” he was

demanding nothing novel, despite presumption.86 Reformation and post-

Reformation Scottish divines were often schooled on the Continent or took up

teaching posts there.87 Numerous ministers waited out exile in continental

centres of Reformed Protestantism. Dynastic and political ties between France

and Scotland dated from the Middle Ages: Huguenot academies in Sedan and

Saumur were natural choices for Scottish students. Relative ease of

transportation to and from the Calvinist Netherlands, plus the international

84 “Solemn League and Covenant, 1643,” in Gordon Donaldson, ed., Scottish Historical Documents (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970), 208. 85 The Tudor church looked foremost to Zürich: see W. J. Torrance Kirby, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 86 George S. Hendry, God the Creator (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1937), viii. Hendry wanted to find a hearing in Scotland for Brunner and Barth. 87 A. L. Drummond, The Kirk and the Continent (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew P, 1956), 26-136.

44

reputation of Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht drew many Scots. Scottish

students from the sixteenth into the eighteenth century frequented the

University of Heidelberg in the reformed Palatinate, and academies in Herborn

(Germany) and Geneva. To great effect, as we shall see, Scottish divinity’s

centuries-old habit of looking to the Continent for theological stimulation and

as a means of circumventing Anglican restrictions and harassment was

resumed in the nineteenth-century after a hiatus during the isolation of the

British Isles in the Napoleonic era. Mr. Gore did not appear to have read any

of the German treatments on the subject, clucked FC professor James Iverach

(1839-1922) in a review of Lux Mundi—indeed, a running criticism directed at

the C of E by nineteenth-century Scottish evangelical theologians was that it

was insular.88

[1.4.2] The same 1690 parliamentary act that would finally secure the

C of S as Presbyterian ratified the Westminster Standards—a confession of

faith, larger and shorter catechism, and directory of worship—as the C of S’s

standard of belief, subordinate only to the Bible (see also 1.2.3). At the onset

of the Civil War, the Long Parliament had convoked an assembly of divines

from among the various factions clamouring for further reform of the C of E to

draw up a confession of faith. English and Welsh delegates, Scottish guests,

and parliamentary representatives sat in session at Westminster Abbey until

1648, and irregularly thereafter.89 Although the resulting Confession (as the

body of documents in toto is typically referred to) was quickly adopted by the

national parliaments, simmering political and ecclesiastical differences in the

Puritan coalition that had been arrayed against established church and king

soon boiled over in open conflict, rendering it impotent to effect political and

ecclesiastical unity. Following the Restoration, the C of S, however, kept

88 James Iverach, “Mr. Gore on the Incarnation,” ET 3 (1891/92): 302-07. Similarly William G. Blaikie, “Catholic Presbyterianism,” Catholic Presbyterian 1 (1879): 2. Stephen Sykes laments this insularity in “Germany and England: An Attempt at Theological Diplomacy,” in England and Germany: Studies in Theological Diplomacy, ed. Stephen Sykes (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1982), 146-70. 89 On the Assembly and Standards see Sinclair B. Ferguson, “The Teaching of the Confession,’ in The Westminster Confession in the Church Today, ed. A. I. C. Heron (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew P, 1982), 28-39; John H. Leith, Assembly at Westminster: Reformed Theology in the Making (Richmond: John Knox, 1973).

45

intact the Confession as a statement of faith, standard for church government,

and order of worship.

The Confession indelibly marked Scottish Presbyterianism. After 1690,

all ministers, elders, and probationers subscribed to it as true and worthy of

full adherence. After 1711, subscription was ratcheted tighter through a

formula aimed at squeezing out closet Jacobites or Episcopalians. The above,

now to include university professors, were obligated to “own the same as my

confession of faith.”90 And far from being the preserve of clergy, A. C.

Cheyne maintains that the entire religious life of Scotland between the

seventeenth and nineteenth centuries should be considered as an ellipse

between the Bible and the Confession.91 The distillation of over a century of

Reformed theology, the Confession is Presbyterian, Calvinist, and Protestant

orthodox. Presbyterian polity is endorsed on scriptural grounds and, consistent

with the Genevan origins of this ecclesiology, a prominent place is given to

church discipline. Keynotes of Calvin—or, at least, of the Genevan

reformation—on the law, the civil magistrate, the sacraments, and the

mediation of Christ are joined by typically Reformed treatments of Scripture,

divine sovereignty, and justification by faith. The scholastic method typical of

post-Reformation Protestant theology lends the Confession its measured tone

and enables its precise, carefully wrought doctrinal definitions; its doctrine of

assurance and its bipartite covenantal structure further locate it within

Reformed orthodoxy’s honing of the theology of the Reformation.

Derogatory references to the Confession litter scholarly and popular

literature. The “harsh legalism” of its “narrow, dogmatic Calvinism” forged

manacles—theological, moral, aesthetic—that bound Scotland in

unevangelical servitude. Critics sometimes look for liberation in the breaking

of all dogmatic irons, but more often in the retreat from a sullied Confession to

a pure Calvin.92 Whatever their theological merits, such criticisms are

tendentious and historically simplistic, yet at least underscore (if negatively)

90 Cited by Ian Hamilton, “Subscription, Confessional,” DSCHT, 805-806. 91 A. C. Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious Revolution (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew P, 1983), 4. 92 Thomas F. Torrance’s tendentious Scottish Theology: From John Knox to John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996) and J. B. Torrance’s “Strengths and Weaknesses of the Westminster Theology,” in The Westminster Confession in the Church Today, 40-53, exemplify the Torrance brothers’ influential criticisms of Westminster Calvinism.

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the Confession’s massive impact on Scottish church life. The Confession left a

deep imprint in part because it is a weighty document: it circumambulates then

maps a vast terrain. Through rote memorization the Westminster Assembly’s

popular Shorter Catechism pounded the “whole counsel of God, concerning all

things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life” (1:6) into

generations of children. This breadth, coupled with a conceptualization of faith

that awarded place of prominence to correct belief in pure doctrine, formed a

highly intellectualized and exceedingly dogmatic tradition that insisted upon

notitia of God’s truth and assensus to it as marks of the true church (25:2-4). J.

H. Merle D’Aubingé (1794-1872), a Swiss professor whose racy histories of

the Reformation made him one of the most popular church historians of his

time, marvelled upon visiting Scotland in 1845 at the penetrating grasp of

Christian doctrine by laypersons.93 William Cunningham reminded New

College graduates at their 1856 convocation that their chief task as ministers

would be to teach “correct knowledge of the fundamental principles of

Christian doctrine.”94 A similarity to Lutheranism’s rich confessional heritage

is obvious, in contrast to the more implicit doctrine of those traditions centred

upon a prayer-book or ritual act. Thus it comes as no surprise that

Dogmengeschichte was most avidly pursued in the Lutheran and Reformed

traditions.

The ahistoricism of the Confession is also telling. Despite the

Assembly’s setting in the millennial ferment of the English Civil War and the

Confession’s federal (foedus) theology, which marched along to God’s

covenantal acts in history, any sort of historical awareness is conspicuously

lacking. On the contrary, the Confession’s teaching on the perspicuity of

Scripture and optimistic assessment of the aptitude of human reason to

interpret God’s revealed will evoke a timeless presentation of divine verities,

even if Reformed orthodoxy formally made a very sharp division between

theologia nostra and theologia in se.95 Yes, it is common for Reformed

theologians to smugly claim for their tradition (in contrast to the “closed”

93 J. H. Merle D’Aubingé, Germany, England, and Scotland; or, Recollections of a Swiss Minister (New York: Robert Carter, 1848), 119-20, 122. 94 William Cunningham, Principal Cunningham’s Address (Edinburgh, n.p., 1856), 4. 95 See the illuminating section in Muller, PRRD 1: 221-38. The Confession’s claim that Scripture’s meaning

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hubris of the Lutheran Book of Concord) an “open” posture that denies any

single confession status as a definitive articulation of the revelation of God,

but rather accumulates sundry confessions into a manifold witness. “The large

number of Reformed confessions is evidence that Reformed churches have

always sought to bring the gospel to bear on the specific theological, moral,

and political issues that have arisen in new social and historical contexts.”96

This claim is technically correct but should not obscure the fact that the

Confession, like Reformed confessions of a similar period, neither endorsed

nor was aware of any sort of historical relativism, or that the Confession was

still to be subscribed to as the most definitive and authoritative confession

fallible humans could make in that time and place. The rise of historical

consciousness would affront any theological system like the Confession that

articulated doctrine without explicit regard to historicity or teleology.

A final aspect of Westminster’s legacy pertinent to my study is its

ambiguous treatment of the religious duties of the civil magistrate. One

hundred and fifty years of belligerence between Protestant and Roman

Catholic, then Presbyterian and Episcopalian, was the crucible in which a

peculiar church was forged: resolute and supercilious, steeled by doctrine and

brashly confident of the “clear and perfect notes…by which the true Kirk be

discerned from the filthy synagogue” (Scots Confession, 18). As well as pure

doctrine and holy conduct, an ecclesia reformata demanded jealousy for the

“crown rights” of Jesus Christ. The uncompromising Andrew Melville (1545-

1622) flouted in James’ face that “there are two kings and two kingdoms in

Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King and His kingdom the Kirk, whose

subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord,

nor a head, but a member.”97 Presbyterians outstripped other magisterial

Protestants in exalting the spiritual freedom of the church under the ascended

Christ—with it came fierce intolerance toward the state’s infringement on the

spiritual realm of the church’s King and, as Scottish church history abundantly

illustrates, fissiparous tendencies over perceived trespasses on Christ’s rights.

96 Shirley C. Guthrie “The Doctrinal Task of the Reformed Church,” Bulletin of the Institute for Reformed Theology 2 (2000): 4. See also, e.g., Jack Stotts, “Introduction,” to Jan Rohls, Reformed Confessions: Theology from Zurich to Barmen, trans. John Hoffmeyer (Louisville: WJK, 1998). 97 Cited without reference in Burleigh, 205.

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Accordingly, the Confession cramps the civil magistrate’s power vis-à-

vis the church by an anti-Erastian interpretation of the Reformation’s “two

kingdoms” doctrine (23:1); from its side, the (assumedly) Christian

magistrate’s governing of the realm is protected from meddlesome

ecclesiastics (31:4). And yet, the Confession exhorts rulers “to take order, that

unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure

and entire; that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed; all corruptions and

abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed; and all the ordinances

of God duly settled, administered, and observed” (23:3), and nods at its own

parliamentary-given mandate (23:3, 31:2). This “Constantinian” tension

between the freedom of the church and the civil proscription and maintenance

of religion troubled Scottish church life for three centuries. As shall be shown

in the next section, the ecclesial bodies at the centre of this study, the FC and

the UP, came into being precisely at the point when the civil magistracy’s

religious responsibilities clashed with evangelical exigencies.98

[1.4.3] The 1707 Act of Union that created the United Kingdom has

been widely interpreted as a marriage of convenience necessitated by political

instability, economic opportunity, and fear that occasioned little rejoicing

among most Scots.99 Among the problems soon apparent was Parliament’s

reintroduction of lay patronage—i.e. the right of a patron to select a minister,

or approve or reject the congregation’s or Presbytery’s choice of a minister—

in defiance of both popular opinion and the 1707 Act of Union pledges that

Scottish legal and religious traditions would “continue without any

alteration.”100 Patronage raises crucial problems for a Presbyterian church: in

polity, it deprives the congregation of its right to choose a minister;

theologically, it denudes the spiritual independence of the church; and since

98 T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000 (Allen Lane: Penguin, 1999), 379: “Evangelicalism was at the root of the great schism of the Church of Scotland.” 99 In addition to Burleigh, 286-333, I am indebted here to Jeffrey Stephen, “The Kirk and the Union, 1706-1707: A Reappraisal,” RSCHS 31 (2002): 68-96; David W. Bebbington, “Evangelicalism in Modern Scotland,” SBET 9 (1991): 4-7; Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), and especially John McIntosh, Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The Popular Party, 1740-1800 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998). 100 “1707 Act for the Security of the Church of Scotland,” in Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents, 275.

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the eighteenth-century Scottish gentry were highly anglicized, it raised the

spectre of nationalism. Because the state controlled many churches, and many

more were located on estates, by the 1720s laymen—government agencies,

lairds, or lords—were increasingly exercising patronage over “their”

congregations, protests from congregations, presbyteries, and the General

Assembly notwithstanding.

The course of the eighteenth century saw an “evolving theological

alignment” of three parties, all of whom received the Confession and resorted

to it for their position on lay patronage.101 There was, first, an orthodox party,

dominant in the first third of the eighteenth century, drawing sustenance from

the strong meat of Westminster theology and Puritan spirituality, and opposed

in principle to patronage. Second, there was a moderate party, stimulated by

the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, honouring the letter of the

Confession but forsaking its spirit for latitudinarian religion. Urbane,

conservative, “ostensibly if tepidly orthodox,”102 moderates never achieved

numerical supremacy but through skill and the benefices provided of

patronage controlled the machinery of the Assembly and the university chairs

for much of the century. The moderates made peace with the patronage system

and deployed it to ensure stability in church and state, as well as to fence the

pulpit from that bane of enlightened religion—spiritual “enthusiasm”. Finally,

the seed of an evangelical party planted in the so-called Marrow Controversy

by the parish minister Thomas Boston and others blossomed, the result being

an intelligent and irenic evangelicalism as the dominant religious influence in

the latter decades of the eighteenth century.103 Scottish evangelicals tapped

into the nascent trans-Atlantic movement that connected continental Pietism,

Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening in America, and the evangelists

George Whitefield and John Wesley.104 Cross-centred, Bible-based, busy to

101 The phrase and taxonomy are McIntosh’s. 102 Burleigh, 303. 103 See David C. Lachman, The Marrow Controversy. 1718-1723: An Historical and Theological Analysis (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1983). 104 On the international origins of evangelicalism see Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2004); Erich Geldbach, “‘Evangelisch’, ‘Evangelikal’ and Pietism: Some Remarks on Early Evangelicalism and Globalization from a German Perspective,” in Global Faith: Essays on Evangelicalism and Globalization, eds. Mark Hutchison and O. Kalu (Sydney: Centre for the Study of Australian Christianity, 1998), 156-180; W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992).

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redeem both sinful society and souls, evangelicals combined traditional

Protestant belief with openness to fresh movements of the Spirit and

enlightened commitments to toleration, inductive reason, and free inquiry—

what one English Congregationalist called “a disinterested love of truth”105—

which British Dissent and its American children had long owed to Locke, even

if their confidence in reason seemed to jar with the severe anthropology of

their professed theology.

While patronage was not the issue per se dividing these groups, it

became the catalyst for exacerbating theological differences over ecclesiology,

the human predicament, and the nature of salvation. While many orthodox and

evangelicals had blended together by the end of the eighteenth century into the

“popular” party in the C of S, other evangelicals abandoned the establishment

or were pushed out. One needs a scorecard to keep track of eighteenth-century

secessions from the state church.106 The first originated in the 1733 deposition

of Ebenezer Erskine for preaching Christ’s sole headship of the church in

response to the trumping of congregationally-chosen ministers by lay patrons.

A second major secession, the Relief Church, originated as an evangelical

clarion call for religious liberty. It formed the vanguard opposing slavery and

promoting foreign missions in Scotland; its emphasis on the church as a

collegia pietatis, over against the longstanding, inclusive notion of the C of S

as the covenant nation at worship, was distinctly modern. The Relief Church

was the first Presbyterian body in Scotland to endorse “voluntaryism”, a

conviction they carried into their 1847 union with the USC as the UPC, and a

fact that necessitated revision of the Confession.

This instance of confessional amendment cannot be overlooked, even if

the tweaking of a matter like the power of the civil magistrate lacks the gravity

of a Nicene article.107 After all, the methodology of the Confession, noted

above, does not officially permit a gradation between central and peripheral

doctrines, nor did the pretensions of divine right [ius divinum] Presbyterians

105 Robert W. Dale, The Old Evangelicalism and the New (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1889), 19. 106 A helpful one is Kenneth R. Ross, “Secessions,” DSCHT, 764-65. 107 See Ian Hamilton, The Erosion of Calvinist Orthodoxy: Seceders and Subscription in Scottish Presbyterianism (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1990); idem, “Subscription, Confessional,” DSCHT, 805-806.

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that held every iota of their polity as divinely ordained.108 There is no evidence

of a covert laxity ever granted elders and ministers to “marginal” doctrines

when subscribing to the whole Confession as containing the truths of God. To

amend any article was to concede that the church’s standard belonged to

another time and place, and that its doctrinal formulations could become

redundant or were, in hindsight, always erroneous. This was something all

Presbyterians theoretically admitted, but it was these secessionist bodies,

renowned for their strict Reformed doctrine and strenuous cultivation of

personal holiness, who, feeling the prick of the state’s power of the sword,

were the first to amend the Confession so as to sheath that sword. Over several

decades, belief in state toleration of religion and liberty of conscience

germinated in the secessionist churches, culminating in calls for the separation

of church and state. The tacit recognition that the Confession’s teaching on

this matter was antiquated because the church’s understanding of the Bible

had progressed beyond the seventeenth century mind crystallized into softer

formulas of confessional subscription in the USC in 1820 and, when it merged

with the Relief Church in 1847, the UP.109

But an adversarial relationship to the civil magistrate was only the

efficient cause of confessional revision. Evangelicalism was the material

cause. The secessionist churches were steeped in evangelicalism and

appropriated its valuation of toleration, tendency to position itself around pan-

Protestant essentials, and bibliocentricism. The latter, crucially, could disarm

confessions and doctrine if they were perceived to obscure the priority of

Biblical teaching or hinder the “gospel call”. Accordingly, a tension between

Reformed confession and evangelical sola scriptura runs throughout the

history of the USC and UP, which occasionally erupted in formal

investigations and heresy trials. The secessionist churches shared in the early

nineteenth-century Europe-wide evangelical retrenchment of the doctrine of

Scripture in the face of attacks on the Bible’s inspiration, historical veracity,

108 A. Craig Troxel, “‘Divine Right’ Presbyterianism and Church Power,” (PhD diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1998), 91-92. 109 David Woodside, The Soul of a Scottish Church; or, The Contribution of the United Presbyterian Church to Scottish Life and Religion (Edinburgh: The United Free Church of Scotland, n.d); Stewart D. Gill, “United Presbyterian Church, 1847-1900,” DSCHT, 839-40.

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and doctrines.110 Against Scripture’s cultured despisers, evangelicals now

strongly emphasized the Bible’s plenary inspiration and full inerrancy in fact

and teaching. Their counter-offensive, surprisingly, used the same arsenal

claimed by their rationalist opponents—a commitment to free and impartial

inquiry—that hastened a looser stance toward creeds and confessions of faith.

As a nineteenth-century evangelical argued: “The gentle—the violent—

pressure which used to be put on reluctant texts by theologians and preachers

of all creeds to make them say the right thing or to prevent them from saying

the wrong, was as bad as the gentle or violent pressure put on obstinate

heretics by the inquisition with precisely the same object.”111

While the tension detected in the secessionist bodies between

evangelicalism’s inductive approach to Scripture and the inherited

confessional system should not be overplayed so as to cast doubt on their (and,

later, the UP’s) essentially traditional and Reformed convictions, it does figure

in this study.112 Evangelicals invested the Bible with practical—not just

theoretical—authority over confession and doctrine. The fourth chapter, in

particular, will show how this trait would be heightened in reaction to the

bloating of the importance of early church dogma by the Tractarians and

Newman at the expense of Scripture’s clarity and sufficiency, by the profound

impact of the Moody Revival (1873-74) in transcending denominational and

confessional particularity, and at century’s end, lent unprecedented

sophistication and historical credibility by a surprising ally—Albrecht Ritschl.

In this vein, the evangelical Congregationalist and Ritschlian Robert

Mackintosh could criticize Martin Kähler’s dictum that ‘the Jesus of history is

the Christ of faith’ as playing into the hands of the high church party!113

110 Kenneth J. Stewart, Restoring the Reformation: British Evangelicals and the Francophone ‘Reveil’ 1816-1849 (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 1996) reconstructs the Scottish-Continental evangelical bridge, especially concerning the Bible. See also David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hymen, 1989), 75-77. 111 Dale, The Old Evangelicalism and the New, 25-26. 112 Even the softened subscription formulas in the secessionist churches were very similar to the ones held by conservative American Presbyterians. See William Barker, “System Subscription,” WTJ 63 (2001): 1-14. 113 Robert Mackintosh, “Historical,” in DCG, Vol. 1, ed. James Hastings (New York: Scribners, 1906), 726-728.

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[1.4.4] Evangelical vitriol against rationalism, as in the nineteenth-

century clash in the C of S between populars and moderates, disguises

evangelicalism’s deep debt to the Enlightenment. Evangelicals reaped the

harvest of the Enlightenment’s remarkable blooming in Scotland, for, far from

being an intellectual backwater in the eighteenth century,

Scottish universities and the coteries of cultivated men in the bigger towns were lively intellectual centres at a time when universities in Europe, and especially the two torpid seminaries of Oxford and Cambridge, were in their doldrums. At Edinburgh, in particular, with its High Courts of Justice and a well-educated bar, a good university with many able teachers, three libraries which in some sense were ‘public’ and in all senses were remarkably well furnished with books of scholarship, we have a centre of research facilities without its equal in contemporary Europe.114

Besides commitment to religious toleration and free inquiry, evangelical

Presbyterians were decisively shaped by the “Commonsense philosophy” or

“Scottish Realism” initiated by Thomas Reid (1710-96), moderate C of S

minister and professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and developed by his

disciples.115 They resisted Locke’s view—radicalized by Hume—that the

mind knows only sensations of external reality, insisting instead that the

mind’s constitution permits knowledge of things as they really are.

Commonsense discloses innate beliefs, the denial of which would force us to

act and think absurdly, as if our perceptions did not give us the world as it

really is. These basic beliefs include God’s existence, the reality of the world,

and the relation between cause and effect. Hume’s epistemological scepticism

regarding the reliability of our perceptions of cause and effect or the

believability of God, and Kant’s metaphysical agnosticism were rejected. In

addition, Scottish Realism extended intuition of reality to include a universal

moral sense and the universal applicability of Bacon’s inductive method

whereby “truths about consciousness, the world, or religion must be built by a

strict induction from irreducible facts of experience.”116

114 Hays, Annalists and Historians, 176. 115 Paul Helm, “Scottish Realism,” DSCHT, 759-60. 116 Mark A. Noll, “Common Sense Tradition and American Evangelical Thought,” AmQ 37 (1985): 222-23. See also Michael Gauvreau, “The Empire of Evangelicalism: Varieties of Common Sense in Scotland, Canada, and the United States,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990, ed. Mark A. Noll et al. (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), 219-252.

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Despite origins that evangelicals could consider rather suspect, Scottish

Realism became the stock intellectual property of much nineteenth-century

evangelicalism, offering a working philosophy that justified traditional theism,

established a common morality, and accommodated scientific discovery. And

despite elitist origins in a moderate party frightened by any whiff of

subversion of state or church, Scottish Realism lent itself to sedition. Its appeal

to ‘everyman’ commonsense played a key role in providing intellectual

justification for the American Revolution, and its ascendancy in post-

Revolutionary intellectual circles owed much to its ability to provide

foundations for law, morality, and religion as the old order and verities were

being swept away or cast under suspicion.117 In this regard, Scottish Realism

was well suited for evangelical appropriation: it buttressed orthodox doctrine

and gave due respect to revelation and reason, but also relocated authority

away from traditional church hierarchies and creeds to the democratic intellect

and universal facts of experience.

“Evangelicalized” Scottish Realism predisposed Victorian

Presbyterians against the notion of the historical development of doctrine in

two ways. First, it strengthened Scottish theology’s traditional perspective on

Scripture and tradition, as well as its ahistorical theological method. Inductive

method reinforced the sufficiency of the biblical text as the singular source for

doctrine, from which revealed “facts” were mined out of the Bible and then

systematized. James Buchanan’s opening lecture at the 1851 inauguration of

New College’s new premises compared a botanist who tramps over a meadow

to locate then classify flowers to a theologian who classifies doctrines after

inductively studying Scripture.118 Because this method presupposed the

universal, intuitive faculty of the mind, gleaned facts, e.g. doctrines, were as

fixed as the scientist’s specimens. George Smeaton, launching his initial

lecture at the Aberdeen FC College with a timely quote from Bacon, attacked

the “Schleiermacher school” for putting doctrine at the mercy of the Spirit’s 117 George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture. The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870-1925 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), 14-18. 118 James Buchanan, “Systematic Theology,” in Inauguration of the New College of the Free Church, Edinburgh: November, M.DCCC.L. With Introductory Lectures on Theology, Philosophy, and Natural Science (London and Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1851), 79-100. For similar definitions of theological method by evangelical Reformed theologians of that era see: Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:10; W. G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888), 3-4.

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historical life in the church.119 This aspect will be explicit when evangelical

Scots’ contentions that Newman’s theory of historical development belittled

Scripture as neither fully containing nor clearly disclosing saving doctrine are

examined.

Second, Commonsense thought’s orientation to the facts of experience

kept its feet firmly planted on the ground. It distrusted speculation and so had

little sympathy with romanticism or German idealism. As a sharp-tongued

Highlander remarked after hearing William Robertson Smith defend himself

before the 1881 FC Assembly from heresy charges for propagating

Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis: “All hus [Smith’s] goots kam un papar

parsals from Shermany, for un that kuntry they kan spin an waive wi’oot wan

tuft o’ wool, they take their threed, like a spider, oot o’ their own booals.”120

Theories of the Spirit’s realization in national, political, or dogmatic

development, philosophies that spoke grandly of History rather than historical

facts were, in the opinion of many evangelical Presbyterians in this era,

fancies plucked from the ethereal heights of speculative idealism rather than

dug from the sure rock of factual experience.

For various reasons, over the course of the nineteenth century Scottish

Realism as a coherent philosophy caved in before idealism; as a habit of mind,

however, it did not disappear. Chapter 4 suggests that the “back to Christ”

movement associated with Ritschl could, upon reaching Scottish firths, draw

upon the residue of Common Sense thought to reject positive theories of

doctrinal development, even after the propositional view of Biblical revelation

underwriting an inductive approach to theology had been replaced by a more

historicized view of the Bible.

[1.4.5] Of course, Scottish Realism and its empiricist kin was not the

only philosophical contender in nineteenth-century Britain. Tendrils of

German romanticism were snaking into Britain by the century’s beginning

and, after arrest by Napoleonic-era tumult, resumed growth thereafter. Initial

119 George Smeaton, The Necessary Harmony Between Doctrine and Spiritual Life: Being an Introductory Lecture, Delivered on the 9th November, 1853, to the Free Church Students attending the Divinity Hall at Aberdeen (Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co., 1853), 9-10. 120 Anonymous [James Kennedy], A Purteekler Acoont o’ the Last Assembly. By Wan o’ the Hielan’ Host (Edinburgh: James Gemmell, 1881), 16.

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optimism that sensible Anglo-Saxon intellectual soil would prove inhospitable

to the transplantation of a foreign weed gave way to fear as it did germinate

and grow—a development made more comprehensible by the fact that

romanticism was at first aesthetically diffused. It was Walter Scott’s novels of

pre-modern Britain—bucolic, gothic, Catholic—which “struck the new note of

the century,”121 wagered John Tulloch (a claim that could be transferred to

Samuel Taylor Coleridge or extended to the Sturm und Drang writings of the

Scot Thomas Carlyle).122 But by mid-century, Patrick Fairbairn had to issue an

achtung! regarding romantic thought to FC seminarians in Aberdeen: no

longer a stranger to British soil, German idealism posed a greater threat than

the revelation-denying, doctrine-discarding rationalism of an earlier age, for

its philosophers and theologians perniciously “hold principles in direct

antagonism with everything usually denominated religious, who yet as freely

talk of the incarnation, redemption, inspiration, God taught men, divine light,

and eternal life, as if the Bible itself were their text book.”123 He was not alone

in recognizing the challenge of romanticism and philosophical idealism for

traditional Scotch philosophy and Calvinist theology.124

The romantic stimulus to the historical study of the church and doctrine

has been touched upon (1.3.3). Its effects on the historicizing of doctrine were

various—even contradictory—in keeping with a movement itself fraught by

antinomies. On one hand, historians detect romanticism behind the shared

esteem within the Oxford Movement, the Mercersburg theology, and German

Neo-Lutheranism for classical dogma, as well as their stout defence of the

visible church from both the secularizing aims of political liberalism and the

corrosive effects of ad hoc evangelical ecclesiologies.125 And yet, aspects of

121 John Tulloch, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth Century (London: Longman, Green, & Co., 1885), 125. Newman thought similarly according to Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 173. 122 On the literary diffusion of German romanticism into Britain see Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988). 123 Patrick Fairbairn, The Calling and Acquirements of the Christian Ministry, Viewed in Connection with the Leading Tendencies of the Age: An Introductory Lecture, delivered at the Opening of the Free Church College, Aberdeen (Aberdeen: Geo. Davidson, 1852), 26-27. 124 See A. C. Fraser, “Logic and Metaphysics,” in Inauguration of the New College of the Free Church, Edinburgh: November, M.DCCC.L., 172-73. 125 Walter H. Conser, Jr., Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America, 1815-1866 (Macon: Mercer UP, 1984) is a stimulating comparative study of the appropriation of romanticism for conservative theological ends. For the

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the romantic worldview had a liberalizing effect on the content and form of

doctrine and dogma.126 As a reviewer in the FC-influenced North British

Review, lamented:

The icy and rigid Rationalism of the last age has dissolved in the heat of a warmer season, and of late we have had a time of wading deep in melted matter, and now we are in an atmosphere of sultriness and dimness, of haziness and dreaminess… In the last age, certain of our ‘excelsior’ youths were like to be starved in cold; in this age, they are in great danger of having the seeds of a wasting disease fostered by lukewarm damps and gilded vapours.”127

Favoured metaphors of organic growth and germinal development

sometimes brooked little sympathy for the very idea of systematic doctrine—

“it is not with any particular expression or doctrine of the Westminster

Confession that I find fault,” wrote Edward Irving, “but with the general

structure of it”128—nor could they see binding doctrine as anything but

restrictive to growth. Could the numinous be expressed in mortal language,

least of all in propositions and dogmas? Did not creeds and confessions

overreach in daring to articulate a Mystery better plumbed by poets’ diction or

on an artist’s canvas?129 Some nineteenth-century Reformed theologians

worried that romantic Christians were surrendering doctrine to save

Christianity as a life force.130 The romantic priority to the heart often mutated

into sentimentalism. When it did, as among the Victorians, it muddied

doctrinal precision, faulted the intellectualism of the Greek metaphysics

underlying much catholic dogma, and tended to swap right belief about God

for tender feelings toward God. “Whether we are less religious than our

Mercersburg theology see Reformed Confessionalism in the Nineteenth-Century: Essays on the Thought of John Williamson Nevin, ed. Sam Hamstra, Jr. and Arie J. Griffioen (Lanham: The Scarecrow P, 1995). D. G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2005) tends to downplay Nevin’s debt to idealist and romantic motifs. 126 David Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2005), 148-83, and A. P. F. Sell, Theology in Turmoil: the Roots, Course and Significance of the Conservative-Liberal Debate in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986), 11-38, document romanticism’s liberalizing effect. 127 Anonymous, “Article VI; Review of H. L. Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought Examined,” in North British Review 30 (1859): 73. 128 Edward Irving, The Confessions of Faith and the Books of Discipline of the Church of Scotland of Date, Anterior to the Westminster Confession (London, n.p., 1831), cli. 129 See D. G. Hart, “Poems, Propositions and Dogma: The Controversy over Religious Language and the Demise of Theology in American Learning,” CH 57 (1988): 310-321. 130 Buchanan, “Systematic Theology,” 84; Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2: 42.

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fathers, we are certainly less theological,”131 noted the FC theologian J.

Oswald Dykes (1835-1912) at century’s end.

Similarly, the so-called turn to the subject, an aspect of romanticism

accorded status as a Leitmotif of modern theology by some interpreters of

nineteenth-century thought,132 when joined with a pantheistic or panentheistic

concept of divine immanence, shifted theological authority from the

commands of a transcendent God to the human participant in the divine.133

With human conscience quasi-divinized, revelation corresponded to the

psychological wants or moral aspirations of the believer, which accelerated the

moral critique of classical doctrine and dogma. This imperilled Reformed

theology, especially, whose doctrines of predestination and original sin

seemed harsh even to those from whom they commanded assent, and whose

all-powerful God trampled human freedom. As will become clearer in

chapters 3 and 4, holding doctrine accountable to the believer or church-in-

history practically effected its historicization, even when explicit theories of

doctrinal development were lacking and only implicit assumptions of moral

progress present.

Of signal importance is the central place romanticism and idealism

gave to the person of Christ. The incarnation pervaded nineteenth-century

theological reflection across the spectrum. The Congregationalist Robert Dale

(1829-95) drew a sharp contrast between the “old” and “new” evangelicalism:

[V]ery considerable import must be attributed to the great place which is now given to the fact of the Incarnation and to what the Incarnation reveals concerning the true and ideal relations between God and man. The leaders of the Evangelical movement believed with their whole heart that the Eternal Word…became flesh in our Lord Jesus Christ… But it was a common belief of Evangelicalism that the Incarnation was a kind of after-thought in the mind of God; that it was contingent upon sin…. But, according to the faith of modern Evangelicalism, it was God’s eternal thought and purpose that the race should be one with Christ… Our sin gave further occasion to a further

131 J. Oswald Dykes, “The Shorter Catechism in Relation to the Doctrines of Grace,” RARC 5 (1898): 8. 132 Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1972), 60-61, finds proof for this anthropological turn among such diverse tendencies as Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, Newman’s illitative sense, Ritschl’s value judgments, and Troeltsch’s Christus pro nobis. See also A. C. McGiffert, The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 279-310. 133 For romantic doctrines of God see John W. Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 64-119.

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and still more wonderful revelation of the infinite love of God…that, even apart from the sin of the race, the Son of God would have shared the life of man, and man would have shared the life of God in him.134

The reasons behind the fundamental shift in Protestant theology from

Golgotha to Bethlehem to pursue theology according to a “Christological

method” are beyond my scope of examination.135 It can at least be noted,

however, that despite deep differences, Schleiermacher’s romanticism and the

idealist philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all centred on the union

of God and man in Jesus Christ as paradigmatic of the coincidence of the finite

and Infinite, and indicative of the essential unity of God and humanity. “I and

the Father are one,” spoke the Nazarene in John 10:30, the superlative gospel

according to Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.136 Current German theology,

noted the Presbyterian H. B. Smith (1815-77), saw humanity and divinity “as

capable of each other.”137 The incarnation—understood finitum capax

infinitum—promised to overcome dichotomies inherited from the

Enlightenment and, indeed, much earlier, between freedom and nature, subject

and object, the one and the many, creation and Creator. And as the quotation

from Dale indicates, considered from this perspective, the remedial economy

of classic Presbyterian theology appears to be highly deficient, riddled as it is

with dualities between God and sinner, grace and nature, free will and divine

sovereignty.

James Orr observed that since Schleiermacher, all the best theology has

centred on the person of Christ.138 But, as Orr’s confirmatory parade of

citations from Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Herrmann, and

others suggests, nineteenth-century theology’s giving priority to the person of

Christ did not guarantee the dominance of any particular type of theology, nor

would it for the study of the history of doctrine. Idealist Christology could wed 134 Dale, 45-46. 135 Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1: 5 (who is criticizing the departure from a Trinitarian format). Of course, the interest in the human Jesus of Nazareth and his non-dogmatic moral teaching awakened during Enlightenment continued to feed liberal and radical theologies in the nineteenth century. See Brown, Jesus, 161-238. 136 Brown, Jesus, 89-92. 137 Smith, System of Christian Theology, 343, ftn. 1. Smith, a German-trained Union Seminary professor, was another evangelical Presbyterian struggling with the historical construction of Christian doctrine. See W. K. B. Stoever, “Henry Boyton Smith and the German Theology of History,” USQR 24 (1968): 69-89. 138 James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World as Centring in the Incarnation (1893; reprint, Vancouver: Regent College P, 2001), 41, 389-90.

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an incremental view of the incarnation to notions of doctrinal development in

history in order to vindicate the logical process of dogmatic definition in

church history. Other theologians reached back behind the classical dogma of

Christ to recover the historical Jesus. As will become clear in chapters 4 and 5,

the centrality of Christ would impact how evangelical Presbyterians

approached the issue of doctrine and history, but the doctrine of incarnation’s

susceptibility to historical and philosophical pre-commitments would yield

very different results.

It is worth noting that while romantic tendencies became amplified

over the course of the nineteenth century, it was already present in Scottish

theology by the 1820s. A significant challenge to the hegemony of traditional

Presbyterian belief arose from a trio of brilliant theologians within the orbit of

the Scottish church who were indebted to continental romanticism: Edward

Irving (1792-1834),139 Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788-1870),140 and John

McLeod Campbell (1800-72).141 These disgruntled sons of Scottish Calvinism

were not of one mind in all matters theological, and their own legacies varied.

What stands out of great significance was their preoccupation with the person

of Christ. Although Barthian theologians find resonance with their theology

and its critique of confessional Calvinism,142 historians typically highlight the

139 Irving pastored in London until his meteoric career fizzled out in deposition, and premature death. His premillennialism, high-church proclivities, and recourse to Presbyterianism’s catholic heritage point to the influence of romanticism (Tulloch, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth Century, 156-66; Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism, 184-214). Graham McFarlane, Edward Irving: The Trinitarian Face of God (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew P, 1996) provides a theological introduction to Irving. 140 Erskine, an Episcopalian who spent most of his life on the fringes of the C of S, was an acolyte of Coleridge. His interpretation of Scripture and doctrine through intuition and the light of conscience left him repulsed by Reformed theology: he rejoiced in God’s fatherhood of all rather than stingy grace to a few, and through an organic notion of Christ’s headship he advocated a pardon of humanity in Christ that veered toward apokatastasis. See N. R. Needham, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen: His Life and Theology, 1788-1832 (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1990). 141 Campbell’s pastoral experience with parishioners starved of an assurance of God’s love led him to challenge the Confession’s teaching on election and assurance. Like Irving, he was tried for heresy, although his influence only increased with the 1856 publication of The Nature of the Atonement, an innovative and still-influential dogmatic treatment of the atonement that sought the rationale of the cross in love, not law, by making the Father’s love prior to his retributive justice or wounded honour. 142 E.g. Torrance, Scottish Theology, 287-320; James B. Torrance, “The Contribution of McLeod Campbell to Scottish Theology,” SJT 26 (1973): 295-311; Michael Jinkins, Love is of the Essence: An Introduction to the Theology of John McLeod Campbell (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew P, 1993).

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congruence of their ideas with what would become liberal Protestantism.143

Not only does the experience of salvation loom large, it provides considerable

justification for dismissing the classical Reformed doctrine of the atonement

as a penal substitution and for revising the doctrine of God. Further, the

rejection of “limited atonement” was the result of fresh—and in Irving’s case,

creative—attempts to rethink the atonement through the incarnation so that the

forensic aspect paled in significance to the union of man and God in Jesus

Christ. Not only, then, was a significant challenge lodged against traditional

Presbyterian doctrine that would demand revisiting over the next decades, it is

apparent that by the 1820s elements indebted to continental romanticism were

percolating within the Scottish church that could abet the process of

approaching Christian doctrine from an historical perspective.

[1.4.6] Otto Pfleiderer deemed the rejection of this trio’s liberalizing

approach to God, incarnation, and atonement to have retarded British theology

for the next half-century. But it was not, as he implies, mere recalcitrance

behind the hesitation to take up their gauntlet. A ‘total war’ mentality gripped

the C of S soon after the heresy trials of McLeod Campbell and Irving. At

stake was the spiritual freedom of the church; at issue was the old sore of lay

patronage; the fulcrum of this “Ten Years’ Conflict” was a combination of

social, political and theological factors.144 British church leaders were

increasingly aware that the state churches were poorly equipped to respond to

their nation’s rapid industrialization. Not only did urbanization render the old

parish system obsolete and heft considerable financial burden onto the

churches to provide houses of worship in the booming cities, dissenting

congregations were swelling as the lower and middle classes discarded

established religion as a prop of the crumbling old order. Attempts were made

to renew Britain’s established churches, especially by rejuvenating the parish

143 E.g. Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825 (London: Sonnenschein, 1890), 445; Vernon F. Storr, The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longman, Green, & Co., 1913), 424-28; B. M. G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: A Survey from Coleridge to Gore, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1995), 293-303; Jan Rohls, Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit, Vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 626-27. 144 Kenneth R. Ross, “Ten Years’ Conflict (1834-43),” DSCHT, 816-17; Arvel B. Erickson, “The Non-Intrusionist Controversy in Scotland, 1832-1843,” CH 11 (1942): 302-325.

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system.145 In the C of S, the indomitable Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847)

brought his own program for reform from his Glasgow parish to the national

stage as leader of the evangelical party and professor at St. Andrews and

Edinburgh.146 Chalmers hoped evangelical parishes empowered to redeem

bodies and souls could alleviate Scotland’s problems; of course, such parishes

could come about only when evangelical ministers could be secured over

lackadaisical moderates. His reform project was steeped in the myth of John

Knox’s theocratic, covenanted Scotland. It prized the church’s spiritual

freedom yet sought the nation’s weal with resources only an established

church possessed, even as it failed to account for the altered political

landscape in which the established churches’ status and privilege were being

pared down.147 When the confident evangelical party managed to occupy

positions of influence within the apparatus of the Assembly and church at

large, they began to enact programs to renew parishes and, ultimately,

Scotland. An 1834 Veto Act was part of this plan, alleviating patronage’s

worst ills by making the congregation’s vote decisive.

The Ten Year Conflict broke when a candidate who had been

presented to an unwilling congregation by a patron, but was rejected by

presbytery on the authority of the Veto Act, appealed. In 1837 the Court of

Session sided with the claimant and vehemently struck down the Veto Act as

unconstitutional, declaring the notion that a church could regulate itself under

Christ’s sole rule “the most pernicious error by which the blessed truths of

Christianity can be perverted.”148 The C of S was deemed an appendage of the

state. Petitions to London were of no avail: preference for an establishment

principle construed along the lines of the C of E, general ignorance of Scottish

145 Stewart J. Brown’s impressive The National Churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1801-1846 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) provides a wealth of social, political, and religious statistics. 146 On Chalmers see Stewart J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982). 147 The benefit of hindsight sees this project bound somewhat to the idealising of bonny old Britain’s parish-life as touted by romantic poets, and based on the naïve individualism typical of evangelical social thought. See Stewart J. Brown, “Reform, Reconstruction, Reaction: The Social Vision of Scottish Presbyterians c. 1830-c. 1930,” SJT 44 (1991): 489-517. Pressured by powerful Protestant and Irish Catholic dissent lobbies, Westminster removed political disabilities first on non-established Protestants (1828 Repeal of Tests and Corporations Act), then on Roman Catholics (1829 Catholic Emancipation Act), and further undermined the old social order by extending the franchise to non-propertied classes (1832 Reform Act). 148 Cited without reference in Burleigh, 342.

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affairs, and suspicion of evangelical insubordination toward the established

order left Westminster largely unsympathetic. Faced with intractable

opposition and a revived moderate party, the popular party—not without

controversy—resolved to eradicate patronage rather than simply curb it. When

their desperate “Claim of Right” (1842) demanding the repeal of patronage

stalled in the House of Lords, many in the evangelical party forsook the C of S

in a dramatic, pre-orchestrated manoeuvre during the 1843 General Assembly.

Thronged by cheering crowds, the “non-intrusionists” marched from the

Assembly to rented facilities and there constituted itself as the C of S, Free.

This “Disruption” (as it came to be known) was a church schism on an

unprecedented scale: the Swiss theologian Karl Hagenbach declared it “the

most remarkable religious event of the century.”149 Approximately 450

ministers abandoned manse, pulpit, and stipend over the principle of the crown

rights of Jesus Christ. One-third of the membership of the C of S joined them,

including majorities in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the Highlands.

The FC aggrandized itself as a national church, undertaking in spiritual

freedom what the established church did in servitude to the state, and hastily

tried to make good that boast. Within a few years, from scratch, monies were

gathered, churches built, and the rudiments laid for a nation-wide parochial

school system. The Mound in Edinburgh was soon crowned by New College,

emblematizing both the FC’s ambitious evangelical mandate to pulsate the

gospel from the heart of Scotland and its Reformed commitment to theological

scholarship in the promotion and defence of Christian doctrine. D’Aubingé

concluded breathlessly after meeting Chalmers and sitting in on the 1845

General Assembly that the infant denomination “is perhaps destined at the

present period to be the vanguard of Christ’s army,” an observation that

coheres with much FC self-opinion.150

To comprehend the theological developments that would unfold in this

denomination that are pertinent to my study, two points need to be made to

dissuade against quick dismissals of the FC as either fanatically evangelical or

immutably Calvinist. Such a verdict could be derived from the sharp-toned

149 Karl Hagenbach, A Text-Book of the History of Doctrines, trans. H. B. Smith (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1862), §285. 150 D’Aubingé, Germany, England, and Scotland; or, Recollections of a Swiss Minister, 120.

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pamphleteering and invective Assembly-floor debates during the Ten Year’s

Conflict, but the frequent recourse to Bible and Confession which give rise to

this interpretation really signify not so much a blinkered biblicism or

confessionalism as the fact that both gospel and Confession were perceived to

be at the heart of the evangelical-moderate debate and were, therefore, heavily

cited. It is misleading to speak of “intransigent dogmatism”151 in connection

with evangelical Presbyterianism if what is meant is that the FC was bigoted

and obscurantist. And Alec Vidler’s contention that the FC spliced themselves

from mainstream Scottish culture and church life in 1843 to remain “narrowly

and rigidly Calvinist” is patently false.152 More accurately, Hagenbach

observed that the early FC united loyalty to catholic creeds and Protestant

confessions with open, questioning scholarship.153 At its inception, the

majority in the FC combined strict adherence to catholic and Reformed

doctrines with liberal political opinions and breadth of interest. Without being

slavish to the Confession—Chalmers and Cunningham both thought it too

long and minutely detailed154—they were committed to it as a living

expression of Biblical truth, though not yet questioning its substantial

doctrines or, like the churches born of the eighteenth century secessions,

conceding the historical conditions affecting its doctrines.

Indeed, neither the FC nor the UPs was a conservative church as

understood in nineteenth-century terms, in other words, keen to defend a

paternalistic worldview against the encroachments of the state and the

dissenting religion, “homesick”—as Benedetto Crocce characterized the

romantic pathos—for the old ways of a Christian Europe defaced by

urbanization, industrialization, and social upheaval.155 An evangelical

inheritance and its upwardly mobile constituency tempered their allegiance to

traditional doctrine and primitivist ecclesiology with a progressive and liberal

151 Drummond and Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843-1874 (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew P, 1975), 19. Drummond and Bulloch toss “fundamentalist” at persons and groups in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries as if the term was both self-explanatory and not grossly anachronistic. 152 A. R. Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution: 1789 to the Present Day (London: Penguin, 1971), 61-62. 153 Hagenbach, A Text-Book of the History of Doctrines, §285. 154 Noted by James Lachlan MacLeod, “Revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Free Church of Scotland’s Declaratory Act of 1892,” in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, ed. J. Ligon Duncan (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2003), 345. 155 Cited in Nigg, 156.

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outlook.156 As deliberately evangelical bodies, the FC and UPs were, in fact,

more outward looking than the broad-church moderates in the C of S, for they

were connected to worldwide evangelicalism and Reformed churches on the

Continent and in America. However useful it might be for tidy analysis, the

retention of a conservative-liberal theological grid will prove misleading for

understanding nineteenth-century Scottish Presbyterianism, given its mottled

theological heritage, the manifold social and political traits of its parentage,

and the cultural-social make-up of the people who filled its pews and pulpits.

1.5. Conclusion

My analysis of the historicizing of doctrine among evangelical

Presbyterians in nineteenth-century Scotland presupposes the textured

background sketched in this chapter. Various influences were at work in the

genesis and process of their historical study of church teaching, some waning,

some waxing, some of them incompatible. Traditional evangelical and

Presbyterian convictions of Scripture’s perfection and the normative status of

the New Testament-era church, formed and fixed since the Reformation,

would disparage “development” as a disingenuous prop of Roman Catholic

ecclesiology and “tradition” as the antithesis of the gospel. The growing

awareness in the early nineteenth century—much of it received then only in

wisps as rumour and hearsay—that German divinity combined an irreverent

approach to sacred history with views of a notion of development as progress

beyond classical formulations of the faith, again did little to endear the concept

of doctrinal development in history to British theologians. That said, the

Reformation had stripped off the divine veil from the human face of the

church, committing Presbyterians in principle to criticism of doctrine upon the

word of God, a tendency strengthened by the growth of evangelicalism in the

eighteenth-century, concomitant with its epistemological inclinations. The

secessionist Presbyterian bodies bore both of these pregnant principles. And

all Presbyterians prided themselves on the doctrinal muscle of their tradition,

which meant that the historical interrogation of dogmatic or doctrinal origins

156 The jumbling of conservative and liberal tendencies within evangelicalism is brought out well in Stewart J. Brown, “Movements of Christian Awakening in Revolutionary Europe, 1790-1815,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 7: 575-95.

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and development gathering strength since the seventeenth century simply

could not be ignored.

Further, British churches were reeling from the social, industrial,

political, and intellectual upheaval underway in the Victorian era. Change,

development, even revolution, was coming to be a fact of life. “Look wherever

you will, revolution has come upon us,” roared Thomas Carlyle in his 1866

inaugural address as rector of the University of Edinburgh.

All kinds of things are coming to be subjected to fire, as it were…. Curious to see how, in Oxford and other places that used to seem as lying at anchor in the stream of time, regardless of all changes, they are getting into the highest humour of mutation, and all sorts of new ideas are afloat. It is evident that whatever is not inconsumable, made of asbestos, will have to be burnt…157

How asbestine was ‘the faith once delivered’? Romanticism was inculcating a

taste for history among Victorians. But Clio would not be satiated with gothic

nostalgia—she had totalitarian aims, and picking up the earlier critical stances

toward church doctrine that had wheedled their way through the

Enlightenment, a growing historical consciousness began pushing questions of

origins, development, and telos onto ecclesiology and church dogmatics. The

next chapter deals with William Cunningham, who stood resolutely against

this trend.

157 Thomas Carlyle, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh University, April 2nd 1866, by Thomas Carlyle, on Being Installed as Rector of the University there (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1866), 41-42.

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Chapter 2

William Cunningham, John Henry Newman, and the Development of Doctrine

“The historian looks backwards; at last he also believes backwards.” - Friedrich Nietzsche1 2.1. Introduction In 1876 John Henry Newman received several Scottish admirers to the

Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham. Remarkably, these pilgrims to the

soon-to-be cardinal were loyal sons of the FC of Scotland, and included

among them Marcus Dods and the eminent preacher Alexander Whyte.2 They

sought out Newman not for dispute or debate but to pay homage to a man

who, having outlasted the rancour of his early life, had come to be esteemed

even among Protestants in late Victorian Britain for the graceful style and

pervasive sense of eternity—so redolent of a more faithful, less material,

age—of his novels, poems, and sermons.3 Newman charmed his visitors by

recounting to them how, in 1844, having received a handsome sum of money

as a birthday gift, he visited a local bookseller with the aim of purchasing a

recently advertised Acta Sanctorum. To his dismay, he was mere hours too

late—an order for the costly sixty-volume set had just been telegraphed in

from a Rev. William Cunningham on behalf of the library of the New College

of the upstart FC. This incident could only heighten Newman’s estimation of

his visitors’ ecclesiastical pedigree. “‘But gentlemen, is not your Church a

very learned and open-minded Church?’”4

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1968), 25. 2 The famous hymn writer Horatius Bonar (1808-1889) was another FC enthusiast for Newman. And according to William Blaikie, David Brown, D.D. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1898), 234-49, David Brown of the FC College in Aberdeen corresponded with Newman during the 1870s and 80s. 3 Among others, W. Robertson Nicoll, Princes of the Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 28-29, thinks the elderly Newman achieved national stature less for reasons theological then personal and literary. 4 Recounted by G. F. Barbour, The Life of Alexander Whyte, D.D. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), 194-96.

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This 1844 incident seems a portent. Two years later Cunningham

assailed Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Doctrine in a published

review.5 In a sense, the second “encounter” between Newman and

Cunningham also centred on the Acta Sanctorum. After all, that landmark

work of Bollandist erudition was both a result and embodiment of sixteenth

and seventeenth-century debates between Protestants and Catholics over the

nature of Scripture, tradition, and church, in which each side contested the

other’s claim of fidelity with the doctrines of Scripture and historical and

theological continuity with early Christian tradition (see 1.2.3). This chapter

will largely concern itself with explicating Cunningham’s assessment of

Newman’s Essay as being the onset of a problem which taxed Victorian

Presbyterianism, namely, the recognition that Christian doctrine was (in some

way) implicated in history. Yet, it finds one foot of this consummately modern

problem still standing in the seventeenth century. For Cunningham’s critique

of Newman’s theory of development took place within the theological

parameters of the seventeenth-century status quaestionis. Indeed, his is

probably the most able criticism of the Essay from the position of classical

Protestant theology.6

Two things are especially apparent in his challenge to Newman’s

theory. First, while Newman may have found his way into the church of the

Bollandists on the very same grounds for which they contended—that

contemporary Rome is the church of the apostles and fathers—he did not enter

via a path they or any other Catholic had laid. By blazing his own trail into the

Church of Rome, he helped push the idea of the historical evolution of

doctrine onto the agenda of Victorian theology. Second, while the venerable

debate between Catholics and Protestants over Scripture, tradition, and

doctrine, resisted superannuation by Newman’s theory, Cunningham’s

rejoinder exposed the traditional Reformed and evangelical position as

vulnerable to what many nineteenth-century theologians were increasingly

convinced were history’s rights. Cunningham’s response, then, became as 5 Published in 1846 in the North British Review, and republished as the “Romanist Theory of Development,” in Discussions on Church Principles: Popish, Erastian and Presbyterian (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1863), 35-77. 6 Scholarship has largely focused on Newman’s Roman and C of E critics: C. G. Brown, “Newman’s Minor Critics,” DR 89 (1971): 13-21; David Nicholls, “Newman’s Anglican Critics,” ATR 47 (1965): 372-395.

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much a part of the ‘problem’ of dogma and history for his tradition as

Newman’s Essay itself.

After summarizing Cunningham’s critique of the Essay, then

expanding and clarifying his views on the relation of doctrine to Scripture and

tradition in light of his magnum opus, Historical Theology, a glance at some of

his occasional pieces on doctrinal development within the Reformed tradition

will underscore the scholastic legacy on evangelical Reformed thinking about

the historical formation of doctrine. First, however, Cunningham himself

warrants a quick introduction, especially as certain biographical details

illuminate personal and theological traits that were very much operative in his

dispute with Newman.

2.2. William Cunningham (1805-61)7

Cunningham entered the University of Edinburgh in the 1820s a

convinced Tory and moderate, but finished the arts course an ardent

evangelical of vintage Calvinist persuasion. As a theologue, he displayed the

precocity of intellect and bellicosity of character that marked his mature

career, taking an active part in student debates over slavery and the Apocrypha

controversy, and intently studying historic Protestant-Catholic polemical

literature. “If my life is spared,” he wrote at this time, “it will be spent in

controversy, I believe.”8 Indeed, he became embroiled in controversy during

his first pastorate at Greenock. Glossalia and suspect teaching were sprouting

in the region, the seeds of which were sown by the minister of a neighbouring

region, John McLeod Campbell (see 1.4.5). When McLeod Campbell chanced

to preach in a nearby church, Cunningham jotted down notes of a sermon

7 On Cunningham see Robert Rainy and James Mackenzie, The Life of William Cunningham, D.D. (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1871); Rudolph Ehrlich, “The Church in the Teaching of Principal William Cunningham (1805-1861),” (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1952); Donald MacLeod, “Cunningham, William (1805-61),” DSTCH, 229-231; Joel Beeke, “William Cunningham,” in Historians of the Christian Tradition, ed. Michael Bauman and Martin I. Klauber (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1995), 209-226; Sandy Finlayson, “William Cunningham—Theologian,” in Unity and Diversity: The Founders of the Free Church of Scotland (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2010), 83-107; especially Michael W. Honeycutt, “William Cunningham: His Life, Thought, and Controversies,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 2002). Aspects of his thought are treated by Toon, The Development of Doctrine in the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 25-33, and A. C. Cheyne, “Church History in Edinburgh, c. 1840-1990,” in Studies in Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999), 267-69. 8 Cited in Rainy and Mackenzie, 32.

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propounding universal atonement that were later used as evidence in his

heresy trial. Such punctiliousness for confessional orthodoxy gained him

exposure in the wider church, and a call to a large Edinburgh parish was

forthcoming; it has also contributed, no doubt, to his disparagement by many

current scholars as a sort of Calvinist grand inquisitor.

As a pastor in the capital city, Cunningham launched himself into the

foremost church controversies of the day: Roman Catholicism and church

patronage. Anti-Catholic sentiment was rife in mid-century Britain.9

Legislative concessions to Catholics, the impoverished Irish swelling the

cities, and the papacy’s aggrandizement triggered Protestant fears of Babylon

rising. Cunningham earned laurels as a formidable controversialist through

public lectures and the 1845 republication of Bishop Stillingfleet’s The

Doctrine and Practices of the Church of Rome Truly Represented (1686),10

with glosses that often surpass the text in length and vitriol. He hated Rome as

the masterpiece of Satan: the absolute syncretism of Christianity and

paganism, whose religious idolatry and political tyranny demanded exposure

and refutation. But unlike many contemporaries (including most Tractarians)

however he supported Catholic emancipation; he also never doubted that there

were true Christians within Rome or that it still possessed Christian

fundamentals.11 He held it an opponent worthy of the deepest respect, and

encouraged—as iron sharpens iron—his students to master the opera of a

Bellarmine or a Baronius.12 Given his mastery of post-Reformation polemical

theology and alarm over Rome’s waxing strength, he surely whetted his epée

upon the news of the publication of the Essay.

Cunningham was also among the most vociferous and articulate critics

of patronage during the Ten Year’s Conflict. His Defence of the Rights of the

Christian People (1840) defended the Veto Act by pushing well beyond the C

9 J. R. Wolffe, “Anti-Catholic Societies,” DSCHT, 17-18; MacLeod, The Second Disruption, 22-25. The papal bull Universalis Ecclesiae (1850) restored the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Britain. 10 Edward Stillingfleet, The Doctrine and Practices of the Church of Rome Truly Represented, ed. William Cunningham (1686; reprint, Edinburgh: Johnstone, 1845). 11 Cunningham, Speech Delivered at the Meeting Against Papal Aggression, held in the Music Hall, George Street, Edinburgh, December 5th, 1850 (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850), 10-11. 12 Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607) wrote the Annales in reply to the Magdeburg Centuries. Most Protestants considered St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) to be the most formidable apologist of the Catholic Reformation.

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of S evangelical status quo, asserting congregational rights and the popular

election of clergy with a litany of citations from the Bible, fathers, and

reformers (see 1.4.6).13 This period makes explicit his obsession with the

doctrine of the church.14 That evangelical Presbyterians in Scotland assumed

the centripetal place of the church in the divine economy, and contended for

its spiritual freedom, purity of doctrine, and primitive constitution, indicates

that they shared with the otherwise opposite Tractarians a perception that the

church was under threat from the social and political changes afoot in

Victorian society, as well as the obtrusive theological legacies of the previous

century. Consequently, both parties committed themselves to ecclesiological

renewal, however their specific diagnoses of the problems facing the church

and solutions needed differed. If Cunningham’s ecclesiology assumed the

confessional Protestant form appropriate to his heritage, his Victorian context

made it a preoccupation.

When the initial FC General Assembly called for the immediate

erection of a new college for Reformed and evangelical scholarship and the

preparation of ministers, Cunningham, who had been awarded a doctorate

honoris causa from Princeton in 1842, was made a junior professor at New

College.15 He was then issued to America to investigate and assess seminary

models there, as well as to cultivate support for the infant FC. A stimulating

friendship with Princeton’s Charles Hodge was an ancillary but important

outcome of this trip. In 1845 the Assembly transferred him to church history,

and upon Chalmers’ death in 1847 he served additionally as New College’s

principal until his death in 1861.

As confessional Reformed theology is out of sorts with contemporary

theology, Cunningham has been largely forgotten when not consigned to

13 Cunningham, Defence of the Rights of the Christian People in the Appointment of Ministers, from the Constitutional Standards of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: Johnstone, 1840). Cunningham was instrumental in spurring the popular party to reject patronage outright rather than be content to curb its evils. 14 This is recognized especially in the dissertations by Ehrlich and Honeycutt. 15 Chalmers, New College’s first principal, envisioned a university of superlative evangelical and Reformed scholarship, able to counter the threats to orthodoxy and Scottish Realism emanating especially from Germany. The dream never materialized, but it was still partially in sight in Cunningham’s “Address Delivered at the Opening of the New College,” in Inauguration of the New College of the Free Church, Edinburgh: November, M.DCCC.L, 39-58. On New College’s founding see Stewart J. Brown, “The Disruption and the Dream: the Making of the New College 1843-1861,” in Disruption to Diversity: Edinburgh Divinity 1846-1996, ed. David F. Wright and Gary D. Badcock (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996), 29-50.

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ignominy. As a result, interpretations of this forceful high Presbyterian risk

caricature or calumny.16 I would caution against confusing his fervent

evangelical and Reformed convictions with theological antiquarianism, or his

admittedly parochial outlook with closed-mindedness. Even his undutiful

students remarked upon his openness to new ideas and willingness to linger

over a difficult item of theology.17 He was among the last Scottish theologians

not obligated to learn German—he was also among the last Scotch

Presbyterians of his century to prefer a visit to Dordrecht over Berlin!—but he

was not oblivious to modern thought. He followed German theology in

translation or in Latin.18 It pained him that Scotland lagged behind Germany in

the study of the Bible’s text and history, so with evangelical confidence that

the problem with much German divinity was not the critical tools in their

hands but the infidel presuppositions of their hearts, he pushed for the

establishment of a chair in critical exegesis at New College. Moreover, the

British and Foreign Evangelical Review, which he edited from 1855-1860,

was an important medium for introducing into Britain evangelical scholarship

from the Continent and America as well as, through book reviews, avant-

garde German and Dutch divinity.19

2.3. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine The writing of the Essay in 1845 climaxed Newman’s lengthy, often

anguished, search for the nineteenth-century whereabouts of the ancient

church.20 Newman himself tells us that near journey’s end he determined to

16 E.g. Drummond and Bulloch’s assessment in The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843-1874, 17-19. 17 E.g. James Strahan, Andrew Bruce Davidson, D.D. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917), 57. 18 He especially made use of the Halle professor J. A. L. Wegscheider’s Institutiones theologiae christianae dogmaticae (1815). Rohls, Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit, 1:391-99, notes that Wegscheider’s contemporaries considered the Institutiones to be the standard textbook of neologist divinity. 19 J. A. H. Dempster, “British and Foreign Evangelical Review,” DSCHT, 95-96. 20 On Newman’s life see David Newsome, The Convert Cardinals: John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning (London: John Murray, 1993); Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography; more concisely, Sheridan Gilley, “Newman, John Henry (1801-1890),” TRE 24, 416-422. While I find much of the psychohistory in Frank Turner’s controversial John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002) rather speculative (e.g. 110-161, 631-37), by refusing to read Newman’s Anglican period through the Apologia, he has recovered the anti-Protestant streak in Newman’s thought he later sought to obscure. Some of Turner’s conclusions are reaffirmed by Kenneth J. Stewart, “Newman

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write an essay on the development of doctrine to test a hypothesis; if satisfied

with the outcome, he would seek reception into the Church of Rome.21

According to Cunningham, however, the Essay was the inevitable terminus of

a wrong turn taken when the classical Protestant position on the sufficiency of

Scripture and its regulative authority for church doctrine was rejected for what

Tractarians called “Antiquity,” that is, the necessary mediation of scriptural

teaching by the doctrinal consensus of the early church. This was the taproot

of all Newman’s errors, and it comprised the first of a three-pronged assault on

the former Oxford don’s argument for the historical development of Christian

doctrine. Cunningham’s second prong aimed at the fact that Newman’s new

fangled theory of development, with which he sought to further secure the

priority of church tradition over Scripture, incongruously burst the banks of

Rome’s long-held position on the character of tradition and the sources of

doctrine, even as he used the theory to endorse the selfsame church. So much

for the vaunted continuity of Roman tradition! Third, the hazy connection

between revelation, doctrine, and development in the Essay ultimately

implicated Newman’s theory as not just non-Roman but infidel. Newman

travelled to Rome via Germany.

Before proceeding to look at Newman’s theory of development proper

(prong 2 and 3) along with Cunningham’s appraisal, it is essential to linger a

while over his accusation that Newman and his Oxford cohorts had taken over

Rome’s grossly deficient doctrine of Scripture (prong 1). For the black/white

Scripture-tradition grid of post-Reformation theology not only determined

Cunningham’s assessment of the Tractarian movement as inherently “popish,”

even more importantly it left him wholly unsympathetic to those difficulties

that Newman keenly felt to incur when the historical, i.e. visible, life of the

church is taken earnestly—difficulties, as we shall see, that moved Newman’s

mind from the authority of “Antiquity” to the development of dogma, and

therefore shifted his ecclesiastical allegiance from Canterbury to Rome. But

yesteryear’s theological polemics obscured for Cunningham what Newman

against Newman: The Apologia pro vita sua of 1864 and Subsequent Autobiographical Writings Compared,” SBET 26 (2008): 57-67. 21 Newman, Apologia pro vita sua (1864/65; reprint, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1913), 318-26.

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came to see as the issue of the day: how to reconcile the continuity of church

doctrine with discrepancies in its historical record.

[2.3.1] The Tractarian movement was the progeny of seventeenth and

eighteenth-century high church Anglicanism, and the sibling of romantic

movements of theological restoration like neo-Lutheranism and the

Mercersburg theology (see 1.4.5). It distanced itself from its kin, however,

through a virulent anti-Protestantism that found expression, especially, in a

disavowal of the Protestant understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture.22

“Bible religion” as Newman called it, scorned the churchly process by which

Christians are initiated into the faith. Swapping the church’s stewardship of

the apostolic faith for the lonely individual and his Bible, Protestants had

recourse only to the whims of private judgement to ascertain that faith, rather

than the weight of catholic tradition.23 Moreover, sola scriptura cohered with

neither historical fact nor actual evangelical practice. As to the former,

because “the full tradition of Christianity existed before the Christian

Scriptures,” the C of E was in concert with early church practice by

maintaining doctrines like the Trinity, infant baptism, or the sacrifice of the

mass that were not obvious in the Bible, but apostolic nonetheless by virtue of

their antiquity and subsequent preservation through apostolic succession.24 As

to the latter, Newman shrewdly insisted that evangelicals “cannot consistently

object against a person who believes more than they do, unless they cease to

believe just as much as they do.”25 In other words, sola scriptura, the

Protestant hammer used to smash Tractarian peculiarities, could just as easily

be turned against their doctrines like the civil establishment of religion or the

divinity of the Holy Spirit.

22 On Tractarianism see especially Owen Chadwick, The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990); Peter Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). 23 Newman’s The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) argued that it was Arius who appealed directly to the Scriptures to overrule traditional belief about Jesus Christ. Cited in the anthology edited by Owen Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1960), 146-47. 24 John Keble, cited in The Mind of the Oxford Movement, 126-30. 25 Newman, “No. 85. Lectures on the Scriptural Proofs of the Doctrines of the Church,” in Tracts for the Times. By Members of the University of Oxford. Volume 5 (London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1840), 3.

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Tractarians sought a via media between Protestant and Roman

extremes: the full coherence of Scripture and tradition in the doctrine and

practices of the early church, as established by Vincent’s canon (see 1.2.1).

“As we accord to the Protestant sectary, that Scripture is the inspired treasury

of the whole faith,” Newman wrote, “but maintain that his doctrines are not in

Scripture, so we agree with the Romanist in appealing to Antiquity, but deny

that his doctrines are not to be found in Antiquity.” Scripture contains all

doctrines necessary for salvation—there is no supplementary tradition as

maintained by Rome—but the doctrines therein are not perspicuous, and must

be identified and authorized by the Vincentian canon.26 Rejecting evangelical

bibliolatry, Tractarians affirmed the church under the historic episcopate as the

authoritative source and teacher of Christian doctrine, with the Bible

functioning as the “document of appeal” for its lex orandi and lex credendi.27

This forestalled Roman appeals beyond Scripture and still avoided the “non-

descript system of religion now in fashion, that nothing is to be believed but

what is clearly in Scripture.”28 The cacophony of Protestant interpretations of

the Bible and the hubris of the papacy were silenced by the voice of a tradition

that was catholic, apostolic, and episcopal but not Roman.29

Along with trouncing the popular evangelical understanding of

Scripture, the early Tractarians garnered notoriety for their sacramental

realism, clericalism, and insistence on the C of E’s unbroken connection with

the apostolic church through the episcopal office. It is important to note here

the close alignment in the via media between the doctrine of Scripture and the

doctrine of the church visible. To bring light and order to the teaching of the

Bible, Tractarians looked to the unadulterated church of the early centuries as

the visible embodiment of perpetually valid liturgical and doctrinal standards.

The Tractarians were insisting upon a necessary connection between the

visible church and the historical church that was at odds with the generic

evangelical priority to the invisible church. Indeed, the Tractarians were

26 Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, Viewed Relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1837), 47, 369-70. 27 Newman, “No. 85. Lectures on the Scriptural Proofs of the Doctrines of the Church,” 14, 25; Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 343. 28 Newman, “No. 85. Lectures on the Scriptural Proofs of the Doctrines of the Church,” 25; see also 5-9. 29 See Newman, Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 24, 158-223.

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utterly aghast at the ecclesiastical promiscuity of Anglican evangelicals who

joined themselves to a motley crew of Dissenters in all sorts of ecumenical

ventures and societies so long as all parties involved pledged themselves to the

supposedly clear and simple teachings of the Bible.30

Newman wrote to a C of E evangelical who had criticized his

seemingly exclusivist emphasis on the church visible:

You argue, that true doctrine is the important matter for which we must contend, and a right state of the affections is the test of vital religion in the heart: and you ask, ‘Why may I not be satisfied if my Creed is correct, and my affections spiritual? Have I not in that case enough to evidence a renewed mind, and to constitute a basis of union with others like minded? The love of CHRIST is surely the one and only requisite for Christian communion here, and the joys of heaven hereafter.’

But it is not enough, he vehemently maintained. “[T]he Visible Church is not a

voluntary association of the day, but a continuation of one which existed in the

age before us, and then again in the age before that; and so back till we come

to the age of the Apostles.”31 Christians who took themselves out of the C of E

were no longer in visible communion with the ancient catholic and apostolic

church. Dissenters were not exactly outside the pale of salvation—Newman

likened Presbyterian Scotland to “Ephraim under the Law”, which at least had

“the school of the Prophets”32—but neither could they be considered as

belonging to the true church. The invisible church of the Victorian pan-

evangelical consensus, by eschewing the visible C of E, lacked historical

continuity with the ancient church and, as such, was less than fully real.

Yale historian Frank Turner remarked upon Newman’s “scorched-earth

policy” toward the Protestant understanding of the Bible during his Anglican

days. Scripture’s inconsistencies and difficulties were exploited and

juxtaposed against the clear and purposeful dogmas of the early church;

myriad interpretations of the Bible were relieved by the unanimity of

30 See G. F. A. Best, “The Evangelicals and the Established Church in the Early Nineteenth Century,” JTS 10 (1959): 63-78. 31 Newman, “No. 11. The Visible Church. Letter I & II,” Tracts for the Times, Vol. 1 (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1834), 1, 3. See the analysis in Kenneth J. Stewart, “The Tractarian Critique of the Evangelical Church Invisible: Newman’s Tracts 2, 11, 20 & 47 in Historical Context,” ChM 121 (2007): 347-360. 32 Newman, “No. 47. The Visible Church. Letter IV,” Tracts for the Times, Vol. 2 (London: J. G. & F. Rivington, 1836), 2.

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authoritative catholic tradition.33 This policy did not change when Newman

entered the Roman church. “Throughout his career as an ordained priest, first

Anglican and then Catholic,” observed Avery Dulles, “Newman continued to

pummel the doctrine that Scripture alone was a sufficient guide to faith.”34

What did change—in fact, what precipitated Newman’s move from Oxford to

Rome—was that he lost confidence in the via media as historical fact. This

entailed that the visible visage of the ancient church needed to be sought

elsewhere than in the C of E.35 The via media, which he thought characteristic

of English divinity, “contains a majestic truth” but lacks concrete

application—it is only abstractly true.36 The real history of Christianity, as he

claimed to have begun to realize during his preparatory reading of Bishop Bull

for The Arians of the Fourth Century, simply cannot deliver the doctrinal

consensus demanded by the Tractarian appeal to antiquity.37 In fact, the

standard of orthodoxy condemns many of the earlier fathers’ teachings on

central dogmas like the Trinity, original sin, or the homoousion.38 Clearly,

33 Turner, 276. For corroboration see Hermann Eigelsheimer, “John Henry Newman und der reformatorische Protestantismus,” (Ph.D. diss., Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 1964), 54-73. 34 Avery Dulles, Newman (London: Continuum, 2002), 65. 35 In the Apologia, 210-13, Newman recalled his study of the monophysite controversy in the summer of 1839 as first raising doubts about the viability of the via media, specifically the reality of the Tractarians’ ‘Antiquity’. By the early 1840s (e.g. “No. 85. Lectures on the Scriptural Proofs of the Doctrines of the Church,” 14; Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 37, 335-6), Newman was suggesting that doctrines lie in Scripture as intimations, needing time and complementation to achieve fullness. In a review, “The History of Christianity, from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire. By the Rev. H. H. Milman,” The British Critic 29 (1841): especially 77, 100-103, he countered Milman’s view that “nothing belongs to the Gospel but what originated with it” with an appeal to organic growth of doctrine. An Essay on the Miracles Recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1843) blurred the demarcation between the New Testament and the early and medieval church so as to allow for miracles wrought by saints or relics. Most significantly, in an 1843 sermon, he used Luke 2:19—“but Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”—to show how the “sacred impression” or “idea” of revelation needed time, prayer, and reflection to unfold to maturity. He marvelled at the rich catholic tradition that “is the expansion of few words, uttered, as if casually, by the fishermen of Galilee.” See “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine,” in Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached before the University of Oxford (London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1843), especially 315, 317, 323-24, 335. Slowly but surely, Newman abandoned the Tractarian stronghold of Vincent’s canon for a theory of doctrinal development. 36 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845), 8, 24. The sixth edition of the Essay is standard, but because it is considerably revised I will use the original unless otherwise noted. 37 Ibid., 11-12. Anglican bishop and high churchman George Bull’s (1634-1710) famous Defensio Fidei Nicaenae contended against the Jesuit Petavius for the Trinitarian orthodoxy of the pre-Nicene church fathers. 38 Ibid., 25-26.

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unless the indisputable variation in church belief and practice over eighteen

hundred years is to be glossed over, and the hope of finding any continuity of

doctrine therein abandoned, only a theory of historical development can allow

the “family resemblance” of the ancient church to be discerned among the

ecclesiastical visages of the nineteenth century.39

Hence, Newman declared his Essay to be “undoubtedly an hypothesis

to account for a difficulty.”40 The hypothesis—a real historical development of

church doctrine—follows from the difficulty: Christianity as a real historical

phenomenon. “Its home is in the world, and to know what it is, we must seek

it in the world, and hear the world’s witness of it.”41 Contrasting his theory

with Tractarians’ appeals to a static tradition and the primitivist ecclesiology

of evangelicals, Newman professed to reckon with Christianity not as theory

but as it is, roughened by the wear and tear of time, savouring of the soil

where the gospel takes root. As he famously remarked: “in a higher world it is

otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have

changed often.”42

[2.3.2] As we turn to Cunningham’s review of the Essay, two things

become immediately apparent. First, the Scotsman engaged the Essay as the

crown of a decade-long campaign by Tractarians to undermine the Bible as the

singular and sufficient rule of faith. Unde inter nos et ipsos quaestio agitatur

de Perfectione Scriptura, declared his favourite divine, Francis Turretin

(1623-87), against Rome, a contention his scion widened to encompass

Tractarianism, and through both of them, Newman.43 He began his review by

remarking upon the long-suspected Romeward creep of Tractarianism, proved

at last by the conversion of Newman and some of his peons.44 While a rather

hackneyed course of argument, it is significant: Newman and the Tractarian

movement that he left behind should be viewed foremost through the lens

provided by the position on Scripture and tradition of the church to which all 39 Ibid., 137, 57. 40 Ibid., 58, 28. 41 Ibid., 2. 42 Ibid., 39. 43 Francis Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1679-85; reprint, Edinburgh: John Lowe, 1847), locus II, q. 16, i. 44 Cunningham, “Romanist Theory of Development,” 35-36 [hereafter abbreviated as “Romanist”].

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Tractarians, albeit at different speeds, were travelling. And the path from

Oxford to Rome was straight and broad. Both parties perjured Scripture’s

perfection and exalted in its place human, churchly tradition as the ground and

measure of doctrine.45 He underscored at a number of points that there was

little substantial differences between the two (even if the Tractarians rejected

supplementary tradition and rightly dismissed Trent’s accord with the early

church): both let apostolic warrant trespass its canonical boundary; both

insisted upon early church tradition’s necessary determination of the doctrines

contained in an opaque Bible; both shut their eyes to the irrefutable evidence

of the lack of doctrinal unanimity in the early church. Cunningham never let

out of sight the fact that because Oxford, Rome, and Newman all abandoned

the perfection of Scripture, all were obligated to appeal to historical tradition

to justify the discrepancy between biblical and church doctrine.46

Second, given his unflinching commitment to the perfection of

Scripture, Cunningham never really felt the “difficulty” that arose from

insistence upon the necessary role of church tradition in establishing the

Christian doctrine. He applauded Newman’s attack on the via media as able

and decisive, concurring that current scholarship was leaving the Vincentian

canon in shambles, although he was keen to remind Newman that the

wrecking ball was largely operated by German Protestants, whose

Dogmengeschichten were slowly becoming known in Britain. He noted as

well the affinity of Newman’s new position with the old Protestant case

against the integrity of Catholic tradition, and their rejection of a univocal

witness of the church fathers.47 Has Newman, then, aligned himself with the

Reformed conclusion that “the old Roman pretence of tracing historically their

doctrines and practices to primitive times can no longer be sustained?”48 Yes

and no. Cunningham resorted to the perfection of Scripture as the lingering

point of division. Where can one now find the one holy church that is “in

45 Ibid., 39-40. See also Cunningham, “Lecture XXXVI: Rule of Faith—General Principles—Popery and Tractarianism,” in Theological Lectures (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1878), 447-58. It is important to remember that Cunningham’s vocabulary of Scripture’s perfection, sufficiency, perspicuity, etc., was the technical terminology of classical Protestantism, not modern fundamentalism. 46 Ibid., 40-42, 44, 48. 47 “Romanist,” 40, 42. Cunningham also linked Newman to the controversy between Bull and Petavius (43-45). 48 Ibid., 48.

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substance the very religion which Christ and his Apostles taught in the first,”

asked Newman, given the undeniable fact of change in the church’s history?49

Cunningham answered: from the New Testament alone. “Give to us proof

your doctrinal additions proceeded from the New Testament” was the stock

response of the old Protestant apologists, confident that all doctrines, indeed,

all undisputed knowledge of the apostles’ teachings, are contained in a

pellucid Bible.50 But not only did Newman dismiss this position as fictitious,

he subpoenaed sola scriptura as damning evidence that “to be deep in history

is to cease to be Protestant.”51 The via media may be a paper theory, but at

least Tractarians were, so to speak, ‘in the game’. Since Protestants abandoned

the historical, visible church when it became clear that the testimony of church

history was no ally to their innovative doctrines, and ever since have taken

refuge from the study of church history in a fall theory of the church, they are

mere bystanders to all issues and questions arising from the church’s history.

Cunningham pounced on Newman’s claim that Protestants disregard

church history as showing all too clearly the English insularity of his

learning.52 But he happily pleaded guilty to Newman’s charge that Protestants

do not have the same stake in church history. “Protestantism,” he averred, “is

not historical Christianity.” Not only did the Antichrist reign for a millennium

over a materially different church, Protestants do not conflate authentic

Christianity with its historical manifestations. The standard and source of

church doctrine is the Bible alone and not church tradition. Herein lies the

ground of the lapsarian church historiography favoured by Protestants. A

perfect Scripture as the rod by which all facts of church history, all purported

cases of doctrinal development are to be measured, is coupled with the

indubitable fact of departure from that standard over the course of the church’s

49 Essay, 3. 50 “Romanist,” 51. Note also Westminster Confession, 1:6-7; Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae, locus II, q. 21, xiii: Unitas Ecclesiae per unitatem fidei in Scriptura traditae proprie conservatur, non per consensum Patrum, de quo vix ac ne vix quidem constarre potest. 51 John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed. (1878; reprint, Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1989), 8. 52 “Romanist,” 48. This claim is almost certainly connected to his complaint that Newman only superficially engaged the Protestant position on the sufficiency of Scripture. See footnote 56.

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history; when the Bible’s own testimony to both the corruption of the human

heart and the wiles of the Adversary set against Christ’s church is added to

this, a fall theory is both possible and probable (see 1.3.1-2).53 If not in

Scripture, then where, asked Cunningham, is Newman’s standard to be found

to allow genuine Christianity to be judged over against its historical

manifestations?54

The older Protestant-Catholic debate had deadlocked over whether the

receptacle of apostolic teaching was Scripture alone or Scripture plus early

church tradition. By insisting that both sources stand in need of further

development, because neither position can hold the tension between the fact of

doctrinal variation in the church’s history and the theological need for

continuity of ecclesiastical institution and belief, Newman, argued

Cunningham, “cuts the knot, but most certainly does not untie it.”55 Newman

has failed to answer any of the old Protestant arguments for a perfect

Scripture, to which, as the Confession has it, nothing “is to be added, whether

by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men,” and from which all

things “necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so

clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not

only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may

attain unto a sufficient understanding of them” (I. 6-7).56 It is, for

Cunningham, this simple: a doctrine is true and binding only if it can be

satisfactorily proved to clearly inhere in Scripture—the sole repository of

divine teaching—or be logically deduced from it; if a doctrine fails this, or

contravenes Scripture’s plain sense, then it is either false or a corruption. Even

if a purported doctrine could be shown to be the result of a genuine historical

development, it would still not be binding because it would not be bound to an

inspired font.57

53 Ibid., 60-61. In this section the Confession 24:2-5 is being loosely paraphrased. 54 Ibid., 46-47. 55 Ibid., 51. 56 I am not certain what Cunningham meant by his assertion that Newman did not answer the old Protestant arguments—he dwelt at some length on the insufficiency of Scripture. Likely, he means that Newman did not appear to have read serious Protestant controversial literature on the subject, apart from Bull, but rebuked instead a caricature of popular evangelicalism. This is a justified complaint. 57 “Romanist,” 67. This, of course, relates to the third prong of Cunningham’s argument: the nature of revelation.

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[2.3.3] The second prong of Cunningham’s blistering review of the

Essay follows inevitably from the doctrinal and logical presuppositions laid

out beforehand. As a Tractarian-turned-Catholic, Newman was, in

Cunningham’s view, doubly implicated in the old error of casting aspersion

upon Scripture’s perfection. This did not mean, however, that he relied on

Rome’s old tricks to prove tradition’s primacy. Newman’s endorsement of

development, marvelled Cunningham, was nothing less than a “newly

invented substitute for the ground on which all former defenders of

Romanism—many of them men of great talent and ingenuity—had felt it

necessary or expedient to take their stand.”58 This complaint is the second

prong of his criticism of the Essay, and is repeated several times. Behind the

peevish tone of a pugilist who showed up for a duel only to find the rules of

combat inexplicably changed, a substantial charge is being made: Newman’s

scheme of the historical development of doctrine is incompatible with the

classic Catholic position on church tradition. As a result, both the nature of

historical evidence for assessing and validating a doctrine’s origin and the

method of proof for determining legitimate instances of doctrinal development

are radically altered.

In the Essay’s daring first chapter, Newman harked back to his seminal

discussion of the Christian revelation as an “impression” or “idea” in his 1843

sermon “The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine.” Christian

revelation is an overwhelming and inexhaustible impression; or, it is a

munificent idea that resists simple comprehension by words, concepts, and

feelings. It needs, rather, to be “walked round and surveyed on opposed sides

and in different perceptions and in contrary lights.”59 Development follows

necessarily from the profligacy of Christian revelation.

[T]he increase and expansion for the Christian Creed and Ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion; that, from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of

58 Ibid., 53. 59 Essay, 32.

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great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as received and transmitted by minds not inspired, and through media which were human, have required only the longer time, and deeper thought, for their full elucidation. This may be called the Theory of Development of Doctrine...60

Development takes mariological shape: a community spanning the ages

“ponder in their hearts” their piecemeal grasp of the idea. Such reflection

eventually produces a cumulative body of doctrines and practices that

sufficiently represent the original impression, or “will be what the idea meant

from the first.”61 This process is not a paper equation. It takes place, insisted

Newman, on the “busy scene of human life.” It rolls across cultures and

countries. It encounters and incorporates alien cult and creed, endows them

with new meaning or throws them off. And no facet of life and thought can

resist expansion, change and development inherent in this process.62 In fact,

the greater the idea, the greater the risk of corruption; and truly great ideas like

Christianity come to fruition only through warfare with other ideas.

Given the proleptic nature of ideas or impressions, Newman disputed

the evangelical axiom that, like a stream, revelation is clearest and purest near

the source. On the contrary, all great ideas flow purest and strongest

downstream, after having been swelled and thickened by tributaries and

having carved deep and wide into the bedrock. Consequently, church doctrines

are not cleanly plucked from where they nestle in the Bible or, as Tractarians

would have it, a favourite moment of church history. Doctrines have histories.

And those histories are inextricable from their God-intended fullness. To settle

for a doctrine’s inception rather than its consummation would be to spurn the

butterfly for the grub, to forget that “a representation which varies from its

60 Ibid., 27. On Newman’s theory of development see Paul Misner, “Newman’s Concept of Revelation and the Development of Doctrine,” HeyJ 11 (1970): 32-47; Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 134-63; Söll, Dogma und Dogmenentwicklung, 196-208; Hugo Meynell, “Newman on Revelation and Doctrinal Development,” JTS 30: 138-52; Bruno Forte, “‘Historia Veritatis’: On Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,” in Newman and Faith, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Louvain: Peeters, 2004), 75-92. Newman likely owed his belief that doctrine is a secondary expression of religious truth to the “Oxford Noetics” like Richard Whately who influenced him during his student days at Oriel College. See Thomas C. Hummell, “John Henry Newman and the Oxford Noetics,” ATR 74 (1992): 203-215. 61 Ibid., 35-37. 62 Ibid., 43-54.

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original may be felt as more true and faithful than one which has more

pretensions to be exact.”63 This is the bomb Newman tossed at the Victorian

ecclesiologies of evangelical primitivism and Tractarian antiquitarianism.

He then proposed seven notes or tests of development to distinguish

healthy from diseased development of doctrine: preservation of type,

continuity of principle, assimilative power, logical sequence, anticipation,

preservative additions, and chronic vigour. Their prominence at the forefront

of the argument and, indeed, the fact that the vast portion of his Essay is

concerned with extrapolating these tests in the church’s doctrinal and liturgical

history, confirm his designs to ‘scientific’ history.64 This intent needs to be

respected, even if the tests themselves have been roundly criticized as almost

uselessly pliable—which was Cunningham’s view, too—and even if the heavy

deployment of “antecedents”, that is to say, deductive or presumptive

reasoning, in the subsequent course of argument undermines his aspirations.65

The taxonomy of tests is followed by sustained appeal to the antecedent

probability of doctrinal development based upon either the fact of Christian

revelation as an idea, or of Christianity as a “typical” religious idea.66 To take

but two examples of suggested antecedent probabilities, to the fore-mentioned

fact of the Scriptures’ “defect or inchoateness” which makes it probable that

“the letter needs completion,” he argued that if the “pregnant texts” of the

Hebrew prophets and the slow growth of the kingdom of Israel evidence the

dynamism of revelation and the fact of development inside the Bible, why not

outside of it? Newman also paid careful attention to Bishop Butler’s argument

of an analogy between nature and religion: the inexorable growth of natural

63 Ibid., 59-60. 64 The revised Essay (1878) pushes back the treatment of the notes to the beginning of part two. This, plus the excision of a lengthy section in the original affirming the pragmatic method of Gibbon and Mosheim (182-202), gives some credence to B. M. G. Reardon’s opinion in Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, 109, that Newman eventually reconciled himself to the neo-Thomist notion of development as logical deduction from revealed premises then prevailing in Catholic theology. 65 A notable exception is Gerald O’Collins, “Newman’s Seven Notes: The Case of the Resurrection,” in Newman After a Hundred Years, ed. Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 337-352. 66 Newman, 96, argues Christianity cannot plead immunity from the laws of growth and fact of change because the incarnation shows that it differs from other religions in what is superadded to the historical form.

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organisms suggests an antecedent probability that the Creator intended the

development of all his handiworks.67

He conceded that although the next step in his argument lacked direct

evidence it was, nevertheless, “required by the facts of the case.” Given that

revelation is bestowed as an impression God probably intended to develop;

given that the idea can only be appropriated piecemeal, which makes likely

various and competing interpretations; yet, given the fact that God gave

Christian truth objectively and likely wished it to remain so; and given the fact

that the essence of religion is obedience and authority, cannot a case be made

for the antecedent probability of an infallible interpreting authority?68 Only

now did Newman explicitly endorse Rome as “of all existing systems…the

nearest approximation in fact to the Church of the Fathers, possible though

some may think it, to be nearer still to that Church on paper.”69 The fact of

doctrinal development leaves it most proximate to the ancient catholic church

among all claimants, while the logic of historical development shows that its

claims to authority and exclusivity, though lacking direct evidence, are

antecedently probable given the nature of revelation, and in order to preserve

the dogmatic nature of religion.

This conjugation of the antecedent probabilities of a development of

doctrine and its infallible interpreter force a revolution in what Newman called

the “method of proof” in assessing development, as well as to “the state of the

evidence” left in the wake of an instance of development. Newman was now

treating the fathers similar to how he had treated the Bible as a Tractarian,

namely, as containing seminal doctrinal matter that achieved final form only

later, under the coaxing and control of an exterior interpreter.70 He is not

bothered, for example, by the fact that ante-Nicene theologians (even if they

implicitly held the whole revealed idea) spoke of Christ’s divinity in a way

suitable to Arian appropriation, or that the views on free will that appeared

before Augustine were rankly semi-Pelagian.71 For only from the viewpoint of

67 Essay, 97-100, 102-103, 108-10, 112-114. Butler’s (1692-1752) Analogy (1736), the great anti-Deist tract, was still required reading for many nineteenth-century British seminarians. 68 Ibid., 114, 116-18. 69 Ibid., 97-98. 70 Newman, 16, trod carefully (and even more so in the 6th ed., 19), affirming that ‘the fathers’ are an entity, but that attempts to read them as forwarding a consistent position is defeating. 71 Ibid., 160-63.

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a developed doctrine can “the converging evidence” be duly traced and

established, the gaps in the historical record filled, and a consensus of the

fathers found. And this does not take place by pure induction of the historical

record but as judgement of the church under papal guidance.72 Such is the

method of proof: as a biblical prophecy is interpreted by its fulfilment, so

dogmatic definition by the church “imposes a meaning” on the developmental

course of the doctrine.73

Newman knew full well that Francis Bacon was widely acclaimed in

Britain for having destroyed the method he was rejuvenating. He remained

convinced, however, that the “state of the evidence” in history typically

precludes the direct evidence coveted by the Baconian method. “In such

sciences, we cannot rest upon mere facts…because we have not got

them…and in such circumstances the opinions of others, the traditions of the

ages, the prescriptions of authority, antecedent auguries, analogies, parallel

cases…obviously become of great importance.”74 The historian who tries to

chart the secret valleys and hidden bights of the historical landscape is

inevitably thrown back onto presumption and antecedent probability.

Critics of the Essay have questioned Newman’s intent to write

unbiased history, accusing him of using antecedents to control material often

unfavourable to his dogmatic convictions, and, ultimately, to relieve entirely

the risk of historical development through the introduction of an infallible

interpreter. To be fair, however, Newman was not discarding what he called

“historical instances”. He conceded that if Pope or Council—the very oracles

of heaven—ever contradicted themselves, then “the hypothesis I am

advocating is at once shattered.”75 What he seemed to want was a

historiography consistent with the concept of development. If revelation is

given as an inchoate idea, reflection on which by the church-in-history

produces doctrine, then only in the act of doctrinal definition are the shadows

and hollows on the path of its historical development fully illuminated. Nunc

72 Ibid., 142, 165. 73 Ibid., 109-10, 144-148. This shifts onto Protestants the burden of proof for a corruption of doctrine. 74 Ibid., 179-80. 75 Essay, 6th ed., 121.

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dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace. So ends his

essay: that bright vision in which, one day, all dim history will be seen.76

[2.3.4] Cunningham was not surprised that the Roman authorities

refused to read the Essay before its publication or endorse it thereafter.77 Not

only did Newman impertinently ignore the last four hundred years of Catholic

theology, his theory of development “interferes too obviously with their

claims to authority.”78 Cunningham was referring to the impressive exegetical

and patristic studies by Tridentine theologians which aimed to find, first of all,

scriptural warrant and testimony from the early church fathers for Catholic

doctrines, and then to prove that those doctrines were always held over the

course of the church’s history. In light of Newman’s revolution to the state of

the historical evidence, this vigorous defence of immutable tradition now

appeared to have been wasted labour. And is it not ironic, he mused, that up

until the broaching of Newman’s theory, the infallible interpreter of this

developing tradition was blithely unaware that its doctrines were developing

and, in fact, sought to prove the contrary beyond any doubt?79

More to the point, Newman’s “method of proof” overturned the

manner in which Catholic theologians had previously validated and defended

Roman doctrine. True, Cunningham hastened to add, his belittlement of

Scripture’s clarity was an old ploy to heighten the need for an infallible

interpreter; true, too, that the antecedent reasoning he used to coerce the

evidence was not unlike the a priori ecclesiological claims Rome had always

deployed to plug holes in its claim to an unbroken doctrinal tradition.80 But

formerly, Catholics at least shared with Protestants a belief that church

doctrine was contained in toto in a fixed body of propositional revelation,

recourse to which permitted a relatively straightforward debate between the

two sides over the biblical warrant and evidence in church history for a

contested doctrine—even if Rome did claim an apostolic residue in extra-

Biblical tradition. But it is this classic position, wagered Cunningham, which

76 Essay, 453. 77 See the preface of the Essay. 78 “Romanist,” 46, 54. 79 “Romanist,” 66-67. 80 Ibid., 45, 48-49, 64.

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is at odds with the Essay, because the theory of development endorsed therein

explodes the concreteness of revelation and, therefore, a historically delimited

apostolicity.81 Cunningham’s (correct) contention that Newman differed from

the traditional Roman apologetic assumes, of course, a propositional view of

revelation. As the Catholic theologian Joachim Drumm has pointed out,

propositional revelation entails a Konklusionstheologie, that is to say, dogma

or doctrine formed as logical conclusions from a body of revealed

propositions.82 Traditional Catholic theology knew this as the deposit of faith

(depositum fidei), although traditional Protestant theology held something very

much like it, finding it housed exclusively in Scripture rather than also

entrusted to the church. And it was a deposit of doctrines that Cunningham

considered ill-served by the scheme of historical development advanced in the

Essay, where revelation was less a system than a seed, and apostolicity

determined a doctrine diffusively rather than directly.

While the specifics of his complaint will be taken up in the following

section, Cunningham’s charge of the incompatibility of the Essay with the

classical Roman method of proof for assessing instances of doctrinal

development finds two targets. First, he points out that Newman resolved even

more upon an infallible interpreter to determine doctrine than did the old

apologists like Bellarmine. They at least sought to best Protestants on common

ground before they appealed over their opponents’ heads to papal

superintendence. But Newman’s theory eschewed the “fixedness” of

revelation that had provided a point of recourse for both sides and had

discouraged overly-hasty appeals to an infallible interpreter.83 Second, the

logical development of doctrine—what had been the only recognized form of

development for Protestants and Catholics—Newman marginalized. When a

81 Ibid., 40, 51-52. 82 Drumm, “Dogmenentwicklung,” 296. 83 Cunningham, 57, granted that Newman did not want to resolve so much onto the bare authority of the papal office, yet had to, given his understanding of revelation, and especially given the vagueness of his seven tests. The Essay explicitly professes that the development of doctrine requires an infallible interpreter (165-78). Yet Newman, while believing in the infallibility of the papacy, was not an ultramontantist and was initially wary of making the doctrine into a dogma. He was thus relieved with the Vatican Council’s somewhat restricted definition of the scope of papal infallibility. See the very thorough survey by Francis Sullivan, “Newman on Infallibility,” in Newman After a Hundred Years, 419-46 and the shorter assessment by Dulles, Newman, 92-96. Newsome, The Convert Cardinals, 276-84, brings out well the tension between Newman and the rabid ultramontanist and future cardinal and archbishop H. E. Manning (also an Anglican convert to Rome).

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deposit of faith is presumed, the doctrines contained therein are binding, as are

logical deductions from them. Cunningham complained that Newman gave

logic only one place of seven in his notes of development, and even then, used

it to play “fantastic tricks.”84 Given the nature of revelation as idea, Newman

insisted that doctrinal developments “are carried on silently and

spontaneously.” A notion of logical development should be considered less a

deliberate undertaking of the church to create a “body of thought” than a

check brought in at the end of the process to ensure the coherence and

appropriateness of the developed doctrine.85 Indeed, the slight attention

Newman paid to his fourth test of logical sequence indicated his distance from

the traditional mindset of deduction and inference from a deposit of faith, and

left Cunningham despairing, “Mr. Newman has an ingenious and subtle, but

not very logical, mind.”86

[2.3.5] Cunningham’s final gravamen against the Essay reveals the

tight sequence of his three-pronged critique. Newman, having abandoned

Scripture for ‘Antiquity’, then having had his faith in the sufficiency of early

church tradition shaken by the historical evidence, seized upon a notion of

doctrinal development wholly foreign to the classical Roman Catholic

apologetic in order to save the Roman doctrinal tradition. Hence, the third

prong: whereas Rome and Protestantism once met on the common ground of a

fixed, closed revelation to which all parties had recourse through historical

investigation and a shared commitment to logical inference, his theory of

doctrinal development, in essentially infidel and German fashion, submerges

revelation into the turbulent flow of history, leaving Christians haplessly

unsure of God’s will—apart, of course, from the deus ex machina role of the

papacy.

This third prong resorted to the penchant of Victorian theologians to

blacklist new ideas by tagging them with a “made in Germany” label. The

same infidel spirit ravaging Germany possesses Newman, charged

Cunningham. There, it breeds such scepticism to God’s word that sanctuary

84 Ibid., 71. 85 Essay, 81-82. 86 “Romanist,” 45. Newman would be unperturbed by the comment!

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must be sought in reason; here, only external authority saves Newman from

the shaky probabilism born of his scepticism towards God’s word.87 This Geist

demeans revelation as defective, incomplete, and so over-conditioned by its

birthplace that universal application is wanting without the enlargement and

improvement provided by Reason or Rome. Note the similarity, he urged,

between Newman’s theory and the contemporary Halle neologist

Wegscheider’s belief: Religio Christiania ad majorem perfectionis gradum

evolvi potest.88 Yet, behind the sensationalistic jargon of ‘Teutonic infidelity’,

Cunningham had discerned a substantial problem in the Essay. As usual, the

insight owed to the unyielding doctrine of Scripture he inherited from

Protestant orthodoxy. Perhaps also lurking in the background was his

trepidation that certain circles in his own tradition, under the heady influence

of continental Romanticism, namely the McLeod-Campbell—Edward Irving

—Catholic Apostolic church nexus, were revoking the finality and

completeness of revelation as had the Montanists of old (see 1.4.5).89

Cunningham found Newman torn—he wanted only a “subjective”

development of doctrine but needed “objective” development to save Roman

tradition. The former maintains the expansion of theological science toward a

better understanding of doctrines and their consequences; the latter posits “an

actual external addition to the objects of faith, or the doctrines believed.” The

tension between subjective and objective development of doctrine resides in

the Essay’s problem-fraught concept of revelation. What is the tenor and tense

of the revelation upon which church doctrine is based and from which it

purportedly develops?90 Sometimes a closed corpus of propositional revelation

87 “Romanist,” 53, 73. The essentially sceptical cast of Newman’s mind was a frequent charge of nineteenth century critics. E.g. Andrew M. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1898), 25-47; George Park Fisher, History of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1896), 460-61; Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825, 446-50. 88 Ibid., 52. Here and below, Cunningham was citing from Institutiones theologiae christianae dogmaticae, §27. 89 It is significant that Cunningham did not oppose Irving and McLeod Campbell solely on account of their Christology, but also because he feared that their participation in tongues and prophecy loosed the Spirit from the Word. Irving is compared to Tertullian in Historical Theology, 1: 162-63. 90 “Romanist,” 58, 55. Paul Schrodt, The Problem of the Beginning of Dogma in Recent Theology (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1978), 184-202, concludes that it is difficult to ascertain if Newman thought the source and warrant of dogma lay in a fixed deposit or in the church’s present mind. Broadly speaking, his relating of doctrine to revelation and,

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is assumed. It yields a “body of theology” or theological “system” which

achieves indelible definition as dogma through the agency of an infallible

ecclesiastical institution. Yet, he sometimes implies a truly startling notion of

revelation as a pre-conceptual, supra-verbal “idea”, whose inexhaustibility

cannot be wholly reduced to or contained by church dogma or institution.91

The former is agreeable to the conventional Christian belief in a closed

revelation—but not the latter. It mingles divine revelation too much in the

ways of the world, complained Cunningham, so that not only does

supernatural revelation become comprehended like any other “idea”, that is to

say, subject to temporal development and the conditions of human finitude, it

also sprawls out of the Bible and into the mundane history of the church.

Subjective development unfolds from a concrete, fixed notion of

apostolicity—Newman did hold that the apostles, as the original impress of

revelation and its subsequent purveyor, knew “all the high truths of

theology.”92 But by insisting that the impression or idea of revelation

permitted the apostles to only implicitly know such high truths, he rendered

apostolicity suggestive for doctrine rather than directive, a source to be

developed rather than the bar by which developments are to be measured. Not

quite fairly, Cunningham, in fact, deemed Newman to have functionally

abandoned apostolicity as a mark of true doctrine.93

This 1846 review was only among the first to wonder if Newman’s

theory entailed continuing revelation.94 Seizing upon sentences in the Essay

like “such as it begins, such let it be considered to continue,”95 Cunningham

specifically, the question of whether his theory entails continuing revelation, remains contested among Newman scholars. It should be remembered that I am trying to summarize Cunningham’s perspective in this section, not offer my own interpretation. 91 Note carefully Newman’s use of language in the Essay, especially 34-35, 137. 92 Essay, 83. 93 “Romanist,” 51. This is an unfair criticism inasmuch as Rome understands the concept of the church’s apostolicity differently than Protestants or the Orthodox, as the succession of bishops from the apostles (Wilfried Härle, “Apostolizität,” in RGG4 1, 653-54). Cunningham’s point has force, however, in drawing attention to the fact that Tridentine Catholicism was insistent that Catholic dogma was explicitly apostolic, i.e., as the First Vatican Council declared, “contained in written books and unwritten traditions, which were received by the apostles from the lips of Christ himself, or came to the apostles by the dictation of the holy Spirit, and were passed on as it were from hand to hand until they reached us (“On Revelation,” 2:5). 94 “Romanist,” 63. 95 Essay, 119. A few pages later, Newman, leaning upon Butler’s use of an analogy from nature, seemingly collapsed creation into providence and the act of revelation into its

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felt compelled to conclude that Newman’s theory ultimately crowned the pope

as the standing organ of revelation who, no longer content to just authorize

inferences from a fixed body of revelation, could now add new doctrines.96

Tradition, under papal oversight, now carries revelatory power rather than,

traditionally, a disclosing or clarifying function. And this fact finally aligned

Newman with Wegscheider’s theory of an objective development of Christian

belief. Omnino autem in religionem major perfectio cadere dicitur, non tam

sensu quodam subjectivo, quatenus ejus cognitio in hominibus perfectio reddi

potest, quam objectivo, ita ut ea religionis doctrinae intelligatur indoles quae

permittit adeoque juvat et methodi et ipsius argumenti emendationem,

temporis successu suscipiendam. Moreover, Cunningham made a significant

concession: if Newman is correct that church doctrine historically, i.e.

objectively, develops, then an infallible interpreter is indeed required to avoid

“inextricable confusion and leave every man to be practically a rule to

himself.”97 Yet the parting shot of his review harked back to a concept of

revelation which made such an infidel theory wholly unnecessary: the old

Roman theory of doctrinal continuity and logical development from the

depositum fidei, he concluded, remained superior to Newman’s attempt at

improvement.98 Ironically, this closing jab by an ironclad evangelical Calvinist

was one almost all mainstream nineteenth-century Catholic theologians would

also wholeheartedly endorse.99

maintenance: “as creation argues continual governance, so are the Apostles harbingers of Popes” (124). 96 “Romanist”, 52, 68-69. 97 Ibid., 66. 98 Ibid., 75-6. 99 Despite being invited to the Vatican Council in 1870 and receiving a cardinal’s hat in 1879, Newman remained an outsider to the Catholic hierarchy in both England and Rome during his lifetime. His notion of doctrinal development did not sit well with the Vatican and most Catholic theologians in the nineteenth century. It was radicalized by Modernists like Tyrell and Loisy and condemned under their guise in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis. Victor Consemius, “The Condemnation of Modernism and the Survival of Catholic Theology,” in The Twentieth Century: A Theological Overview, ed. Gregory Baum (Marynoll: Orbis, 1999), 14-19, provides context. The Essay, however, grew in reputation and influence among mainstream Catholic thought, so much so that the Second Vatican Council has been often interpreted as Newman’s posthumous vindication. Some scholars—notably Nicolas Lash, “Tides and Twilights: Newman since Vatican II,” in Newman After a Hundred Years, 447-464—doubt very much the explicit influence of the Essay on the council documents and subsequent papal teaching. Yet Newman’s theory does appear latent in the statements on divine revelation in Verbum Dei, 8 (http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html), and the recent

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[2.3.6] Because Cunningham reviewed An Essay on the Development

of Doctrine as the work of a turncoat Tractarian—not a saint, a cardinal, or a

religious sage—he assessed the Essay through the hoary Protestant-Catholic

debate over Scripture and tradition. When the Essay is assessed by a mind

fluent in the finical debates of sixteenth and seventeenth-century controversial

theology, it takes some hard hits, especially regarding the compatibility of the

theory of doctrinal development with traditional Catholic teaching, and the

tenability of its reconstruction of the relationship between Scripture,

revelation, and doctrine. Newman’s breezy dismissal of traditional Protestant

church historiography and its carefully nuanced articulation of Scripture’s

perfection appear grossly irresponsible. “Newman would have perhaps judged

Protestantism differently had he obtained an exact knowledge of the

Reformation, which he clearly did not have,” Hermann Eigelsheimer rightly

argued.100

Yet, if Cunningham’s strategic position within the seventeenth-century

status quaestionis regarding Scripture, tradition, doctrine, allowed him to lob

some penetrating criticisms at Newman’s case for the development of

doctrine, it also sequestered him behind immovable ramparts. He was simply

unable to gauge the new state of the question forecast by the Essay for the

nineteenth century. Peter Toon concluded a study of the Victorian evangelical

response to Tractarianism with words that could apply almost verbatim to

Cunningham’s response to Newman’s Essay.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Evangelicals never really answered the doctrine of justification proposed by Newman. They were so wedded to looking at the subject in terms of the possible formal causes, either internal or external, that they looked for a scholastic basis for Newman’s doctrine of an internal righteousness and believed they found it in the teaching of the apostles. So their response to the Tractarian teaching was governed by their knowledge of the controversies between Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.101

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 94, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTML. 100 Eigelsheimer, 222. 101 Peter Toon, Evangelical Theology 1833-1856: A Response to Tractarianism (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1979), http://www.anglicanbooksrevitalized.us/Peter_Toon_Books_Online/evantheo.html.

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Cunningham was fighting a past battle. His theological mind lagged several

centuries behind Newman’s venturous attempt to account for the history of the

church and its doctrines in a manner sensitive to the challenges to the study of

church history and the origins and development of doctrine born of the critical

scholarship of the eighteenth century, and appropriate to the historical

consciousness inundating the nineteenth century. In the Essay, Newman had

pointed to Jesus’ parable of the leaven (Luke 13:18-21) as suggestive and

permissive of doctrinal development beyond the letter of the Bible. But

Cunningham only ever heeded Jesus’ warning to beware the leaven of human

tradition blighting God’s pure word (Matthew 16:6).

2.4. Historical Theology The verbose literary reviews of Victorian-era periodicals allowed much

to be said, but not all. Fortunately, Cunningham’s church history lectures at

New College, which were posthumously edited and published as Historical

Theology: A Review of the Principal Doctrinal Discussions in the Christian

Church since the Apostolic Age, expand and illuminate the critical perspective

set forth in the North British Review.102 Cunningham expected his students to

learn church history proper through a prescribed textbook. His lectures, in the

manner of seventeenth-century controversial theology, forsook a genetic

narrative to focus instead on the “great developments of truth and error” (4)

over the history of the church.103 Ever the redoubtable Presbyterian, he

dawdled little over the institutional history of the church or the history of

Christian thought, and not at all over the social history of the Christian

religion, but—and here, at least, he thought the Germans correct!—drove

straight to the heart of the matter: the history of dogma. Church history on this

plan has the decidedly servile function of providing commentary on a given

doctrine’s controversial setting, be it true or false, then illustrating that

doctrine’s effect for good or ill on the life of the church. Church historians

hew wood and draw water for the systematic theologian to build “correct and

102 Cunningham, Historical Theology, 2 vol. (1864; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1960). References will be made within the text and are taken from volume one only. 103 Likewise, in his “Introductory Lecture on Church History,” in Inauguration of the New College of the Free Church, 75, Cunningham described his two-year church history curriculum as centring on theological issues raised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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intelligent views of the doctrines revealed in God’s word.”104 In effect,

Cunningham’s lectures conjured up an ethereal seminar room where the

church’s greatest minds met in happy isolation to debate doctrine. The

published result is two tomes of capable and vigorous discussion of specific

doctrines, which deeply disappoint as historical theology. For not only does

the history of doctrines function as a helpmate to systematic theology in such a

way that its sheer “pastness” is thinned and flattened, the history of the

church’s faith is not determined by its actual historical life. Simply put,

Cunningham imposed onto the history of theology a theological system

weighted to evangelical Reformed emphases on the bondage of the will,

atonement, justification, and church, all of which he felt were under threat in

his own day no less than in the church’s past. This thrust into prominence the

controversies between Augustine and Pelagius over grace and freewill,

Anselm and Abelard over the atonement, and the Reformers and Trent over

Scripture and justification by faith. Further, his evangelical Christus pro nobis

approach to doctrinal theology downgraded in importance the lengthy

controversies over the Trinity and the person of Christ in the early church

because they were rife with speculative metaphysics.105

Despite the limitations of Historical Theology—or, rather, because of

them—two unspoken factors that controlled Cunningham’s review of

Newman’s Essay now found articulation. The first concerns the nature of the

church’s visibility, which frames the question of the historical continuity of

the church and its doctrines. Protestants and Catholics, he argued, both believe

that an account of church history is partly determined by an a priori doctrine

of the church, specifically, Christ’s promise of presence in or with his church

(33-36, e.g. Matt. 16:18-19, 28:20).106 Contrary interpretations of how Christ’s

promise secures the visible course of the church in history influence how

Protestants and Catholics assess historical evidence, furcating, as a

consequence, their respective church historiographies. That Rome interprets

Christ’s promise as preserving (under papal surrogacy) his perpetually spotless 104 “Introductory Lecture on Church History,” 59-77, especially 67. 105 He held the Apostles Creed to be an insufficient statement of Christian belief because it does not make explicit grace and atonement (Historical Theology, 1: 94). 106 Lukas Vischer, “Church History in Ecumenical Perspective: A Preliminary Discussion Paper,” in Church History in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Lukas Vischer (Bern: E. A. O. Schweiz, 1982), 11, argues similarly.

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bride from all errors of faith and doctrine and, indeed, from the ravages of

time itself (12-13, 35-42), lets her view the church’s visibility as continuity of

institution, uniformity of doctrine and cult, and the ever present primacy of

Peter’s see. Her defenders must assemble this from the historical record—not

an easy task, remarked Cunningham wryly, as Cardinal Baronius’ Annales

ecclesiastiae and Bellarmine’s Disputationes de controversies christianae

fidei make clear (11-12, 37). “They admit, indeed, that errors and corruptions

soon appeared among professed Christians,” he summed up the classic Roman

defence of its visibility,

but then they allege that these errors never infected the church, since she always rejected and condemned the errors, and expelled from her pale those who maintained them. They assert that the Catholic church, in communion with the see of Rome, has always maintained the apostolic faith pure and uncorrupted, without any mixture of error; that she has never changed her faith or contradicted herself; that all the doctrines she now holds she has always maintained stedfastly [sic] since the apostolic times, without variation, although from time to time she has given more full and explicit definitions and explanations regarding them, in opposition to the various heresies that may have been propounded (35).107

The Reformed, on the other hand, strip church visibility of its

institutional and clerical apparel, as well as its pretensions to infallibility.

Christ’s promises ensure an indefectible witness to him and his teachings in

history, but the student of church history may be hard pressed to spot this

visible church in the catacombs and mountain vales where it often fled to keep

the faith (17). If Cunningham was repeating the standard Protestant distinction

between the church visible and invisible, his view was surely strengthened by

his experience as a minister who suffered the loss of the benefits of Scotland’s

established religion in order to visibly witness to Jesus Christ.108

Second, Cunningham outlined some historiographical repercussions of

the opposing determinations of church visibility held by Protestants and

Catholics. Protestants, as he had conceded to Newman, do not have the same 107 Cunningham recognized variety among the Salamanca school over the development of doctrine [see ch. 1, 2.3.1] and differences between Jesuits and Gallicans over papal authority. See also Cunningham, “XXIX. Tradition: Positive Evidence against It,” in Theological Lectures, 482-83. 108 It is likely in this sense, then, that Cunningham chastened Protestants for too often treating the invisible church as literally invisible (17). See the summary of the Reformed understanding of the church as visible/invisible by Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1941), 565-67.

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stake in church history as Catholics do. Rome “is open to a fatal wound from

the testimony of history” if the actual history of the church contradicts its

diffused and detailed interpretation of Christ’s promise (38). The Protestant

understanding of church visibility, however, refuses to sanctify institutional

church history. It pleads agnosticism about the specific outworking of Christ’s

promise of guidance, which frees Protestants for an inductive investigation of

the unvarnished history of the church (33-34, 36-38). Cunningham admitted

that Roman incredulity regarding Protestants’ somewhat meagre interpretation

of Christ’s promise of presence carried a gut appeal. But he maintained that a

Protestant conception of the visible church is better attuned to the “plain facts

of history” (37) and, moreover, is consistent with the “analogy of divine

procedure,” that is to say, with the fact that God’s people have always suffered

trial and sword, and that God’s own word foretells apostasy and the rise of

charlatans who will deceive even the elect (42).109

In this context in Historical Theology Cunningham briefly reintroduced

Newman’s theory of doctrinal development as a diabolic ploy to shield Roman

claims of the ‘visibility’ of its doctrinal tradition from the threat of history by

making that same visibility the antecedent measure of church history and of

so-called instances of doctrinal development (40-1). The charge here, as in his

review of the Essay, is that Newman, in typical Roman fashion, had to clean

flaws in the historical evidence with an aspergillum. Yet, when church history

is interpreted “in the ordinary way” (37), inclusive of a presumption of “the

fullness and completedness of the revelation which, at different times, He gave

of His character and plans and especially of the method of salvation,” a

departure from scriptural doctrine is obvious—not, as Newman would have it,

a development (2, his emphasis). A fall theory of church history is both a

likely interpretation of New Testament prophecy and confirmed by the

historical evidence: upon the close of apostolic revelation, seeds of doctrinal

error took root and bore ruinous fruit among even the orthodox church fathers.

By the seventh century, the reign of the papal anti-Christ had fully matured

and the church was in bondage.110 Cunningham let German scholars like

109 See further Historical Theology, 1: 442-43. 110 This timeline was typical of Reformed orthodoxy. Note Turretin, Institutiones, locus II. q. 21, iii.

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Mosheim and Wegscheider marshal evidence for a discrepancy between

apostolic and post-apostolic doctrine and church life he used to confirm the

church’s lapse from biblical standards. And while he had read enough Neander

to begrudge a value to every period of church history, and was not wholly

unappreciative of the fathers’ or schoolmen’s contributions (8), he accused

both of “the almost regularly progressive corruption of the church” (140) and

“the corruption of doctrine” (154). “The progress of error” (169) continued

through the Middle Ages, although Christ was never deprived of faithful

witnesses like Claude of Turin, the Waldensians and Cathars, Wycliffe and

Hus (439-58), until light broke out again at the Protestant Reformation.

Historical Theology is not devoid of stimuli for thinking about church

doctrine in historical perspective, even in spite of the problems with a “fall

theory” of church history. Historical Theology may have predated the

incarnational turn among nineteenth-century evangelicals, but it is Christ-

centred nevertheless (and not only that a focus on the appropriated benefits of

Christ dictated its contents). If Newman implied that the notion of organic

development advocated in the Essay was the consequence of the incarnation as

Christianity’s central fact,111 then the church historiography of Historical

Theology has as its cornerstone the rejected one, he who causes men to

stumble. An interesting ramification of the Reformed distinction between the

visible and invisible church that will be taken up in the conclusion is

Cunningham’s claim that a Protestant understanding of Christ’s promises

liberates historians to investigate and assess church history and the history of

doctrines. In theory, this is a plea for the courage of an unflinching

examination of the church’s past apart from the vested interests of

ecclesiological tradition. It bears semblance to certain German Enlightenment

thinkers’ attempts to wield a “Protestant principle” as a critical tool—that is to

say, to protest any religious authority that claims to be absolute or final.112

111 Essay, 135. Aside from this passage, the Essay seems little affected by an ‘incarnational logic’. 112 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948), http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=380&C=98: “The Protestant principle is the judge of every religious and cultural reality, including the religion and culture which calls itself ‘Protestant’.”

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Lastly, that the principalities and powers are, for Cunningham, agents

of discernible influence in the history of the church’s attempt to teach correct

doctrine—that Satan, thrown from the heights, as a recent theologian

remarked, remains a snake in the grass113—indicates his proximity to the New

Testament and views held by the fathers, schoolmen, and reformers, and his

vast distance from both the canons of modern scholarship and Newman’s

largely secular interpretation of doctrinal development.114

Unfortunately, Cunningham lacked the resolve to unpack the

possibilities within a fall theory for church history or Dogmengeschichte.

Ultimately, he committed himself to a reductionist sola scriptura that was

attributable to the interplay of his Reformed and evangelical inheritance with

factors of circumstance and personality.115 The courage to face the history of

the church and its doctrines stripped of sanctimony was, finally, something

only Roman Catholics need muster; Cunningham used current critical

scholarship, but solely applied its results to their dogmas and doctrines. His

Reformed and evangelical doctrinal convictions, because they were plucked

directly from where they lay as revealed propositions in Scripture, were held

aloof from any challenge history could pose. Thus, he could admit that the

patristic anthologies drawn up by Reformed theologians in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries failed to deliver the fathers to the Protestant side (182-

83, 276), yet remain unfazed by the fact. The doctrines of Christ or the Trinity,

after all, are better and more clearly attested in the plain words of the Bible

than in any theological or creedal statement of early church father or

council.116 Such a static view of the formative process of Christian doctrine,

such naivety toward his own place in the Western doctrinal tradition, as well

113 Paul F. M. Zahl, A Short Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 45. 114 Turner, 583, rightly speaks of the Essay’s “profoundly naturalistic” historiography. 115 Cunningham bears the influence of the early nineteenth-century retrenchment of Scripture [see ch. 1, 4.3.2], even if his doctrine of Scripture owed more to classical Protestantism than to the proto-fundamentalist theories of inspiration and infallibility especially associated with Louis Gaussen’s Theopneustia (1840). On the latter see the interesting article by Kenneth J. Stewart, “A Bombshell of a Book: Gaussen’s Theopneustia and its Influence on Subsequent Evangelical Theology,” EQ 75 (2003): 215-237. 116 He argued similarly in “XXXVIII. Tradition: Its Alleged Necessity Proved by Instances,” in Theological Lectures, 470-72, that most doctrines claimed by Catholics or Tractarians to be only found in or best articulated by tradition can be really drawn from the perspicuous Scriptures.

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as a thoroughly idiosyncratic approach to the discipline of church history,

implicate Cunningham as one who was most certainly not “deep in history.”

2.5. Calvin, Calvinism, and Development In an 1861 essay “Calvin and Beza”, Cunningham took up, and then

rejected, the oft-repeated accusation that Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in

Geneva, was, to lamentable consequence, a Calvino Calvinior.117 Along with

an article from the same year, “Calvinism and its Practical Application”, this

was a rare occasion when he positively treated the development of doctrine.

The two articles provide a sterling example of the justification of doctrinal

development through logical inference, typical of scholastic theological

method.118 It also indicates that to the very end of his life, Cunningham’s self-

quarantine from the diffusing historical consciousness of his time showed no

signs of lifting.

Cunningham recognized that Beza was not Calvin’s parrot. He

proceeded beyond Calvin in regard to the extent of the atonement.

Cunningham, in fact, cautioned against posing the question ‘for whom did

Christ die?’ to Calvin, since a perusal of his writings makes clear that he never

directly addressed the issue (408-09). Nonetheless, material continuity on this

topic exists between the two reformers. Differences owed to the “enlarged

controversial discussion” in which Beza found himself as a third generation

Protestant (350). Cunningham is thus consonant with the long-standing

allowance in the Christian tradition for heresy and false teaching, controversy

and debate, to grant a doctrine an enhanced and refined clarity.119 Yet, he

appeared unwilling to grant historical circumstances sole responsibility for

Beza’s expanded treatment of the atonement, as if the new university setting

of Reformed theology or the need to respond to Lutheran and Roman Catholic

antagonists were alone engines of development. Doctrine develops not only

117 Cunningham, “Calvin and Beza,” in The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation (1862; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2000), 345-412. References will be made within the text. A modern overview of the “Calvin against the Calvinists” debate is provided by Carl Trueman, “Calvin and Calvinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, 225-245. 118 A slight treatment can also be found in Historical Theology, 1: 208-11. 119 Maurice Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine: A Study in the Principles of Early Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967), 8-40; Pelikan, Historical Theology, 1-32.

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from environmental pressures but through inner compulsion; doctrinal

development not only explains the Bible’s doctrines in and to a new situation,

it explains them better.

Men are bound to improve…all their opportunities of acquiring the most clear, accurate, and exact knowledge of all truths revealed in the sacred Scriptures; and some men, in seeking to discharge this duty, have been honoured by the Head of the church to contribute largely to diffuse among their fellow-men more correct, definitive, and comprehensive views of Christian doctrine than had prevailed before, and to show that these views were indeed sanctioned by the word of God (411).

Because third generation Protestants like Beza had at their disposal improved

philological and historical tools for interpreting the biblical text and world,

they better understood the Bible, and were, accordingly, able to hone the

evangelical doctrines of their predecessors.120 But neither should the inner

impulse of development be overlooked: first, an evangelical Victorian note of

inevitable improvement can be detected; second, the Spirit’s bestowal of

wisdom upon specific doctors of the church to allow them to penetrate deeply

into the doctrines of Scripture to benefit the whole people of God.

Cunningham plotted an ascending development or improvement of

doctrine wherein what he would call the “doctrines of grace” were absolutely

central: from Augustine, leaping “the dark ages” to the Reformation, then

reaching a zenith in seventeenth-century Reformed orthodoxy (411).

Seventeenth-century divines like Turretin, the Dutch theologians Peter van

Mastricht (1630-1706) and Hermann Witsius (1636-1708), J. H. Heidegger

(1633-98), professor at Zürich, and the confessional statements from the same

high point of Reformed orthodoxy like the Westminster Standards and Canons

of Dordt, “conclusively determined”, even “completed”, the prior century and

half of Reformed theology. In fact, the clarity and fullness of exposition of the

doctrines of Scripture reached then remain unsurpassed (412).121

The mechanism of doctrinal development as inference or deduction

from revealed propositions becomes explicit in “Calvinism and its Practical

120 Muller, PRRD, 2: 482-501, documents that to which Cunningham is referring. 121 Honeycutt, 298, arrives at the same conclusion as I do.

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Application.”122 Appealing directly to the Confession’s declaration that

Scripture is the source from which “all things necessary for his [God’s] own

glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down…or by good

and necessary consequence may be deduced…” (1.6), Cunningham defended

the Reformed doctrine of reprobation as “the fair and legitimate application of

the views revealed to us as to what God has purposed,” i.e., as a necessary

deduction from more explicit biblical doctrines of election, sin and grace, and

atonement (526, 539).123 He faulted orthodox Arminian divines for admitting

the doctrines of Christ’s divinity, atonement, and the agency of the Spirit but

then suffering a failure of nerve to “fully apply them in some of their most

important bearings and consequences” (528). He called these inferences

“Scriptural consequences” (527), but there is no mistaking the affinity of his

method with how Roman theologians like Molina and Vãzquez necessarily

inferred dogmas from revealed premises, or the similarity of his insistence that

the “practical application” of a doctrine contained in or deduced from the

Bible is also binding on the church with the de fide status of inferred dogmas

in Tridentine Catholicism (see 1.2.3).

A scheme of doctrinal development as the improvement of doctrinal

expression needs to be distinguished from historical development.

Cunningham affirmed that the church’s understanding of its doctrines

progressed over its history. His friend and theological comrade-in-arms

Charles Hodge spoke even more optimistically of an “uninterrupted

development of theology in the Church.”124 For these two Presbyterians—both

devotees of scholastic Protestantism (especially Turretin) and committed to

the Confession’s endorsement of the deduction of doctrines from sacred

principles—doctrinal development was a predominantly logical process, with

the accidents of environment and circumstance playing a minor role. Like its

Catholic analogue, doctrine progressed on the historical plane, that is to say,

over time, but was not really historical development. It was axiomatic that true 122 Cunningham, “Calvinism and its Practical Application,” in The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, 525-599. 123 Note Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae, locus II, q.16, iii: Fatemur enim multa per legitimam consequentiam bene ex Scriptura deduci, et pro Dei Verbo habenda esse. See further C. J. Williams, “Good and Necessary Consequence in the Westminster Confession,” in The Faith Once Delivered: Essays in Honour of Wayne R. Spear, ed. Anthony T. Selvaggio (Phillipsburg: P & R, 2007), 171-190. 124 Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:117.

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doctrine held aloof from historical conditionality, that history was a venue for

the development of doctrine but not an agent, and that the development of

doctrine, once achieved, was irrevocable. Here, as elsewhere, Cunningham’s

concept of development assumed the propositional nature of biblical

revelation and, further, the classical Protestant understanding of Scripture’s

perspicuity and sufficiency for the formulation of Christian doctrine. What

appears perhaps more pronounced in these two articles than in previous

writings analysed is Cunningham’s evangelical inheritance. It underlay his

appeal to the inductive method to extract doctrines from the repository of

Scripture, as well as the fact that the logical deduction from or refinement of

an established doctrine is, at least sometimes, in concert with a latent

expectation of improvement typical of mainstream Victorian evangelicalism.

It is exasperating that contemporary Presbyterian theology seems to

have not progressed much beyond Cunningham. With a few exceptions,

Reformed theologians still are not distinguishing themselves in either thinking

through the historical genesis of catholic doctrine or nuanced, impartial

examinations of their own confessional morphology. Theological discussion

of doctrinal development is focussed on the debate over ‘Calvin against the

Calvinists’. If doctrinal development is admitted, it is as logical inference. Did

later Reformed theology, particularly the Westminster Confession and the

Synod of Dordt develop away from Calvin’s theology as Barthians argue, or

does later Calvinism faithfully reflect the master’s mind as more conservative

Reformed theologians maintain? Of course both sides are reflecting the typical

ahistoricism of the Reformed tradition either in concern for a pure Calvin

against which all developments must be gauged or, alternately, in making the

seventeenth-century confessional documents the terminus of legitimate logical

development of the teachings of Calvin or Bullinger or Bucer on covenant,

predestination, atonement, polity, etc....125

125 E.g. the strictly logical understanding of development in two examples of this debate is typical of the whole: Paul Helm, “Calvin, English Calvinism and the Logic of Doctrinal Development,” SJT 34 (1981): 179-85; M. Charles Bell, “Was Calvin a Calvinist?” SJT 36 (1983): 535-40. A similar problem blights Mark Karlberg, “Doctrinal Development in Scripture and Tradition: a Reformed Assessment of the Church’s Theological Task,” CTJ 30 (1995): 401-18, as well as the excellent study by M. Eugene Osterhaven, The Faith of the Church: A Reformed Perspective on its Historical Development (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

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2.6. Conclusion Would it be presumptuous to imagine Cunningham nodding his head in

agreement while reading a letter his friend Charles Hodge wrote to him in

August 1857?

I have had but one object in my professional career and as a writer, and that is to state and to vindicate the doctrines of the Reformed Church. I have never advanced a new idea, and have never aimed to improve on the doctrines of our fathers. Having become satisfied that the system of doctrines taught by the symbols of the Reformed Church is taught in the Bible, I have endeavoured to sustain it, and am willing to believe where I cannot understand.126

Cunningham stood firm on the feste Burg of classical Reformed theology;

imbued with an evangelical pathos that this theology best expressed the

Bible’s message of God’s redemption of sinners, he propagated it with his full

powers. The virtues inhering in the scholastic method characteristic of

Reformed orthodoxy find reflection in their nineteenth-century epigone:

doctrinal theology as a revealed science, undertaken for the edification of the

church; Scripture as the principium unicum theologiae; doctrinal expression

which, if colourless, was lean and clear, and supposed the logical coherence of

Christian belief; the art of controversy for the sake of truth—hard-hitting but

fair-handed.127

Yet the limitations of Reformed orthodoxy are no less obvious. The

doyen of the study of Protestant orthodoxy, Richard Muller, makes the

significant (though often overlooked) point that Reformed orthodoxy was a

living theology. Rooted in the theological vision of the Reformation, it

remained in extensive dialogue with church tradition, and kept abreast of

current philosophical and philological trends.128 This was no longer the case

two hundred and fifty years later, whatever features of enduring value it might

possess. Cunningham rightly recognized that Reformation teaching was 1982). To take another example, a collection of quality essays on the “modern development” of Reformed theology, David F. Wells, ed., Reformed Theology in America: A History of its Modern Development, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), is clearly uneasy with the fact that development might imply progress beyond strict confessional boundaries. 126 Cited in Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge, 430. 127 Cunningham, who despised the English mind as insipid, challenged Tractarians to study Bellarmine to learn the art of theological controversy as well as the integrity of the Catholic system he felt they handled sloppily. 128 Muller, PRRD, 1: 219-20.

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systematized and clarified in the confessions and theological institutiones of

the seventeenth century. Indeed, he interpreted this process as a legitimate

development, and contested attempts to exploit the nagging discrepancies

between the Reformers and their descendants. Yet, by honouring Reformed

orthodoxy as a final achievement—or, at least, a conditionally final

achievement—he rendered it a monument. “They’re sayin, the we are trade

eshanists,” wrote a Free Churchman, tongue in cheek, some years after

Cunningham’s death. “What this beg wurd manes, am tould is, that we belave

what oor faithers belaved. An’ why should we no? Uf oor fairthers wus richt,

it canna make us rong to be like them.”129 Reformed orthodoxy might be

repristinated in the nineteenth century, as Cunningham and not a few other FC

theologians attempted, but it could not be repeated. The intellectual ferment in

Europe in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had unleashed

formidable scientific, philosophical, and historical challenges to orthodoxy,

made that impossible.

Perhaps Cunningham’s dilettantish account of the genesis of doctrine

shows the ditch between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to be

dauntingly wide. Protestant orthodoxy bequeathed to him an unassailable

scriptural principle of a perspicuous, sufficient, and perfect Bible. Such a

principle would not budge before Newman’s argument that the desultory and

diffusive nature of revelation makes probable a development of doctrine under

an infallible guide. Abetted by the Scottish Realism that Cunningham imbibed

as an evangelical and a Scotsman, this principle commandeered a confident

induction of the body of orthodox Christian doctrine seemingly independent of

the context provided by either theological tradition or historical location. Yet,

herein lies a decisive reproof of his account of the formation of Christian

doctrine. The Reformers enthroned the Bible, interpreted in its strictly

grammatical sense, as the norma normans of the church’s doctrine and

practice. This enabled the reformation and modification of the doctrinal

tradition, even as the basic veracity of orthodoxy, the general coherence of the

sacra pagina and sacra doctrina, was not doubted (see 1.3.1). Only under fire

from seventeenth-century Socinians and freethinkers, and the Enlightenment

129 Anonymous, A Purteekler Acoont o’ the Last Assembly. By Wan o’ the Hielan’ Host, 3.

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thereafter, did it become apparent that the exposition of the Bible according to

historical and grammatical exegesis was, in fact, often hard-pressed to

reproduce orthodoxy. Critical scholarship was showing traditional Christian

belief to be a complex product, founded on a sacred text that prior theologians

did not think exhausted by its sensus literalis, forged in unique circumstances

over a centuries-long process, fed by sundry influences. The Scripture

principle deployed by Protestants against the doctrinal corruptions and

devotional abuses within medieval Christendom, which was at the same time

its shield from Trent’s retort of innovation, was eventually exploited to drive a

wedge between Scripture and classical Christian doctrine.130

It is not that Cunningham was unaware of this critical literature but,

rather, that he conceded much of it, detached the basic system of orthodoxy

from the intellectual, social, cultural, and especially ecclesiastical context of

its historical formation, then discovered it more or less intact in Scripture. This

is egregious. It entailed, simultaneously, an overinvestment of the Bible and an

underestimation of the irreducibly churchly and historical genesis of Christian

doctrine. Further, making “neology” or German infidelity the scapegoat for the

“presumption against dogma” 131 which Cunningham feared was creeping

among his contemporaries obscured what this trend owed to his own

Protestant forebears.

John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian

Doctrine exposed the evangelical and Reformed understanding of how the

church formed its doctrines as “unreal”, along with all other theological

accounts of doctrine that failed to reckon with Christianity’s earthly and often

earthy existence.132 Newman was not a good historian by either nineteenth-or

twenty-first-century standards—as with Cunningham, it is hard to escape the

conclusion that he ultimately sought to overcome history through dogma.133

130 Muller, PRRD, 2: 341, 442-55. 131 Rainy and Mackenzie, 506. 132 Ker’s biography of Newman frequently touches upon his passion for the ‘real’ as opposed to theoretical. 133 E.g. Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don (1885; reprint, London: Cassell, 1988), 100-112; Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987), 4-6; Turner, John Henry Newman, 479-96; Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 295-307, judges Newman’s historical analysis of Reformation teaching in his Lectures on Justification (1837) inept, if not deliberately dishonest.

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But while still a Tractarian he became cognizant that the trend to approach

Christianity historically made the problem of change and discontinuity in the

history of the church and its doctrines unavoidable. If the Tractarian via media

was uselessly aseptic for the messiness of church history, evangelicalism’s

sola scriptura was too thin to bear the full weight of Christian doctrine and too

condescending of the church’s history to admit its assistance. Newman’s

Essay proposed a solution to be found, at least partially, in history itself: a

theory of development promised a frank reckoning with history and the

preservation of the church’s vast doctrinal tradition. The Essay’s legacy for

Victorian theology supports Gerhard Ebeling’s contention that “the service

performed by the study of church history is the disturbance it causes. History

makes a naïve theological understanding of ourselves impossible and calls into

question the sense of our theological studies.”134 Newman’s theory of

development burst the hemmed and tidy concepts of doctrine held by his

contemporaries and made the fact of the change and contextuality of the

church and its belief both uncomfortably present and unavoidably pressing.

For attempts by FC and UP theologians to think through the

implications of “the category of the historical” for the origin and nature of

church doctrine, An Essay on the Development of Doctrine needs to be

considered alongside its 1846 review by Cunningham. It disturbed

evangelical Presbyterians, but so too, in short time, did some of the traditional

Protestant assumptions that governed Cunningham’s response and underlay

his other works. His trenchant rejection of a theory of doctrinal development

and reaffirmation of the Protestant doctrine of Scripture and its concomitant

church historiography laid bare the ill preparedness of Reformed theology to

reckon with the challenge of history for doctrine with which Newman had

struggled. In effect, Cunningham presented a choice to posterity. Given the

sine non qua status for Protestant theology of the belief that “Holy Scripture

containeth all things necessary to salvation” (Thirty Nine Articles, 6), and

given the fact of the development of church doctrine of which Newman argued

so convincingly (even if Presbyterians never became convinced of his case for

why and how it developed), the choice lay either in revamping traditional

134 Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963), 429.

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doctrines under the auspices of the recovery of the beliefs of the historically-

reconstructed church of the New Testament, or granting church tradition a

greater role in the development of doctrine from a sufficient Scripture.

That German Dogmengeschichten would allow this tradition to pursue

both ‘solutions’ was something neither Cunningham nor Newman could have

predicted. In any case, Presbyterianism in Scotland and beyond would not

encounter such a deliberately anti-historicist reckoning of church doctrine and

the history of theology as Historical Theology —at least not of such muscle

and magnitude—until the neo-orthodox revolt in the twentieth century.

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Chapter 3

Oxford—Erlangen—Edinburgh: Robert Rainy on the Historicity of Church and Doctrine

“Then came a change, as all things human change.” - Alfred Lord Tennyson1

3.1. Introduction “The philosopher need address himself only to the best minds of an

age—perhaps only to the best minds of all times. The historian of ideas must

also consider the representative minds of an age, which may be the ‘second-

best’ minds.”2 Robert Rainy, the FC’s mastermind in what he himself

described as an age of violent change and confusion,3 was a second-best mind

of first-rate importance for the Presbyterian tradition in the Victorian era and

beyond. Despite attaining a chair at New College at the age of thirty-six,

Rainy has left a skimpy paper trail for scholars of Christian thought to

follow.“His ambition was to study and teach or write Church history, his task,

to make it,” declared his biographer Carnegie Simpson.4 With only a little

push, then, does his life slide into “ecclesiastical biography”, and following

Simpson’s lead this is exactly what historians have done. Rainy is so entwined

with the course of the FC in Victorian Britain that he becomes decidedly one-

sided: ecclesiastical; his mind is so representative of his age and his church as

to become patently obvious.

The customary portrait of Rainy needs to be redrawn. He deserves

credit as a thinker, who took the lead among nineteenth-century evangelical

theologians in confronting the claims of history for church doctrine. Although

a thinker of far less consequence, Rainy can be considered the Newman of

1 From “Enoch Arden,” in Alfred Tennyson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). 2 Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (London: Weldenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), x-xi. 3 Robert Rainy, Address to the Students of the New College, Edinburgh, At the Close of the Session 1881-82 (Edinburgh: n.p. 1882), 5-6. 4 P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, Vol. 1 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), 146.

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nineteenth-century Presbyterianism, who recognized the Janus-face of history

and refused to blink from its manifold, often contradictory, repercussions on

the Christian faith; like Newman, he responded in such a way as to try to make

history ultimately enhance rather than diminish classical Christianity.5 His

significant ecclesiastical career—and the discord that followed his every

move—may be the best testament of this, but his few publications fixate too

on the taut meeting of centuries-old Christian belief with the historical

consciousness of his century. Most notably, his Delivery and Development of

Christian Doctrine (1874) is an initial evangelical foray into the daunting

implications for church proclamation when it is conceded that Christianity is

essentially and not just accidentally bound up in history.6 Appropriately, an

analysis of this wide-ranging work forms the centre of this chapter, even if, as

shall be hinted on occasion, the text’s Wirkungsgeschichte is in truth better

traced through the ecclesiastical-political tumult of the FC in Victorian

Scotland than the pages of its theological discourse during this time.7

Like many second-best minds (who make up for in influence what they

lack in originality), Rainy had a knack for the timely application of the first-

rate ideas of others. An analysis of DDCD thus need refer its argument to the

past, namely, the Reformed orthodoxy Rainy absorbed through Cunningham

and his FC upbringing, and to the present: Newman, of course, but especially

German theology.8 Rainy’s keen attention to the evangelische Theologie then

being imported by evangelical Scots was typical of his generation. Nor was his

indebtedness to certain types of German theology in order to fund a struggle

5 A comparison which holds in more ways than one, as suggested by James Denney’s jaded comment: Letters of Principal James Denney, D.D., to his Family and Friends, ed. James Moffat (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), 62. 6 Rainy, Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1874) [hereafter abbreviated as DDCD]. Union Seminary’s W. G. T. Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, 2 vol. (1863; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998) is a genetic history of doctrine, not a study of doctrine per se. See H. W. Bowden, “W. G. T. Shedd and A. C. McGiffert on the Development of Dogma,” JPH 49 (1971): 246-65. 7 Theological contributions by Scottish Presbyterians which interact with Rainy’s thesis include John Laidlaw, “Evangelical Theology Living and Progressive,” BFER 31 (1882): 1-15; William A. Curtis, A History of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in Christendom and Beyond (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911), 433-40; P. Carnegie Simpson, The Evangelical Church Catholic (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934), 103-36. 8 This latter aspect is absent in the analyses of DDCD by Toon, The Development of Doctrine in the Church, 37-53, and Karlberg, “Doctrinal Development in Scripture and Tradition: a Reformed Assessment of the Church’s Theological Task.”

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with the Zeitgeist unusual. DDCD divulges a clear link of critical importance

between its author and the faculty of theology at the University of Erlangen, at

that time stamped by a vigorous, pan-German movement called neo-

Lutheranism [Neuluthertum].

Although this movement originated as a protest to the Prussian

monarchy’s heavy-handed promotion of a united Protestant church, its

hostility to all ecclesiastical, political, or theological attempts to detract from

the inviolability of the Lutheran church and confessions was not quite a

repristination of classical Lutheranism.9 For one thing, as many neo-Lutheran

theologians had been converted during the Awakening, their allegiance to the

Book of Concord was tempered by the inheritance of pietism: Biblicism, a

dynamic view of history, and a deep concern for the experience of conversion

and faith (see.1.3.3) that left them implicitly sympathetic to Schleiermacher.

His starting point for theological reflection in the religious consciousness was

given, however, an intensely evangelical interpretation as the consciousness of

being ‘born again’. At the same time, neo-Lutherans found aspects of the

romanticism then suffusing German thought and culture congenial for

conservative ends. The consubstantiation of finite reality and the Infinite

reinforced the “high” views of church, sacrament, and priestly office of the

Lutheran confessions. Catholic dogma and Lutheran doctrine was well served

by romantic philosophies of history that encouraged both reverence for past

epochs of the church and recognition of a positive development of doctrine up

to its confessional crescendo. No small feat indeed: by presupposing the nature

of the church as an organism—a fashionably romantic Leitmotif—personal

religious consciousness could even be writ large as an objective and churchly

Glaubenslehre that dovetailed with the Lutheran confessional standards (see 1.

4.5). “It is less the Lutheran inheritance which formed the conservative

character of confessionalism than its strong dependence on the romanticism of

its time,” rightly concluded Felix Flückiger.10

9 See F. W. Kantzenbach and Joachim Mehlhausen, “Neuluthertum,” in TRE 24, 327-41; Gottfried Hornig, “Die Theologie des Neuluthertum,” in HDThG 3, 174-88; Hermann Fischer, “Konfessionalismus,” in TRE 19, 426-31; Karlmann Beyschlag, Die Erlanger Theologie (Erlangen: Martin-Luther Verlag, 1993). 10 Felix Flückiger, Die Protestantische Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), 74.

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Not unsurprisingly, evangelical Presbyterians were deeply interested in

this creatively conservative movement, with whose proponents they shared

awakened hearts and a Protestant orthodox mind.11 Rainy himself seem to

have been an attentive ‘distance student’ of Erlangen’s star J. C. K. von

Hofmann (1810-77). Hofmann, whom Barth thought to be the greatest

conservative theologian of the century,12 was widely read in Scotland, and

drew scores of international students to Erlangen. DDCD explicitly refers to

Hofmann only twice, but those familiar with the unique contours of his

theology will find his fingerprints all over Rainy’s opus. And on account of

Rainy’s massive stature in Scottish church life, these fingerprints would mark

too Victorian era evangelical Presbyterianism.13 In 1857, Schaff had

bemoaned the fact that evangelicals still had their eyes shut to the great law of

development “which pervades all created life, all the works of God.”14 This

chapter finds evangelical eyes finally blinking open to the law of historical

development on revelation and Bible, church doctrine and creed, and that that

sight was given not only by Newman, as is often supposed, but also by

evangelical Germany.

3.2. Robert Rainy (1826-1906)15

Rainy was one of the many enthusiastic young men who scorned

comfortable prospects in the established church for the threadbare new FC.

When he began studies at New College in 1844 (then able to meet only in

rented rooms), he came under Cunningham’s formidable influence. His

“beloved master” imparted to him a reverence for classic Reformed theology

and the great minds of the church, and impressed upon him the essential

11 For detailed documentation see Todd Statham “‘Landlouping Students of Divinity’: Scottish Presbyterians in German Theology Faculties, c. 1840-1914,” ZKG 110 (2010): 40-65. 12 Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Bowen (1959; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 20025), 96 [hereafter abbreviated as PT]. 13 John Dickie, Fifty Years of British Theology: A Personal Retrospect (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937), 87-8, appears to be one of the few who recognized this. 14 Schaff, Germany, 311. 15 On Rainy see W. Robertson Nicoll, “Robert Rainy,” in Princes of the Church, 192-203; Mackintosh, Principal Rainy: a Biographical Study; Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy. For background see especially Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk; Gerald Parsons, “Victorian Britain’s Other Establishment: the Transformations of Scottish Presbyterianism,” in Religion in Victorian Britain. Volume 1: Traditions, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester: U of Manchester P, 1988), 117-45.

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spiritual and intellectual coherence of orthodoxy.16 Nor was their relationship

simply deferential: in 1854, Cunningham convinced Rainy to leave his small

Aberdeenshire congregation for the Free High Church, which, because it sat

on a quadrangle with New College and the General Assembly buildings,

perched the young man on the corridors of influence in the FC.

He grew into the mantle of leadership over the subsequent decade. He

was appointed to Cunningham’s old chair at New College in 1862 and soon

after received the University of Glasgow D.D. He began to exert himself in

assembly and church, lobbying in favour of union with the UPs. Rainy was

incongruously thrust into national prominence in 1872 when the dean of

Westminster Abbey, A. P. Stanley, delivered a set of lectures in Edinburgh on

the history of the Scottish church.17 The broad churchman’s addresses were

superficial—Walter Scott novels provided his knowledge of Scottish history—

but provocative: he was friendly with moderates in the C of S, and varnished

their vision of a national church that was inclusive, non-dogmatic, and

Erastian. All this was challenge thrown at the ‘fanatical’ Calvinist seceders

who comprised the other half of Scottish Protestantism. “Do you know what

they’re saying, Dr. Rainy?” goaded Alexander Whyte after the final lecture.

“They’re saying that if Cunningham had been alive, Stanley would not wait

long for his answer.”18 His demosthenic response shredded Stanley’s slack

research and Whiggish historiography, and reproached his English and

Anglican condescension.19 More importantly, he resolutely opposed the broad

church pursuit of church unity at the cost of doctrine and of religious influence

without first converting the country to Christ. Popular support for the C of S’s

disestablishment was kindled in the wake of his lectures.

Despite Rainy’s academic appointments–he became principal of New

College in 1874—his subsequent career was noteworthy for its ecclesiastical

rather than scholarly achievements. He led the charge to persuade Westminster

to disestablish the C of S; as chair of the FC’s Highland committee he raised

funds for church extension and mission in Gaelic-speaking areas; he 16 Noted in Rainy and Mackenzie, The Life of William Cunningham, xli. 17 For context see Stewart J. Brown, “Dean Stanley and the Controversy over his History of the Scottish Church, 1872,” RSCHS 31 (2001): 145-172. 18 Cited in Simpson, 1: 226. 19 Rainy, Three Lectures on the Church of Scotland (1872; reprint, Edinburgh: Macnivan and Wallace, 1883).

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represented the FC at international organizations and meetings; having

orchestrated union with the Reformed Presbyterians in 1876, he guided the FC

through tortuous negotiations into union with the UPs in 1900; after the House

of Lord’s decision to award all former FC property to a small group of

dissentients, he co-ordinated the new UFC’s legal and political protest. Rainy

was a three-time moderator of his church—an extraordinary occurrence in

Presbyterian polity. He was the very first FC moderator (1887) drawn from

post-Disruption ordinands, and was later called to the moderator’s chair on

two of the most critical occasions in the life of his church: as the UFC’s first

moderator (1900), and then again during its legal battle against the

“continuing” FC (1905).

Rainy led the FC like an old Highland ceann cinnidh through what

Alec Cheyne called “the Victorian religious revolution,” when every aspect of

the church’s life was passing through the fires of modernity. He cautiously

oversaw the FC’s acceptance of the use of organs and hymns in worship, and

begrudged its opening up to the theory of evolution, biblical criticism, and

revision of the Westminster Confession. His considerable diplomatic skills

were often employed to dissuade progressives from rushing ahead and

dissuade conservatives from decamping outright. This was perhaps nowhere

more evident than during the William Robertson Smith heresy trial, the most

famous such case in the nineteenth century and a defining moment in the

development of biblical studies in the English-speaking world. Robertson

Smith, a dashing young professor at the Aberdeen FC College, unleashed a

maelstrom of opposition by brashly advocating views on revelation and

biblical history that looked suspiciously German.20 Charged with trespassing

the Confession’s teaching on Scripture, his convoluted prosecution (1876-81)

ended with a solution attributable to Rainy’s savvy: the FC’s de facto

toleration of the ‘believing criticism’ that Robertson Smith promoted, but at

the cost of his teaching post. To progressives this mediating solution was

utterly underhanded; to the traditionalists it did nothing to prevent the acid of

20 See J. Sutherland Black and George Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912); Simpson, 1: 284-356; H. F. Henderson, “The Robertson Smith Case,” in The Religious Controversies of Scotland (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905), 207-230. A fine new study is Bernhard Maier, William Robertson Smith (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).

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higher criticism from eating away the orthodox bedrock of the FC, as was

proved less than ten years later when Rainy had to exculpate Marcus Dods and

A. B. Bruce of similar charges, and then again George Adam Smith in 1902.21

Similarly, Rainy’s masterstroke, the 1892 Declaratory Act on the

Westminster Confession, sought to conserve the authority and integrity of the

FC’s venerable subordinate standard whilst permitting wider interpretations of

those Calvinist doctrines that were vexing his generation. Conservatives,

however, especially Gaels, came to damn “Black Rainy” for allowing the old

views of the Bible and Confession to be undermined; progressives in and

outside the FC came to deem his attempt to plot a forward course for the FC in

deliberate continuity with older Calvinism proof that he remained ever

Cunningham’s protégé, “at home in the old interpretation of the old or

timeless truths of the gospel.”22 What has escaped the notice of many of

Rainy’s interpreters, however, is that this contested legacy is already presaged

in his 1873 Cunningham Lectures on the nature of doctrine, where his

mediating programme lies sketched out as blueprint for the future of doctrine

in the evangelical and Reformed tradition.

3.3. Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine

Circumstances may have made Rainy a last minute replacement as the

incumbent of the lectureship (vii), but he was primed. Having retained from

student days his mentor’s obsession with post-Reformation polemical

theology, he had kept tabs on the fresh defences of the Roman view of

tradition and doctrinal development made by Newman and Johann Adam

Möhler.23 In fact, an early publication reviewed Newman’s Apologia, mixing

praise for the author’s Augustine-like spirituality with a Kingsley-like

reprimand for playing loose with historical facts for the sake of Roman

dogma.24 Nor had Rainy’s mind lain fallow during his pastorates: he had

21 See Henderson, “The Dods-Bruce Case,” in The Religious Controversies of Scotland, 231-270; Campbell, Fixing the Indemnity: The Life and Work of Sir George Adam Smith (1856-1942), 128-139. 22 Mackintosh, Principal Rainy, 38. 23 Like Cunningham, Rainy respected Rome greatly but Anglicanism not all (Simpson, 2: 180). 24 Rainy, “Apologia pro Vita Sua. By John Henry Newman, D. D. London: Longman & Co., 1864,” North British Review 41 (1864): 85-104.

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learned German and had poured over the church fathers. Unlike Cunningham,

Rainy was a specialist in patristic literature, and an easy intimacy with the key

documents concerning the formation and development of creeds and dogma in

the first centuries is obvious in DDCD, as is familiarity with the path-

breaking, sometimes bridge-burning German scholarship on the topic.25 He

had fretted in his inaugural lecture at New College (1862) over the tendency of

German theologians to “abridge history” by squeezing facts into speculative

theories of development. Nevertheless, their “turn to history” afforded the

contemporary church a chance to better understand its institutional life,

doctrines, worship, and mission to the world, and to comprehend ecclesiastical

life as an organic whole.26 The contrast with Cunningham’s inaugural lecture,

only a decade removed, could not be more pronounced. Rainy served notice

that under his tutelage, not only would church history be more than the study

of doctrines, it would also no longer be content with its submissive role as a

handmaid to systematic theology.

[3.3.1] Rainy began the first lecture (1-33) unapologetically.

Controversy has, after all, always swirled around the topic of church doctrine,

especially around those “doctrines pressed with a greater weight of authority”

(3) that churches have fixed as their creed and to which, traditionally, they

have imperiously demanded assent. But if previous epochs saw strife over the

legitimacy of particular doctrines, nowadays “Bible Christians” parley with

romantics and rationalists against the right of doctrine to even exist (3-4). The

modern distemper toward doctrinal religion is widespread, growing, and,

Rainy admits, not always unjustified. Theological pedantry has created a dense

system of opaque teaching that weighs heavily on believers’ consciences and

echoes weakly in their hearts. First, then, the Zeitgeist must be confronted: is

25 David F. Wright, “‘From a quarter so totally unexpected’: Translation of the Early Church Fathers in Victorian Scotland,” RSCHS 30 (2000): 124-169, finds evangelical Scots from Cunningham onwards intently studying the church fathers. He does not link this, as I do, with their ongoing attention to the problem of doctrine. 26 Rainy, Introductory Lecture, Delivered in the New College, Edinburgh, on 7th November, 1862 (Edinburgh: Johnstone, Hunter, & Co., 1862), especially 12. See further Rainy, “Modern Theological Thought,” in Report of the Proceedings of the Second General Council of the Presbyterian Alliance, Convened at Philadelphia, September, 1880, especially 77-8, 85-7 [hereafter abbreviated as “MTT”].

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Christianity properly doctrinal, or was the church’s pursuit to articulate its

experience and knowledge of God a chasing after the wind? (29).

“Christian doctrine not only has a being,” he adds, “it has a history; a

very large, various, and interesting body it is, not soon mastered, not easily

judged” (4). The church has been palpably ill at ease with this history,

although it was perhaps only after the Reformation, when Reformed and

Roman divines were both “twisting and torturing patristic testimonies” to

prove themselves the legitimate children of the church fathers (14), that

churches really began to perceive that historical inquiry was threatening not

only the pedigree of specific doctrines but also the traditional understanding of

the essence of doctrine (17-9, 298-9). Post-Reformation polemics were

trumped by the cool, critical analysis of eighteenth-century divines, who made

it undeniably clear that in all lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy “doctrine has

been a matter of development—it has grown and become by virtue of

processes and tendencies of human minds” (25). Rainy intends, second, to

own up to what post-Enlightenment scholarship has put beyond doubt. But can

Dogmengeschichte only ever undermine the church’s historic faith as

evangelicals feared, or does “development” presuppose an integral continuity

within church proclamation? If so, how does it connect to revelation (28-9)?

The preliminary lecture promises a multi-front fight. Against those

who would flee the scarred pages of church history for the sanctuary of

Scripture, Rainy declares impossible a retreat to the Bible alone. However

much church doctrine should aspire to be biblical, it is never just a

reproduction of biblical teaching. As well, critical questions raised about the

propriety of certain doctrines dare not be ignored even by those who, in their

biblical solitude, like to think themselves unaffected (5, 33).27 Clearly,

Newman’s equation of evangelicals with Arians has hit him hard. Rainy also

wants to disarm those modern despisers of doctrinal Christianity who wield

Dogmengeschichte as a sledgehammer against the church’s historic faith.

Radical critics may be beyond repair, but perhaps renewed attention to the

form of doctrine’s delivery can embolden a restatement of its proper function

27 Rainy (291) refers this point to Athanasius, de Synodis §36, i.e., that ousia, once raised in debate over the person of Christ, subsequently could not be avoided by either party then or any church tradition now.

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in the life of the Christian community that will assuage some of the unease felt

toward doctrine and creed.28 Finally, against those who judge the historical

development of doctrine as proof that Scripture was never adequate to the

needs of the church, Rainy refuses to concede either to Rome the insufficiency

of Scripture or to rationalism denial of a real revelation conveyed by Scripture

(33, 307-8). His lectures, then, will expound this thesis: the nature of the

delivery of doctrine determines its development (32-3). This means that when

the Bible is properly understood foremost as an infallible record of God’s

great acts and deeds in history, as the second and third lectures will argue, the

fourth lecture can show how ‘salvation history’ provides the category for

understanding how church doctrine is derived from historical revelation. The

fifth lecture will critique past and current theories of doctrinal development

from the standpoint of his thesis. Sixth, Rainy lays out some principles for

ensuring that the church’s confession of God’s saving acts in history is ever

contemporary and continuous with past proclamation.

[3.3.2] The second lecture (34-74) peruses the Old Testament to

discover what it teaches about doctrine’s original delivery. Presuppositions

brought to the task are deeply traditional. Rainy brooks little sympathy for

modern critics who impute Israel’s religion to their heightened awareness of

divine immanence in history (312). Jehovah wants to be known, and only he

can make himself known to minds and hearts darkened by sin (42). This he

has done by purposeful disclosure in human history, and Rainy finds no

compelling reason not to call it supernatural (315-7). God’s revelation has

been faithfully recorded as a narrative that mirrors the canonical Old

Testament—Rainy commits, in fact, to a doctrine of plenary inspiration (175,

309, 316). Accordingly, his perusal yields the conclusion, no less traditional,

that God’s revelation to Israel contains “teaching so permanent in its matter,

so direct and unambiguous in its terms, and so precise in the convictions it was

fitted to produce, that we may reasonably call it doctrinal” (71). This teaching

falls into three themes in particular: the character of God, the malignity of sin,

and hope of good to come (43). He also judges the church fathers and his

28 Compare with Bernhard Lohse, Epochen der Dogmengeschichte, 6th ed. (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1988), 12.

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Reformed forbearers right to have looked and listened for “the footsteps of

Christ” in the Old Testament (68, also 35, 72, 317).

Unmistakably, however, Rainy is taking leave of the manner in which

evangelicals and Presbyterians had typically found doctrine and Christ in the

Old Testament. The keyword is now “historical communion” (39). Divine

disclosure into the warp and woof of history was inevitable, given God’s

desire to relate with those who are “radically creatures of days and years and

generations” (39, 41).29 The object of revelation further determined the

specific method of revelation. He did not reveal his character, his abhorrence

of sin and unrighteousness, and his gracious promises of blessing, fully and

instantly, for God’s revelatory words and deeds were always accommodated to

Israel’s historical context, and were progressively disclosed in such a way that

the keynote teachings resounded evermore limpid and loud over the course of

its history (35-6, 64). As a result, “when we speak of progressive lessons, a

distinction should be made,” he cautions.

There be might a process of teaching by successive lessons, so delivered that each lesson should be abstract and general,—‘doctrinal’ so we say,—coming as a maxim that shall always be applicable to that case as long as human knowledge subsists under its earthly considerations. It might conceivably have been so; but such was not the divine method. From the first, God has dealt with men in the concrete. He has dealt with them about facts; He has taught them through events,—those facts and events being the centre and the hinge of His teachings” (36-his emphasis).

Revelation effects—and here Rainy discharges Newman’s loaded word—a

“kind of impression” of who God is, what he has done and promises to do,

based on the facts of his speech and deeds in the history of Israel (54-5); this

impression was intensified and clarified as his people marched through new

times and places, and supplemented by further revelation (45).30 The people of

Israel knew and felt the drift but not the final destination of God’s acts of

promise, covenant, law, kingship, exile, and blessing. As a consequence,

divine teaching in the Old Testament is definite but incomplete, for God was

always “moving on, with sedulous intent which never relaxes” (66-7). Thus,

29 See also Rainy, Introductory Lecture, 3. 30 Thirty years later, James Orr, “Review: The Ancient Catholic Church. By Robert Rainy, D.D.,” Expository Times 13 (1902): 305-8, remarks upon Rainy’s ongoing use of ‘impression’ to describe the impact of revelation.

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the church should only speak of Old Testament “doctrine”, or use the Old

Testament to proof its doctrine, with a tentativeness born from the recognition

of a revelation fully bound to the contingency of Israel’s historical existence.

Yet even the deployment of “impression” is a guise for what Rainy

really wants to do, namely, reconstitute the value of the Old Testament for

Christian doctrine on the basis of Heilsgeschichte. God has revealed himself

and his will not foremost in propositions but in and through historical acts and

deeds. Israel’s beliefs about the meaning of God’s words and deeds, their hope

for the fulfilment of his promissory words and actions, should be considered

as “rising out of, and returning into, a historical process” that anticipates

Christ (67). This might seem banal. Versions of salvation history, after all,

have had long (albeit uneven lives) in recent theology and biblical studies. But

in mid-Victorian Britain it was daring and fresh. It was also ‘made in

Germany’. Nineteenth-century German theologians were creatively revamping

the older conceptions of salvation history of seventeenth-century Reformed

federal theologians and German pietists (see 1.3.2). In fact, it was Hofmann

who coined the word ‘Heilsgeschichte’; it received at his hands its most

accomplished nineteenth-century treatment.31 As noted in the first chapter,

Newman’s use of the ambiguous notion of revelation as an “impression” did

not affect his belief that the Christian religion was essentially dogmatic.

Hofmann’s understanding of salvation history, at which we will now glance,

enabled Rainy to take a step of more radical consequence for church doctrine.

[3.3.3] Like many Christian thinkers in his uncertain age, Hofmann

was concerned to secure faith’s certainty.32 This led him to describe

Christianity as foremost fact rather than a set of doctrines, a moral ethos, or an

31 A. Josef Greig, “A Critical Note on the Origin of the Term Heilsgeschichte,” ET 87 (1976): 118-9; Hans-Joachim Kraus, Die biblische Theologie: ihre Geschichte und Problematik (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1970), 247-53. More generally, see Friedrich Mildenberger, “Heilsgeschichte,” RGG4 3, 1584-6. 32 On Hofmann see Barth, Protestant Theology, 593-60; Rohls, Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit, 1: 564-6, 681-9; Matthew L. Becker, “Appreciating the Life and Work of Johann v. Hofmann,” LQ 17 (2003): 177-93; Jörg Lauster, Prinzip und Methode. Die Transformation des protestantischen Schriftprinzips durch der historische Kritik von Schleiermacher bis zu Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 163-84; Eberhard Hahn, “J. Chr. K. von Hofmanns Programm theologischer Erneuerung. Dargestellt anhand seines Werkes ‘Der Schriftbeweis’,” in Dein Wort ist die Wahrheit, ed. Eberhard Hahn et al. (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1997), 65-82.

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institution (although it included all these aspects).33 And like many sons of the

Awakening, it was the experienced fact of being united with Christ as Lord

and Redeemer that provided the starting point for reflection upon faith. This

led him to proceed from personal religious consciousness to full-fledged

orthodoxy, in concert with the actuality of a converted life—what he called the

Tatbestand [‘the facts of the matter’] of spiritual experience—that is to say,

that a Christian does not come to faith through the inductive study of the Bible

or by submitting to the dogmas of the church, but comes back to these things

upon having experienced fullness of new life in Christ, and having been made

certain of the reality of that experience through the inner testimony of the

Spirit. In this way, the experience of spiritual rebirth connects back to the

histories of Israel and Jesus Christ recorded in the Bible and summarized in

the Lutheran confessions. Hofmann brazenly claimed that the whole body of

Christian doctrine, from Trinity to final judgement, could be unpacked from

the Tatbestand, i.e., the fact of the experience of new life in Christ. “I, as a

Christian, am for me the theologian, the own material of my science…Out of

the self-certainty of his experience of new birth, the theologian gathers ‘the

doctrinal whole’ that then receives its confirmation through the proof of

Scripture.”34

Not surprisingly, Hofmann’s decision to proceed with Schleiermacher

by way of the religious consciousness has been pilloried as an extreme

example of pietistic subjectivism. This is not quite fair. Christian experience,

specifically, the profundity of being ‘born again’, is not self-generated; it

comes to the self from outside it, and continually refers back to the reality that

created it. Hofmann writes: “Christianity rests initially on the present Christ

who has the historical Christ as his presupposition and who himself refers

back to this historical presupposition of his presence.”35 True, the whole

Christian doctrinal tradition can be first discovered and then delineated from

the fact of being ‘born again’, but the experience of being united with Christ is

not merely the consciousness but the fact of it, which substantially refers to

33 Hofmann, Enzyklopädie der Theologie (Nordlingen: Beck, 1879), 3. This posthumous work helpfully introduces his method and theology. 34 Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis, 2nd ed. (Nordlingen: Beck, 1857), 1: 10, 31, cited in Hornig, “Die Theologie des Neuluthertum,” 183. See also Enzyklopädie, 27-36. 35 Enzyklopädie, 28.

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the historical reality behind. Hence his ‘Scriptural proof’ (Schriftbeweis) that

prevents his subjective starting point from adducing an idiosyncratic version

of Christian faith: introspection upon the individual experience of new life in

Christ will recapitulate the ecclesial explication of the very same experience; it

will then find itself rooted in and conformed to the scriptural record of God’s

saving acts in history.

The factuality of the believer’s union with Christ (Tatbestand) and the

historical deeds and acts (Taten) of salvation which are recorded in the Bible

are integrated in the fact (Tatsache) of Heilsgeschichte, which has as its goal

the union of humankind and God in Jesus Christ.36 Hofmann’s understanding

of salvation history rejected pietism’s version of the pilgrim’s progress of

God’s people through history for an exhilarating vision of world history as the

progressive taking up of all humankind into the Trinitarian life through the

incarnate Son.37 History is the execution of divine predestination, the triune

God’s self-determination to love outside the divine self and bring that other

into union with him. As “the self-presentation [Selbtsdarstellung] of Christ in

the world is the essential content of all history,”38 world history is subsumed

under salvation history, for “all things great and small serve the purpose of

uniting the world to its head, Christ.”39 History not only contained prophetic

revelation of the coming of the Saviour—witness the half-dreams of the

heathens who found Christ in the natural world and in moral conscience, in

addition to the increasingly definitive predictions of Israel’s prophets—it is

prophecy. It manifested progressive forms of the union of God and humankind

that pointed to its centre and consummation, Jesus Christ, or perhaps its

proleptic conclusion, since Christ is the proof and model of the full

eschatological union of humankind with God.40

36 Hofmann, Weissagung und Erfüllung im Alte und Neue Testament (Nordlingen: Beck, 1841), 1: 55 [hereafter abbreviated as WE]. 37 Among others, Becker, 187-89, likens it in form and scope to Pannenberg’s. Surprisingly, in his article “Geschichte/Geschichtsschreibung/Geschichtsphilosophie VIII. Systematisch-Theologie,” Pannenberg misreads Hofmann as ghettoizing salvation history in pietistic fashion. 38 WE, 1: 40. 39 WE, 1: 7; also WE, 1: 58. 40 The phrase “proleptic conclusion” [vorläufiger Abschluß] is used by Rohls and others, but not by Hofmann himself as far as I can tell.

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Rainy detached Hofmann’s vision of Heilsgeschichte from its

Trinitarian basis. Such a God-intoxicated vision of history—so steeped in

philosophical idealism41—must have staggered an evangelical Presbyterian

raised abstemiously on Scotch Common Sense and Calvinism’s sharp

distinction between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena. But his remark

before the 1880 assembly of the Presbyterian Alliance, that “thoughts, which

in Germany would be weighed in a speculative system, exert their influence

among us in a looser, but an equally effective way,” carries a biographical

intimation.42 It appears that he took several “thoughts” from Hofmann that

provided the crucial lineaments of his thesis and, therefore, demand a closer

look: the nature of Scripture, the delivery of doctrine in Scripture, and the

dynamic of biblical history.

Hofmann was not as dutiful to orthodoxy as his neo-Lutheran

affiliation might suggest. He charged orthodoxy with partaking of the same

error as rationalism, namely, ransacking the Bible to find isolated truths, then

enshrining them as timeless expressions of the divine mind.43 When

Christianity is defined as a set of dogmas, the Bible is inevitably read as a

compendium of inspired teaching—the Old Testament has been especially ill

served by this traditional habit. Classical exegetes hear of Christ in prophecies

or see him in types floating free from historical context. Functionally,

revelation comes not in the sweep of Israel’s history but scattered in pieces:

allegories, occasional events, or rare flashes of clear teaching in the midst of

strange speech.44 Hofmann insisted that the whole history of the chosen people

is the growth of the union of God and humankind toward fullness in Christ.45

Its record, the Bible, is a divine memorial of God’s great acts and deeds for the 41 Hofmann did his doctorate in history at Berlin under Leopold von Ranke; like other Erlangen theologians he was influenced by Schelling’s philosophy. 42 “MTT,” 82. Gustav Oehler, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 2 vol. (Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1873-1874) [ET: Theology of the Old Testament, trans. E. D. Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1880)], was another Heilsgeschichte theologian to whom Rainy occasionally referred in DDCD. I maintain the ultimately greater importance of Hofmann for DDCD on account of the circumstantial reasons noted earlier, as well as the fact that Oehler himself was deeply influenced by Hofmann (Kraus, Die biblische Theologie, 99-106). 43 WE, 1: 7, 33. 44 WE, 1: 3. Berlin professor and neo-Lutheran E. W. Hengstenberg’s massive Christologie des Alten Testaments [ET: Christology of the Old Testament and a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, 4 vol., trans. Theodore Meyer (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1854-8)], a work then widely read in the evangelical world, comes under heavy fire for its “dogmatic” approach. 45 WE, 1: 36.

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redemption of the world and the original impact of that history. The church’s

present experience of salvation is rooted in and measured by it, and from it, it

takes heart for the future.46 Scripture’s authority resides in its exclusive

recording of the facts of salvation history that function as the measure for the

experience of those incorporated into that historical continuum. Its sufficiency

lies in its accurate recounting of salvation history, rather than any sleeve of

doctrines it purportedly contains as expressive of the divine counsel.

Hofmann insisted his theological method was simply a new way of

expressing old truth. Its appeal for those who wanted a biblical and Christ-

centred faith that took seriously the traditional Protestant religious experience

of sin and grace is obvious. He never did write the Glaubenslehre his

presuppositions seemed to demand of him, Barth shrewdly pointed out.

Instead, his great work, Der Schriftbeweis, devoted twenty pages to unfolding

the doctrinal whole of Christianity from experience, and 1600 pages to

examining this body in the Bible! He concluded that Hofmann was a pietistic

devotee of the Bible who played at apologetics in order to appear current.47

Indeed, Hofmann intended the resolutely historical understanding of revelation

at the heart of his version of salvation history to secure for his century the old

Protestant esteem for Scripture’s unique revelatory function and normative

authority for the church.

Moreover, he was no despiser of doctrine. He was deeply (though,

unlike most neo-Lutherans, not slavishly) attached to the Book of Concord

because it best reflects the Tatbestand of salvation and Taten of salvation

history. For him, salvation history was primary; doctrine was second order

reflection by the church upon God’s great acts and words in history. Yet even

if the Bible, properly speaking, does not yield a system of doctrines, doctrine

is the inevitable and appropriate outcome of Christians’ introspection upon the

fact of their faith, and it is the essential self-articulation of the church’s part

and place in salvation history.48 Further, the classical Christian insistence that

46 Enzyklopädie, 252. British evangelicals were aware that Hofmann’s view was eliciting controversy among neo-Lutherans: August Dieckhoff, “System and Scripture- Dr. v. Hofmann,” BFER 10 (1861): 553-75. 47 Barth, PT, 597. 48 Enzyklopädie, 3-7.

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Jesus Christ is the centre of Scripture received a new lease through this

version of Heilsgeschichte. Beleaguered pastors in mid-century Germany,

caught between a critical onslaught upon traditional exegesis of the Old

Testament and Schleiermacher’s outright dismissal of the Old Testament for

the purposes of the church, were deeply grateful to Hofmann for giving them

back an Old Testament from which Christ could be preached without recourse

to theological obscurantism, for Scripture’s historicity was acknowledged, and

historical investigation of it encouraged, because the onus of revelation had

shifted from proof-texts to the whole history of Israel.49

[3.3.4] Hofmann’s influence exerts itself pointedly in the third lecture

(75-104), as Rainy turns to the stage of the “history of redemption”—

presumably how he translated Heilsgeschichte (e.g., 86, 95, 359)—found in

the New Testament. Indeed, if the dynamic of redemptive history is promise

and fulfilment, then the New Testament records the very climax of history, for

God’s promissory acts and transactions in Israel’s history find their terminus

in Christ—incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended in glory (77). Rainy

unequivocally rules out a progression of revelation beyond the apostolic

witness to Christ (77-78). That revelation is finished, however, does not mean

it is frozen. He waxes eloquently of revelation as “fathomless fountains”

(100), capable of “endless progress” (104) through the church’s worshipful

contemplation of it; Scripture is “pregnant” with fresh teaching capable of

guiding the church through the travails of each and every epoch (105). Such

exuberant description parrots Newman, but is Rainy saying anything different

from what traditional Reformed theologians like Cunningham claimed in less

efflorescent language (see 2.5)? Likewise, while the pattern of promise and

fulfilment seems imitative of Hofmann’s Weissagung und Erfüllung, it is far

from novel. It frequents the spiritual exegesis of some church fathers; more

notably, the federal theologians of the seventeenth century sought a

methodology centred on the biblical covenants as the progressive fulfilment of

God’s promise of salvation.50

49 Hahn, “J. Chr. K. von Hofmanns Programm theologischer Erneuerung,” 72. 50 Christian Link, “Föderaltheologie,” RGG4 3, 172-5; Wilhelm Neuser, “Die Föderaltheologie des Johann Coccejus,” in HDThG 2, 343-7; Eberhard Busch, “Der Beitrag und Ertrag der

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Rainy breaks new ground in the evangelical and Reformed tradition in

the radical degree to which he sinks revelation into historical reality.

Revelation is salvation history. This means that the Bible is not a syllabus of

doctrines but a record of salvation history (99). It tells of who God is by what

he has done, how his deeds have seized the hearts and minds of those who first

witnessed them (81, 85, 101). Scripture is essentially a history book, he

declares, a record of the decisive persons, facts, and events of the story of

salvation which always presupposes past history as the arena of God’s saving

acts, tracks the consequences of those acts into the present moment, and awaits

the realization of salvation at history’s end (80).

The first great effect of his claim is the revamping of the traditional

Protestant attributes of Scripture in light of the Bible’s nature in respect of

salvation history. Rainy has sidled away from Cunningham over to Hofmann.

Scripture has singular authority in the church because nowhere else is there a

“sealed and unalterable record” of the facts of redemption (78, 104). Scripture

is sufficient because it is an accurate and immutable record of salvation history

(80, 350-1). Rainy makes this move so quickly it is easy to miss its

significance: the long, noisy debate between Rome and the Reformed over

whether Scripture is sufficient to deliver those doctrines or dogmas deemed

essential is muted. As a record of historical events rather than a fixed itinerary

of teachings, Scripture is divinely adapted to be a fertile and flexible standard

as God’s people themselves develop in history.51 At every stage of the

church’s life the historical facts of redemption, especially those clustered

around the incarnation and death of Jesus Christ (82), “should lay hold of their

mind, mould their thoughts and their impressions, and become a means of

teaching, a foundation of it, which nothing else could be” (85). These are facts

of such power and truth that they seize the whole person (96), facts of such

magnitude that the light the church shines on them from sundry vantage points

of its history never fully pierce their depths or circumscribe their breadth

(81,101). As a result, the self-serving reconstructions of a regula fidei from

Föderaltheologie für ein geschichtliches Verständnis der Offenbarung,” in Oikonomia: Heilsgeschichte als Thema der Theologie (Hamburg: Herbert Reich, 1967), 171-190. 51 Compare the similar statement in WE, 1: 44.

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early church documents offered up by competing church traditions to seal their

own similitude to the golden age of the church are disrated.52

The perspicuity of Scripture is likewise rooted in the historicity of

revelation. Because revelation addresses persons in history it addresses

persons in the organic totality of life—head, heart, and hands (93-96). The

record of salvation history thus encompasses God’s mighty deeds for the

salvation of his people, as well as their memory of these events, their attempts

at covenantal fidelity, their hopes for the future. Christians who would

struggle to understand an abstraction or a theory can grasp the significance of

the fundamental historical events of redemption, for even the lowliest believer

shares the same orientation to the “knowledge of realities” as those to whom

revelation was first given (98). Rainy’s vocation as a churchman rather than a

scholar surely abets this persistent emphasis on the history of redemption as

revelation to the whole person and every person.

Having argued that the Bible, and the New Testament specifically, is

foremost a transcript of the facts of salvation history, Rainy carefully—though

not always consistently—determines the extent to which doctrine can be said

to be in the New Testament. He lapses on occasion into the older language of a

“system of teaching” or a “body of doctrine” in the New Testament. On the

whole, however, he vehemently maintains that Scripture should never be

approached as a compendium of dogmas or doctrines (102). That God

disclosed himself and his purposes in history has endowed revelation with a

remarkable dynamism and richness that the older theology simply could not

handle. There, the historical nature of revelation went typically unrecognized,

when not suppressed. One result of the domination by this propositional view

of revelation was to leave churches constantly confusing a just concern to

protect the finality of revelation with the finality of their own dogmas, creeds,

or traditions.53 Another was to leave historical revelation pounded flat and

painted monochrome for the sake of a system. The Tübingen school may be

fatally wrong on many things, he avers, but give them credit for perceiving the 52 Rainy has a running battle with Tractarians and the Anglican Newman in the endnotes (357-63). 53 Furthermore, when Scripture is understood primarily as a book of doctrines, doctrinal development is narrowed to the deduction of secondary and tertiary doctrines from scriptural doctrines or first principles (102). Rainy will pick up this thread of argument in the fifth lecture.

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messy richness of a revelation that is authentically historical. A concept of

revelation both unashamedly supernatural and historical need not shy from

admitting that Peter or Paul or John interpreted the facts of salvation according

to considerations of location, need, and personality. The manifoldness of the

biblical canon, in fact, reflects the fact that salvation history itself combines

the unity of truth appropriate to the purposes of its subject, God, and the

diversity appropriate to the manner of revelation, history (85-87, 105).54

Rainy’s focus throughout lies on the sequence of historical fact to

interpretation as essential and exemplary. New Testament “doctrine” is

enmeshed in historical narrative and loses meaning apart from this point of

reference to the acts and transactions of God in history (76-78, 81, 85, 99-

100). The teaching of Jesus and the apostles’ teaching about Jesus clarifies and

deepens the teachings of the Old Testament, and the great Old Testament

themes regarding God and redemption become more intelligible and profound

in the New Testament (79, 89). Yet at no point can this teaching be absolved

from the historical narrative. “The grand distinction of the Christian

revelation,” he insists, “is that the facts which lie at the foundation of it are the

adequate and eternal embodiment of those truths, not imperfect and transient

illustrations of them” (101-his emphasis, also 81-82).55 From this history,

which knits together the historical facts of revelation and the initial impression

of divine history in the minds of God’s people (what could be called biblical

doctrine), church doctrine emerges (100-05)—what will be addressed at length

in the next lecture. Not only is Rainy, like Hofmann, making a tacit distinction

between biblical theology and systematic theology, biblical doctrine and

church doctrine, he is exhorting his tradition to better distinguish its humble

house of doctrine from the superlative building materials.56

54 Hofmann makes the same argument regarding the canon. See especially Hahn, “J. Chr. K. von Hofmanns Programm theologischer Erneuerung.” Of course, Rainy’s (and Hofmann’s, for that matter) appeal to canon assumed a sharp divide between the inspired canon and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers (e.g., 343, 360); nor could it be perturbed yet by the plethora of non-canonized Christian and Gnostic texts still awaiting discovery. 55 Rainy uses this fact-interpretation sequence to challenge both rationalist or orthodox divines who pluck eternal verities from the New Testament as well as the Tübingen school, who argue counter-intuitively that Paul invented Christianity, i.e., that the Epistles have priority over the Gospels (83, 85-8). 56 Lauster, Prinzip und Methode, 173.

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[3.3.5] A voluble fourth lecture (106-74) makes explicit what is at

stake for church proclamation when it is acknowledged that revelation is

embodied primarily as historical acts, i.e., what Rainy calls the historical

delivery of doctrine. It handles the church’s reception of the biblical testimony

and its consequent formation into church doctrine from two angles,

programmatic and apologetic. If the Bible is a repository of doctrines then the

church’s task would be elementary—it could even include verbatim repetition

of biblical formularies (111-3). On the contrary, doctrine is forged in the fires

of believing minds, thinking, praying, wrestling with the meaning and impact

of salvation history, recorded in Scripture as an historical narrative of

staggering depth and dimension, whose plotline tumbles and turns over

thousands of years through lands and cultures strange and distant. Rainy’s

definition of doctrine as “determinations of what men are led to hold to be true

on the authority of Revelation” (107) presupposes revelation as a narrative of

historical events rather than a collection of polished or semi-cut doctrines, and

underscores—specifically the keyword “determination”—the formation of

doctrine as an involved human process. Older theology rendered revelation

overly objective in its delivery and overly cognitive in its reception. The

Christian mind was a passive recipient of the clear and lofty doctrines revealed

in Scripture. Yet, “revelation…will not let him be passive. It solicits, awakes,

exhorts him; by influences which seize him on every side, it sets him in

motion.” A mind enlivened by the Spirit is compelled to investigate the plot

and path of the story into which it has now been integrated (110, 128). But

even an awakened mind cannot comprehend the facts of redemptive history

apart from the normal processes of human thought. “I must select words which

enable my mind to mark how it is taught to think, as well as how it is taught to

feel or act” (115), he avows.

This utterance divulges the lure the Erlangen theologians’ so-called

theology of fact must have held for Rainy. “Historical communion” is not an

excuse to slough off the objectivity of revelation. On the contrary, it secures

an objective, supernatural revelation and combines it with attention to the

subjective side of Christian belief—what orthodoxy has been loath to admit in

his estimate. First, it admits the significant role of the believer in creating

doctrine via the mind’s determination of revealed facts. Doctrine is not simply

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the message of Scripture. It is rather “our holding up as ours the truth, made

ours, which the Father of Lights delivered to us as His” (117). And not even

those who scorn theological subtleties for simple biblical expressions, he adds,

can avoid re-embodying biblical words and concepts into what they have

determined it means (116). Second, historical revelation incorporates the

whole Christian person—not just the mind. Not only is the formation of

doctrine tangled up in the church’s prayer, piety, and worship (107-8, 115),

doctrine proper is not the extent of the Christian life. Salvation history ensures

that faith is seen as a totality and not merely gnosis. In sum, doctrine is the

terminus of a complex process in which the meaning of the Bible is, as Rainy

puts it, “re-embodied” into the church’s words and thoughts (112, 126).

Rainy seems aware that his position has advertently widened the

traditional Reformed distinction between the absolute authority of the Word of

God and the relative authority of church and its doctrine. It is not his wish,

however, to discredit orthodoxy by making doctrine appear all too human

(118, 125-26, 363). So, he attempts to back-fill the ditch between divine

revelation and church doctrine, significantly, through possibilities inherent in

the salvation history paradigm. For one thing, it enables the believer to

participate in the original facts of revelation (120, 129-30, 151). As he wrote

earlier: “The divine truth is designed to lead us into the understanding of

divine history, in which history it calls us to confess and to claim our own

place. The adoption of any other method seems inconsistent with the nature of

man; possibly it may be inconsistent with the nature of God…” (82-3, also

102). The church does not form doctrine by gazing from afar on the mind of

God or his works. Through the Spirit, it is plunged into salvation history; there

it encounters a revelation which—as it was disclosed in historical acts and

transactions—has already crossed the qualitative gap between the divine mind

and human history (106, 121, 133).

He then appeals to the facts of salvation history to lessen the shock of

having emptied the biblical storehouse of doctrines. Far from consigning the

church to be “haunted by perpetual doubt” of the clarity of revelation, “the

historical structure of the Scripture fits it to afford us a guarantee that we do

correctly catch its drift, and that when we read it we are dealing with teaching

which is indeed ‘in part’ only, yet is firm, definite, and reliable” (156, also

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118, 130, 155). As such, despite all that he has professed about the authentic

humanity of church doctrine, he assures listeners that the distinction between

church doctrine and biblical teaching is mainly a formal distinction in regard

to the fundamental doctrines. Enthusing that Heilsgeschichte could facilitate

ecumenical consensus on essential doctrines, Rainy consciously stands himself

under the shadow of Reformed orthodoxy’s quest for a unified Protestantism

gathered around a coterie of fundamental articles (119-21).57 Cunningham’s

protégé knew that the Reformed irenic was spurned by the punctilious

Lutherans. But could the perspicuous facts of salvation history secure the

consensus on fundamental doctrines that the Reformed orthodox sought in

vain?

Even as Heilsgeschichte dashes the confidence of the older Protestant

dogmatics, it further mitigates the disconcerting ditch between historical

revelation and church doctrine by assuring the church that its doctrine is

invested with the vast wisdom of the catholic mind because it was and is

determined in a fellowship of the ages (118, 137). Protestant orthodoxy was

fully justified to dispute Rome’s equation of the regula fidei with its own

testimony. And Rainy had earlier damned the Vincentian Canon with words as

unflinching as anything Cunningham could have mustered: oppressive

tradition suffocated voices calling for fresh restatements of old doctrines and

cramped faithful minds from realizing new truths from Scripture (7). But the

ahistorical concept of revelation assumed by the old Protestant divines let

them exalt the sufficiency of Scripture by belittling the role of the church in

the determination of the rule of faith (137, 364-65). Salvation history binds the

Christian mind and experience of all ages to the “mighty acts of the Lord”

recorded in Scripture (130). As a result, the catholic mind is a major factor in

the ongoing formation of doctrine. Tradition shapes the present Christian mind

(for good and bad) to such an extent that inherited doctrines could be

outgrown but never fully shed (137-38). Of course, traditional church beliefs

are not infallible, but the present task of re-embodying Scripture should

always be weighed against past results of that same process.

57 For background see Martin Friedrich, Von Marburg bis Leuenberg: die lutherisch-reformierte Gegensatz und seine Überwindung (Waltrop: Spenner, 1999); specifically, Walter Schöpsdau, “Fundamentalartikel,” RGG4 3, 412-4; Muller, PRRD, 1: 406-50.

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As noted previously, Hofmann’s method carried within itself a back-

check: doctrine, unfolded from the individual’s experience of salvation, was

then measured against the church’s experience of the same salvation, and

ultimately against the authoritative record of salvation in Scripture. While

Rainy denies outright—surely in reference to Hofmann—“that human

faculties can construe the developed Christianity…out of the experience”

(132), he offers a similar back-check, distinguished by a more guarded

assessment of the ability of experience to correctly recapitulate the story of

salvation history, whether writ small in the individual’s heart or large on 1800

years of church tradition (132-37, also 123-24).58 Remarkably, the crucial role

accorded experience in Heilsgeschichte allows nothing less than the

rehabilitation of church tradition for Reformed dogmatics.

The second half of the lecture responds to the motley crew of pietists,

romantics, and rationalists who decry doctrine as a malfunction of the

Christian mind and a mistreatment of the Bible.59 The psychology of the

Christian mind in the appropriation of revelation is his lynchpin argument for

why the church simply must have doctrine. All Christians form doctrine,

willingly or not (149, later 250-2, 255). Rainy is prescient of what has become

a visited topic among scholars who investigate the nature of doctrine: by

defining dogma or doctrine via its function as a social demarcation, the

category is broadened to include groups whose non- or even anti-creedal

posture excluded them from previous accounts of the formation and history of

classical dogma or doctrine.60

58 Schleiermacher is standing behind them both. Rainy reproves him for constricting revelation to experience, but admits his defective Glaubenslehre contains a precious truth: “there is a verification of the truth in the life, and a congruity between the two, that moderates the boldness of theory…” (131, also 364). Rainy’s disavowal of Hofmann’s attempt to derive the whole body of orthodoxy from religious experience still assumes the congruity of the two within the continuum of salvation history (129). As such, could he resist measuring doctrine by moral conscience—a process which led to the dilution of much traditional doctrine in the Victorian era and left Calvinism, especially, reeling (see 1.4.5)? See Michael Bartholomew, “The Moral Critique of Victorian Orthodoxy”, in Religion in Victorian Britain, 2: 166-190; H. R. Murphy, “The Ethical Revolt against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England,” AHR 60 (1955): 800-817; Alan P. F. Sell, “From Worms to Sunbeams: The Dilution of Calvinism in English Congregationalism,” JURCHS 7 (2004): 253-74. 59 See also “MTT,” 86. 60 Recent examples: Ulrich Köpf, “Dogmengeschichte oder Theologeschichte?” KuD 85 (1988): 455-73; Alister E. McGrath, “Dogma und Gemeinde: Zur sozialen Funktion des christlichen Dogmas,” KuD 37 (1991): 24-43.

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Two contentious aspects of the Christian mind loom especially large in

an apologia for doctrine for the nineteenth century context: the nature of

analogy, and the legitimacy of logical inference. In regard to the first, Rainy

does not interact with Newman’s deployment of natural analogy to shore up

the probability of Christianity’s development (see 2.3.3), but rather the

accusation that doctrine can be derived from the Bible only by a philistine

inability to read it for what it is: literature. The cultured Oxonian Matthew

Arnold (1822-1888), in Literature and Dogma (1873), was the most articulate

voice accusing churches of culling doctrine from the pages of Scripture only

by twisting poetry into prose. “All we have is picture-writing,” Rainy

summarized his argument, “we are not intended to presume that the pictures

have prototypes behind them that are of one pattern with them...” (148-9, also

169). But not only does Arnold’s position abandon the Bible as a word from

God in any meaningful sense, it overlooks that Scripture is above all a record

of the facts of salvation history (150-1, 156), even it does occasionally employ

analogy as a descriptive device.61

The facts of salvation history are likewise deployed to damper the

misuse of logical inference in the formation of doctrine (see 1.2.3; 1.4.4)—

what concerns him most of all. Here it becomes explicit that his defence of the

necessity of doctrine, though sincere, is festooned with hesitations about how

the church in the past has adduced and used doctrine (142-3, 157), and is

aligned with an ongoing polemic against the hubris of systematic theology.

The older theologians had been too bold in their use of inference, guilty of

“the frequent exemplification of excess and over confidence, in handling

doctrine” (159). Rainy is timid. As inference is a facet of thought it is a

legitimate aspect of the ecclesial mind’s re-embodiment of revelation so long

61 Insisting upon the historical rather than literary nature of the Bible does not exculpate Rainy from having to deal with the problem of analogy; it only shifts him to the problem of historical analogy. Even if it is somewhat unfair to reprove him for neglecting this topic—what Ernst Troeltsch would later table as a burning issue of religious historiography—his admission that he had no interest whatsoever “to speculate on the nature of knowledge” (155, also 150) in regard to historical analogy is sloppy. Its omission is never rectified, even in pieces where one rightly expects to find involved analysis of historical method, for example: Rainy, “Merle D’Aubigne and his Works as Historian,” Catholic Presbyterian 1 (1879): 101-111. A concise summary of Troeltsch’s important position is his article “Historiography,” in ERE 6, ed. James Hastings (1913; reprint, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937), 716-722. Good treatments of his view of analogy, from opposite standpoints, are Van Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York, Macmillan, 1966), and C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), especially 170-202.

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as it is natural, unfolding harmoniously from the direct message of Scripture.

But what danger lurks at hand! Much of the modern distaste for doctrine stems

from “the prodigality of distinction and inference” whereby theologians,

lusting for a truly systematic depiction of faith, have piece-by-piece erected

doctrinal superstructures that soar far above the life-giving facts of redemption

held in the Bible (145, 161-4). Yet a complete system of doctrine is precisely

what revelation delivered in history cannot offer. “Here incompleteness, i.e.,

the befitting incompleteness which the nature of our knowledge implies, ought

to be deliberately aimed at. But the power of halting at the right point is one of

the rarest powers even of clear-sighted and truthful minds” (373).

Doctrine must stay in pulmonary connection to the saving acts of the

Lord. That an inference may be logically possible from a ‘first doctrine’ does

not make it desirable or permissible (167-8). The further doctrine drifts from

the “intended scope” of Scripture, the more frigid it grows to the believing

heart; the further theology employs inference in pursuit of a system, the

greater is the likelihood to impose itself upon Scripture rather than be imposed

upon by revelation. This is, in fact, what Cunningham’s “undue and exclusive

regard” for the Calvinist ordo salutis did to his reading of the Bible (367-8),

suggests Rainy, finally in open defiance of his teacher. And the further

inference or deduction carries theology from the facts of salvation, the more

the “mixed speech” of churchly proclamation (5) becomes weighted toward

the human accent (158, 170-3). If what is logically inferred is as certain as that

which has been first deduced from the divine truths of Scripture, what portion

of this newly inferred doctrine bears the proliferated spores of human error

(165, 365)? If the manifoldness of God’s creation makes inferential

conclusions in science provisional and apt to be often revised, should not

inference from revealed truth make theologians equally cautious, he asks,

taking aim at the theological Baconianism characteristic of his tradition

(167)?62 But how could a theory of development draw the church’s body of

doctrine back into vital proximity with revelation rather than let it sprawl

further afield?

62 In a similar comment in “MTT,” 90, Rainy sounds like Newman in eschewing “dogmatism” for “probabilism”.

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[3.3.6] Rainy’s audience held a prejudice against the notion that

doctrine develops: past and current theories devalued the Bible and inflated

instead either infallible reason or an infallible church (176-7). In his fifth

lecture (175-233) he pleads for reappraisal. The time is right. Evangelicals are

now cognizant that ‘believing theologians’ in Germany have been assuming

doctrinal development for some time. They are also less inclined to evade the

evidence of doctrinal fluctuation delivered by the impartial historiography

born of the Enlightenment (175, 178, 181-2). Newman too deserves credit.

The decades since the Essay’s publication have seen the idea of doctrinal

development garner acceptance among Protestant theologians, even if, Rainy

reproves, “development” is becoming a sloppy theological catchphrase. Only

Rome still professes to be unruffled by the findings of the new history and to

remain steadfast before the pull of time (178, 182).63

Yet evangelicals still have two things to unlearn. First, revelation as a

“direct delivery” of doctrines (181) must be forsaken. Only when a particular

theory of revelation is confounded with the Protestant position on the

Scriptures can doctrinal development be construed as treasonous to “the faith

once delivered” (180, 378).64 Second, their church historiography will have to

be rewritten (178-9). Replicating a golden age of the church cannot be the

goal, be it the Reformers’ intent to return to the theology of the fathers, the

Tractarian slogan of “Antiquity”, or the Latitudinarian attempt to limit

essential dogmas to the first five centuries, for it bullies the early church into

producing a body of orthodoxy that scholarship shows was not there (374).

Nor should it be the goal. Newman is right. “Adherents of those creeds, who

draw the line there, have to answer the question why just those creeds should

be thought to comprehend all that the Church ever may confess?” (375). The

preceding lectures have placed Rainy in a position where he thinks he can

defend Scripture as the sole and adequate rule of faith and “assert and

vindicate development of doctrine as a function of the Church…belonging to

her duty, connected with a right use of her privileges, and indeed

indispensable to her life” (183).

63 Likely, Rainy has the recent Vatican Council in mind. 64 Perhaps in deference to Cunningham, Rainy reproves instead the Irish clergyman Archer Butler (1814-48) as representative of the short-sighted rejoinders to the Essay that reaffirmed “development” only in a logical rather than historical sense (180-1, 375-9).

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The dilemma is twofold. Current theories of doctrinal development are

stillborn, first of all because each in its own way picks the same wrong starting

point for development, namely, Scripture; second, because they either bloat or

belittle the achievement of the post-apostolic church (183-6). Regarding the

first aspect, Rainy has identified a crucial problem: how can Scripture be a

sufficient rule of faith if it provides only the point of departure for doctrinal

development? His solution is to insist that doctrine should develop not away

from but up to Scripture (226). The “great world of truth” (190)65 held in the

Bible is never fully mapped or explored; church proclamation is the pursuit of

the fulsome truth contained in Scripture. A true theory of development, then,

departs from the sub-apostolic church, the very first instance of the Christian

mind engaging the “deep facts” (201) of God’s saving action in history. In

respect to the second, it is absolutely imperative to gauge accurately the pitch

of early church belief. The Roman and Tractarian apologetic grossly

overestimates the achievements of the early church, consequently finding no

space for a genuine development of doctrine (186, 196). Current historical

criticism is making clear that the early church was less than orthodox. In the

earliest centuries, several fundamental beliefs were only partially expressed by

the early fathers; some doctrines later considered essential are conspicuously

absent; the human proclivity to sluggishness of spirit made the church soon

rest at what had already been doctrinally achieved rather than forge ahead into

the depths of revelation (191, 193, 197).

Baur and other radical critics, however, underestimate the early

Christians as babes in the faith. Assured by Hofmann’s work on the canon that

the substance of the canonical New Testament was widely circulated at a very

early date (188), Rainy maintains the early church had the same “thorough

acquaintance with the history of the great facts of divine revelation” that the

church had after the crystallization of the canon (189), as well as a strong and

joyful hold of the facts and their doctrinal implications, even if they could not

yet do full justice to it (191-2). The early church was akin to a new convert,

Bible in hand and heart afire, in possession of the full truth but not yet of the

fullness of that truth (186-6). The doctrinal attainment of the early church as a

65 Compare the expression to Newman, Essay, 27.

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real though diminished reflection of the light of revelation must be considered

the point of exit for the development of doctrine (185, 195, 198-9).66

Rainy lacked Newman’s nerve. He timorously abstained from

sustained attention to actual examples of the development of doctrine, leaving

his treatment of development largely theoretical where Newman’s notes are

bedighted with messy detail.67 Still, his cursory examples of the history of

Christology, the sacraments, and justification, explicate his understanding of

the mechanisms of development. It is typically “slow and secular” (220, 183),

the interplay of present historical context with tradition and recourse to

Scripture. But doctrine has also developed in the heat of controversy, in which

the church had to expose outside malignant cultural and religious impulses;

“and in doing so, she became more fully aware of the proper genius and

bearing of her own” (211).68 False teaching within the church “cross-

questioned” the status quo of belief, provoking open reflection as well as

resistance to new truth (215).69

Significant, too, has been the influence of various methods on

theological reflection. Scholasticism, in particular, by insisting upon

systematic and logical corroboration, has developed doctrine by sheer

proliferation (214, 382-3). Rainy deems the church’s historical life as a “cross-

questioning” at the hands of Providence, to which it has responded either with

a deepened understanding of scriptural revelation or falsely, by defective

development, or by preferring the familiar to the rough prodding of divine

truth. Given the church’s natural indolence, the latter has regrettably occurred

66 Lauding the early church’s posture to Scripture as exemplary, Rainy argues against Rome and Oxford that the rule of faith in the early church originally intended to underscore the dependence of church teaching upon Scripture, even if the rule “too readily lent itself to serve the purposes of ecclesiastical parties—to embody the arrogance of majorities, or to sustain by an evil conservatism every abuse which became habitual” (207, also 217, 379-80, 383-6). In the earliest centuries, something akin to a coincidence theory of tradition and Scripture was held (see 1.2.2) and was likely even “factually true”, i.e., what the early church taught generally coincided with the apostolic teaching in the New Testament writings. The problem was that it was not “theologically true”. The early church overestimated the scope and depth of its grasp of the facts of salvation, which worked to castigate as innovations doctrines that sought to develop or deepen the church’s understanding of revelation. 67 His final work, The Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1902), tracks in more detail the development of early church doctrines, although without theoretical discussion. 68 Benjamin B. Warfield, in his review of the above work (PRR 13 [1902]: 662-64), complained that Rainy depicted the doctrine of paedobaptism as a development spurred on largely by the need to counter false teaching. 69 Compare to “MTT,” 79.

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all too often, especially as the early church began to impose itself onto the

Bible under the guise of tradition (220). Indeed, Augustine’s sombre

amillennialism flavours this lecture. The development of doctrine is entwined

in the historical unfolding of the cities of God and of man. Like the church

itself, doctrine is ever an admixture of sheep and goats, and even the best and

purest churches are not free of error (218, 221-22). Further, Rainy considers

the church’s “fallenness” as a major obstacle to the healthy development of

doctrine. Not only does church doctrine frequently stray onto wayward paths,

the church’s spiritual sloth and its leaders’ addiction to power leaves it

indurate to the leading of the Spirit to ponder anew the great events of that

“blessed history of redemption” (201).

Church tradition presses Rainy’s argument as an ambivalent weight.

The organic nature of the church entails that the doctrinal tradition is, for good

or bad, “a communicable attribute”, handed down to successive generations

(224, 216, 225-6, 378). Generations vary in the degree of attention they pay to

specific aspects of that heritage, and various groups or parties may contest or

correct, endow with new meaning, or positively develop aspects of that

doctrinal heritage. Still, “something is gained which the mind does not, nay,

which it cannot again abjure” (216-7). A Protestant catholicity behoves each

generation to consciously appropriate orthodoxy as the yield of earlier

labourers in the task of determining revelation. A Protestant catholicity does

not chain church proclamation to the past.70 Each generation must critically

receive the orthodox tradition as it listens to the voice of the living God

speaking in Scripture (225, 231). In this sense, then, Rainy assesses the

Reformation as a complex religious phenomenon. It was not only a regress

back to the Scriptures and beliefs of the early church and, negatively, the

eradication of medieval doctrinal corruptions and spiritual superstitions; it also

attained an unparalleled—in many ways still unsurpassed—advance into

Scripture.71 Yet, it too was shaped by what it was bequeathed, and as happens

with all of God’s gifts, it variously mismanaged the blessings it handed on to

posterity (221-2).

70 Note: the language of “Protestant Catholicity” is mine, not Rainy’s. 71 Despite patristic and medieval precursors, the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, Rainy avers, was fundamentally unprecedented, and a real achievement of the Reformers (386).

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An unresolved tension at lecture’s end is between the open process of

development and the finality of a developed doctrine. The former, which

Rainy wagers to risk a real errand in the wilderness (221-22),72 renders

provisional each and every doctrine determined by the Christian mind. Even

the classic catholic dogmas of the early church are not beyond correction,

improvement, or supplementation (223-26, 232). True to form, however, he

recoils from radical conclusions: past decisions of the church on fundamental

doctrines like Christ, Trinity, grace and free will, while not, strictly speaking,

final for Protestants, were handled with such dexterity and precision that

material alteration is not really conceivable (224-25). Just how consistent is

his mediating position? This question sits uncomfortably in the closing lecture,

a programmatic piece which, given the future ecclesiastical status of its

speaker, was pregnant with repercussions for the future of his theological and

ecclesiastical tradition.

[3.3.7] The final lecture (235-90) on the function and form of creeds

finally makes explicit the practical consequences for the church of what had

been handled theoretically until now. Rainy delivered these lectures as he was

hitting stride as a front-rank FC leader, and it is hard not to read them,

especially the sixth, as plotting an advance course through a challenge

looming for confessional churches like the Presbyterians: creedal revision. His

repeated insistence on the necessity of a written confession (248-9, 250-1,

255); his plaintive awareness of the mocking irony of church history, where

creeds and confessions, against their modus operandi, have so often

heightened antagonism and ossified division (234-43); his wish to find the

ideally slow and steady development of doctrine reflected in a reverent and

cautious practice of creedal revision (242, 275), bespeak an ecclesiastical

leader desirous of a thoroughly “conservative arrangement” (277) between his

tradition’s extensive body of doctrine and the possibility that parts of that

corpus no longer resonated with church conscience. Rumblings of discontent

had been heard in Scotland, at least, for some time. Under the guidance of

John Cairns and James Orr, the UPs would pass a declaratory act on the

72 See also “MTT,” 82.

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Westminster Confession in 1879; calls to revise the Confession began coming

before the FC Assembly in the 1880s.73 To his credit, DDCD shows that Rainy

was seeing well beyond the older question then taxing contemporaries,

namely, which church office bearers need subscribe to the Confession (248-9,

254, 274, 393-9), to the profounder issues of the very nature and necessity of

church creeds and confessions.

A creed functions to express that portion of doctrines a church

considers fundamental. For Rainy, “fundamental articles” of faith

(approximating what other church traditions designate as dogma) connotes

those doctrines deemed to be so integral to the church’s life and mission that

to deny them would be to subvert the church and rupture the body of Christ

(260). What had been broached in his fourth lecture in the context of the

chance offered by the perspicuous events of salvation history to break the

post-Reformation impasse over the discernment of core Christian doctrines is

now revisited in force (260, 262-3, 281).74 Considering examples like the

Nicene Creed and Augsburg Confession, Rainy argues that creeds historically

executed a dual function—anticipated in the New Testament—of confessing

fundamental beliefs as a public witness to the world without and to reprove

false teaching within (242, 245, 248, 256-8). As such, a creed is the church’s

response to the question arising from both within and without: what do you

hold most fundamental about the revelation you claim to have received from

God? What beliefs bind God’s people together in the unity of truth? The logic

of Heilsgeschichte further affects the function of a creed by helping the church

“utter the present faith so as to bring out the consent of past ages with our

own” (272). For there must be, he insists in a manner not unlike Newman’s

second test of doctrinal continuity, a durable identity to the church’s core

doctrines, a stable cluster of fundamentals, which any new creed or confession

73 The literature concerning Presbyterian creedal revision in America and the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries is considerable, including: Don S. Fortson, III, “New School Calvinism and the Presbyterian Creed,” JPH 82 (2004): 221-243; Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford UP, 1991); William Klempa, “Canadian Presbyterianism and the Westminster Standards,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Presbyterian History 23 (1998): 38-51; Robert Swanton, “The Westminster Confession and the Declaratory Statements,” RTR 44 (1985): 13-19; Peter Matheson, “Transforming the Creed,” in Scottish Christianity in the Modern World, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000), 119-31; Findlay Holmes, The Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Dublin: Columba P, 2000), 123-133. 74 See also “MTT,” 90; Simpson, 2: 83-84, citing his 1887 address as moderator.

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must retain unless it deigns to deny the organic continuity of the church in

history or cast aspersion upon the clarity of the facts of salvation (273, 276).

At the same time, he vehemently maintains that the church has no right

to speak except from present conviction (271, 279). The intrinsic stability of

the church’s core faith must not petrify the form of a creed. A Protestant

church should neither permit creeds to bar the pathways opened by divine

revelation nor protect them from the attrition of doctrinal development (254).

There was no lack of modern detractors to remind Rainy that, practically,

Protestants confessions often function in a manner indistinguishable from

Roman dogma, enticing the Christian to a habit of deference to the human

document and the consent it purports to express, and leave them awed before

the hoary wisdom that invests it (255).75 This is illegitimate, he contends. Like

their component parts, doctrine, creeds are human, and to treat them as

inviolable is to make an “idle flourish” of the Protestant claim that the Word

of God stands over the church (274-5). Every branch of the church has a right

and duty to hold its creeds subject to correction, “for as the inspired teaching

is before the Church, so the Church is before the confession…” (274, also

397).

If the church must not flinch from this charge, it should also not move

hastily against fundamental doctrines. The perspicuity of the saving acts of

God recorded in the Bible, as well as the organic-historical nature of the

church, ensure that Christian fundamentals are stable. Consequently, the living

voice of the church will utter substantially the same “credo” as past

generations. Rainy can even speak of the fundamentals as a “permanent

acquisition” and “fixed possession” (270, 273). In fact, two strata exist in any

given confession of faith: fundamental doctrines that aim for a catholic

presentation of the Christian faith, and peripheral doctrines, bound to the

questions and issues of a specific time and place. The latter, because they tend

to stray further from the central determinations of salvation history, are more

liable to error or redundancy, and therefore to abridgement, correction, or

elimination as the church’s mind develops (262-3, 272-5). The former are

really susceptible only to deeper penetration. For this reason, a great creed like

75 See also “MTT,” 87.

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the Scots Confession can confidently proclaim the faith whilst admitting the

possibility of correction (397-8). Given that creedal revision is a reflex of the

church’s ongoing determination of the facts of salvation held in the Bible, the

manner of revision should bear the same traits as the ideal of development. It

will incrementally and cautiously aim to scale down a confession to focus

more sharply on the centre of faith rather than swell it with littoral doctrines; it

aspires for catholicity, the fundamental beliefs that unite across time and

place, rather than to retrench sectarian tendencies or time-bound peculiarities

(279, 399).76 And this task now confronts the church, Rainy declares. God

intends to bring Presbyterianism back to the living Word to let its doctrine be

affirmed, or pared down and simplified (371-3).

Rainy’s position on creeds has a common lineage in nineteenth-century

theology. An effect of neo-Lutheranism’s mutual debt to the evangelical

awakening and Schleiermacher was its insistence that doctrine expresses the

church’s living faith. Werner Elert (1885-1954), an esteemed later

representative of the Erlangen school, wrote concerning dogma: “According to

Protestant understanding, they are not decretals of faith but confessions of

faith. They do not say what should be believed but rather what is believed.”77

At the same time, the movement’s debt to the romantic Leitmotif of the

organic nature of historical reality gave the ‘churchliness’ of doctrine a

conservative embodiment; indeed, for most neo-Lutherans, the Book of

Concord was a definitive description of faith’s consciousness of salvation.78

Similarly, Rainy believed creeds should speak out those doctrines that the

present church considers central. The Christian mind of each and every age,

after all, must re-embody the great facts of salvation for its own. Yet the

constant revision of a creed according the whims of the age is far removed

from his wholly conservative intent, as if fundamental doctrines were to be

determined each generation by polling church members’ beliefs. As with

Hofmann, the Tatsache of salvation history ensured that for Rainy, doctrine

and creeds are never merely descriptive of the church’s faith. The delivery of 76 See also his critical remarks on the Heidegger-penned Formula Consensus Helvetica of 1675 (284-5, 402-6). 77 Cited in Bienert, Dogmengeschichte, 16-7. Emphasis is Elert’s. 78 On the links between ideological conservatism and organic thinking see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1973), 15-6, 25-9.

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doctrine as historical revelation guarantees that a confession of faith is an

inextinguishable aspect of Christian faith, the fundamental doctrines that it

proclaims can be determined with confidence, and the essential continuity of

“the church’s familiar faith” (226) in history is assured.

Ultimately, the crucial difference between a German Lutheran like

Hofmann and a Scottish Presbyterian like Rainy on the subject of creeds was

practical: the latter had the ecclesiastical and legal freedom to let the present

tense of the church’s faith actually alter its past voice. And how Rainy’s

contention that a confession is the church’s offspring and not its sire agitated

the FC during the latter years of the Victorian era! It expressed in a nutshell

what was startling for evangelical Presbyterians about his understanding of

doctrine in relation to revelation and history: doctrine, and thus also creeds, is

the utterance of faith, not of revelation. It also raised a thorny legal problem

with large ecclesiological ramifications. Could a church alter its doctrinal

standards to reflect the development of its doctrines, as the FC did through its

1892 Declaratory Act and 1900 Act of Union with the UPs, and still be the

same church?79 The House of Lords did not think so in 1904 when they

awarded all FC deeds, trusts, and property to the minority who dissented from

UFC church union.

3.4. Conclusion A work of DDCD’s magnitude is not easily assessed. It touches at

some point upon every aspect of doctrine. Admittedly, this inevitably entails

often-superficial overviews of issues. Yet this was attributable not only to the

hasty preparation of the lectures (34) but to the churchman who hurried at

times to the practical repercussions rather than linger in thought. Moreover,

the knotty prose and sometime convoluted organization confirm the quip heard

then in FC circles: “Dr. Rainy was misty as well as Rainy.” (It was this, in

combination with his cautious poise, which gave him a reputation for

craftiness and opportunism).

79 See the excellent study by K. R. Ross, Church and Creed in Scotland. The Free Church Case 1900-1904 and its Origins (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1988); G. N. M. Collins, The Heritage of Our Fathers (Edinburgh: The Knox P, 1976), 64-119; “United Free Church Act anent Spiritual Independence of the Church, 1906,” Corpus Confessionum 18 (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1937), 811-3.

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Notwithstanding, DDCD is an impressive treatment of the nature of

doctrine that is rife with stimulating observations, some of which will

percolate in the next two chapters, and some of which, especially the congruity

of aspects of his proposal with so-called linguistic or hermeneutical

interpretations of the nature of doctrine current nowadays, will be revisited in

the conclusion of the dissertation. That DDCD is also a controversial agenda

for the future viability of the evangelical and Reformed tradition makes it

worthy of attention not only from theologians but also church historians. It

could only have been written on the “darkling plain” of uncertain times, where

the stalwart beliefs of Christianity were being battered, old certainties

toppling, and the church’s weapons at hand seemed blunted with age. It takes

a great leader to neither retrench nor capitulate. DDCD makes explicit that

while Rainy heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of

Faith”,80 and sought to respond to those voices inside and outside the church

who protested that classical church doctrine was keeping Christ from them

rather than bringing them closer (142-43), he refused to allow the church’s

historic confession to ebb. To accomplish this task, he adopted a thoroughly

historical approach to revelation, church, and doctrine, despite the fact it was

still widely suspected within his evangelical and Reformed tradition, and

leaned hard upon Newman and Hofmann, each of whom had already tried in

his own way to combine a conservative theological agenda with the century’s

new historical consciousness.

Three topics in particular are worth revisiting at the conclusion of this

chapter to examine further Rainy’s contribution to the problem of history and

doctrine within the contours of this dissertation: the web of issues related to

doctrine and salvation history, his lack of a theory of development proper, and

his quest for the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

An evaluation of Rainy’s contribution to his tradition’s negotiation of

its doctrines with the rights of history during the nineteenth century must focus

upon his specific contribution: Heilsgeschichte. The temptation to be avoided

is to either reduce his version to its parts or to read it anachronistically.

80 Arnold, “Dover Beach,” http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html; “MTT,” 88.

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Salvation history à la Rainy is composite, and at no point does he appear

slavish to his obvious influences: Cunningham, Newman—whose Essay

affected him suggestively rather than substantially, exposing the ahistoricism

of evangelical views of church doctrine and tradition but not providing a

satisfactory alternative—nor even Hofmann. Colin Brown’s judgement of

Hofmann rebounds upon Rainy: “His work appealed to a public that wanted to

be evangelical, Christ-centred, and broadly biblical, but that was content to

leave largely to one side the historical questions that engrossed the nineteenth-

century biblical critics and the philosophical questions with which

Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, and Kierkegaard wrestled.”81 Rainy was in the

nadir of a Protestantism not yet embarrassed to profess a plenary inspiration of

the Bible as the concomitant of divine revelation. As with Hofmann, he had no

need to posit a distinction between Historie and Geschichte to cover the

discrepancies between historical or theological reconstructions of Israel’s

history because for him there were really none to speak of. The ‘God who

acts’ movement of the mid-twentieth century which popularized the idea of

salvation history was criticised (among other things) for creating a canon

within the canon, marginalizing the vast sections of Scripture that are not

historical narrative.82 For Rainy, however, revelation was foremost but not

exclusively the mighty deeds and words of the Lord—it encompassed also the

experience, ritual embodiment, and propositional interpretation of these acts

within the inspired Word of God.83

A Heilsgeschichte paradigm provided Rainy, as an evangelical and

disciple of the Reformed tradition, with an antidote to the “disease of

ahistoricism”—his tradition’s hereditary ailment—of which he had been made

81 Brown, Jesus, 248. 82 Summarized from Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 9-87. 83 Perhaps Rainy’s combination of revelation-as-history and a doctrine of plenary inspiration was enabled by his New College colleague James Bannerman’s widely read Inspiration: The Infallible Truth and Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1865). In addition to distinguishing between revelation and inspiration—a distinction not prominent in older Reformed theology—Bannerman admitted the Bible itself provides no theory of inspiration beyond asserting the fact of it, even though he still defended a theory of verbal inspiration. See further (though tendentiously) Nicholas Needham, The Doctrine of Holy Scripture in the Free Church Fathers (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1991).

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poignantly aware by Newman’s stultifying critique of Bible Christianity.84 It

broke open the classic status quaestionis concerning revelation, doctrine, and

tradition without conceding the integrity of the Protestant position. Moreover,

the continuum of salvation history—what Hofmann called the Tatsache—that

linked all ages of the church to God’s acts in history and their original

impression recovered the significance of church tradition for the formation of

doctrine as fact and ressourcement.85 The long birth of orthodoxy is duly

acknowledged, as is the church’s maternal role in passing on the faith. Rainy

called evangelical Presbyterians to consciously engage church tradition as its

inheritance and as a resource for the present determination of Scripture. Yet,

even when understood as a record of salvation history, the Bible retained all

the perfection and authority it was invested with by Protestant orthodoxy and

contemporary evangelicalism. Indeed, because he rejected the approach of

Schleiermacher and Hofmann of deducing doctrine first from the religious

consciousness, Rainy’s position even harmonizes with the Confession’s

statement that all that humankind needs to know of God and his ways is

expressed in Scripture or “by good and necessary consequence” (I.6) may be

deduced from it. In fact, he considers his own (vague) imperative to let the

natural scope of Scripture itself sharply delimit doctrinal inference to finally

be able to implement the Reformed orthodox maxim of consequentiae

proximae, necessariae evidentes (164).

Rainy’s endorsement of salvation history also promised to ratchet the

tension between a doctrine’s normativity for church confession and its

historical relativity, which confessional Protestant churches had let snap, with

the result that their confessions of faith had taken on an aura of permanence.86

Rainy—as with most proponents of Heilsgeschichte in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries87—dethroned systematic theology as the queen of the

84 The phrase is from Bernard Ramm, The Evangelical Heritage: A Study in Historical Theology (1973; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 15-16. Rainy’s role in opening the FC to “believing criticism” of the Bible is related, of course. See especially Richard Riesen, Criticism and Faith in Late Victorian Scotland (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1988). 85 Kenneth Stewart, “Evangelicals and Patristic Christianity: 1517 to the Present,” EQ 80 (2008): 307-21, has shown the suprising extent to which evangelicals have engaged patristic literature. But proof-texting the church fathers is not the same as being conscious of the weight of patristic tradition on their own theological thinking. 86 Gustav Krüger, Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Dogmengeschichte? (Freiburg: Mohr, 1895), 17-18. 87 On the varieties see Mildenberger, “Heilsgeschichte,” 1574-5.

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sciences. Church doctrine necessarily shares in this humbling. His emphasis

on revelation as history thwarts the “syllogistic manipulation” (379) of

Scripture that has spawned such vast and unwieldy systems of doctrine, and

calls the church back to the facts of redemptive history to let its doctrinal

achievements be reaffirmed, revised, or rejected. A preference for the

description of Christian faith through a combination of biblical exegesis and

historical theology is an unmistakable trait of the diffusive influence of that

father of modern theology, Schleiermacher. At the same, despite his acerbity

toward the systematizing tendencies of traditional theology, Rainy’s ‘turn to

history’ was motivated above all to protect the same orthodoxy. He refused to

budge from a full-fledged affirmation of the necessity of doctrine, its

importance for the life and mission of the church, its authority under Scripture

for belief, and even the essential stability of orthodoxy. As we shall see

shortly, it was features within the paradigm of salvation history that secured

the latter, namely, the perspicuity of historical revelation, and the organic-

historical nature of the church.

In the same year that Rainy delivered the Cunningham Lectures, the

Presbyterian Alliance sponsored a plenary session on the theme of

development during its general assembly in New York City. After papers on

the subject by stalwarts like John Williamson Nevin and James McCosh,

Charles Hodge rose in the question period to address one of the speakers: “I

rise simply to ask Dr. Brown one question. I want him to tell us what

development is. That has not been done… This is a vital question, sir. We

cannot stand here and hear men talk about development, without telling us

what development is.”88 The curmudgeonly Hodge’s point was incisive. Alan

Sell has remarked that over the course of the Victorian era evolution became

less a theory than a theme—of dubious omnipresence.89 Like Hodge, Rainy

expressed frustration in DDCD at the current sloganeering of “development”

in theology (178-9, 181). Notably, he also resisted conflating the development

of the species with the development of doctrine. The lack of reference to

88 “Discussion on Darwinism and the Doctrine of Development,” in History, Essays, Orations, and Other Documents of the Sixth General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, 318. 89 Sell, Theology in Turmoil, 71.

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scientific theories of evolution in DDCD is surprising; one year later,

however, he devoted his inaugural lecture as principal of New College to the

topic. What is remarkable about his address is not its unconcern with evolution

as scientific theory—the fact of the assimilation of evolutionary theory among

nineteenth-century evangelicals being a casualty of later theological wars90—

but rather his insistence that evolution or development was variously operative

in the world God governs, specific to the integrity of each sphere of creation.91

Understanding evolutionary processes could shed valuable light on where and

how environment has given impulse to the church’s determination on the facts

of salvation; it could sort out what a doctrine might owe to the Greeks or the

Jews; it could help retrace the long march of the church’s collective mind

toward a doctrinal definition. But deleterious effects follow when pseudo-

scientific theories of evolution bracket God from history or, conversely, make

him so immanent as to be indistinguishable from natural processes. Then,

doctrine becomes only a by-product of environment, and development is

reduced to natural operations of cause and effect or natural selection.92

Second, Rainy maintained a cool distance to philosophical theories of

development. Of course, he was not immune to the philosophical currents

swirling about him: DDCD clearly partakes of the fascination with historical

movement, change, and process typical of his age, and asserts the participation

of the believer in the history of salvation (110, 120)—with all that entailed for

doctrine—by appropriating some generic aspects of an idealistic philosophy of

history. But protest had been raised early in his career against the imposition

of theories of development upon the historical record.93 Newman’s clever use

of antecedents was as guilty of this as were the idealist-soaked

Dogmengeschichten that streamlined the history of doctrine as the logical (and

predictable) unfolding of the divine mind indwelling the church. Rainy’s

historian’s sensibilities left him impervious to proscribing development

90 See David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1987); James R. Moore, The Post Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Comes to Terms with Darwin in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979). 91 Rainy, Evolution and Theology: Inaugural Address delivered in the New College, Edinburgh, at the Opening of the Session 1874-75 (Edinburgh: MacLaren and Macnivan, 1874), 6-7. 92 Evolution and Theology, 17-21; see also “MTT,” 96. 93 Rainy, “Apologia pro vita sua,” especially 100-2; “Introductory Lecture,” 16-8.

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according to a purported order (215). Further, his resistance to the

interpretation of the development of dogma famously propounded by Baur is

implicit in some of the practical misgivings in DDCD about development. A

dialectical theory of doctrine’s origins and progress sanctifies the violent

opposition of ideas, political mongering by ecclesiastical parties, and the

necessity of error in the realization of the divine Mind in history. This is

precisely what the churchman, consensus builder, pragmatist cannot stomach,

even if the historian knew that some doctrines have indeed developed in this

way. Indeed, a host of comments in DDCD give rise to the nagging suspicion

that Rainy was not always keeping the distinction in mind of how doctrine

actually developed and creeds were formed and how it should have happened

(136, 183, 191, 202, 211, 218, 221, 239, 243, 277-9).

Yet Rainy’s resistance is all the more notable for the fact that

dialectical development was not the only option at hand.94 Conservative

histories of dogma were plentiful in mid-nineteenth century German theology,

including specimens from Neander as well as the mediating and neo-Lutheran

camps. Differences aside, the conservative spectrum typically shared idealist

presuppositions that dictated a gradual organic development of doctrine in

which the contents of revelation came to consciousness in the church’s mind

over the course of church history in a divinely ordained order that looked

strikingly like the classic loci of systematic theology (see 1.3.3; 1.4.5). A

number of historical theologians have observed that the Erlangen school drew

upon Schelling’s less violently dialectical philosophy rather than Hegel’s.95 In

contrast to his UP peer, James Orr (see chapter 5), Rainy appeared unaffected

by these contributions, as well as by the affiliated trend of making a “central

dogma” or fundamental principle the centrifugal point of a given tradition’s

doctrine or institutional ethos.96 He references on occasion Schweizer’s now

classic Die protestantischen Centraldogmen (1854-6), for example, but

appears unperturbed by its thrust. Like Augustine, he argues that Providence is

94 Chapter five will glance at some conservative German Lutherans who also employed Hegel’s philosophy to serve their accounts of the development of dogma. 95 E.g. Beyschlag, Die Erlanger Theologie, 55. 96 For background see Günter Meckenstock, “Protestantismustheorien in Deutschen Idealismus,” in Das protestantische Prinzip: Historische und systematische Studien zum Protestantismusbegriff, ed. Arnulf von Scheliha und Markus Schroeder (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1998), 39-54.

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ultimately inscrutable on this side of the eschaton. The hand that orchestrates

the development of church and doctrine through the “cross-questioning” of

history remains hidden in the counsel of God, capable of being traced but not

predicted (215, 232-3, 287).97

Can Rainy’s professedly “from below” account of the delivery and

development of doctrine match the confidence of those histories of dogma that

imposed an external theory of development or a guarantor like a pope, or

merely mimic it?98 His loud insistence throughout DDCD (and elsewhere)

that the recognition of the historicity of revelation and church need not rattle

the church from a confident confession of who God is and what he has done

for our salvation suggests that he himself, at some level, was bothered by it.

His commitment to pursue this topic with his feet firmly on the ground of

historical fact and experience (29) rather than with his head in the clouds

plunged him into the turbulence of historical reality. In the absence of a theory

of development, the complex and considerable question of the origin and

progress of doctrine will have to be accounted for via rigorous historical

phenomenology. This brings at last the issue of the articuli fundemantales,

which I believe lay at the very heart of Rainy’s treatise and its vision for the

future of doctrine in the Reformed tradition.

Given Rainy’s avowal of the church’s doctrinal heritage as a

communicable attribute, it is fitting that considerable traces of seventeenth-

century scholastic Protestant theology mark DDCD. In some sense he did

indeed remain Cunningham’s scion. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his

concerted attention to the topic of the fundamental articles of faith—what

Reformed orthodox theologians had sought in order to establish a unifying

doctrinal centre for a fragmented evangelical Christendom. Their irenics

aimed first for a single confession of faith for the regional Reformed churches,

then a statement of belief agreeable to the Lutherans. Perhaps the most

important example—at least the work that drew the most retaliatory fire—was

the Leiden professor Franciscus Junius’ Eirenicum de pace ecclesiae

catholicae (1593). The bristling Lutheran response conceded agreement only

97 See also Introductory Lecture, 18-22. 98 “From below” is his often used expression: DDCD, 34, 75, 81, 89; “MTT,” 86.

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on the fundamentum organicum seu ministeriale, Scripture, not the

fundamentum dogmaticum seu doctrinale. Nor would doctrinal unanimity be

forthcoming when the fundamentals were ultimately made equivalent to the

full extent of the Lutheran confessions. Rainy, the consummate churchman,

thought the turn to history could renew the possibility of ecumenical

consensus, thereby reviving the possibility that the one, holy, catholic, church

was not merely an invisible reality, at least not among pugilistic Presbyterians.

What advantage lay at his hand that his forebears lacked? Zacharius

Ursinus (1534-83), co-author of the Heidelberg Catechism, had proposed a

synod for Protestant unity in 1581 on terms that included recognition of

Scripture as supreme judge. “For him, Holy Scripture is directly equated with

the truth,” elaborates Wilhelm Neuser. “A doctrine that stands expressly in

Scripture or necessarily follows from it is orthodox; if the opposite is the case,

it is rejected. What is not proven from Scripture but does not contradict it is

nonessential for faith.”99 Such a principle failed to secure doctrinal unanimity

among Protestants, despite agreement on the fundamentum organicum seu

ministeriale, the perspicuity of the doctrinal system contained therein, and the

legitimacy of inferential reasoning from it. Rainy’s bold proposal is that the

articuli fundemantales can be attained only through history. Scripture

confronts the church with the clear and definite facts of God’s saving acts in

history; the palatial structures of doctrine that the older theologians believed to

be domiciled in the Bible, along with the sprawling additions fastened on by

logical deduction, are left without a sure foundation. The facts of salvation

history are so potent and perspicuous that the determination of their meaning

by the church in history attains a stable consensus on fundamental doctrines.

A historical itinerary of fundamental doctrines is now expected, nay

required, by the course of the argument. But Rainy falls silent. He offers no

list, apart from a few vague references to the doctrine of God, Christ, and

salvation, as fundamentals or inerasable achievements of classical orthodoxy.

Having displayed an historian’s not unwarranted disregard for “top-down”

approaches to the history of theology, it is understandable that he would not

presume the core Christian doctrines. Establishing the “fundamentals”, a

99 Neuser, “Die abschließende reformierte Bekenntnisbildung,” in HDThG 2, 350.

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‘mere Christianity’, or a “Nicene faith” is, after all, more difficult than

theologians typically suppose.100 But to neglect a phenomenological

reconstruction of fundamental doctrine from the record of church history

leaves unfulfilled his attempt to reckon with doctrine “from below”, i.e., what

the church throughout history has really determined of revelation, and,

ultimately, renders his proposal as much a paper theory as the Tractarian via

media.

This is not an abstract grievance. The FC’s 1892 Declaratory Act on

the Westminster Confession, a piece of legislation widely considered as

vintage Rainy, intended continuity with traditional Reformed theology by its

very nature as a declaratory act rather than a new confession; yet, recognizing

“diversity of opinion in this Church on such points in the confession as do not

enter into the substance of the Reformed Faith” still permitted whosoever

wanted to narrow the gap between the theological understanding of the

seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.101 As the act’s many critics pointed out,

the key phrase—“substance of the Reformed Faith”—was left undefined.102 It

must be said that Rainy reneged on the promise of a truly historical delivery of

doctrine, and it is difficult to ascertain if his confidence in history to secure

such fundamentals failed, or if his confidence was so great that he was sure he

did not have make the obvious explicit.

Rainy’s effort to historically validate and determine the form and

function of church doctrine, exemplified both in his publications and in his

ecclesiastical legislation and leadership, is perhaps best understood as an

100 Argued to disconcerting conclusions by Euan Cameron, Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches’ Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 101 “Declaratory Act of the General Assembly of the Free Church, 1892.– Anent the Confession of Faith,” in Corpus Confessionum 18, 802-04. During the raucous debate leading up to the passing of the Declaratory Act, Rainy argued that the substance of the Reformed faith could be deduced from the body of Reformed confessional documents, but neglected to specify what would be included therein. See “Overture Anent Declaratory Act,” in Proceedings and Debates of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, 1892 (Edinburgh: Ballantyre, Hanson & Co., 1892), 145-79. 102 See Ross, Church and Creed in Scotland, 288-9. A protesting rump broke away in 1893 to form the Free Presbyterian Church. See the fine study by James Lachlan MacLeod, The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), especially 179-232; idem, “Revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Free Church of Scotland’s Declaratory Act of 1892,” in The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, ed. J. Ligon Duncan (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2003), 343-366.

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interrupted legacy of seventeenth-century federal theology. This conclusion

might seem strained, given that this analysis of DDCD has excavated the

foundations of his proposal above all in conservative Lutheranism. Except that

Hofmann’s thought, as many have pointed out, itself points back to federal

theology via pietism. Previously, some scholars toyed with the possibility that

Hofmann directly absorbed federal theology from the “awakened” Reformed

pastor in Erlangen, Christian Krafft, who had converted a number of future

neo-Lutherans, including Hofmann. There is, however, no concrete proof.

Regardless, his Heilsgeschichte theology is unthinkable apart from the ground

laid by federal theology. As Eberhard Busch has observed: “Federal Theology

oriented its attention…not to the elevation and maintenance of theological

truths, valid in and of themselves and ascertained as a system of abstract

doctrine, but rather to the realization that those truths occurred (and were

occurring) on the horizon of human reality.”103 The historicizing of revelation,

church, and doctrine propounded by Rainy lies within the trajectory of the

federalists’ abiding concern with divine accommodation in history and the

Bible as a progressive record of the covenantal history of God with

humankind. Despite its dissimilarity on many points with the work of his

teacher Cunningham and the majority of evangelical and Reformed peers,

Rainy’s recasting of doctrine within the bounds of Heilsgeschichte was of

Reformed lineage, even if it represents—like the federalists themselves did—a

‘minority report’ in the tradition. And not insignificantly, federal theology was

closely aligned with the quest for fundamental articles.

As the course of analysis moves from Rainy to the Ritschlian-inspired

critique of doctrine, the fate of seventeenth-century federal theology casts a

shadow too. The historicizing tendency of some federalists left them prey to

the powerful influence of anthropocentric Cartesian philosophy then sweeping

through many north European universities in the seventeenth century. The

human side of the history of the covenants came into sharpest focus: gazing

“from below” at the history of redemption, they lost the anchor thrown into

history “from above”. As we have seen, Rainy intended nothing like this. But

did his attention to the delivery of revelation in what he called “human tracks

103 Busch, “Der Beitrag und Ertrag der Föderaltheologie für ein geschichtliches Verständnis der Offenbarung,” 173; see also Link, “Föderaltheologie,” 174.

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of thought and feeling” (123) and the very human process of the formation of

doctrine abet others in his tradition to consider doctrine as all too human? This

connection will become clearer as we turn to a peer who sought to free the

living Christ of history from the musty shrouds of dogma.

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Chapter 4

A. B. Bruce and the “Ritschlian” Critique of Doctrine

Ah, but I was so much older then,/ I'm younger than that now.

- Bob Dylan1

4.1. Introduction

Amidst the euphoria at the FC’s jubilee Assembly in 1893, the

Manchester Baptist Alexander Maclaren’s plenary address posed a sober

question about the future. “We have heard very much of late about the return

of this generation to Jesus Christ as the centre of all our religion. But, but what

Christ is it that we are going back to?” His question would have surely

touched nerves. Some in the FC looked back to the rigorous Calvinism of the

Disruption fathers as a rock for all ages; some looked for a church to arise

whose cornerstone was hewn directly from the original evangel. “Is your

historical Christ the divine Christ? …Is your historical Christ the risen,

ascended, royal Christ?”2

Protestants in late Victorian times were harkening ‘back to Christ’.

This was a movement related to but distinct from the shift in theological

thinking from atonement to incarnation that had occurred earlier in the

century—“the new emphasis on Jesus as man rather than lamb”3—that had

affected even evangelicalism (see 1.4.5). “But, but what Christ is it that we are

going back to?” wondered Maclaren. In fact the dogma of Christ was losing its

evocative hold on the religious affections of most Victorians, even where it

still persisted as official church teaching and even though some Protestants at

century’s end were using idealist philosophy to bloat the two-natures symbol

1 Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages,” Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), [www.bobdylan.com/songs/my-back-pages]. 2 Proceedings and Debates of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, 1893 (Edinburgh: Ballatyne, Hanson & Co., 1893), 79-80. 3 Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 5.

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into grand Christic cosmologies.4 For the most part, going ‘back to Christ’

entailed leaping over the sublime dogma of the incarnation constructed by the

church fathers to the simple Jesus of history recorded by the evangelists. It

was not a program or a method but simply an overriding focus on the human

Christ that carried both diffusive religious manifestations—tangling together

everything from mantle piece lithographs of a handsome saviour to dulcet

Sunday school songs of Jesus the friend of children to socialist political

agendas inspired by the Beatitudes—and sharp theological challenges. For the

agitation by many late Victorian Protestants for a practical and non-dogmatic

religion centred upon the teaching and example of Jesus was a tantrum against

the form of orthodoxy when not the content. ‘Back to Christ’ was a cry for a

creed beyond the longstanding quarrels of Protestantism; it was a plea for a

living faith unencumbered by airy doctrines, a liveable faith whose helping

hands were not bound by antiquated traditions. One defining impulse in

Scotland came through the American evangelist Dwight Moody’s 1873-74

crusade, which saw Presbyterian factions finding unity beyond doctrinal

difference in Moody’s stirring message of the Father’s love in Christ for all

sinners, his non-partisan appeal to the Bible as the basis of belief, and his call

for cooperative Christian social action.5

Theology proper stood in reciprocity to the movement ‘back to Christ’.

On one hand, Jesus needed to be protected from the theologians. Indeed, of the

plethora of Victorian ‘lives of Jesus’ that played out the story of the Saviour as

a fast-paced novel, many were concerned to make the emerging results of the

historical-critical study of the New Testament palatable by consoling readers

that the cherished man from Galilee remained unperturbed by scholars’

findings, however much the critical juggernaut had shattered old

interpretations of other parts of the Bible.6 On the other hand, Jesus needed to

be saved from the church. A. B. Bruce was one of many theologians convicted

4 E.g. Charles Gore, ed. Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (London: John Murray, 1889); John Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 2 vol. (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1900). See the literature cited in chapter 5, footnote 3. 5 See K. R. Ross, “Calvinists in Controversy: John Kennedy, Horatius Bonar and the Moody Mission of 1873-74,” SBET 9 (1991): 51-63. 6 A fascinating account is Daniel Pals, The Victorian ‘Lives’ of Jesus (San Antonio: Trinity P, 1982).

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that “to ‘re-conceive the Christ’ in a spirit of historic fidelity is an urgent task

of vital consequence to the Church’s spiritual health.”

The ecclesiastical Christ is to a large extent not the Christ of the Gospels, but a creation of scholastic theology. Notwithstanding all our preaching, Jesus Christ is not well known… Men are not permitted to see Jesus with open face, but only through the thick veil of a dogmatic system… By remounting to the fountain of inspiration, instead of tarrying by cisterns in which the waters of life have become putrid and unwholesome, the Church will renew its youth with beneficent results in all directions.7

The historical approach to the gospels he and others pursed with alacrity in

order to recover Jesus Christ became both cause and conduit of the wider

movement back to Christ. In this sense, then, what Bruce expressed in

shorthand as the “Galilean gospel” demands the attention of this study

inasmuch as it was aligned with a negative judgement on traditional Christian

doctrine and creeds. Going ‘back to Christ’ typically combined an

unfavourable account of the rise of the ecclesiastical doctrine, especially the

dogma of Christ, with a vision of a future faith in which the unwieldy creeds

of the past had been sublated into the answer to the only question that really

mattered: “But whom say ye that I am?” (Mark 8:29).

Already in his 1881 address to the Presbyterian Alliance meeting in

Philadelphia, Rainy had remonstrated against this growing sentiment. It would

eviscerate Reformed Protestantism, he warned.8 Yet the next decades saw

leading evangelical and Reformed minds fleeing the old confessions back to

Christ, many of them riding the slipstream of a rising power in German

Protestant theology, the Göttingen professor Albrecht Ritschl. The Glasgow

FC College professor Bruce was one of them—indeed, perhaps the superlative

British example of the ‘back to Christ’ movement9—and this chapter assesses

his thought in reference to his tradition’s ongoing struggle with the problems

posed for church doctrine by the rise of an historical consciousness. Bruce’s

corpus, which formed one of the most widely read bodies of theological

literature of its day, sharply differentiated the ecclesiastical Christ from the

7 Bruce, The Kingdom of God; Christ’s Teaching according to the Synoptical Gospels, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1891), 348-49. 8 Rainy, “MTT,” 79. 9 As claimed by George R. Logan, “Alexander Balmain Bruce: A Review of His Contribution to New Testament Study and to Theology,” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1950), 71.

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Jesus of the gospels; his diverse apologetic and biblical studies stand in unity

as a concerted attempt to puncture the former so as to let the light of the latter

shine through more brightly. Scholarly specialization meant he never strayed

beyond the first century of the Christian era to offer a full-fledged account of

the development of doctrine. Yet he so obviously appropriated the general

tendencies of Ritschl’s school that his overall treatment of the nature of

doctrine and rise of dogma partook of its influential interpretation of dogma as

the bitter fruit of the miscegenation of the gospel. For this reason, Bruce is of

immense significance for the wider contours of this dissertation: the Ritschlian

perspective on doctrine that is refracted in his corpus would become the point

of departure for almost all subsequent Dogmengeschichten, and continues to

this day to feed popular malcontent with the theological and ecclesiastical

status quo.10 Any study of the ‘problem of doctrine and history’ that aims for

historical comprehensiveness and hopes for relevancy simply must account for

it.

True, the link between Bruce and Ritschl can be challenged. “In Great

Britain the Ritschlian school never made much headway,” argued Horton

Harris, “since it was strongly opposed by Orr and [James] Denney, and its

supporters were never able to find a champion who could match Orr’s breadth

and depth of knowledge of the Ritschlian theology.”11 No Ritschlian school

formed in Scotland. But it is a patent “Germanism” to presume that the

absence of a school signifies the silence of the master.12 Accordingly, a

biographical sketch of Bruce and then a quick tracing of the lineaments of the

Ritschlian theology as they pertain to the ‘problem of doctrine’ will be

followed by a few remarks as to why this school did attract late Victorian

evangelical Presbyterians like Bruce.

10 Demonstrated by Lohse, “Theorien der Dogmengeschichte in evangelischen Raum heute,” in Dogmengeschichte und katholische Theologie, ed. Werner Löser et al (Würzburg: Echter, 1985), 97-109. 11 Horton Harris, “Albrecht Ritschl’s Theology: An Investigation into its Origin and Development,” (DTheol diss., Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 1970), 323. 12 Harris is simply wrong concerning Denney, whose Studies in Theology (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1895), while explicitly critical of Ritschl (see 2-3, 17-18, 197, 258), still proceed with him by way of Christology and lean upon Harnack’s scholarship to document a “fall” of the post apostolic church. Further, Denney’s New Testament contributions exemplify the Ritschlian disinterest in Christ’s person apart from his work.

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4.2. Alexander Balmain Bruce (1831-1899)13

In 1890 Bruce was arraigned before the FC General Assembly to

answer for his recent book The Kingdom of God.14 His friend and fresh

appointee to the chair of New Testament at New College, Marcus Dods, who

had been irking conservatives for some time as a leader of the “Scottish

mediating theology,”15 stood trial separately at the same Assembly. With the

smoke from the Robertson Smith conflagration still lingering in Scotland, the

evangelical world watched with baited breadth. A host of accusations were

thrown at the Glasgow professor: contravening the Confession by endorsing

universal election as well as admitting discrepancies in the biblical text;

suggesting the evangelists tampered with narratives for theological effect;

keeping company with Germans of ill repute like Ritschl; impugning the

honor of the church with statements like: “the Church is only a means to an

end. It is good only in so far as it is Christian…”16 Along with a wry appeal to

the book’s favorable reception in unimpeachable Princeton, Bruce insisted that

the blacklisted portions needed to be read as an apologetic tactic of vindicating

the gospels by meeting skeptics down at their level rather than from the

heights of orthodoxy. His passionate rejoinder carried the delegates’ votes. It

also carried a candid personal recollection of a young man’s journey through

the slough of skepticism. For Bruce had been a casualty of what is now

stereotyped as a ‘Victorian crisis of faith’.

He had come down to Edinburgh from a Perthshire farm in the early

1840s. After studying at the university, he ascended to New College in 1849

only to be enveloped upon the Mound by a cloud of intellectual doubt and

13 For Bruce see John E. McFayden, “Professor Alexander Balmain Bruce. An Appreciation,” BW 15 (1900): 87-104; Michael Jinkins, “Bruce, Alexander Balmain (1831–1899),” ODNB [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/3724, accessed 9 Oct 2008]; Sell, Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some Scottish Examples (Exeter: Paternoster, 1987), 89-117 [hereafter abbreviated as D&DF]; Logan, “Alexander Balmain Bruce.” 14 See “Special Report on the Case of Professor Bruce,” in Proceedings and Debates of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, 1890 (Edinburgh: Ballatyne, Hanson & Co., 1890), 145-80; a full account is also provided by Sterling J. Edwards, “Marcus Dods: With Special Reference to his Teaching Ministry,” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1960), 148-81. 15 Robert Watts, Dr. Dods’ St. Giles Sermon on the Essentials of Christianity; or, the New Scottish Homiletic. A Review (Edinburgh: James Gemmell, 1889), 4. 16 The Kingdom of God, 272.

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spiritual despondency brought about by David Strauss’ Leben Jesu.17 This betê

noire of nineteenth-century theology slashed deeper into the gospel records

than had even his teacher, F. C. Baur, using the Hegelian distinction between

conceptual truth (Begriff) and its depiction (Darstellung) to commend the

eternal relevance of Christ to modern Christians only once he had been

extracted from the historical slag of the gospels. “Many a one,” Bruce

recalled,

now well established in faith, can remember the sensations of horror and despair which seized his heart when, with the hunger of a student, he devoured that tremendous book, finding intellectual gratification in its clear trenchant style and rigorous logic, and possibly deriving a certain furtive pleasure from its sceptical tone, only however to exchange the sweetness in the mouth, while the pages were being turned over, for intense bitterness in the inward parts, when the work had been perused and its drift realised.18

His childhood evangelicalism was left in tatters. And the ironclad Calvinism

of New College professors like Cunningham could not recover old certainties

for him.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bruce did find his way back to the

light. Over a long probationary period he was helped by the moral heroism of

Carlyle, the broad church sermons of Robertson of Brighton, and above all, by

turning away from church dogmatics to seek Christ anew in the gospels. Leben

Jesu is said to have set the agenda for nineteenth-century New Testament

studies. It set Bruce’s agenda too. Not only was his very first publication a

collaborative translation of one of the legion of orthodox German attempts to

defuse Strauss’ bomb, his crisis of faith resolved him to commit his life to

piercing the shadows of modern doubt with the “brightness and unearthly

beauty” of Jesus.19 His mandate, he declared to the Assembly, had become:

“Have I seen Christ and helped others see Him?”20 His life’s task was to be the

cultivation of what he called “exegetical apologetics”: building up the

17 See Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973), 58-84. 18 Bruce, “The Apologetic Function of the Church in the Present Time,” BFER 25 (1876): 646. 19 J. H. A. Ebrard, The Gospel History, trans. James Martin, ed. A. B. Bruce (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1863). Dods, whose career followed a similar path toward critical study of Scripture and a theology with Ritschlian overtones, edited around the same time another heavyweight German response to Strauss: J. P. Lange, The Life of the Lord Jesus Christ, trans. Sophia Taylor (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1864). 20 “Special Report on the Case of Professor Bruce,” 176.

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historical facts for Jesus while tearing down all that obscured him—be it old

orthodoxies or new ideologies. That Bruce’s message as preacher and

professor was born of a doubt-scarred faith gave it the perfect pitch for late

Victorian Protestantism, and a whole generation of evangelical pastors sought

his help to speak the gospel to the seekers and the tremblers of their fretful

age.

In 1875 he left his pastoral charge of Broughty Ferry for the chair of

New Testament and Apologetics at Glasgow FC College. The symbiosis of the

two disciplines into a single post had been a rather belated rearguard action of

the FC to fortify ordinands against Baur. As incumbent of the chair Bruce

fulfilled the terms to remarkable effect for the next quarter-century. It would

be amiss to forget that many biblical works of this British pioneer of the

critical study of the New Testament were concerned to make Jesus familiar to

those who had confused him for the pale Christ of church dogma or had

abandoned him for a gaudy idol of the age.21 Likewise, his often reprinted

Apologetics (1892), and even his 1896-97 Gifford Lectures on providence and

moral order in the world rest their final case upon the remarkable fact of the

life and teaching of Jesus Christ as recorded in the gospel histories.

In an obituary notice upon Bruce’s 1899 death, John McFayden of

Knox College, Toronto, suggested that his erstwhile teacher’s spiritual history,

theological method, and personal creed found striking affinity to Luther. He

too straddled the divide between theological eras.22 “At transition times,”

Bruce had written, “when an old world is passing away, and a new world is

taking its place, it is ever the fewest who enter with intelligence and sympathy

into the spirit of the new times.”23 Through sermons and scholarship,

convenorship of a hymnbook committee that brought the songs of a new day

into the psalm-singing FC, and agitation for a contemporary confession of

faith, Bruce laboured to bring Presbyterians into the new era. Thus he was, as

21 See Ernest Best, “The Study of the New Testament in Glasgow from the Disruption to the First World War,” in Traditions of Theology in Glasgow 1450-1990, ed. W. Ian P. Hazlett (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1993), 27-42; especially Riesen, Criticism and Faith in Late Victorian Scotland. 22 McFayden, “Professor Alexander Balmain Bruce,” 99. 23 Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews: the First Apology for Christianity (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1899), 20.

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one student fondly recalled, “the epoch-maker” for many in his tradition at the

fin de siécle.24

4.3. Ritschlianism and Scottish Theology [4.3.1] Albrecht Ritschl was in fact the epoch maker of late nineteenth

and early twentieth-century theology, even if the twentieth century’s greatest

theologian, Karl Barth, has persuaded most that he was merely an evanescent

episode.25 A growing number of scholars, however, are not only revisiting

Ritschl as the sine non qua of Protestant theology in the four decades before

the Great War, they are noting striking family resemblances between Ritschl

and his rebellious neo-orthodox brood.26 The heavily tinted “Barthian lens”

worn by much of the modern historiography of theology loses the trace of

Ritschl’s footprints through twentieth-century theology even as it fails to see

the meteoric path he burned through his time. An unfriendly German

correspondent captured the latter well in a breathless report to an American

audience in 1891.

No dogmatician of this century has created such a profound sensation…. In a short time he had founded a school, and his disciples are now more and more filling up the academic chairs of instruction. Since his death in 1889 his place in Göttingen has been occupied by Häring of Württemberg. In Berlin there is Kaftan. In Giessen he has captured the entire faculty, as also in Marburg, where he is represented especially by Herrmann. In France too and in Switzerland he has won followers to himself. In fact the talk now is of universal conquest.27

Ritschl’s victory march was nowhere near as total as some feared. But

the young talent that gathered around him by the mid 1870s to form a loose

“Ritschlian school” profoundly impacted subsequent church and theology in

Germany. Ritschl’s international influence was posthumous, as a crowd of

Scottish and American students began in the 1890s to carry his school’s aims

and methods back home from Berlin, Marburg, and Jena right up until the

Great War put an end to such happy Studienjahre. Ritschlianism was always

24 W. M. MacGregor, A Souvenir of the Union of 1929, with an Historical Sketch of the United Free Church College, Glasgow (Glasgow: Wm. Collins, Sons, and Co., 1930), 10. The emphasis is his. 25 Barth, PT, 640-47. 26 See the literature cited in “Introduction,” page 6. 27 Adolph Zahn, “The Drift of Dogmatic Thought in Germany during the Last Decade,” PRR 2 (1891): 447.

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diverse to an extent, and even by its founder’s death was fracturing—the left

wing being identified with the so-called historical study of religion school

[religionsgeschichte Schule]. Yet its core concerns, dispersed, diluted, or

developed, would dominate twentieth-century theology through progeny as

different as Barth, Bultmann, and the Baillies.

Ritschlianism was less the systematization of its namesake’s thought

than a coalition of scholars and ecclesiastics who followed his lead in pursuing

several regulative aims into the fields of systematic theology, ethics, biblical

studies, church history, and the history of dogma.28 Orr summarized well the

school’s common method and generic features as encountered by Victorian

Protestantism:

the strong contrast…between religious and theoretical knowledge; the desire to free theology from all association with, and dependence on, metaphysics; the insisting on the positive revelation in Christ as the one source of true religious knowledge; the central position they all assign to the doctrine of the kingdom of God, and their making of this conception determinative of every other notion in theology…; the rigorous exclusion from theology of everything which lies outside the earthly manifestation of Christ (e.g. pre-existence, eschatology); and finally, the distrust of, and antagonism to, everything of the nature of mysticism in religion.29

What was perhaps Ritschlianism’s paramount concern, namely, to let the

singularity of God’s revelation in the historical person of Jesus Christ sharply

limit both the manner in which the church receives revelation and its content,

was in fact the very same concern pulsing through Bruce’s mandate of

exegetical apologetics. It is thus necessary to glance at several of the tenets

identified by Orr as characteristically Ritschlian to perceive how they

sharpened historical focus on the Jesus behind the church’s doctrinal tradition.

The late nineteenth century’s sobered-up intellect and subdued spirit is

reflected in piercing clarity in Ritschlianism. The exalted ideal of mediation 28 Among the considerable literature on Ritschlianism I have found useful: Helmut Thielicke, “Albrecht Ritschl,” in Modern Faith and Thought, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 324-44; Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 2: 1-30; Eckhard Lessing, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen evangelischen Theologie von Albrecht Ritschl bis zu Gegenwart, Bd.1: 1870-1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 79-116, 181-86, 197-204, 218-29; E. P. Meijering, Theologische Urteile über die Dogmengeschichte. Ritschls Einfluss auf Harnack (Leiden; Brill, 1978). 29 Orr, Ritschlianism: Essays Critical and Expository (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), 55.

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(see 1.3.3) that had characterized mainstream German theology since

Schleiermacher, which ambitiously sought the reconciliation of traditional

Christian belief with modern thought, divine immanence with transcendence,

church with world, seemed exhausted. Mediating theologians had presumed

that historical criticism would not and could not contradict the church’s

Glaubenslehre. But as a student, Ritschl too had been deeply unsettled by

Strauss’ Leben Jesu, and the subsequent development of the discipline of

biblical criticism seemed to be confirming what Troeltsch and others would

later argue, namely, that the historical-critical method per se could only

undermine traditional doctrines and dogmatic belief.30 The best cultural ideals,

philosophical concepts, and scientific hypotheses had been enlisted with

utmost confidence to serve mediating theologies. But if the romantic

conception of humankind as an historical organism had earlier inspired the

poets and tempted the philosophers and theologians to exalt the corporate and

esteem the ancient, in the Wilhelminen era the integrity of the individual over

against das Ganze desperately needed to be safeguarded from the ravages of

industrial society and an aggressive naturalism.31 How could a philosophical-

aesthetic depiction of God as historically immanent in the world prevent

Providence from being muscled aside by the machines or the determinism of

Darwin?

Ritschl, whose own Göttingen University was a centre of German

empiricism, developed a theology for an age whose concern for the real, the

practical, and the scientific was presenting very new challenges to Christian

faith. The result was a fresh mediation of central Lutheran tenets with the so-

called positive-historical (as opposed to speculative) method then ascending in

German scholarship. Ritschlianism’s beating heart was Luther’s slogan of

solus Christus. Only from Jesus do we learn that God loves us as a father and

wills us to partake of his benevolent kingdom. Only in Jesus is human

personhood affirmed as believers share in his knowledge of being accepted

before God as a beloved son, as Ritschl reworked the Lutheran doctrine of

30 Ernst Troeltsch, “Historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie [1898],” in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913), 729-53. 31 Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870-1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996) illustrates the religious dilemmas created by Germany’s rapid industrialization.

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justification; reconciliation is the church living out Jesus’ victory over the

forces that oppress and dehumanize.32 Solus Christus, however, was not only

content but also epistemology. Ritschlianism raised loud protest against any

theology that soared beyond the revelation of God in the historical Jesus.

Natural theology was disqualified outright. So too were all theologies that

sought God in Blut und Volk or that swamped Jesus under a philosophical

system, as did Baur, Hegel, and many mediating theologians. Chastened too

are mystics and pietists who seek a Saviour in the heart rather than in history.

Schleiermacher, complained Ritschl, should have “taken his final bearings in

the realm of the history of religion,” namely the gospel histories, rather than

with Gefühl.33 Christian theology is grounded in the facts of history and

experience mediated through the historical Jesus. So when Adolph Harnack

(1851-1930) famously asked after the essence of Christianity, he insisted that

the answer could be made only in “an historical sense.”34

The disavowal of a speculative starting point for theological reflection

was boosted by a concurrent neo-Kantian revival in Germany. Ritschl began to

use the neo-Kantian argument against metaphysical speculation to justify the

delimitation of theology to the historical person of Christ and his eminently

practical message of the kingdom of God.35 The adage of Christus pro nobis

the Ritschlians adopted from older Lutheranism—a refusal (in principle) to

consider Christ from a speculative basis but only from his relationship to

believers—was philosophically tightened by the neo-Kantian notion of value

judgments, which posited that one can ascribe meaning to any fact, even the

gospel facts, only in its relation to or value for us. Hence Ritschl’s three-

volume magnum opus The Christian Doctrine of Justification and

Reconciliation put the work of Christ back on the agenda of German

Protestant theology. What Jesus did and taught was concretely historical and

personal; who Jesus was is speculative and abstract. Ritschl considered that in

some sense Jesus is the Christ because he alone offers the answer to the 32 See McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 381-92. 33 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, Vol. 3, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macauley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1909), 9. 34 Adolph Harnack, What is Christianity? trans. T. B. Saunders (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 6-7. 35 The Marburg theologian Wilhelm Herrmann (1846-1922), especially, encouraged his mentor to use Kant. See Christophe Chalamet, “Wilhelm Herrmann and the Birth of the Ritschlian School,” JHMTh 15 (2008): 263-89.

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question of human existence: how can humanity overcome the contradictions

of natural existence? In his own death and resurrection he refused to bow his

will before the world, thereby overcoming the domination of soul by the

‘powers’ and securing the transcendence of the ethical individual over the

natural order.36 Further, the Kantian current in Germany reinforced the

Ritschlian focus on Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God as the

manifestation of humanity’s reconciled state. Long subordinated in catholic

Christianity to dogma or blithely equated with the church, the concept of the

kingdom in Ritschl’s opinion had only lately received due attention in

Schleiermacher’s awakened sense of the teleological nature of Christianity,

but above all in Kant, who was among the first to recognize both the centrality

of the historical Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom and its ethical rather than

ecclesial shape.37

Under Luther’s venerable banner the Ritschlians raised anew the older

critics’ protest that dogma shackled the Christian conscience to churchly

authority. Justification by faith places the individual in direct relationship with

God through Christ, and the church wrongly infringes upon this intimacy

when it insists upon mediating faith through dogma, sacrament, or priest.38 Yet

this appeal to justification would seem to reflect less the old Lutherans’

concern with the righteousness of God (iustitia dei) than the neo-Kantians’

concern with human freedom: the Christian soul must be shielded against the

domineering entanglement of the natural world or ecclesiastical authority.

More substantially, its peculiar take on solus Christus depreciated the status of

doctrine in the church’s life and turned Jesus against church tradition. The

trajectory coursing out of Pietism and through the German Enlightenment that

sought to liberate the religion of Jesus from the dogma of the church (see

1.3.2) received at Ritschlian hands’ unprecedented epistemological refinement

and historical rigor. The insistence that faith has no business with anything

above or beyond God’s revelation in Jesus prejudiced the impressive

theological systems and profound dogmas of orthodoxy in favor of a simple,

eminently practical gospel rooted in primitive Christian beliefs about its Lord.

36 Ritschl, “Instruction in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays, trans. and ed. Philip Hefner (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 8, 23. 37 The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 3:11. 38 The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, 3:261-62.

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Christianity is not a set of doctrines to be believed, after all, but a life to be

lived in union, i.e., ethical imitation, with Jesus Christ.

This suspicion of each and every thought that strayed behind the

historical Jesus to ontology or soared beyond the ethical kingdom of God to

metaphysics underwrote the famous ‘Hellenization thesis’ of doctrinal origins,

which was evident already in Ritschl’s Baur-breaking Die Entstehung der

altkatholischen Kirche (2nd ed., 1857), and held by all Ritschlians to some

degree.39 As the post apostolic church extended beyond Judaism into the

Gentile world it struck a fateful compromise in order to make its message

intelligible. Hellenistic patterns of thought came to subsume the gospel. The

church’s mind became metaphysical rather than historical, the ethical potency

of the original message of Jesus was weakened or even obscured, and the New

Testament notion of faith as personal trust hardened into a concept of decreti

borrowed from the philosophical schools or Roman courts.40 Classical

Christian dogma is tainted by the sublation of the gospel by the speculative

thought of the Greeks. Like earlier proponents of a Hellenization thesis,

Ritschlianism depicted the rise of ecclesiastical doctrine as a regress from the

simple utterances of faith to intellectually complex dogmas; the history of

doctrine tells a sad story of an early error never repented of, a wrong step

never retraced. Luther was one of the few who caught a glimpse of the true

nature of faith, although even he (much less his followers) never quite freed

himself from the grip of the dogmatic mindset.

In this line of thought, then, Dogmengeschichte becomes indispensable

for the church, and it is little wonder that Ritschlians like Harnack, Karl Holl

(1866-1926), Ferdinand Kattenbusch (1851-1935), Friedrich Loofs (1858-

1928), and Gustav Krüger (1862-1940) excelled in this field. It shows, as the

latter argued, how “not to mix up the form with the thing [Sache], the dogma

with the gospel.”41 With tools of the trade honed sharp since the

Enlightenment, the historian of doctrine saves the contemporary church from

redundancy by making the life-saving incisions between the ancient and

39 James Orr, Ritschlianism and the Evangelical Faith (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1897), 191-92. 40 A concise statement can be found in Harnack, Outlines of the History of Dogma, 5. 41 Krüger, Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Dogmengeschichte?, 55-56.

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eternal gospel and its contextualization as dogma and institutional religion

during the birth of orthodoxy.

That die Sache was not necessarily the religious world of first-century

Judaism has been muddied by the fact that the Hellenization thesis inspired

many twentieth-century theologians to derive theological capital from a

purported antagonism between Hebrew and Greek thought. But Ritschlians

themselves aimed to distil the essence of Christianity from the “Jewishness” of

Jesus.42 The historical study of the origins and development of doctrine rightly

divides content from context, eternal truth from historical trapping, back to

Jesus himself. For all the diversity within the Ritschlian school—and it came

to quarrel fiercely over how deeply Hellenistic ideas penetrated the New

Testament, and whether it was even possible to untangle Jesus’ key religious

ideas from his Jewish worldview without (as the religionsgeschichte Schule

argued) contravening impartial historical inquiry43—the Hellenization thesis

remained largely intact. If ostensibly a purely historical description of the

formation of Christian doctrine, it was loaded with ecclesial and theological

repercussions, and would long outlive the demise of the Ritschlian school

proper.

[4.3.2] In the late 1880s Ritschlianism began gathering real momentum

in Britain, although really only among English Nonconformists and Scots. It

accelerated over the next decades, attracting both acclaim and argument.44

What drew evangelicals to it? True, that it could appear obsequious to the

Protestant pillars of Bible and Reformation gave it a “ring of orthodoxy” that

rankled conservative critics as a theological Trojan horse.45 Yet real

Anknüpfungspunkte were found between the Ritschlian resort to the biblical

Jesus behind church tradition and an evangelical Biblicism that had often

abetted a callous handling of church tradition and a careless disregard for the

historical gestation of doctrine, as well as Ritschlianism’s sharp focus on the

42 Harnack claimed that Jesus’ greatness consists precisely in the fact “that he did not become entangled in his times” (Outlines of the History of Dogma, 4). 43 Rupp, Cultural Protestantism: German Liberal Theology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Missoula, Montana: Scholars P, 1977), 23. 44 For Ritschl’s British reception see Alan Sell, “Ritschl Appraised: Then and Now,” RTR 38 (1979): 33-41. 45 Harris, Albrecht Ritschl’s Theology, 322.

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concreteness of Jesus’ work and proclamation of the rule of God (rather than

the speculative dogma of the person of Christ) with traditional evangelical

crucicentrism and moral activism. Victorian evangelicalism was also a species

of cultural Protestantism, even if its grip on society was loosening at century’s

end.46 The Ritschlian watchword of ‘back to Christ’ promised a certain gospel

to an often anxious generation, and was thus deeply attractive to evangelicals

desirous to reach their age with the gospel, or, alternately, made insecure by

their age’s objections to traditional Christianity.

Consider the Aberdeen theologian David S. Cairns (1862–1946).47 He

remembered an addled student body at the UP Divinity Hall during his studies

in the late 1880s: doubts about the reliability of the gospels and the reality of

God; atheistic philosophies and empirical science threatening old dogmas and

the traditional worldview; isolation from their professors whose beliefs

seemed to belong to a more tranquil age of faith. Students returning from

semesters in Germany told of a prophet in Marburg; piqued, Cairns went

himself in hopes of salvaging his evangelical beliefs. While the theology

faculty at Berlin, which boasted Ritschlians like Julius Kaftan (1848-1926)

and Harnack, was a destination for ambitious FC and UP (and, post 1900,

UFC) students, Herrmann was a phenomenon. Cairns recalled a lecture-room

atmosphere like a prayer meeting—tears streamed down Herrmann’s face as

he warned his students of the dangers of materialistic science and pointed

them to the saviour Jesus Christ. The idealist theologians spoke of God, Cairns

recalled thinking, but only Ritschlians knew den lebendigen Gott revealed in

Jesus. Herrmann offered battered evangelicals like Cairns a Ritschlian solace:

Jesus’ inspiring teaching instead of the old dogmas then under fire as morally

repugnant or metaphysically abstract, and a faith kept safe from critics’

scalpel-work on the Bible because Christ made himself present to souls

through the experience of faith.

Unlike in America, where Ritschlianism bore great fruit as the ‘social

gospel’, in Britain few Scots were fully persuaded. Ritschlian notes would

46 See David W. Smith, Transforming the World? The Social Impact of British Evangelicalism (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), especially 42-74. 47 For what follows see David S. Cairns, An Autobiography (London: SCM, 1950), 123-37.

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resound for a long time from Caledonian pulpits and lecture rooms, however.48

H.R. Mackintosh’s shrewd observation made in 1923 was as true before the

mighty influx of Barth’s theology in Scotland as it was after: “the careful

observer of theology will perceive that Ritschlian ideas are now in circulation

more widely than is readily owned.”49 Simply put, Ritschl spoke the timely

word to his generation. John Dickie recalled the turn of the twentieth century

as a time when many Presbyterians came to believe that “the ultimate

problems of theology and Bible [were being] tackled with great courage, and

even something like finality […] in Berlin, Göttingen, and Marburg.”50 The

great theologians who came of age in the UFC, like Cairns, Mackintosh, John

Oman, and John and Donald Baillie sat at the feet of Ritschlians. The so-called

liberal evangelicalism they propounded was prepared by an earlier generation

of Scottish evangelicals, Congregationalists like Robert Mackintosh and P. T.

Forsyth, and Presbyterians like Denney and Bruce, who selectively used

Ritschlianism blocks to shore up the house of evangelical theology against the

storms of the age.

4.4. Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of Chalcedon

[4.4.1] The best point of entry to Bruce’s mind on doctrine, history,

and church over thirty years of scholarship is his second and most overtly

dogmatic work, The Humiliation of the Christ (1875). This is a finely tuned

overview of the doctrine of the earthly existence of Christ [de statu Christi]

from the church fathers through the Reformation to recent “humanistic” and

(for the first time in English) kenotic theories, evaluated in light of the

Christological axioms of the New Testament.51 It commands attention here

less for its many illuminating analyses than for how it discloses how Bruce

viewed his very nineteenth-century project of exegetical apologetics as

springing from the soil of his own evangelical Reformed tradition, even whilst

48 For the social element see Donald J. Witherington, “The Churches in Scotland, c. 1870- c. 1900: Towards a New Social Conscience?” RSCHS 19 (1977): 155-68. 49 H. R. Mackintosh, Some Aspects of Christian Belief (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), 166. 50 Dickie, Fifty Years of British Theology, 5. 51 Bruce, The Humiliation of the Christ in its Physical, Ethical and Official Aspects, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1895). References to this work will be made within the text.

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extending the reformation of church and doctrine left unfinished in the

sixteenth century.

The Humiliation followed DDCD as Cunningham Lectures, and Bruce

appeared to commence his investigation with a nod to his immediate

predecessor: reverence and audacity are equally required to rise to the great

truths of Scripture. A bracing dose of the latter let Bruce register his dissent

from the entire catholic tradition for its oversight of what should be the main

business of Christology, namely, the historical life of Jesus (8). The ancient

creeds made scant reference to Jesus’ earthly life, and the topic was merely an

appendix to Reformed treatments of Christology and Soteriology or a prop for

the Lutheran position on the communicatio idiomatum. But if “the exclusive

study of the older dogmatists would tend to discourage the idea of

commencing a discussion on Christology with the doctrine of the Exinanition

as a mere conceit; or, to speak more correctly, it would probably prevent such

a thought from ever arising in the mind,” Scripture itself is not so shy in its

attention to Christ’s life and message. But this recognition has only lately

dawned as critical biblical scholarship has developed, and as a salutary by-

product of Christological debates within the new Prussian Union church (2-3,

44-46, 65-66).

This newfound insight was of the utmost importance for the

contemporary church’s predicament, for the life of Jesus is what most

resonates with a wholesome evangelical piety that could nourish the church

and commend its witness. As Bruce read recent church history, orthodoxy

began to wither in the previous century as dogmas came to be perceived by

many as having only scarce connection to what is “dear to the Christian heart.”

He wanted to brake this slide but not à la the old apologists for traditional

belief. Their trenchant opposition to a rationalism that emptied Christ of his

saving power was compromised by their commitment to a theological

“scholasticism” that so elevated Jesus above the inspiring facts of history as to

leave him bloodless. A Christian apologia for the nineteenth century needed to

revivify doctrines precisely through focus on their historically mediated moral

value (7-8). Hence, the recovery de statu Christi from orthodoxy’s bottom

shelf promised nothing less than the revitalization of both the doctrine of

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Christ and doctrine of God proper by investing both with a winsome ethical

interest (6).

Even as evangelical keynotes of Bible and piety permitted his protest

against orthodoxy’s neglect of the historical Jesus, so too was the Calvinist

mind enlisted. The reconstitution of theology around the sublime history of the

Son of God’s humiliation was a logical outcome of the classic Reformed

Christology. Delving deep into the fierce Protestant controversial literature

over the person of Christ, Bruce castigated the Lutherans for letting the

sacramental desideratum of corporeal ubiquity eradicate Christ’s genuine

humanity (83-84, 106-9). Whether in its extreme form, where the status

exinanitionis consists in Jesus’ possession of and frequent, furtive use of the

divine majesty, or in the milder form associated with the great Martin

Chemnitz (1522-86), where the Son of God only occasionally used his divine

powers, Lutheran Christology effectively routes the communication of idioms

solely from the divine to the human. As such, the gospels’ testimony to a

divine life under the ordinary conditions of human existence is recognized in

Lutheran Christology but not really accounted for: “incarnation in the

Lutheran Christology signifies simply the union of the Logos to a humanity

endowed with divine attributes... Incarnation and exinanition are entirely

distinct; the former in idea precedes the latter, and it does not necessarily

involve the latter” (112-13). Little wonder, surmised Bruce that Luther’s

nineteenth-century children teach the incarnation as the eternal identity of the

divine and the human realised in humanity at large (113-14). The theological

idea of incarnation has finally shed the historical humiliation of God’s Son.

But if the old Lutheran doctors were speculative in method and

theological in character, the Reformed were historical and anthropological.

Those old Calvinists wrote treatises on de veritate humanae naturae Christi,

not, as the Lutherans did, on de divina majestate Christi, because they

“adhered rigidly to the facts of the gospel history, and refused to draw any

speculative inferences from the doctrine of the Incarnation.” A consequence of

this intent to theologize from the historically tangible was an understanding of

incarnation as practically synonymous with exinatition (114-16), which

endows Reformed Christology with an ethical vigour that speaks directly to

modern times.

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Bruce appealed to Reformed orthodoxy as Ritschlians appealed to

Luther, namely, as a vintage theology promising the rejuvenation of

Christianity against modern detractors and popular apathy. But neither appeal

should be understood as intending slavish adherence to the past. For his part,

Bruce deemed the ancient dogma of Christ taken over by the Reformed

immeasurably superior to modern humanistic accounts but far from perfect

(192-94); he indicated at several points that Reformed Christology could be

improved simply by focusing on the moral rather than metaphysical union of

God and humankind in Jesus (what was, of course, the burden of Ritschlian

Christology).52 Indeed, in light of his lifelong labour to rid Christian doctrine

of its “scholastic” dress, The Humiliation’s deliberate recourse to the

Christology of the Reformed schoolmen appears bizarre. Yet note Hofmann’s

frequent appearances in The Humiliation.53 As Scottish evangelicals knew

well, the Erlangen theologian’s attempt to rethink Christianity as a history of

salvation rather than a system of doctrines gave him grave misgivings about

the appropriateness of the scholastic method employed by second-generation

Lutherans to collate Protestant belief.54 Strongly rebuked by more

conservative neo-Lutherans, he invoked both history against dogma and

Luther against the Lutherans—in other words, the spirit of the Reformation

against the scholastic mind. This controversy jogged Ritschl and his devotees

to the historical investigation of precisely those discrepancies between the

Reformers and their children.55 The Humiliation was Bruce’s singular visit to

the formative period of Protestantism. But rippling the pages of his subsequent

publications was the very same antagonism between history and classical

doctrine that nineteenth-century theological mavericks like Hofmann and

52 Lessing, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen evangelischen Theologie, 1:107-8. 53 John Dickie, “Modern Positive Theology,” ET 19 (1908): 508-9, noted the significance of Hofmann for Bruce, as does Pfleiderer, The Development of Protestant Theology, 469. 54 Hofmann’s historical approach minimized the law-gospel dialectic and “corrected” the confessional Lutheran position on biblical inspiration and atonement. The FC-connected British and Foreign Evangelical Review avidly followed the controversies among neo-Lutherans: e.g., James S. Candlish, “Hofmann and his Opponents,” BFER 14 (1865): 294-318; [?] Schneider, “The Lutheran Doctrine of Christ’s Vicarious Death,” BFER 10 (1861): 123-171; Dieckhoff, “System and Scripture: Dr. v. Hofmann,” 553-75. 55 See Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1: 225. Neo-orthodox theologians would harden this gap into the axioms of ‘Calvin against the Calvinists’ and ‘Luther against the Lutherans’.

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Ritschl struck to vilify the rise of Protestant scholasticism for retarding the

Reformation.

In this sense then, what is significant in Bruce’s appeal to classical

Reformed Christology was its highly idealized description. It suggested rather

than actually provided the contours of a relevant commendation of the faith

rooted in status Christi, in which the church’s thinking about God begins with

the concreteness of the human rather than conjecture about the divine, and

where the metaphysical has been eschewed for the moral as “the highest, if not

the distinctive, in the Divine Being” (14). If the Scot has started out in the

evangelical Reformed ethos typical of the mid-century FC, the ellipse between

historical fact and ethical significance that he has seized upon by 1874 shows

him on the road to Ritschl.

[4.4.2] As the groundwork of Bruce’s thought, the ellipse between

history and ethics articulated already in The Humiliation would effect his

tearing down of the forms of traditional doctrine and confession to erect upon

the cornerstone of the historical Christ a faith for his age—what his critics

charged as built according to German specifications.56 This ellipse needs to be

laid bare: as with Cunningham and Rainy, the conception of revelation dictates

to a large extent the nature and form of doctrine. When excavated, the

religious motivations and contextual pressures behind Bruce’s methodological

‘turn to history’ are rendered visible, and in such a way, moreover, that the

lure of Ritschlianism for Victorian Protestants gains a more sympathetic

hearing than it might otherwise receive.

Bruce’s invitation to the church to quench its spiritual thirst at “the

pure fountain as it leaps sparkling into light in the evangelic memoirs” rather

than “the polluted waters of the River of Life far down the stream”57 was

provoked by what he perceived as the collapse of theological options—

evangelical, catholic, mediating—in a Zeitgeist that had soured on orthodoxy.

Pantheism and speculative theism were leeching Christian theology from

inside the church as, from the outside, an aggressive atheistic materialism

56 E.g., Peter Richardson, Dr. Bruce on “The Kingdom of God,” A Review (Glasgow: David Bryce & Son, 1890). 57 Bruce, “Theological Thought. The Historical Christ and Modern Christianity,” The Thinker 3 (1893): 28.

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promoted by prophets like Huxley and Strauss as the faith for a new age of

fact pushed, “like the Russian host at Inkerman, to drive us into the sea.”58 As

every Victorian reader knew, on the heights of Inkerman—a key battle in the

Crimean War—victory was achieved through close cooperation between

British and French field armies. But Bruce surveyed a church weakened by

division wrought by undue attachment to peripheral matters of doctrine and

practice. With enemies massing, none of the orthodox options at hand in the

late Victorian milieu could attain a unifying and compelling witness to the

heart of the Christian faith (the second pole of the ellipse) because all hesitated

at the steep indemnity it would demand: the forsaking of their beloved

theological systems and religious traditions for the Jesus of history (the first

pole of the ellipse). So they fell back on antiquated battle cries that neither

rallied the troops nor routed the enemy.

True, almost all contemporary theologies, liberal and orthodox, were

urging the church to re-centre on Christ. But to which Christ should the church

return? In those voices raised from across the theological spectrum advocating

the present Christ because they coveted the unshakeable certainty that history

purportedly cannot deliver, Bruce heard only self-serving expediency. First,

speculative theology treats the history of Jesus as scaffolding for timeless

ideas of incarnation, reconciliation, or moral self-sacrifice, which ultimately

stand independent of the gospel histories. But “disembodied ideas, however

angelic the ghosts may be, yield a religion deficient in ethical inspiration.”59

Second, the Tractarians present Christ through sacramental

machinations and the timeless dogmas of the early church. But the only

saviour they can bring near is the “conventional Christ” of ecclesiastical

tradition whose dogma befuddles the head as much as the sheen of his divinity

blinds the heart. The protective arms of Mother Church shelter this Christ

from Jesus’ thunder against religious tradition. Even the recent Lux Mundi

programme, which Bruce granted was concertedly trying to connect Anglo-

58 Bruce, “The Apologetic Function of the Church in the Present Time,” BFER 25 (1876): 643. Logan, “Alexander Balmain Bruce,” 269-75, summarizes Bruce’s apologetic. 59 “Theological Thought,” 28-29, 34.

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Catholicism with Jesus, remained too obsequious to the traditional dogma of

incarnation to see his visage.60

Third, the evangelical cherishes Christ in his or her heart as the risen

saviour; there, in the unassailable reality of religious experience, he is kept

safe from the wolves of criticism. Bruce relents most to this option:

evangelical keynotes of personal conversion and discipleship find significant

rapport in the Bible, as does its assumption that theology is rooted in

experience. But without greater attention to the objective witness of the

historical Jesus, evangelicals court Feuerbach’s charge of religious

anthropocentricism.61 Experience must be yoked to the fact of the history of

Jesus. Significantly, Bruce commends to them Herrmann’s The Communion of

the Christian with God—one of the spiritual classics of its era—as a profound

treatment of the intersection of religious experience, the historical Jesus, and

the (ethical) revitalization of Protestant doctrine.62 Later editions of the book,

sharpened in debate with Troeltsch, would disown any historically determined

foundation for faith as an apologetic prop incompatible with the epistemology

of justification by faith, but in the early 1890s Herrmann was still close to

Ritschl in insisting that faith must be rooted in personal encounter with the

historical fact of Jesus.63 Bruce found this salutary, although he was perturbed

by Herrmann’s equivocation about how much of the life of Jesus was

recoverable for the purposes of faith, or even needed to be.64 In any case,

Bruce honoured the Ritschlian school for pointing Protestant theology back to

the gospel histories, where Jesus’ open face can be seen stripped of the moss

of ages. “Some go to Oxford, some to Rome, and some to Keswick; let us not

forget to visit Nazareth.”65

60 Ibid., 31, 35-36. 61 Ibid., 37-38. 62 Bruce, Apologetics; or, Christianity Defensively Stated, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1895), 354, 404-5; also “Theological Thought,” 38-39. 63 Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville: WJK, 2000), 14-27, summarizes Herrmann’s changing mind. 64 Bruce insisted more vigorously than did Herrmann that the “value of Jesus” depends on its objective historicity and not just its resonance with the moral conscience. Still deeply supernatural presuppositions gave him full confidence that criticism would establish rather than erode a fulsome life of the Christ, e.g., “To One who finds Scientific Bible Study Hostile to Devotion,” BW (1899): 409-12. 65 “Theological Thought,” 38.

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Clearly, the concept of revelation was the lynchpin of his critical

evaluation of the church’s predicament. Eager to return to Christ as the centre,

the various theological options of the day were stumbling over the fact of

historical revelation. Not even the Baconian method beloved by evangelicals

could attain the historical Jesus and his priorities, argued Bruce, disowning the

textbook definition of theological method he learned at New College from

Cunningham and Bannerman and propagated by his learned predecessor in the

chair of New Testament at Glasgow FC College, Patrick Fairbairn (1805-74)

(see 1.4.4).66 “What we find in theological systems based on Scripture texts is

a Hortus Siccus, or collection of dried plants, arranged according to their

specific resemblances for the purposes of science, but with the life pressed out

of them.”67 Despite its inductive approach, this method faltered at the source.

“Put the book foremost in your idea of revelation, and you almost invariably

think of revelation as consisting in words, doctrines.”68 It was Baur above all,

opined Bruce, whose rigorous historical examination of Christian origins

broke beyond repair the dogmatic reading of the Bible as containing a flat

credenda of doctrines. Even if the Tübingen school’s idealist presuppositions

left their own reconstructions of Christian history only “dead idea schemes, ”

they forced the church to reckon with the messy historicity of revelation.69

Evangelicals need to forsake their penchant for deriving from Scripture an

encyclopaedia of doctrines as incompatible with historical revelation as well

as injurious to the prospect of Christian unity. When every biblical teaching is

valued equally because each is equally “God-breathed” the church remains

66 Dods, Recent Progress in Theology. Inaugural Lecture, New College, Edinburgh, November 6th, 1889 (Edinburgh: Macnivan and Wallace, 1889), especially 9, 19, 29, 31, granted (rightly in my opinion) more affinity between the old evangelical method and historical critical approach than Bruce allowed. 67 Bruce, The Chief End of Revelation (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1881), 13. 68 The Chief End of Revelation, 56. 69 Bruce, Ferdinand Christian Baur and His Theory of the Origins of Christianity and of the New Testament Writings (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1886), 33-34. He unpacked the manifoldness of historical revelation in a four-part series: “The Teaching of Christ in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke,” BW 6 (1895): 455-66; “Four Types of Christian Thought. II. The Pauline Epistles,” BW 7 (1896): 6-19; “Four Types of Christian Thought. III. The Epistle to the Hebrews,” BW 7 (1896): 94-104; “Four Types of Christian Thought. IV. The Fourth Gospel,” BW 7 (1896): 168-79.

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incapable of staggering doctrine as fundamental or peripheral according to its

proximity to the perfect revelation of God in Christ.70

Similar in respects to Rainy’s endorsement of revelation as history,

Bruce was in fact striding boldly past the plodding FC leader. Progressive FC

thinkers like Dods, Bruce, and Robertson Smith wore openly their debt to

Richard Rothe (1799-1867) of Heidelberg, a mediating theologian renowned

at one and the same time for his deep piety and daring mind.71 Rothe’s Zur

Dogmatik (2nd ed. 1869) first struck the now common distinction between

revelation and Bible. Like Hofmann, he submerged divine revelation into the

flow of history; unlike Hofmann, with whom he crossed swords, Rothe

considered the Bible itself as a purely historical source for knowledge of

revelation that required uninhibited historical criticism and the best

speculative knowledge of the day to be rightly understood.72 Bruce’s

programmatic The Chief End of Revelation (1881) echoed Rothe’s high

estimation for the Bible as the unique and authoritative source for revelation

but likewise refused to shortcut the historical investigation of Scripture with

an appeal to a doctrine of plenary inspiration—a daring move for a FC

theologian of that day. The sundry historical strands within the complex fabric

of revelation are “all…profitable for doctrine, but none are dogmatic; all are

excellent for religious edification, but disappointing from the point of view of

scholastic theology.”73

Evangelical theology may have remained keen on Rothe and other

mediators as part and parcel of the late nineteenth-century fascination in

Britain with philosophical idealism, but Bruce, like the avant-garde

Ritschlians, was bidding a curt adieu to the mediating project even by the

1880s. Rothe rightly saw the historical nature of the revelation and the need to

interpret it with free and open mind but, finally, remained blind to its full

ramifications. In Bruce’s own parlance, mediators had not shaken themselves

free of “scholasticism”. They were rightly insisting against liberal theology on

the historical factuality of the saving acts of God but not with the historical 70 The Chief End of Revelation, 14; also Bruce, “Progress in Theology,” Catholic Presbyterian 4 (1883): 370. 71 See Ronald R. Nelson, “The Theological Development of the Young Robertson Smith,” EQ 45 (1973): 81-99; Maier, William Robertson Smith, 89-92, 104, 121-22. 72 Lauster, Prinzip und Methode, 175-84, covers the Hofmann-Rothe debate. 73 The Chief End of Revelation, 284.

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single-mindedness that was appropriate to the nature of revelation, brashly

speculating beyond the historical facts of revelation in order to achieve a

system of doctrines. This was as wrongheaded as the evangelicals’ clumsy

horticulture of Scripture. “Scholasticism” functioned for Bruce as

“Hellenization” did for the Ritschlians, namely, to encapsulate the church’s

wrong way of thinking about revelation as much as the wrong thoughts that

accrued from this error.74

To make his point he rather cruelly adduced an anecdote related to him

by friends returning from semesters in Heidelberg. Rothe, afflicted by an optic

ailment that left one eye sagging downwards, exemplifies the intrinsic

problem of mediating theology: a person with one eye cast down at history

and one eye raised to the heights of pure thought will never see straight.75

Christ cannot be found via history and philosophy but either through historical

or speculative method.76 If Bruce could not quite bring himself to commit in

theory to the view of some Ritschlians that Christ was the singular revelation

of God—if Jesus is right about his loving Father, should not the world show

some trace of him he asked in response to Herrmann’s Christomonism?77—he

functionally followed it. The historical Christ was the “perfect exegete” of the

doctrines of God, humanity, church, and redemption.78 The wedge Rothe and

others drove between Bible and revelation had prepared the distinction

between Bible and Christ that Ritschlians and theologians within their orbit

like Bruce sharpened with a jealous historical epistemology in order to evoke

the rejuvenation of Christian belief.

Hence, Bruce’s twist on the traditional Protestant appeal to Scripture

against tradition. Of course, Protestants were right to make the Bible stand

over a church whose own history shows how little it had learned from its

Lord.79 But sola Scriptura falls short of the mark. Evangelical theology must

74 Meijering, Theologische Urteile über die Dogmengeschichte, 51-59, helpfully explicates the Ritschlian understanding of Hellenization as encompassing both flawed thinking and flawed thoughts. 75 “The Apologetic Function of the Church in the Present Time,” 654. 76 Ibid., 653. 77 Bruce, “Theological Agnosticism,” AJT 1 (1897): 10-11. This position was consistent with right-wing Ritschlians like Kaftan who refused to jettison the first article of Luther’s Catechism (Lessing, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen evangelischen Theologie, 1: 84). 78 Apologetics, 501-2; also “Progress in Theology,” 373; Bruce, “The Future of Christianity,” BW 6 (1895): 255. 79 Apologetics, 514, 351-52; also “Theological Thought,” 35-36.

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return to the evangel, which is the historical Jesus. Theology always

recognized in principle Jesus and his teaching as the perfect revelation of God

but never gave it full due. Christ was always subordinated to either church or

Bible.80 Missing Jesus for the Bible has left orthodox doctrine neither inspired

or imprinted by God’s perfect revelation in Christ.81 In missing Jesus for the

Bible, Protestant theology lost its unifying centre amidst competing systems of

doctrine.82 Yet the moral connection between Christ and humankind that

sustains living faith is precisely in those gritty, humble details of his

humiliation which scholastics ancient and modern treat either as a mere

springboard to higher truths or brush past in pursuit of a rationally satisfying

account of faith. The indenture of Protestant theology—evangelical or

mediating—to scholasticism has left it impotent to effect either the

Christianizing of doctrine or the all-important distinction between first and

secondary doctrines. Only a re-centring of faith on the historical Jesus can

accomplish that, and Bruce yearned for the day when the church’s creed

would heed Jesus’ revelation of the Father.

The emphatic assertion of the great truth that God is an Ethical Being, morally simple, comprehensible in His moral nature by man made in His image, will signify the inbringing of a new spirit into theology and religion which will change the structure of creeds, brighten Christian life, and bring about the breaking down of many partition walls by which God’s people are kept apart from each other, and the fellowship of saints is rendered to a large extent a nullity.83

The time was at hand. Bruce believed that modern historical scholarship was

accomplishing nothing less than the “rediscovery of Christ,” obscured for

centuries behind the rules of legalistic piety or the speculations of scholastic

dogmas.84

A final aspect of the ellipse provides the bridge between Bruce’s

recovery of what Jesus did and said and what, as a consequence, Jesus could

now do in and say to the church, in other words, the spanning of ancient text

and contemporary doctrine. His exhortation to the church to come “to Christ’s

80 Ibid., 512, summarizing the argument of the Jena Ritschlian H. H. Wendt. 81 “Progress in Theology,” 371; The Chief End of Revelation, 289-90; Bruce, The Christian Church: its Function and the Conditions of its Future Power (Manchester: Alexander Thomson, 1883), 14-18. 82 The Chief End of Revelation, 289-90; “Progress in Theology,” 372. 83 “Progress in Theology,” 372. 84 “The Future of Christianity,” 255.

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school” and “learn of Him how to think of God, man, and their relations”85

presumed something like the Ritschlian notion of value judgement, although

he left it largely implicit. The concept of value was a heuristic device that

enabled the Ritschlian scholar to thresh historical husk from spiritual kernel.

The historical method established the objective facts of Jesus’ life and

teaching of the kingdom of God, which then received due attention in church

proclamation according to their perceived spiritual value. This is important to

make clear, for ‘back to Christ’ proponents like Bruce and Ritschl often draw

the charge of skewing the symmetry between history and ethics, reading into

the historical record Jesus’ ethical-theological proclamation of the fatherhood

of God and inestimable value of the individual human soul, all the while

touting their impartial exegesis. Even within the Ritschlian movement, the

historical study of religions school came to insist that the attempt to balance

the facts of history with the needs of the church inevitably forced present

theological interests onto what should be a purely historical account of

Christianity.

Such criticism is not quite on target. Bruce and the Ritschlians were

not historical positivists. Re-centring contemporary Christianity on the

historical Jesus and his proclamation of the kingdom was never just a matter

of following the rules of exegesis. It was always imperative to discern between

“husk” and “kernel” for historical events are not of equal value and indeed

much of the historical fact can obscure or detract from the spiritual meaning.

Harnack’s What is Christianity? should be read as an extended attempt to

smelt the gospel from the ore of first century Judaism. Similarly, Bruce

grumbled that New College’s Old Testament professor A. B. Davidson

interpreted the New Testament as “…Judaism + an infinitesimal increment”

because he lost the spirit of Christ’s intent amidst the historical details of his

Jewishness.86 In reference to Paul and with an appreciative nod to Herrmann,

Bruce argued that legitimate theology is based on the Christian experience of

the facts of history.87 The pressing need for the modern church to determine

those fundamentals upon which it can stand in catholic unity “must be settled

85 Bruce, With Open Face (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896), 155. 86 Bruce, “The Rev. A. B. Davidson, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Hebrew in the New College, Edinburgh,” BW 8 (1896): 261. 87 “Theological Agnosticism,” 7.

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by the Christian consciousness, which, if not the test of the truth of doctrines,

is at least the test of their relative value…”88 Just as a given scriptural truth

does not entail its equal importance with other scriptural truths—the mistake

of the flat Baconian method loved of evangelicals—so too is the centre of

faith, the history of Jesus, “valued” according to its resonance with Christian

experience.89 Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere. This

clarification is crucial, of course, to prevent the position of Bruce and the

Ritschlians from being caricatured, but especially because it committed him to

a concept of doctrine not as the blasé mimicry of biblical expressions nor even

a confession of faith as pristine as the Lord’s Prayer (what Ritschl proposed as

a sufficient confession of faith90) but rather the careful determination of the

church of what aspects of Jesus’ witness most need to be said to its age.

[4.4.3] It is understandable, given Bruce’s professional obligations,

although nonetheless frustrating, that the progression within his thought from

establishing “the simple Christianity of Christ” via the historical critical

method to “the working out of His great thoughts”91 in the church’s doctrinal

reflection finds no crisp, comprehensive account. Moreover, despite his

protestation that “it does not suit my temper to speak oracularly,”92 the

Glasgow apologist’s “swashbuckling style” (Alan Sell) often gave his

piecemeal comments on the nature, origin, and development of church

doctrine more flash than substance. The church’s grand system of doctrines

and vast body of rituals were perjured as “Rabbinism”, “dogmatism”,

“conservatism”, and above all “scholasticism” to emphasis its vast distance

from the simple doctrines of Christ and the evangelic spirit of the New

Testament church. Indeed, so bilious was his rhetoric at times against

orthodoxy that the fundamental orthodoxy of this self-professed conservative

must be reaffirmed.93

88 “Progress in Theology,” 375. 89 The Chief End of Revelation, 289-90. 90 Ritschl, “Instruction in Religion,” 80. 91 Bruce, The Moral Order of the Universe (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1899), 399. 92 Bruce, The Providential Order of the World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1897), 309. 93 See The Chief End of Revelation, 304-5; The Kingdom of God, 357; The Christian Church, 24.

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It also needs to be kept in mind that while his agitation for the

replacement of his denomination’s doctrinal standards did not endear him to

the Confession’s praetorians in the FC, his passion for better doctrine and an

improved confession proves that he was no friend of a broad church

ecclesiology where unity is achieved by ignoring articles of belief. Not a

creedless faith but a better creed was what the church desperately needed; it

needed to seize upon those few “theological postulates…essential to the

Christian faith, and while treating other positions as matters of comparative

indifference,” defend them “against all comers.”94 All this having been said,

once the soapbox style of his writing is stripped away and the gaps in his

thinking filled in, Bruce’s interpretation of doctrine is clear enough, if

incomplete. This section, while abstaining from any critical conclusions for

now, pieces together his views on a sequence of vexing issues: (1) the biblical

origins of doctrine; (2) the rise of church orthodoxy; (3) the problem of

development; (4) the nature of church confession.

Jesus of Nazareth revealed many things about God, humanity, and

world. Christian belief takes its cue from these facts. As such, doctrine should

be explicitly and deliberately Christocentric. The Old Testament is the

religious and historical prerequisite of Jesus, of course, but is of limited value

for the church’s doctrinal task—Jesus’ ethnic context must not obscure the

theological rupture he evoked with Judaism.95 Alternately, the New Testament

writings themselves are the diverse “fruitage of seeds dropped by the Master,”

real developments of the fact of Jesus witnessed to in the gospels that,

however profound, still stand under those facts.96 The contemporary church

forms doctrine analogous to the early church at the council of Jerusalem (Acts

15): it deliberates upon and applies the teachings and actions of Jesus to the

problems peculiar to its context.97

Bruce’s basic position on the origin of doctrine is further illuminated in

reference to its contrapuntal alternatives. There is no question of Christianity 94 “The Apologetic Function of the Church in the Present Time,” 653, in reference to the C of S’s John Tulloch. See also “The Future of Christianity,” 259; The Chief End of Revelation, 306; “Progress in Theology,” 375. 95 E.g., The Kingdom of God, 43-45; The Providential Order of the World, 147-242. 96 “Four Types of Christian Thought. IV. The Fourth Gospel,” 169. 97 Ferdinand Christian Baur, 48-51.

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without doctrine as touted by theological liberals. The prominence of

didaskalia in its founder’s ministry makes that clear, even if Jesus’ teaching

may not be always be didactic and propositional but rather parabolic and

evocative.98 There is also no question of maintaining the “doctrinaire

conception of revelation” that hallowed conservatives’ cumbersome systems

of doctrines. During a roundtable discussion on “progress in theology” in the

pages of The Catholic Presbyterian, Bruce jousted with A. A. Hodge, who a

few years before had succeeded his father in the chair of didactic theology at

Princeton.99 Hodge argued that the “mysteries of faith” (Eph. 3) were the sum

of knowledge necessary for salvation held in perpetuity by the church catholic;

they had been explicated systematically long ago as orthodoxy, and were

capable of deeper but not intrinsically different insight. This was scholasticism

pure and simple, fumed Bruce. It blatantly ignored the century’s scholarly

industry that has illumined the kaleidoscope witness of the apostles to Christ

and traced its development into the later documents of the New Testament. As

early as The Humiliation, Bruce was arguing that even the synoptic gospels

show the apostles progressing from a Socinian notion of the atonement to a

catholic approximation.100 Further, by flattening the New Testament as a sum

of doctrines, Hodge has lost the Christological centre and, therefore, cannot

keep doctrine either in living connection to Jesus of history or disciplined by

his priorities. The fact of development within the New Testament demands a

value judgment: is it a good development? Neither Paul nor John, for example,

rose to the heights of Jesus’ revelation of the Father’s universal love: the

former was limited by his strong notion of adoption into sonship, the latter by

his dualistic worldview.101

Privileging the synoptic gospels fuelled Bruce’s dissent from the

church’s habit of over-investing John with doctrinal weight. The fourth apostle

(Bruce defended Johannine authorship) makes lucid what is dim in the first

three gospels, yes, but his manner of looking at Jesus sub specie aeternitatis—

98 Bruce, “Jesus,” in Encyclopaedia Biblica, Vol. 2, ed. T. K. Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 2440; also, Apologetics, 31. 99 “Progress in Theology,” 365-69. On Hodge see P. J. Wallace, “Hodge, Archibald Alexander,” BDE, 302-303. 100 Humiliation, 352; also “The Teaching of Christ in the Gospels…,” 460, 465-66. 101 “Four Types of Christian Thought. II. The Pauline Epistles,” 13; “Four Types of Christian Thought. IV. The Fourth Gospel,” 178-79.

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what could be considered the fountainhead of scholasticism—throws up such a

celestial glare that the earthy details of the Christ that sustain piety and prompt

faithful action cannot be seen.102 Similarly dangerous is the longstanding

Protestant infatuation with Paul, which Bruce frequently attacked in the

extreme form given it in the neo-Baurian Otto Pfleiderer’s widely

disseminated argument that Paul was the founder of Christianity.103 However

true it is that the church needs to develop doctrine beyond the mere fact of

Jesus’ words and deeds, it is equally true that it can never outgrow constant

recourse to those “simple, naïve questions” of its founder that disconcert its

traditions and chasten its systems of doctrines.104

Nineteenth-century theories of the development of church institution

and dogma have followed the Tübingen school in pitching battle on the field

of Urchristentum, Bruce rightly observed. His own expertise, however, kept

his attention riveted to the more limited progress from founder to the apostles,

above all in St. Paul’s Conception of Christianity (1894), where he argued

with the Ritschlians against liberals like Pfleiderer that Paul faithfully

unpacked the genius of Jesus’ key ideas.105 The marks of Harnack—whose

History of Dogma Bruce was editing at this time for publication in T. & T.

Clark’s Theological Translation Library—appear obvious if unacknowledged

in his hasty account of the sclerosis of the church in the early second century

into a dogmatic, hierarchical institution. He did not invoke the Hellenization

thesis here or anywhere else—save one solitary reference to the taint Greek

metaphysics and morals had left on the development of Christianity106—

preferring instead to damn as “scholastic” all diversion from the course

naturally plotted for church belief by the witness of the historical Jesus.

102 “Four Types of Christian Thought. IV. The Fourth Gospel,” 175, 179. 103 See especially Apologetics, 430-47. The work Bruce had in mind was Pfleiderer’s Das Urchristentum (1887). 104 “Theological Agnosticism,” 13-14; also “The Teaching of Christ in the Gospels...,” 458, 460. 105 Bruce, St. Paul’s Conception of Christianity (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1894), 362-78. The central place in the economy of salvation assigned by Paul to the church did not marginalize Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God, for the kingdom is what the church strives after as its eschatological ideal. Nor was the essentially ethical content of Jesus’ proclamation of God’s coming rule trumped by Paul’s notion of the church as the body of Christ. As union with the Saviour was moral, Paul, unlike the catholic tradition, understood the body of Christ as a charismatic community rather than mystical institution. 106 The Providential Order of the World, 248.

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The passing remarks and intimations throughout his corpus regarding

the critical transition of church practice and belief from the apostolic to the

ante-Nicene eras were, in fact, largely concerned with the dogma of Christ.

But his desultory assessment of the catholic dogma of Christ is far from clear.

Bruce could appear wholly resigned (as Harnack also was) that the dogma of

Christ formalized at Nicaea and Chalcedon was the logically unavoidable

outcome of the early church’s belief in Jesus’ true humanity and true divinity.

It was, in some sense, a legitimate development although not without intrinsic

problems and a mischievous legacy.107 He reproved the Ritschlians for their

haste to displace Chalcedon with the simple affirmation that Jesus possesses

the value of God for the church. Is not a more sympathetic assessment of the

creedal process by which the early church sought to articulate their experience

of the Son of God’s humiliation warranted by the very facts of history and

experience that should underwrite legitimate theology?

Yet he also echoed their concern that, as Eckehard Lessing noted,

“Christology must be given an ethical-personal shape,” to the end that

“[t]raditional depictions of Christology, especially the two natures doctrine

and the satisfaction theory were rejected.”108 Some of his writings from the

1890s seemed to abandon the evangelical doctrine of the atonement he

defended earlier with no little acumen,109 and elsewhere he defended the

Ritschlians’ rejection of the catholic dogma of Christ as not only compatible

with belief in his divinity but a distinct improvement on Chalcedon. “The only

faith concerning Jesus as the Divine Lord worth professing is that which

springs out of spiritual insight into its historical basis, and is charged with

ethical significance.”110 Amidst this doubletalk on the dogma of Christ, Bruce

seemed to speak straightforwardly only to disavow the finality of the dogma of

Christ (or any dogma for that matter). As historical scholarship makes Jesus

better known, a confession of faith shall arise which, as he put it, will not

107 “Theological Agnosticism,” 13-14; The Humiliation of the Christ, 65-68. 108 Lessing, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen evangelischen Theologie, 1: 107-8. 109 See Malcolm A. Kinnear, “Scottish New Testament Scholarship and the Atonement c. 1845-1920,” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1995), 305-14. 110 Apologetics, 404-5, 398-99; also “Four Types of Christian Thought. II. The Pauline Epistles,” 18-19.

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reunite divided Christians on the old doctrines but rather re-fuse Christians on

a new understanding of Christ and his teaching.111

Nor did Bruce equivocate about the content of the future church’s

creed. Doctrines would be biblical, of course, but not in the old sense. For the

Bible does not teach “the raw material of an elaborate creed, but rather a few

things very thoroughly.”112 The historico-critical method, by focusing the

church’s gaze on the centre of God’s revelation, Jesus and the kingdom, would

render doctrines that were explicitly Christian, that is to say, fully determined

by God’s revelation in Jesus. Especially, Bruce believed that “it is of essential

importance…that the idea of God be thoroughly Christianized.”113 Ethics

would trump dogma as Jesus’ revelation of our loving Father in heaven took

precedence over the sovereign lawgiver of the old Calvinists. And doctrine

cued to the historical Christ would give evangelical theology a much-needed

sense of proportion regarding which tenets of the church’s ancient creed need

to be spoken boldly and which can be passed over without a whisper.114 Thus,

the “sectional orthodoxy” blighting modern Christianity would give way to a

fundamental creed and a “Christian catholicity” capable of unifying believers

and commending the faith to unbelievers.115

A portentous attempt was provided in a catechism he wrote and

appended to With Open Face (308-22). “Q1: Who was Jesus? He was the Son

of Mary of Nazareth in Galilee, whose husband, Joseph, was a carpenter.” The

one hundred and twenty-two questions and answers abide tenaciously to the

synoptic narrative, with only passing references to the rest of Scripture. Jesus

is flesh and blood: a heroic healer, a religious maverick, a tender friend, a

teacher of God’s fatherly love for all. A measure of caution is needed in

drawing conclusions from the primer. The conspicuous absence of the Trinity,

Jesus’ divinity and resurrection, atonement, church, and final destiny should

be attributed to his pedagogy rather than theology—the catechism was

intended for children, who he felt were being poorly prepared for faith by the 111 The Kingdom of God, 354. 112 “The Future of Christianity,” 255. 113 Ibid., 371; also The Kingdom of God, 127. 114 “Progress in Theology,” 373. 115 “The Apologetic Function of the Church in the Present Time,” 644; also Bruce, The Galilean Gospel (Edinburgh: Macniven & Wallace, 1882), vi, 208.

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authoritarian and abstract Shorter Catechism.116 Perhaps it is best interpreted

as an initial step toward Bruce’s unfulfilled life’s task: to assist the church to

confidently confess its faith with a new creed, grounded in the ancient gospels

yet fresh and relevant, catholic and evangelical.117

Nevertheless, its starkly synoptical lineaments and absolute aversion to

speculation beyond the historical letter embodied Bruce’s conviction that

Christianity of the future would stand on a different fundament from both

classical and current orthodoxies. From the fundament of the historical Jesus

dogma was “de-parentified” with adolescent impudence. “The Church is a

mother,” retorted Bruce, “and like that of all mothers her influence is helpful

up to a certain point, and beyond that is apt to be a hindrance to spiritual

independence.”118 A truly radical reorientation to the Jesus of history rendered

futile the mere tinkering with classical doctrines or confessions by

conservatives like Rainy, even as it exposed the Hegelian-inspired

legerdemain of C of S liberals like the brothers Caird whose cross-town

lectures in the university were maintaining the old forms of dogma fully

evacuated of old meaning.119 A faith for the late nineteenth century would

need new wineskins, although the few places where Bruce intimated these

“Christianized” doctrines show them to be of such a redoubtably Ritschlian

vintage that they seem little more than the historicizing of Kant that he had

once cheekily suggested as a theological desideratum:120 Jesus revealed the

universal fatherhood of God, the dignity of humankind, the coming kingdom

of God as the reconciliation of societal and ecclesial divisions.121

The fundament of the historical Jesus also kept the history of the

church from easy collusion with theories of natural evolution or philosophical

development. This sharply distinguished Bruce’s understanding of the history

of doctrine from much prevailing theological opinion. “Hegel’s philosophy of

history and Darwin’s biological theory both started from what is empirically

116 The Kingdom of God, 352-53. 117 MacFayden, “Professor Alexander Balmain Bruce,” 97-98, remarked on Bruce’s hope to prepare a new creed. 118 Apologetics, 505; also “Progress in Theology,” 365. 119 Ibid., Apologetics, 354-55. Sell treats John Caird in D&DF, 64-88. 120 The Chief End of Revelation, 39-40. 121 See especially “Jesus,” 2435-54; The Kingdom of God, 125-46.

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successful, and argued backwards to the supposed necessity and inner right of

its appearance,” observed Karl Löwith. “Their admiration of historical and

biological forces led to an idolization of whatever force happened to be

victorious.”122 Mediating and Neo-Lutheran parties borrowed freely from both

philosophical and scientific concepts of development to chronicle the history

of dogma as a victory march (see 5.3). Not so the Ritschlians. They rejected

out of hand any theory that submerged spirit to nature or found God’s

revelatory activity outside of Christ. While this carried the consequence that

nature was effectively dropped from the enterprise of Protestant theology,123

positively, it allowed them to damn biological notions of the ascent of species

as well as speculative notions of either dialectical or organic historical

progress as false paradigms for interpreting the history of dogma, in order to

justify their belief that much doctrinal growth was malefic and in need of a

ruthless pruning back to the gospel root.124 Their perspective garnered

credibility as the twilight of Spätidealismus deepened and as the shadows cast

across the countenance of nature by the theory of natural selection left many

theologians more and more uneasy about what nature revealed of God.

Bruce’s similar concern to devolve doctrine to the historic Christ

prompted a disavowal of the easy analogy of the natural to the moral or

religious then prevalent in evangelical apologetics as part and parcel of the

‘common sense’ intuition of external reality. Several scholars have argued that

Scottish evangelicalism had been so thoroughly chastened by Hume in the

eighteenth century as neither to pay much attention to natural theology proper

nor to conflate the natural with the moral as easily as American evangelicals

did. But this line of argument is not quite convincing.125 It neglects both the

widespread influence of Bishop Butler’s famous case for the natural analogy

of religion on Victorian evangelical apologetics, and the flowering in Britain

at the century’s nadir of precisely those idealist notions of development

122 Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 219. 123 Frederick Gregory, Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 201-60. 124 Max Reischle, Christentum und Entwicklungsgedanke (Leipzig: Mohr, 1898), 18-19. 125 Gauvreau, “The Empire of Evangelicalism: Varieties of Common Sense in Scotland, Canada, and the United States,” 235-38; Drummond, The Church in Late Victorian Scotland, 222-23.

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rejected by the Ritschlians.126 Bruce’s contemporary John Laidlaw (1832-

1906) was in concert with his predecessors in the chair of systematic theology

at New College, Chalmers and James Buchanan (1804-70), in arguing with

Butler that theology needed to commend itself by stressing the links between

revealed and natural religion.127 That remarkable polymath and professor of

natural science at Bruce’s own college, Henry Drummond (1851-97), made a

heady argument for the intrinsic continuity of spiritual growth and natural

evolution in Natural Law and the Spiritual World (1883) and The Ascent of

Man (1894).128 The Victorian public may have rapaciously consumed

Drummond’s baptized version of Herbert Spencer’s social-evolutionary theory

of humankind’s upward struggle to final transcendence, but Bruce had no

appetite for mixing the progress of the kingdom with the world’s evolution.

The principle, ‘natural law in the spiritual world,’ is emphatically false here. In nature the few are chosen, and the many are ruthlessly cast away; the fit survive, and unfit perish, and the unconscious cosmos sheds no tear. In the kingdom of God it is far otherwise. The chosen few seek the good of the many; the fit strive to preserve the unfit.129

For similar reasons he warned students off the Ritschlian black sheep,

Johannes Weiß (1863-1914), who kept Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom so

implicated in the apocalyptic expectations of first century Judaism as to be

useless for present churchly needs.130 For Bruce, Jesus was absolutely

unique—not a product of the supposed laws of historical development.131

The disjuncture between natural and historical development permitted

‘back to Christ’ advocates like Bruce to argue for the church’s deliberate

regress to its historical origin without sacrificing current scientific theories of

evolution or even Victorian assumptions of cultural progress. Even if Bruce

126 Newman’s appeal to Butler’s analogy between the natural and the revealed was briefly noted in his arguement for the probability of doctrinal development given the place of development in the natural world (2.3.2). 127 John Laidlaw, “Modern Thought, Its Relation to Christianity and the Christian Church,” PR 6 (1885): 615. 128 See further James R. Moore, “Evangelicals and Evolution: Henry Drummond, Herbert Spencer and the Naturalization of the Spiritual World,” SJT 38 (1985): 383-417. 129 The Kingdom of God, 256-57. Bruce’s Gifford Lectures, however, give a heavily evolutionist reading of the history of religion: Jesus is the crown of humanity’s evolving religious sensibilities (e.g., The Moral Order of the Universe, 277-78). But this incongruity does not directly bear upon his opinions of church doctrine. 130 The Kingdom of God, 43-45, 280-84; “Jesus,” 2443. See Berthold Lannert, “Weiß, Johannes,” in RGG4 8, 1374. 131 The Kingdom of God, 46-49; “The Teaching of Christ in the Gospels…,” 456.

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did not offer an actual theory of doctrinal development as several Ritschlian

historians of dogma did, this disjuncture played a significant role nonetheless

in his critical handling of traditional church teaching. His cry of ‘back to

Christ’ sang in tune with the chorus of voices throughout the history of the

church that have sounded at once liberal and conservative, calling for a return

to an ancient foundation and a renascence of beliefs long forgotten that

promised to open a new horizon for God’s people beyond ecclesiastical

myopia. In the nineteenth century in particular, when various notions of

development were being bent to deeply conservative ends as in Newman’s

Essay, or, in a far-from-conservative history of dogma like Baur’s, still

conserving the whole dogmatic tradition as the inevitable dialectic of Spirit’s

realization, it was the “return journey” taken by Ritschl and his British peons

like Bruce that was truly liberalizing.

According to its own proponents, the historical-critical method shortcut

the historically quantitative gap—the “tragic, humiliating, disenchanting tale”

of church history132—that kept Christ distant from the church. Through the

telescope of historical research “essential Christian truth is seen with unveiled

face and open eye, and in the light of its glory the moonlight of scholasticism

pales.”133 The church need no longer peer dimly at Christ through the stained

glass window of dogma—historical study would bring it face to face with the

very fact of Jesus Christ.

Despite thunderous reproach for what he considered to be the self-

serving, often spirit-stifling safeguards for orthodoxy erected by churches—

popes and bishops, creeds and confessions—Bruce did not deny the very

notion of orthodoxy. He remained ever the Presbyterian, if a disgruntled one,

in his conviction that the church must know and confess what it believed. He

gave up on the vast span of the Westminster Confession but not on the catholic

depth contained therein; to his credit, he never mouthed the trite juxtaposition

of religion and doctrine then being bandied about by broad churchmen.

The hope of the future seems to lie neither in a creedless Church nor a Church clinging superstitiously to all traditional dogmas, but in a Church which has the will and the wisdom to distinguish between

132 The Kingdom of God, 270. 133 “Progress in Theology,” 375.

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essential and non-essential in religious belief, between catholic Christian certainties and matters of doubtful disputation; in other words, between doctrines of faith and theological dogmas.134

Yet what was merely a remote possibility for Cunningham, what was for

Rainy a perilous necessity, was seized upon by Bruce with alacrity: namely,

the contraction of orthodoxy to essential doctrines and the subsequent

shrinkage of the church’s creeds and confessions to a fundamental faith.

Divided Presbyterian churches especially needed a doctrinal standard of wider

basis and narrower focus.135

Yet upon critical analysis, it becomes clear that the theological

presuppositions Bruce brought to the task etherealized the coming church’s

confession. His explication of Jesus’ significance in broadly Kantian ethical

categories was bitter distasteful of both external forms of religion and

heteronomous authorities. This received sharp expression in his attacks on

church institution, sacrament, priestly office, as well, of course, as dogma. His

commentary on Hebrews bristles with disdain for “the sacerdotal drudge” of

the temple cult. Indeed, a pronounced anti-Jewish—even Marcionite136—

thread runs throughout his corpus that is especially apparent when he

mimicked Ritschlianism’s ethicized version of the Lutheran law-gospel

dialectic to contrast religious ritual with the kingdom of heaven “within you.”

“Bruce’s hatred of legalism is unmistakable,” noted Denney, who took over

first his mentor’s old pulpit at Broughton Ferry and then his old chair at

Glasgow, “but though his moral sense is the very strength of him, I don’t think

he appreciates sufficiently the need in his theology of this safeguard against

anomia.”137

Bruce halted at a full endorsement of the need for a concrete, i.e.,

written and church sanctioned, confession of Christ’s gospel as a form of

anomia. Surprisingly his wariness was reinforced by the Confession’s doctrine

of Scripture (see 1.2.2). It had been Robertson Smith who, from the

134 The Chief End of Revelation, 306. His emphasis. 135 “The Future of Christianity,” 255-56; “Progress in Theology,” 375-76. 136 E.g., Apologetics, 513: “Faith could live and even thrive with a very reduced New Testament: the Synoptical Gospels and Paul’s four all but universally recognized Epistles might suffice to start with.” 137 Cited in W. Robertson Nicoll, Letters of Principal James Denney to W. Robertson Nicoll: 1893-1917 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), 6.

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ecclesiastical dock in the 1870s, had dusted off the old Reformed doctrine of

the testimonium spiritus sancti internum to defend his teaching of an inspired

yet errant Bible from charges of heresy. Smith’s allies at the Glasgow FC

College were particularly diligent in subsequently pursuing this tactical line,

reassuring Victorian evangelicals that they could fully confide in Scripture and

affirm the very historical criticism then undermining the well-worn biblical

“evidences” like historical factuality and authorial veracity because the Bible’s

authority was sealed in the conscience by the Spirit rather than proved to the

mind.138

Bruce invoked the inner testimony of the Spirit to plead the authority

of Scripture, to argue the integrity of the canon (amongst the growing

awareness in the late nineteenth century of the voluminous extra-canonical

Christian writings), and, finally, as the sole guarantee of the church’s

orthodoxy. But his emphasis on the inner testimony of the Spirit in guiding the

church’s discernment of the fundamentals of the faith was so pronounced that

an outer testimony of faith like a formal creed or confession became somewhat

negligible, as if it followed from the fact that if the Holy Spirit was the

church’s supreme teacher, as the Scots Confession insisted (18), his teaching

remained wholly in the realm of spirit.139

The interiorizing of the witness of the Spirit among FC progressives

was significant not only for how it impinged upon Bruce’s construal of church

confession but also for how it strikingly connects him to the broader issue (see

1.3.1) of how Protestant obsession for thoroughgoing doctrinal fidelity to the

word of God has determined their ecclesiology and church historiography. It

was noted in critique of Cunningham (see 2.6) that Protestants, having

abandoned a historiography of the visible institution of the church, were often

so hard pressed to find visible continuity of evangelical doctrine over the long

history of the church that the notion of catholic tradition was ignored or

belittled. Bruce radicalized this nexus between ecclesiology and church

138 Church history professor T. M. Lindsay, “The Doctrine of Scripture: The Reformers and the Princeton School,” The Expositor 1 (1895): 278-93, opened fire on his Princeton contemporaries’ doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. I did not have access to James S. Candlish, The Authority of Scripture independent of Criticism (Glasgow: Adam and Charles Black, 1877). I am indebted to James Stalker, “Testimonium Spiritus Sancti Internum,” ET 31 (1920): 246-25, for an account of this doctrine’s nineteenth-century Scottish revival. 139 Apologetics, 354. See also “Progress in Theology,” 375.

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historiography or Dogmengeschichte. When doctrine and confession are

interiorized via the Spirit the church itself practically disappears from the

world. The church’s post-apostolic “fall” has now become a vanishing act,

abetted, of course, by the audacity of the ‘back to Christ’ proponents in

thinking that the historical Jesus who is constitutive of church doctrine and

practice was only lately recovered. Bruce preferred to deal with church and

confession as ideal rather than actual—a strange discrepancy for one who

claimed single-minded attention to seek Christianity “in the world” (as

Newman put it), namely, the earthy facts of the gospel testimonies to Jesus of

Nazareth.

He made little attempt to hide his despair over the sorry state of the

church; considered against its eschatological ideal, the kingdom, it was a

paltry thing indeed. “What is the ideal Church?” he asked:

It is a body of men believing Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, with a faith not received by tradition but communicated directly by the Father in heaven to each believer. Each man for himself has clear insight into the divine worth of Jesus, passionately loves the goodness exhibited in His character, and with sincere, deep fervour reverences Him as the Lord.140

This church did not exist, nor yet did a confession of faith that was purely in

Spirit and in truth. It must be said that there is a docetic feel to Bruce’s

perspective. A skittishness to put doctrine to paper would seem to share in his

frantic suspicion of rite, sacrament, and cult; it was, finally, one and the same

as the disregard of the long tradition of the church for a shimmering ideal

whereby God communicates truth immediately and directly to the believers’

souls. Bruce’s disembodiment of church and doctrine—as evangelical

Presbyterian critics of Ritschl such as Orr wagered—left the Lord of the

church without either visible realm or witness throughout much of history.

Ironically, this resolute advocate of a historical approach to church and

doctrine ended up not very “deep in history” after all.

140 Apologetics, 504.

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4.5. Conclusion

A. B. Bruce’s rambunctious handling of church doctrine and

confession carried no coherent or comprehensive account of the origin and

development of doctrine. The FC pastor and Glasgow professor’s professional

interests rarely let him stray beyond the confines of the New Testament into

the formative periods of catholic or Protestant orthodoxy. Moreover, a

seeming inaptitude for systematic thinking and a sermonic habit of making

sweeping rather than qualified assessments left his scattered judgements on the

historical origins and development of doctrine highly tendentious and his

overall perspective on the problem of doctrine and history difficult to

determine. “I never feel that Bruce deals in a really scientific way with matters

of scholarship,” William Robertson Nicoll, editor of The British Weekly,

complained to Dods.141 Bruce’s position is important simply because of its

luminosity in the Victorian twilight of evangelicalism and its long afterglow,

especially at the popular level. “His glory is that he so profoundly affected

Christian thinking in his generation that ideas which were once original to him

seem almost commonplaces to us now,” was a just estimation made fifty years

after his death, even if the claim to originality is far from accurate.142 Bruce

was irrefragably a product of inheritance and environment. His perspective on

history and doctrine was forged in response to a perceived crisis of the

contemporary church; he leaned heavily upon an historical epistemology then

current in German theology to radicalize a particular view of Scripture and

tradition he inherited as an evangelical, and to retrench its everyday, everyman

(i.e., practical and non-speculative) ethos.

The Ritschlian accent of his critical appraisal of classical doctrine has

been highlighted with good reason. If much recent theological historiography

overlooks Ritschl, many late Victorian evangelical Presbyterians viewed him

as “the most influential, most interesting, and in some ways most inspiring, of

modern theologians.”143 Horton Harris’ hyperbolic claim that the Tübingen

school, by utterly historicizing the various theological disciplines, was “the

most important theological event in the whole history of theology from the 141 T. H. Darlow, ed., William Robertson Nicoll, Life and Letters (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), 133, emphasis his. Cited in Sell, D&DF, 105. 142 Stewart Mechie, Trinity College Glasgow 1856-1956 (Glasgow, n.p., 1956), 33. 143 Denney, Studies in Theology, 3.

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Reformation to the present day,” would have received at least qualified assent

with Bruce and some of his FC colleagues.144 In this new milieu, Bruce was

one of many who turned to that Tübingen turncoat, Ritschl, to help him find a

place for doctrine within the limits of history alone. Although Bruce’s

alignment with Ritschlianism was never flush, in an article on “Theological

Agnosticism” written in 1897—that it was the lead article in the inaugural

edition of the American Journal of Theology suggests something of his stature

at the end of his life—the errors of Herrmann and Harnack are deemed to be

only exaggerations.145 True, Bruce did not construct a theory of doctrinal

origins and development upon a Ritschlian blueprint, but all the requisite

blocks are present, if haphazardly: the scrupulous binding of doctrinal

statements to the facts of the history of Jesus; a highly ethicized interpretation

of Jesus’ message and life as reconstructed by historical criticism; the rise of

dogma—that is to say, the heavy-handed imposition of binding articles of

belief—as proof of the post-apostolic church’s “fall” away from Jesus’

message and the New Testament conception of faith; consequently, a critical

stance toward church tradition as a Babylonian captivity of the gospel. Similar

to members of the Ritschlian right in Germany such as Kaftan, Kattenbusch,

and Theodor Haering (1848-1928), Bruce sought not to dissolve all classical

doctrines but rather sift them and reconstitute the fundamentals through

concerted focus on the historical Jesus as the revelation of God.146

For all Bruce’s concert with the Ritschlian school, an overt

Hellenization thesis is noticeably absent in his corpus. He owns instead a

“rustication thesis”: to expel the Christian mind from the school theology that

had let belief long stray from its rustic home in first-century Palestine. This

tapped into a deep Protestant and evangelical prejudice against

“scholasticism” as the antithesis of the biblical faith—philosophical rather

than biblical, speculative rather than practical, intellectualist rather than

commonsensical, the wisdom of the world not the foolishness of the cross (see

144 Harris, The Tübingen School, xvii. E.g., Bruce, Ferdinand Christian Baur, passim; Dods, “Progress in Theology,” 31-32. 145 “Theological Agnosticism,” 7. 146 Orr, Ritschlianism and the Evangelical Faith, 9-10, remarked on the rightwing Ritschlian attitude to orthodoxy.

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1.4.5).147 That the Hellenization thesis is merely a refined variant of the anti-

scholastic polemic Bruce owed to his theological lineage permits the passing

over of his slight rustication rhetoric in favour of Harnack’s doughty argument

for the pathology of dogma that shall be addressed in the next chapter.

Whatever criticism made there of the formidable Harnack will condemn the

Scot’s straw man doubly so.

In closing, two aspects of this broadly Ritschlian perspective on

doctrine can be revisited with an eye to the wider theological contours of this

dissertation. First, it should be repeated that Bruce, like the mainstream of the

Ritschlian movement, was not reducing theology to history. Historians of

theology who (not unjustly) locate Ritschl at the fount of historicism in

Protestant theology need remember that the line from him to Troeltsch was not

arrow straight.148 When the soon-to-be defrocked Father Loisy (1857-1940)

sneered in his 1902 anti-Harnackian tract L’Evangile et l’Eglise, “Herr

Harnack appeals, above all, to facts,” he was correctly identifying

Ritschlianism as a method attuned to plain historical fact, soberly

considered.149 “Facts”, however, were not the sole tool at Harnack or Bruce’s

disposal for recovering the life and message of Jesus. That would be better

exemplified by the C of S minister and Aberdeen professor Sir William

Ramsey (1851-1939), whose archaeological research in order to prove the

historical veracity of the New Testament and interpret its contents gave him a

certain celebrity during his lifetime.150

Rather, as Troeltsch pointed out with characteristic incisiveness in his

review of Harnack’s famous Berlin lectures on the essence of Christianity, the

147 Michael Basse, “Theologiegeschichtsschreibung und Kontroverstheologie. Die Bedeutung der Scholastik für die protestantische Kirchengeschichtsschreibung,” ZKG 107 (1996): 50-71, highlights a few representatives. 148 For a careful delineation of a complex and contested term see Georg G. Iggers, “Historicism: the History and Meaning of the Term,” JHI 56 (1995): 129-152. Iggers notes that the belief that all truths were specific to particular historical contexts bred skepticism among some late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Protestant theologians toward theology’s traditional claims to truth, as well as a loss of faith in the assumed superior values of Christian civilization. 149 Alfred Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (New York: Scribner, 1909), 3. 150 This important development of the nineteenth century is covered by W. H. C. Frend, From Dogma to History: How our Understanding of the Early Church Developed (London: SCM, 2003).

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favouring of Urzeit as the locus of divine revelation and fulcrum for church

doctrine and praxis requires a theological, not historical, judgement, no less

then the quest to discern an essence to that revelation.151 Troeltsch’s verdict of

this Wesenbestimmung as “unhistorical” because it severed historical cause

from effect and relied on a value judgement to determine what was genuinely

Christian needs to be heeded by theological historians as substantiation that

the Ritschlian mainstream and its derivatives like Bruce were not historicists.

They maintained, if sometimes inadvertently, a crucial place for theological

judgment within the scope of historical criticism.

The recent trend among some theological conservatives from across

the ecclesiastical spectrum to advocate an unabashedly doctrinal interpretation

of the Bible as both more edifying for the church and congruent with

theology’s own nature over against the historical-critical method has much to

commend it. It is tempting to see the rancorous disagreement in the early

1920s between a youthful Barth and a tired Harnack as emblematic of the

debate over the merits of a theological or an historical approach to

Scripture;152 conservatives side with the former, of course, and derive

considerable inspiration from his dogmatic reading of the Bible and

confidence in theology’s autonomy. Yet if proponents of the theological

interpretation of Scripture fail to recognize that the Ritschlian position is not,

in fact, “merely” historical, then it becomes easy to avoid the unsettling, even

threatening theological questions posed by Ritschl, Harnack, Bruce and the

like regarding the relationship of doctrine to Scripture, the nature of dogma,

and rise and development of orthodoxy. An unapologetic claim for the

independence and uniqueness of the theological task should not grant

immunity to the church’s dogmas from the uncomfortable probing of theology

or history.

In this sense, then, I would discourage painting Bruce and the

Ritschlians as mere historical critics of church and doctrine and then pitching

them against “theological” defenders of the same. The problem with Bruce’s 151 Troeltsch, “Was heisst ‘Wesen des Christentum’? [1903]” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2: 386-451. 152 See further H. Martin Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth-Harnack Correspondence of 1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972); Thomas A. Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 403-468.

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view of doctrine is not that it was historical rather than theological but rather

that it was inadequately theological and historical. First of all, the theological

criteria governing the historical task of the selection of doctrinal stuff were too

anthropocentric to allow Christian doctrine, i.e., the teaching and witness of

Jesus according to Bruce’s terms, to be anything more than descriptions of

human potential. Secondly, as has been already suggested, it is not that it was

too historical but rather that it only accounted for a single dimension of the

category of the historical.

Second, along with his insistence on a Christological crucible for the

church’s perennial task of forming doctrine and establishing dogma, Bruce’s

most valuable legacy for the problem of Dogmengeschichte lies in the fact that

his Ritschlian presuppositions allowed him to derail the history of the church

from the tracks of cultural progress, scientific evolution, or philosophical

development. This was no small feat in a day when many thoughtful

Christians had a “one-size-fits-all” notion of development as forward or

upward progress. Bruce’s colleague Drummond was a chief proponent of this

dogma of development.

Even more remarkable than the rapidity of its conquest is the authority with which the doctrine of development has seemed to speak to the most authoritative minds of our time. Of those who are in the front rank, of those who by their knowledge have, by common consent, the right to speak, there are scarcely any who do not in some form employ it in working and thinking.153

Drummond breezily applied the tenet of amelioration to science as the

principle of the evolution of the species, to Anglo-Saxon culture as the path of

social progress, and to Christianity as the fact of redemption in Christ. A

decade after Bruce’s death, most delegates at the epochal World Missionary

Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 held out giddy hopes for the evangelizing

cum civilizing of the world in their lifetime.154 With a few exceptions Bruce

rejected the hegemonizing Victorian dogma of development. Unless the

Christian historiography of church and doctrine respects the diverse manner of

providence, it will invariably be seduced by antecedents of philosophy,

153 Henry Drummond, The Ascent of Man, 9th ed. (New York: James Pott & Co., 1899), 7-8. 154 Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), especially 205-247.

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biology, geology, or sociology that obstruct a truly open, inductive

investigation of the origins and development of doctrine.

In effect, Bruce called the church to let the dead bury the dead. There

can be no doubt that the freedom his perspective wins for the study of the rise

and development of doctrine comes with a cost—as a recent Ritschlian

wagered: “Free inductive theology demythologizes tradition and

demythologizes church.”155 The rise of orthodoxy cannot be justified through

philosophical dialectic or natural selection, nor should dogma, creed, or

confession be assumed as the inevitable flowering of the seed of the gospel.

The challenge posed by the church’s history has to be faced without recourse

to the security provided either by a presumption of determined development

or, along the lines of the question lately asked by Jürgen Moltmann, by a

determining authority: “Do we really want with Dietrich Bonhoeffer ‘to come

of age’, or shall we again be childlike and immature and take shelter in the

protective mantel of Mother Church and Father State?”156 In the Ritschlian

template, the study of the history of doctrine becomes a platform for hard

questions about the church’s past speech and courageous choices regarding the

church’s future message.

But now we turn to another Presbyterian voice in Glasgow, James Orr,

whose abiding concern for doctrinal continuity and equally strong belief that

orthodoxy “progressed” in the history of the church precisely as its Lord

intended, takes us back to a confident historical idealism and robust

traditionalism perhaps more suited to the religious world of the mid nineteenth

century than to its anxious conclusion.

155 Zahl, A Short Systematic Theology, 86. 156 Jürgen Moltmann, “Protestantismus als ‘Religion der Freiheit’,” in Religion der Freiheit: Protestantismus in der Moderne, ed. Jürgen Moltmann (München: Kaiser, 1990), 11. Might Bruce’s harsh words for Mother church and his plea for doctrine to reflect the ‘grown-up’ judgement of the church reflect the phenomenon of ‘muscular Christianity’? Social historians have long analysed the conjoining of piety or religiosity with femininity that occurred within the rise of evangelicalism and, more recently, the reaction it called forth in the later Victorian period as certain Protestant circles challenged the feminisation of Christianity—albeit from within the matrix of a traditional understanding of gender—on its own turf of congregation and home, by exhorting men to a larger participation in “manly” activities in the life of the church and a more consequent “fatherly” presence in the life of the family (see the documentation in Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge, 2009], 58-114). The possibility that the widespread discontent with traditional doctrine in the late Victorian era reflected the feminine-disparaging rhetoric of ‘muscular Christianity’ has escaped the notice of scholars of Victorian religion, likely because most prefer to probe religion as a cultural rather than theological matter.

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Chapter 5

James Orr: the Logic of the History of Dogma

“I myself have a certain weakness for Hegel, and always like to do some ‘Hegeling’.”

- Karl Barth1 5.1. Introduction

In marking F. C. Baur’s tardy arrival in Britain, Bruce wryly remarked:

“For it takes Continental waves of thought well-nigh a generation to reach our

British shores.”2 Such a ‘generation gap’ is illustrated perhaps nowhere better

than with absolute idealism. Its Untergang in its native land of Germany was

largely complete when it loomed up in the twilight of Victorian Britain to cast

a fleeting glow across the religious spectrum, from the sonorous Lux Mundi of

the Anglo-Catholics to the faddish New Theology (1907) of the liberal

Congregationalist R. J. Campbell to the many evangelicals on both sides of the

Atlantic who continued to parry or praise speculative divines like Rothe and

Isaak Dorner (1809–84) as if oblivious to the Ritschlian surge that was

washing away the ideal of Vermittlung in German theology.3

This peculiarity of nineteenth-century Protestant thought directly

implicates the UP/UFC theologian James Orr. Orr earned his laurels as a

staunch defender of evangelical orthodoxy at the time of its ebbing. An

accomplished theologian whose erudition was always up-to-date, his arsenal

was still drawn to a large extent from the German theology of the previous

generation as well as the late Victorian flourishing of Hegel in his hometown

of Glasgow. Dorner was Orr’s favourite theologian. As Barth tells the story,

when Dorner’s mature A System of Christian Doctrine was published in 1879-

80:

1 Cited in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barths Lebenslauf (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1986), 402. 2 Bruce, Ferdinand Christian Baur, 3. 3 See Sell, The Philosophy of Religion, 1875-1980, 1-31; Peter Hinchliff, God and History: Aspects of British Theology, 1875-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 99-222; George Hendry, “Theological Evaluations of Hegel,” SJT 34 (1981): especially 339-41.

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[H]e had been anticipated by six years by Albrecht Ritschl, thirteen years his junior, whose work on Justification and Reconciliation, free of metaphysics, did more justice to the change in the times, so that from the start Dorner’s book had to fight against a prejudiced view that it was old-fashioned and out-of-date…. [T]he name of Dorner, whose learning and powers of thought were so often revered, became covered with a thick layer of dust soon after his death.4 It would seem that T. & T. Clark was translating Dorner too rapidly to

allow any dust to settle upon his name across the North Sea. Orr owed a

particular debt to this mediating divine as he updated evangelical orthodoxy as

a “Christian view of God and the world as centring upon the incarnation.”5

Against its fin de siècle detractors, Orr commended Christianity as the

worldview that alone was able to harmonize the claims of experience, the facts

of history and science, and rational truth. It was his abiding conviction in the

unity of God’s truth that made him turn on Ritschl with vehemence. Kant may

have let the Ritschlians carve a nook for faith safe from its critics but at the

insuperable cost of a coherent theological interpretation of the world. Orr

upheld instead a quintessentially mediating ideal: Christianity is “really the

higher truth which is the synthesis and completion of all the others,—the view

which, rejecting the error, takes up the vitalising elements in all other systems

and religions, and unites them into a living organism, with Christ as head.” He

drew a resolutely conservative conclusion from this: if every part of the

organism were integral then the doctrinal reduction for which many in his day

were clamouring would be fatally injurious to Christianity.6

A key plank in Orr’s presentation of Christian truth as an indissoluble

organism was a case for Christian belief as having taken root, grown, and

blossomed according to divine determination. His argumentation drew deeply

upon the late Victorian interest in idealism as well as evangelicalism’s

ongoing interaction with an older generation of German theologians whose

idealist philosophical commitments served conservative theological

programmes. The Progress of Dogma (1901) should be classified as a species

4 Barth, PT, 564. 5 See Glen G. Scorgie, A Call for Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr (Macon: Mercer UP, 1988), 48, 50-51, 97, 111, 125, 155 notes Orr’s dependence upon Dorner. 6 Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (1893; reprint, Vancouver: Regent College P, 2001), 11-12, 16.

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of nineteenth-century histories of dogma that wed an idealist philosophy of

history to orthodox theology.7 As noted earlier, dogma-dissolving liberals

were not the only theologians to enjoy what Barth called “Hegeling” (see 1.

3.3)!8 Neo-Lutherans, mediating theologians, even a Catholic Tübingen

School that flowered at mid-century,9 variously drew upon the romantic

fascination with organic growth and the idealist teaching of the realization of

the divine immanence in history to defend traditional church teaching. Orr’s

PD is the superlative British specimen of conservative “Hegeling” in the field

of Dogmengeschichte. It would seem from its typical appraisal as pellucid and

learned but peculiar and simplistic, however, that its interpreters do not

appreciate its genus if, in fact, they recognize it.10

This presents a problem. Philosophical assumptions about history

shape the handling of the raw material of history. Consider by way of example

how the English translation of Bernhard Lohse’s widely read A Short History

of Doctrine obscures his argument for Die Epochen der Dogmengeschichte.

Anglo-American theology squirms at what the conservative Lutheran Lohse

can assume throughout his work on account of idealism’s residue in German

intellectual life, namely, that ideas or events in history are the unfolding of

Spirit. “Hegeling” is a byword for flights of dangerous if not heretical

speculation among the conservative Anglo-American theological tradition to

which Orr’s best interpreters belong. Yet an idealist conception of history is

precisely what determines Orr’s solution to the disquieting question posed to

Protestants most recently by Newman’s Essay: Who judges the fact of

dogmatic development in the absence of an external authority (magisterium)

or consensus regarding its formal authority (Scripture)? Classifying PD under

the genus of theological “Hegeling”, then, aims to show it a specimen of

impressive pedigree and widespread dissemination (if only on the other side of

the Channel), the merits and demerits of which, as the Lohse example

7 Orr, The Progress of Dogma (1901; reprint, Vancouver: Regent College P, 2000). Hereafter abbreviated as PD. All references to this book will be made within the text. 8 In this sense ‘Hegeling’ refers less specifically to Hegel than to idealism in general. 9 See Donald Dietrich and Michael J. Himes, ed., The Legacy of the Tübingen School: The Relevance of Nineteenth-Century Theology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Crossroad, 1997). 10 E.g. Toon, Development of Doctrine in the Church, 69-70; Steven L. Oldham, “Alister E. McGrath and Evangelical Theories of Doctrinal Development,” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 2000), 44-52, 167-72; Scorgie, A Call for Continuity, 75-78; Sell, DD&F, 145-46.

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suggests, can only be evaluated by recognizing its philosophical

presuppositions. To this end, following a biographical sketch of Orr, three

German examples of such “Hegeling” for conservative theological ends will

be presented, not to try to prove PD’s dependence upon any one of them but

rather to draw out the characteristics of this genus of Dogmengeschichte to

enable a more fair analysis of Orr’s argument than has previously appeared.

5.2. James Orr (1844-1913)11 That Orr came to be known as a theological pugilist of the first order is

perhaps not surprising. He was a born fighter. Orphaned in Glasgow as a child

and apprenticed to a bookbinder out of economic necessity, he knew the

struggle of the lower classes swelling the tenements of the ‘second city of the

Empire’. But his UP pastor, impressed by his young congregant’s obvious

intellectual aptitude and Christian zeal, actively guided him into university to

prepare for ministry. Entering Glasgow University at the late age of twenty-

one, Orr took up studies in a philosophy faculty in tumult. He looked above all

to John Veitch (1824-94), fighting with his back against the wall as one of the

last Scotch common sense philosophers. Hegelianism was on the ascent, and

he heard it passionately expounded by Edward Caird (1835-1908) to throngs

of enthusiastic students. This period left him standing firm on a mixed

fundament “of Hegelian confidence in reason and the older Scottish reliance

on irrepressible common sense” that had profound repercussions on his

theological thinking.12

No less eclectic were his divinity studies. He started at the UP Divinity

Hall in 1868. Its professors embodied the mild Calvinism and ardent piety

typical of their tradition, but, with the exception of John Cairns, were not

distinguished by scholarly prowess. The same could not be said of Caird’s

brother, John, professor of divinity at Glasgow, who was raising eyebrows by

using Hegel to renew the old C of S moderatism. Prize money enabled Orr to

11 On Orr see David Bebbington, “Orr, James (1844–1913),” ODNB (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/41222, accessed 16 June 2009]; Sell, D&DF, 137-171; J. I. Packer, “On from Orr: The Cultural Crisis, Rational Realism, and Incarnational Ontology,” Crux 32 (1996): 12-26; above all the superb study by Scorgie, A Call for Continuity. 12 Scorgie, A Call for Continuity, 67.

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spend two stimulating years in the faculty of divinity, graduating in 1872 with

the B.D. and wrapping up denominational studies shortly thereafter.

Called to a UP congregation in the Borders in 1874 and married the

very same year, church and family occupied his attention for the next

seventeen years, although he earned a doctorate in divinity (by examination)

from Glasgow in 1885. It is noteworthy how early he had to reckon with the

historical conditionality of doctrine as a concrete problem: despite his

inexperience, he was appointed in 1877 to the church committee charged with

the weighty question of the need to revise the venerable Confession. The

resulting 1879 UP Declaratory Act clarified those Calvinist doctrines that were

most vexing to Victorians so as to assure of the universality of God’s love and

Christ’s atoning sacrifice and insist upon liberty of opinion for matters not

entering into “the substance of faith.”13 Orr’s subsequent career as a broadly

“heritage” rather than a strictly “confessional” theologian stands in obvious

congruency with the decision made then by his denomination to refocus on

catholic and evangelical fundamentals rather than Reformed peculiarities.

An academic career was assured when his 1891 Kerr Lectures on The

Christian View of God and the World was published to wide acclaim. Fifty

years later, John Dickie judged it the most able systematic theology published

in Britain in the second half of the century.14 That same year he was appointed

to the chair of church history at the UP Divinity Hall. If this were not the most

fitting seat for him, it would give him the expertise needed to oppose

Ritschlianism at the very place where they pitched battle against orthodoxy:

early Christianity and the history of dogma. Over the course of the 1890s he

came to earn an international reputation as an authority on this rising German

school, publishing widely and lecturing internationally.15 When the UPs and

the FC united in 1900, he was shifted to the chair in systematic theology and

apologetics at the new UFC College in Glasgow. With James Denney, George

13 “Declaratory Act of the United Presbyterian Synod (Adopted May 1879),” in Corpus Confessionum, 800-802. See further Hamilton, The Erosion of Calvinist Orthodoxy, 156-89. 14 Dickie, Fifty Years of British Theology, 103-4. 15 Later published as PD and Neglected Factors in the Study of Early Christianity (1899; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006). Also dating from his period are his classroom lectures: The Early Church, Its History and Literature, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903).

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Adam Smith, and Thomas Lindsay alongside Orr, it was probably the premier

theological school in the English-speaking world in the early 1900s.16

If Orr looked like one of his denomination’s liberal ‘young guns’ in the

1870s and 80s, anxious to move beyond the Confession to a more generous

catholic Presbyterianism, in this period his tone hardened as he sensed the task

of doctrinal reformulation amongst Victorian Protestants spinning out of

control. He struck back at threats to essential doctrines from evolutionary

science and philosophical naturalism, and disputed the more radical claims of

the historical critics of Scripture.17 As other scholars began to ignore his

arguments as antiquated, he made his plea for theological continuity and

conservation on the lecture and Bible conference circuit in Britain and North

America, pitching his publications for popular consumption. In this vein,

shortly before he died in 1913 he contributed several articles to The

Fundamentals, a venture sponsored by a California millionaire to galvanize

Nicene orthodoxy against the accelerating pressure for doctrinal

reconstruction.18

5.3. “Hegeling” and Dogmengeschichte: Three German Examples

[5.3.1] A decade before Baur wrote his famous Dogmengeschichte, a

precocious Theodor Kliefoth (1810-95) published an Introduction to the

History of Dogma (1839).19 The similarities between the two trailblazing

historians of dogma are striking. With one foot in Schleiermacher’s

understanding of doctrine as the church’s original and ongoing expression of 16 Best, “The Study of New Testament in Glasgow from the Disruption to the Great War,” 38. 17 E.g., God’s Image in Man and its Defacement in Light of Modern Denials (1905; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997); The Problem of the Old Testament Considered with Reference to Recent Criticism (London: James Nisbet, 1906); The Virgin Birth of Christ (1907; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007). 18 Orr was no ‘fundamentalist’, however. His thought would later spur the neo-evangelicals of the mid-twentieth century to move beyond the cramped mentality of fundamentalism toward the mind of the church catholic, as well as a tentative openness to evolution and Biblical criticism. See Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville: WJK, 1998), 44-63, 118-119. 19 Theodor Kliefoth, Einleitung in die Dogmengeschichte (Parchim: Hinstorff und Ludwigslust, 1839). Page references will be given within the text. On neo-Lutheran histories of dogma see Kantzenbach, ED, 153-64; Martin Grahl, “Verklärung—Die Konzeption der Heilsgeschichte bei Theodor Kliefoth,” (DTheol diss., Universität Rostock, 2002); Beyschlag, Die Erlanger Theologie, 93-98; Steck, “Dogma und Dogmengeschichte in der Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts,” 50-54.

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its consciousness of God in Christ, and the other foot in Hegel’s Philosophy of

History (7), Kliefoth and Baur could walk away from yesteryear’s historians

of dogma who disdained their subject matter as a jumble of antagonistic

theological opinions that had progressively corrupted the religion of Jesus.

Those rationalists and neologists simply failed to understand the true nature of

the church as “an organic development out of one principle and into one living

movement…” (365). The one principle palpitating through the development of

the church and its doctrine is the union of the human and divine in Jesus

Christ. The history of the church is a progressive incarnation of God in which

“the Spirit of Christ takes form in human individuals and their deeds,” forming

a single divine-human organism from disparate parts (14).

If Schleiermacher was correct to treat the church’s doctrine as

Glaubenslehren rather than the didactic propositions of the older orthodoxy or

the timeless religious maxims of the rationalists, Kliefoth, like Baur, was not

content to rest in the realm of the subjective. Drawing upon Hegel’s

epistemology, which concretized human action and thinking as “acts” of

Mind, he claimed dogmas as the very acts of the Spirit of Christ who indwells

the church and compels it to conceptualize and articulate its knowledge of its

holy essence (3-4, 81, 297, 301); the history of dogma was accordingly

defined as “a line of acts of the human spirit to scientifically depict the

Christian truth” (299). Kliefoth also insisted as Baur later would that the

church’s divine-human constitution imparted a real “humanity” to dogma: the

“process of realization” (81) of the truth it held was long and agonized;

sharply antithetical opinions and vicious ecclesiastical divisions all figured

into the genesis of dogma (57-59).

Despite treading a common path through Hegel and Schleiermacher,

Baur’s and Kliefoth’s goals markedly diverged. Kliefoth’s “Hegeling” served

an intolerant Lutheran confessionalism that he propagated with great influence

for half a century as church superintendent in the grand duchy of

Mecklenburg. The following programmatic statement on dogma shows him

tweaking the Hegelian dialectic just enough to maintain dogma as finally

inviolable: “It is the one, eternal, unchanging Christian truth that takes

scientific form [wissenschaftliche Gestalt] in dogma. But this process is

mediated through the activity of human individuals. Filled with the Spirit of

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Christ, possessed by its truth, its confessors must grasp and speak out their

faith, their life—even in a scientific way—as dogma…” (297). The economy

of redemption—what the Protestant Orthodox coined the ‘order of salvation’

[ordo salutis]—presupposes God as object, the human as subject, and the need

for the latter to appropriate the salvation held out by the former through

personal faith and word and sacrament. Analogously, the formation of dogma

in the church presupposes the objective facts of salvation history, its reception

by humankind in Scripture and tradition, and its further scientific

appropriation and practical application in the life of the church (9). But

Kliefoth, unlike Hegel and Baur, maintained that only the subject was properly

historical. That the object, God, was not in historical process ensured an

interpretation of dogma as the realization of the organic consequences of an

unchanging truth over the history of the church rather than the realization of

Truth itself in the history of the church.

The realization as dogma of the church’s spiritual life was plotted as an

eighteen hundred yearlong appropriation of the ordo salutis. In four

circumscribed dogma cycles [Dogmenkreisen] the object of salvation (God)

was appropriated (dogma) by the subject of salvation (church) and

progressively unfolded in its theology, liturgy, and ethics (12, 21, 57-59). A

dependence upon Hegel’s “geographical history” is obvious.20 First, the Greek

penchant for speculative thought transformed Jehovah into the triune God and

plumbed the mystery of the God-man Jesus Christ (65-70). The practical, legal

mind of the Romans was suited to then develop the Christian understanding of

humanity (70-9) in light of the doctrine of God. After the barrenness of

medieval theology, the profound spiritual intensity of the German Reformers

achieved a dogma of salvation by synthesising the dogmas of God and sin (82-

7). God was charging Kliefoth’s own century with the dogma of the church,

leading its best theological minds to the categories of the organic and the

incarnational with their embrace of growth and development, the infinite in the

finite, and the reconciliation of seeming opposites in a higher unity (87-99).

Kliefoth took his own counsel to heart by writing influentially on the genius of

confessional Lutheran ecclesiology.

20 See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 79-102.

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[5.3.2] A student in Berlin of Hegel and Schleiermacher, Gottfried

Thomasius (1802-75) was a leading light of the Erlangen school along with

Hofmann and one of several neo-Lutherans inspired by Kliefoth’s Einleitung

to track the divine progress of dogma more deliberately into its climax in the

Book of Concord, yet according to the historical standards Baur had

established in the meantime. Thomasius is remembered today more as a

pioneer of kenotic Christology than for his learned History of Christian

Dogma (1874-76).21 But the chief problem motivating kenotic theories in this

era—specifically, to reconcile a classical Christology “from above” with

respect for the real humanity of Jesus—was precisely what pressed him to

investigate Dogmengeschichte as a divine act under genuinely human

conditions. Christianity was not the “ripe fruit nor the opened up blossoms of

the old world” (as Baur argued); in the theological jargon of the Erlangen

school, Thomasius insisted instead that Christianity owed its existence to a

supernatural act [Tat] of God, namely “the reality [Tatsache] of the

incarnation of God” (1-2). And yet since the “new life” is fleshed in the

human subject through spiritual rebirth and the ministrations of word and

sacrament, dogma unfolds through and under the normal conditions of history

as the Spirit compels the church to penetrate ever more deeply into the

experience of faith (3-6).

As much as the full humanity of the church’s historical context needs

to be respected by the historian of dogma, the genesis and development of

dogma should be equally appraised as a work of God (6-11, 13; also 20-24).

Thomasius took over Kliefoth’s scheme of Dogmenkreisen except to give

Anselm the objective side of the dogma of salvation and let the Reformers

unfold the subjective side (justification) by virtue of the deep Innerlichkeit of

the Germans.22 The nineteenth century is again predestined for the dogma of

the church. If Thomasius gave greater play than Kliefoth to a dialectic method

of unmediated unity, opposition, and mediation in the development of dogma,

he made very clear that dialectic was methodological and not ontological as

21 Thomasius, Die christliche Dogmengeschichte als Entwicklungsgeschichte des kirchlichen Lehrbegriffs, Vol. 1 (Erlangen: A. Deichert 1874). Page references will be given within the text. 22 The same thought is found in Hegel, Philosophy of History, 420.

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with Hegel.23 And if he agreed with Kliefoth that the nature of organic

development precluded the obsolescence of dogmas, it was typical of an

“Erlangener” to admit that the genius of those older symbols might not abide

in the letter—Thomasius’s kenotic speculation, in fact, was his attempt to

unfold the true meaning of the Christological definitions pronounced at

Chalcedon and Augsburg.

[5.3.3] The Berlin Systematiker Isaak Dorner (1809–84)24 embodied

the nineteenth-century German Protestant ideal of mediation: a devoted

churchman and daring thinker, in the pious depths and soaring speculations of

his mind the clefts between infinite and finite, the ideal and the historical,

Lutheran and Reformed, were overcome. The unifying centre to which all

contraries craved was the God-man Jesus Christ. For like his neo-Lutheran

contemporaries, Dorner made the incarnation the fundament of history and

thought, secular or sacred. Colossians 2:3 (“In whom are hid all the treasures

of wisdom and knowledge”) hung over his desk as the key to the universe. It

was his mediation of religious experience and systematic thinking to serve an

explicitly Christological theology that piqued Victorian evangelicals’ attention

and held it for so long. He sought above all to reinvigorate ancient Christology

by modifying it through the modern axiom that the “the divine and the human

conspire towards unity”—an ambitious project enabled by a bold synthesizing

of Schleiermacher and Hegel.25 The former had valiantly broken with the

intellectual dogmatism of Protestant orthodoxy to locate faith in the

experience of God mediated through Christ, but in doing so effectively

obliterated the object of faith by collapsing it into the consciousness of the

church community.26 Yet “Christianity refuses to stay in the antechamber of

23 Compare Thomasius, Die christliche Dogmengeschichte, 14-18, to Kliefoth, Einleitung, 31-38. 24 On the mediating theology see Michael Murrmann-Kahl, “Vermittlungstheologie,” in TRE 34, 730-737. On Dorner see Barth, PT, 563-73; Welch, Protestant Thought, 1:273-82; Kantzenbach, ED, 130-41. 25 Dorner, History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, Vol. 1, trans. W. L. Alexander and David W. Simon, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1872), 2. Page references will be given within the text. 26 Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, Vol. 1, trans. Alfred Cave (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1880), 17-19.

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the spirit.”27 Faith aspires to intellectual certainty of the grounds upon which it

rests and real assurance of the hope within. Precisely here can the latter’s

insistence on the rational apprehension of objective revelation help by leading

the religious a priori through the rigour of speculation into hypostatic union as

a single “organism of truth” (3, 83-84).

This means that the fullness of truth possessed by the church in the

experience of Christ and the witness of the Scriptures needs to be objectified.

So even as Dorner parroted his era’s routine criticism of the Protestant

Orthodox for defining Christianity as dogma rather than as a living organism,

the genesis and development of a system of doctrine is a necessary,

progressive realization of the church’s consciousness of the faith, a “ripening”

of the divine-human organism through the normal processes of history (48, 74-

75). Indeed, if the church’s pistis did not attain gnosis as dogma it would be in

effect a docetic heresy (82).

Dorner’s interpretation of dogma through the sweeping processes of

world history rather than the narrower confines of salvation or church history

provides a clear predicate of “Hegeling”. Deeply influenced by the

seventeenth-century German mystic and neo-Platonist, Jakob Böhme (1575-

1624), Dorner followed Hegel and Schelling’s panentheistic teaching that

incarnation in history was necessary to God’s being because absoluteness must

include the finite. As such, God’s creation needs to be “consubstantiated” to

become complete (2). A “spark of life” in each person longs to be Godlike

even as it wishes to encounter God in the concreteness of the human and

earthly; every religion—from Hebrew law to Hindu monism to Hellenic

theogonies—yearns for that which only Christianity fully knows: the God-

man. But the history of religion is its own judgement—none could attain what

it craved (5-45). Dorner is careful to make clear that the incarnation of God in

Jesus Christ was not an avatar or a specific instance of a generic truth, as he

saw Hegel teaching. It is a new fact in history through which these world

processes alone can be understood (45, 75-76). But world history was a real

praeparatio evangelica, positively and negatively, for the incarnation of the

Son of God; even as, after the fact of Jesus Christ, world history draws

27 Dorner, A System of Christian Doctrine, Vol. 2, trans. J. S. Banks (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1881), 284.

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increasingly together in Christ toward the full eschatological union of the

divine and human, which is the destiny God intended for creation even apart

from sin (47).

As a consequence, pre-Christian religious ideas, especially Jewish and

Greek, “did not immediately vanish with the advent of Christianity, but

exercised the most marked influence on the Christian Church” (10). Indeed,

those critics of dogma who read the ample parallels between the church’s

dogmas and empire’s religions as the corruption of the former by the latter

miss the essence of Christianity as a world-historical act of God; absolute

idealists like Hegel who treat the historical incarnation merely as a supreme

example of a universal idea fail to see the union of God and humankind in

Jesus Christ as the new fact in which those world processes alone have

meaning (47, 74). Dorner found it wholly fitting, then, that in the origin and

development of dogma “the elements of truth, elsewhere here and there to be

met with in a scattered form or a disfigured guise, come together in unity,—a

unity which, as it personally appeared in the God-man, so in the course of

history ever more and more rises upon the consciousness of mankind” (3).

[5.3.4] These Dogmengeschichten are children of common parentage.

Schleiermacher provided the traits of religious experience, Christianity as

“life”, and Christocentricism. Yet absolute idealism effected a mutation. This

genus followed Schleiermacher in understanding doctrine as the church’s

disciplined reflection in the Spirit on the common experience of salvation

(even when they now recovered Scripture’s traditional place of authority) but

insisted on religious consciousness becoming objectified as institution,

worship, and dogma. That this process spanned the ages only shows the

vitality of the organism of the church in realizing the depths of revelation.

They tamed the more wild connotations of exuberance and unpredictability

tangled up with the romantic catchphrase of Christianity as a life or organism,

focusing instead on the regular laws of growth and the organic coherence of

all aspects of the church’s “life”. And by grafting the idealist tenet that “the

history of the World…has constituted the rational necessary course of the

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World-Spirit”28 onto this notion of organism, they saw the development of

dogma growing on a logical timetable.

Finally, this genus owed the exact expression of its Christocentricism

to Hegel’s daring use of the doctrine of the incarnation to variously explain

historical processes at work in church and world (even as they sought to

correct his overly ideal understanding of incarnation with greater emphasis on

the historical fact). If every aspect of the church’s existence was analogous to

the union of the finite and infinite, the divine and human, in its head Jesus

Christ, the “humanity’” of the dogma was granted to be an integral part of the

church’s divine-human essence, even to the extent of embracing vast world

processes as part of the formation of dogma.

This genus—Orr included—begs the question: Is it finally possible to

distinguish the divine and the human natures of dogma? Note the structural

similarity between Christology proper and Dogmengeschichte that “Hegeling”

made possible. Thomasius and Dorner were among their generation’s stoutest

defenders of classical Christology against the charge that it belittled the

humanity of Jesus. The former pioneered the doctrine of divine kenosis; the

latter, unhappy with the implications of kenotic theories for the doctrine of the

Trinity, proposed instead an innovative “progressive incarnation”. Yet their

sensitivity to the widespread rumblings of discontent with the two-natures

dogma did not lead them to jettison either a Christology from above or the

Lutheran understanding of the communicatio idiomatum. Analogously, then,

no matter how authentically “human” was the genesis of dogma it remained

fully permeated and controlled by the divine Logos. This holds even for the

least confessional of the three examples, Dorner. His doctrine of the

progressive incarnation held that the uniting of God and humanity began at the

birth of Jesus and progressively expanded as the divine Logos absorbed and

transformed every new moment and experience of normal human development

and, conversely, as the human capax infiniti itself heightened and deepened.

The same notes of the progressive, inevitable growth of a human organism

fully penetrated by the divine are struck in his definition of the history of

dogmas as showing “how the objective testimony concerning Christ, given for

28 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 10. My emphasis.

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all times, is, in the entire fullness of all its elements, more and more disclosed

to the consciousness of the Church in virtue of her work, conducted by the

Holy Ghost” (47-8; see also 82).

True, the representatives of this genus disavowed the divinizing of the

church and professed to hold themselves aloof from the tendency in

Schleiermacher to equate the “spirit of the community” with the Holy Spirit.

Frankly, however, fusing Lutheran Christology with an idealist philosophy of

history seems to unavoidably consubstantiate whatever it touches. Does

raising the prospect of dogmatic revision raise Nestorius from the grave?

Furthermore, if “fallenness” is not predicated of the human nature of Christ in

the classical Christology, given the structural similarity in this genus between

incarnation and church historiography, what role could sin play in the

development of dogma? A final dimension of the question raised above relates

to Jesus. These neo-Lutheran and mediating historians of dogma theologized

through the template of the incarnation without particularly close attention to

the actual record of the incarnation, i.e., the gospels.29 This discrepancy

became blatant once the Ritschlian revolution had called into question the

possibility of an ‘incarnational paradigm’ for the history of dogma by

contesting the very dogma of the incarnation. How would Orr’s history of

dogma maintain the Christological shape of history beloved by the “Hegeling”

theologians of a previous generation in the face of his own era’s ringing call to

go back to the Jesus of history?

5.4. The Progress of Dogma [5.4.1] Like other members of his theological genus, Orr was speaking

up in PD for “the great heritage of truth which has come down to us from the

past…and is embodied as the expression of our faith in the historical creeds on

which our Churches rest…” (4). The first lecture (1-32) finds him taking a

stand on Ephesians 4:1: “Till we attain unto the unity of faith, and of the

knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the

stature of the fullness of Christ.” Against those whose anti-supernaturalism led

them to disallow doctrine entirely because real “knowledge of the Son of God”

29 See Brown’s conclusions in Jesus, 254, 274.

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was simply unattainable, Orr declared his confidence in a true revelation from

God contained in the Bible, the truth of which the church has possessed from

the beginning and will “unfold in the connection of its parts, and in relation to

advancing knowledge” until the very end (5-8, 11-13, 32). While holding fast

to the belief that Scripture contained a “sum of truths” that provided the

church with doctrine, Orr did not consider doctrine to be contained in

revelation exclusively as propositions. Like Rainy, whom he referenced (see

3.3.5), Orr held doctrine to be the “work of the human spirit operating on the

matter furnished to faith in divine revelation…” The history of revelation

contained in Scripture itself prompts or suggests the formation of doctrine

from its stories, events, and teachings. The church then settles and sets apart

those truths most vital to its life as creedal dogma (8-9; also 25-6).30

His confidence did not extend merely to the fact of divine revelation.

PD was trained not on those who doubted revelation or who decried dogma as

a hindrance to “the unity of the faith” but those who doubted that revelation

supported orthodoxy. Against the latter, especially those who charged that the

church sprouted to a “full-grown” faith on Greek rather than gospel soil, Orr

set a unfashionable thesis: like any true scientific discovery, the “fullness of

Christ” revealed in Scripture had been legitimately ascertained by a long,

public process of trial and error; the end result is housed in the central dogmas

of the Protestant confessions as a largely inviolable possession (8-11, 18).

But how to defend this great heritage of truth? Scripture, of course, is

the ultimate test of dogma: what finds no explicit place therein is not part of

“the ground and pillar” of faith (1 Tim. 3.15). This criterion cuts out much

Roman dogma and modernist Protestant doctrine. Yet the bellicose Biblicism

of Cunningham and other evangelicals was firmly rejected. Appeals to

Scripture cannot be divorced from growing insight into the organic unity and

coherence of its contents—and that depends on the very dogmatic heritage the

appeal to sola scriptura is supposed to test (15). Secondary tests like the

30 See PD, 11-14, for his distinction between theology, doctrine, and dogma. Pelikan, Historical Theology, 189, erred in judging him to have kept doctrine out of the New Testament proper. On the other hand, Oldham errs in thinking Orr’s concern to defend systematic theology as a “science” was proof that he, like Hodge or Warfield, believed that revelation was primarily propositional and could be gathered from Scripture and classified accordingly. Orr’s rhetoric of the “science of theology” has to do with the objective process of trial and error over the history of the church’s appropriation of revelation.

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organic coherence of dogmas, their echo in the Christian heart, and their

ethical vibrancy are valuable but not sufficiently objective (16). The criterion

that most closely approaches absolute objectivity is “the rigorous, impartial,

one might almost say, if sufficient time is given, the practically unerring

verdict of history” (17). The history of dogma is its tribunal: accidents of

locality will be purged, defects will be corrected, new horizons will be opened,

and errors, once cast off, will remain dead. “In history things get beaten out to

their true issues.”31

Orr intended PD as a lean and limpid argument for an immanent law of

history at work in the body of Christ over its nineteen hundred year life,

steadily bringing it to full knowledge of the mind of Christ (9). He was one

with Harnack in seizing upon history as Protestantism’s sword and buckler

against its modern despisers. And both agreed that the history of dogma is the

judgement of dogma. The similarities stop here. It was a considerable

understatement when Orr committed his lecture series “to combat certain of

the positions of that brilliant author” (vi). Truly, not “certain details” but the

very category of the historical was under dispute.32

Harnack saw the church’s hope in listening anew to the voice of the

historical Jesus muffled under centuries of church dogma. Reared in a Dorpat

(Tartu, Estonia) home and university steeped in neo-Lutheranism, he turned

his back on the doughty historical justifications of Kliefoth, Thomasius, and

his own father for confessional Protestantism. “The method of explaining

everything wherever possible by the ‘impulse of dogma to unfold itself’, must

be given up as unscientific, just as all empty abstractions whatsoever must be

given up as scholastic and mythological. Dogma has had its history in the

individual living man and nowhere else.”33 For Orr, history commended Christ

not by isolating him from broad and deep movements of history or the grand

questions of his cosmological and metaphysical significance but by showing

how all reality finds its ground and goal in him. Christ could be extracted from

the history of salvation that had commenced in the Old Testament, found 31 The Christian View, 42-43. 32 In Neglected Factors, 163, he owns his approach to the history of Christianity as “a counter-theory” to Harnack. See too “Professor Harnack on Christ and His Gospel,” in Ritschlianism, 115-148. 33 Harnack, History of Dogma, 1: 12. Theodosius Harnack was a well-known neo-Lutheran professor.

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climax ‘in the fullness of time’ in the first-century Roman Empire—it was no

coincidence after all “that…the world-empire and the world-religion came into

being together”34—and has continued through the long history of the church

only at risk of compromising Christianity as a worldview, a comprehensive

account of the universe as a rational and unified organism. As Orr said in

another context: “Light is cast on the true genius of a system by the cause of

its historical development.”35

Significantly, then, even at risk of appearing old-fashioned, Orr openly

identified with the category of the historical that governed Baur and his era of

Dogmengeschichtsschreibung and Neander and his era of

Kirchengeschichtsschreibung rather than with the Ritschlian historiography of

dogma (vi) (see 1.3.3).36 History is spiritual. The outstanding achievement of

church historiography in the nineteenth century was to understand church

history and world history as one movement of Spirit. History as a work of

Spirit logically calibrates the course of the history of dogma: “history of

dogma...is simply the system of theology spread out through the centuries”

(21-22, 30). Orr invested great importance in the fact that the logical order of

the vast majority of accredited textbooks of theology corresponds to the

church’s temporal determination of dogma (23). This sequence of

prolegomena, theology, anthropology, Christology, soteriology, and

eschatology provides the backbone of PD. Despite this blatant similarity with

Kliefoth and Thomasius, Orr thought himself to have stumbled upon the

discovery of the “exactitude of the parallel” between the logical and the

historical (24)! The belief that Spirit knits together all persons and events into

one diversified organism will also allow him to turn the Hellenization thesis

on its head. For not only is the endosmosis of the church’s environment on the

Christian organism perfectly legitimate, the reverse process needs to be

34 The Early Church, 1. 35 The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith, 182. 36 Orr does not interact with one of the classic histories of dogma of this era, the Berlin neo-Lutheran Reinhold Seeberg’s Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3rd ed., 1913-23 [ET: Text-Book of the History of Doctrines, trans. Charles Hay (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1952-61], a work of similar ethos and argument to PD, albeit of far greater volume. See the detailed analysis in Michael Basse, Die dogmengeschichtlichen Konzeptionen Adolph von Harnacks und Reinhold Seebergs (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).

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recognized: God used the church to penetrate the social structures, overwhelm

the intellectual schools, and answer the deepest longings of its age.37

Second, history is an evolutionary process. Like most evangelicals at

this time Orr was not opposed to evolution. In PD his appropriation of

evolutionary concepts was enthusiastic and thoroughgoing. The Lamarckian

keynote of environment as the crucible for shaping species nicely supports his

anti-Hellenization thesis. Dogma formed as the gospel warred with alien ideas,

took captive the truest insights of its competitors, and quenched the spiritual

thirst of its age (25, 28). Darwin’s theory of natural selection finds even

sharper application. The church’s life, like that of any biological organism, is

not one of violent rupture but continuous and cumulative growth according to

an inner determinism. If world history is one unified movement of Spirit then

every sphere of creaturely reality becomes a theatre for the survival of the

fittest (18-19). If, as Darwin theorized, biological natural selection always

eliminates intermediaries, i.e., false-steps, half-measures, regressive

tendencies, then the history of dogma will yield “instead of fatuity and error,

the gradual evolution and vindication of a system of truth” (30). Theological

natural selection inevitably crowns only those beliefs that vitalize the

organism of the church while irretrievably condemning one-sided or

inadequate doctrines.

Darwin will not only help Orr graft Protestantism onto the main stem

of the developing Christian organism, with semi-Pelagian Rome as a stagnant

or tainted appendage (26-7, 32, 75, 143), he will let him damn as

“unscientific” those pushing for doctrinal reconstruction in the name of

progress or pleading to give old heresies a second hearing (30-31).

Orthodoxy’s tooth and claw coronation over its foes alone coheres with the

fact of the evolution of an organism as a continuous and rational process of

natural selection.

Finally, Orr’s understanding of history was quietly infused by

Christology. The dogma of the person of Christ wields nowhere near the

structuring clout in PD that it does for other specimens in this genus. Where it

37 Neglected Factors, 15-16. This work, along with “The Factors in the Expansion of the Christian Church,” complements the historiographical claims in PD. Note too “Christianity, II. Historical and Doctrinal,” ISBE 1: 624-28.

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did shape his category of the historical was through eschatology. In The

Christian View Orr had linked his ‘incarnational worldview’ to the emphasis

among divines like Schleiermacher and Dorner on the teleological nature of

Christianity. “The highest type of ‘Weltanschauung’ is that which seeks to

grasp the unity of the world through the conception of an end or aim,” he

argued. As the teleological religion par excellence Christianity points people

to the true unity and purpose in life: the gathering up of all things in heaven

and on earth in Christ.38 Regrettably, Orr only drew a few limited pastoral and

apologetic applications from this profound thought in reference to classical

doctrine. Likewise, in PD he never expounds how eschatology, Christology,

and the history of dogma fit together except by way of sowing a few

stimulating—and problematic—suggestions in his final lecture. There, his

concern to bind together sacred and secular historical processes as one

movement of Spirit toward the eschatological supremacy of Christ is explicit

if not fully explicated in reference to specific dogmas. Further, the brash

confidence of this “Hegeling” genus regarding their own century’s proximity

to the end of the development of dogma finds reflection in the final lecture,

where Orr looked back at the whole organism of dogma in light of its end,

Christ, and forward to the twentieth century to furnish that one outstanding

dogma: the last things (29-30).

The various strands of Orr’s view of history together form one

immanent law of history. This law drives its argument for a confident progress

of dogma even as it discloses an eminently nineteenth-century concern with

theological authority and religious certainty. “The days are past when we can

appeal, with the early Church, to fresh apostolic tradition; we refuse to bow,

with the Middle Ages, to decisions of councils and canonists; we repudiate the

Romanist assumption of an infallible head of the Church; we decline, with the

rationalist, to submit everything to the rule of natural reason” (14). Orr’s

sensitivity to the religious disorientation of the late Victorian Protestantism,

his criticism of the Roman doctrine of papal infallibility (160, 200) and

sceptical appraisal of Newman’s seven tests for development as too general to

prove the logic of the development of dogma (20-21), as well as his awareness

38 The Christian View, 322-23.

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of the limits of sola scriptura hoist a remarkable burden onto the “immanent

law of the actual history” to assure “the great decisive landmarks in theology”

are fixed and tethered to evangelical Protestantism (20, 32).

[5.4.2] “The history of dogma, rightly understood, is but the working

out of the solution of what belongs to the essential content of Christianity,”

stated Orr (35). Before this essence could be dogmatically distilled its

religious fundament needed to be established. Prolegomena logically precedes

a system of truth. This was accomplished during the great age of Christian

apologetics in the second and third centuries: Tatian, Justin, Irenaeus,

Athenagoras, Melito of Sardis, and Tertullian. In his second lecture (35-70)39

Orr did not spring directly from the New Testament to Nicaea as did the Neo-

Lutherans’ Dogmenkreisen, which either skirted the apologists or read them

into the later controversies over God and Christ.40 Rather, he figured them into

the logical-historical progress of dogma precisely as apologists, commissioned

by providence to ready the soil needed to grow the organism of Christian

doctrine: “natural theology, apologetics, canonics, the ideas of religion and

revelation, and the historicity of the Christian facts” (25). In defending the

church against malicious attacks from Jewish adversaries, the apologists

clarified Christian beliefs on the relation of the Old to the New Testament, the

supremacy of divine revelation in Christ and the factualness of his death and

resurrection, as well as the life to come; against ill-founded accusations of

atheism from pagan critics, the apologists showed how “the broad truths that

underlie all religion” on the possibility of revelation, the unity and spirituality

of God, his benevolent creation and government of the world, and the moral

freedom and responsibility of humankind find their best and most beautiful

form in Jesus Christ (24, 44-54). Such argumentation not only deflected the

slander of enemies, it declaimed the universal significance of Christ to the

sprawling empire’s spiritual seekers.

Against the internal danger posed by Gnosticism, the apologists made a

crucial contribution to the nature of Christian authority by identifying a

39 See also The Early Church, 39-92. 40 However, the contemporary Erlanger Karlmann Beyschlag’s Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte values this era for establishing the “pre-dogmatic norms” like canon, revelation, etc…

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“consentient testimony” to the apostolic witness that was contained in the

Scriptures, corroborated in the rule of faith, and ensured by proper church

authorities. If Orr’s evangelicalism let him treat this triad in descending order,

and his Presbyterianism made him slight the notion of an apostolic succession

through bishops, he enthusiastically valued this era for establishing the

prolegomena necessary for a fides catholica et apostolica (54-68). As such, he

was emphatically taking issue with Harnack over the worth of the apologists

(35, 48-49, 63). This was no antiquarian spat but a disagreement over the very

essence of Christianity. They both agreed that the theological synthesis

achieved in the second and third centuries was the prolegomena to dogma—

but was it an aberrant development that contemporary Protestantism should

categorically disown?

[5.4.3] Harnack’s masterful account of the history of dogma hinges on

the second-century crossroads of Jewish and Gentile Christianity. In this era

the church embarked down the road away from Jerusalem to Athens.41 Jesus’

first followers, being mostly Jews, worshipped him as the Messiah who had

witnessed in word and deed to the revelation of God as Father and his coming

salvation. Their Lord’s “glad message of the government of the world, and of

every soul by the almighty and holy God, the Father and Judge” and summons

to become “rulers in a heavenly kingdom in contrast with the kingdom of this

world…which will be sensibly realized in a future aeon just about to appear”

was relived and renewed in word and supper as they gathered together in

community.42 Fixated on the earthy facts of Jesus, the earliest church had little

interest in flying off to the supernal heights of his divine person: their

Christology was “adoptionist”, their theology ethical and eschatological.43

And if these first Christians struggled to grasp the universalistic scope and

radically spiritual rather than theocratic content of Jesus’ revelation of the

41 I have found these studies very useful: E. P. Meijering, Die Hellenisierung des Christentums im Urteil Adolph von Harnacks (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1985); especially Basse, Die dogmengeschichtlichen Konzeptionen Adolph von Harnacks und Reinhold Seebergs. Key passages for Harnack are Justin’s Apology 1.53 and Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, 18, 46-48. 42 History of Dogma, 1: 58-60. 43 History of Dogma, 1: 60, 167.

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Father’s kingdom, their own Jewish background at least provided a context for

comprehension.

The Gentile influx into the second-century church, however, diluted

this comprehension, including the potency of Paul’s understanding of the

rupture Jesus had invoked with Judaism. The church clung onto the Old

Testament as a valuable source for establishing Christianity’s antiquity and

divine origin—but its yeast of legalism could not be contained. Christ’s

exhortations became framed as a “new law” enjoined on the new Israel. Law

was entering by the church’s back door as these converts carted through the

front door all the religious paraphernalia of the Hellenic Judaism that had been

the halfway house to Christianity for many of them, including what was for

Harnack the most important step ever taken in the history of Christian

doctrine: Philo’s Logos philosophy. Apologists began to explain the person

and work of Jesus Christ to their contemporaries through the speculative

concept of the eternal Logos, shifting away the focus of Christology from the

history of Jesus to the metaphysical state of the pre-existent and then ascended

Son of God.44

In effect, the church of this era patently failed to grasp the profound

Pauline maxim that Christ was a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness

to the Greeks (1 Cor. 1:3). By arguing against the Gentiles that Christ was the

new philosophy and against the Jews that Christ was the new law, apologists

like Justin replaced the historical and eschatological coordinates of early

Christianity with a philosophical religion and legalistic church. Dogma carried

for Harnack the double force of speculative theological thought combined with

juridical submission to the church (see 4.3.1).45 Christ became a new Moses

who enjoined obedience to the laws of natural religion. The living experience

of Jesus on the hearts of the faithful was replaced by articles of belief about a

God-man that owed more to the metaphysical Logos than the Jesus of history.

Inclusion in the Christian community due to shared belief in Jesus became

inclusion in the church based on correct belief about him. Thus sits Justin at

the headwaters of Catholicism. He was the one who wrote the prolegomena to

every system of dogma, for he looked for salvation not in the coming kingdom

44 History of Dogma, 1: 99-114. 167; History of Dogma, 2: 169-230. 45 History of Dogma, 1:7.

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of God but in the present church, merited according to unimpeachable conduct

and impeccable knowledge.46

Harnack conceded that aspects of this development were probably

inevitable. The church’s death-match with heresy demanded a faith that was

philosophically credible and secured by the centripetal authorities of tradition

and conformity. Hence, by the second century a triplex of supposedly

apostolic norms came to be insisted upon: office, Scripture, and rule of faith.

These knelled the death of the enthusiastic worship, egalitarian leadership, and

fluidity of belief characteristic of apostolic Christianity, and buried its

practical and historical orientation to Jesus and eschatological hope in the

kingdom.47 Inevitable perhaps, but by no means indelible. By retracing the

fateful missteps taken in these early centuries, Harnack hoped to right the

wrong direction taken by the apologists.

Orr owned up to the stain on the church’s development left by the

unhealthy intellectualism and moralism of some apologists (52-3, 69).48 But he

conceded nothing to Harnack’s damning verdict of the second-century

church’s fatal misstep from the Temple to the Acropolis. Their attention to

“the fundamental articles of religion” rather than specifically Christian

doctrines was in keeping with their aim: to convince outsiders of particular

truths under dispute.49 But did they really believe nothing beyond the scope of

their treatises (49-51)? Even Justin, the very figure excoriated by Harnack for

having added a mere Christian veneer to natural religion, was convinced of

Christianity as revealed truth from God, in accord with but not dependent

upon reason (39, 44-54). As all truth derives from the Word, God’s revelation

in Christ transforms and renews whatever truth it encounters in the world at

large. “The creation of the world, e.g., is connected with the Logos who

46 History of Dogma, 2: 223-24. Hence his provocation that the only Gentile Christian in the second century who understood Paul was Marcion (History of Dogma, 1: 76-89). Harnack’s interpretation of Marcion was prepared by his earlier rehabilitation by Neander. See Gerhard May, “‘Ein ächter Protestant’: Markion in der Sicht August Neanders,” in Frömmigkeit unter den Bedingungen der Neuzeit: Festschrift für Gustav Adolf Benrath zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Reiner Braun and Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele (Darmstadt: Verlag der Hessischen Kirchengeschichtlichen Vereinigung, 2001), 261-266. 47 History of Dogma 1: 28, 39, 45, 131. 48 Compare to The Early Church, 39-52. 49 Harnack admitted as much: History of Dogma, 2: 169.

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historically became incarnate in Jesus Christ; the doctrine of immortality is

associated with the resurrection, and with Christian hopes; there is a

judgement, but it is Christ who judges, etc” (53).

In the Alexandrian school the tint of philosophy is admittedly heavy.

But it is much harder to spot blots of Hellenism on the pages of Irenaeus or

Tertullian (69). Further, Harnack’s claim that Gnosticism was a fast-tracked

form of the same Hellenization process that was ruining the church cannot be

sustained (55, 61-2). That Orr took the apologists’ claim to a faithful

conservation—an important word in the Scots’ theological vocabulary— of

the truth once delivered through canon, creed, and bishop with much less

suspicion than did Harnack let him pry apart orthodoxy’s modus operandi of

faithful continuity of tradition based on revelation from Gnosticism’s acute

theologizing from rational first principles (64-68).

It is crucial to observe that Orr was not simply quibbling with Harnack

over the extent of Hellenization in the formation of early Christian doctrine.

He wished also to legitimize Hellenization as proof of the church’s vitality and

of the transformative power of the gospel, albeit balanced by the

Christianization of every stratum of the church’s world. To do so required

some earnest “Hegeling” in order to underscore the unity of history in the

Spirit and the finite’s inherent receptivity to the divine. Imperial Rome’s

spiritual hunger, intellectual curiosity, and moral chaos showed it was

“longing for redemption,” argued Orr, similar to Dorner. Christianity

inevitably marched to victory because the human condition was, is, and

always will be primed for Christ (42-44). As the gospel began to leaven

society, it absorbed and transformed all that was good and true even as it

agitated other religions and philosophies. So of course Gnosticism bore some

resemblance to Christianity—it had to adjust itself to the waxing church.50 Of

course the pre-Nicene apologists presented the gospel as a new philosophy.

The second and third centuries were a golden age of philosophy: Vespasian

had made philosophers hirelings of the state; Marcus Aurelius consummated

the ideal of a philosopher-king. Why would the church, which was penetrating

50 Orr was following Baur’s interpretation of Gnosticism as proof of the internal power of Christianity in the empire during this era (56). See also Neglected Factors, 186-97 and The Early Church, 1-13.

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even the highest literary and intellectual circles, not garb itself in the

philosopher’s mantle so as to express the gospel (36-37)? Of course second-

century homiletics rang like the philosophers’ tradition of rhetorical

declaiming. But is it not plausible, asked Orr, that the empire’s intellectuals

were agitated to refine their craft by those true philosophers like Justin who

were not shy to preach the gospel on Mars Hill (48)?

Assessments of PD often point out that it cannot really be considered a

point-for-point rebuttal of Harnack’s extensive reconstruction of early church

history. Perhaps it would be more fair to realize that, although the basic points

of a counter-theory to the Hellenization thesis are raised in this lecture to spill

out over the next lectures, Orr did not always have to dispute Harnack fact for

fact.51 By shifting the category of the historical, he took over (with

qualifications) Harnack’s quiver of arguments for dogma as the growth of the

gospel on the soil of the Greeks to evidence the gospel’s “mighty internal

force of assimilation.”52 And that is the proof of life of any living organism.

[5.4.4] With the prolegomena in place, the development of dogma

could begin in earnest. In the third and fourth lectures (73-131), Orr

recapitulated the church’s long answer through the third and fourth centuries

to the first question to which its mind was turned: the Godhead. Dogmatic

closure was achieved at the close of the fourth century in the Nicene-

Constantinopolitan formula of the full and equal divinity of the Son and the

Spirit with the Father.53 The correlation between logical order and historical

sequence coursed through this epoch as a Ketzergeschichte. Heresy rudely

awakened the church’s mind to know what it had always believed about God

(73, 75).

First, the Monarchian controversy pressed the church to clarify how it

conceived of God’s essence and unity. Without having a perfect doctrine at

hand, the church knew it could not countenance solutions that emphasised the

divine monarchia at the expense of their age old worship of Christ as divine,

51 This complaint forgets that PD “was not intended for proficients, but for learners…” (vi), as well as the fact that it strictly focused only on those developments that directly touched the progress of dogma (e.g. 111). 52 Neglected Factors, 217. 53 See also The Christian View, 259-84.

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or secured the full divinity of Christ through a “modalist” understanding of

God’s being (88-102). Then, Arius’ contention that “there was a time when the

Son was not” forced the church to probe the Son’s divinity in relation to the

Father. The Arian controversy became the judgement of history on two

incompatible doctrines percolating amongst the orthodox like Origen in the

third century that simply had to collide at some point: the Son’s eternal

generation and identity of essence with God but—in order to protect the divine

unity—his subordination to the Father. The bitter conflict was eventually

resolved at the two great councils of the fourth century, Nicaea (325) and

Constantinople (381), in the sole solution that satisfied logic and the needs of

Christian experience, namely, that Jesus Christ was “very God of very God,

begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father” (112-14, 117-24).

The “circle of Trinitarian doctrine” could only be completed as a sequel to the

Arian controversy. The church embraced the full divinity and personality of

the Spirit as a corollary of its belief in the homoousion of the Son with the

Father, condemning Macedonius’s false pneumatology along with semi-

Arianism in 381 (124-31).

Orr plotted a prolonged dialectic of truth and falsehood—or better yet,

half-truth and half-truth—as necessary for the church to “think out” the Trinity

(105). That this evolving, often anguished deliberation terminated in the

correct decision is sure because history is the judgement of God. Orr tellingly

classified heresies as the losers of a divinely determined process of natural

selection: the Nazarenes were “cut off from the great developing body of

Gentile Christianity, and cramped by their environment…” until they became

extinct; the Ebionites suffered from “arrested development” and died off by

the fifth century (75); the Arians began with a high view of Christ, but the

logic of their position entailed a regress toward a base Unitarianism (117).

Logical error was likened to biological degeneracy and even conflated with

moral dissipation! Paul of Samosata was immoral and irreligious (99-100);

Arius was crafty and vain (108); Macedonius was violent and unscrupulous

(128).54

54 “The noble Athanasius,” however, “sought to conquer by argument, by persuasion, not by violence” (120-21). On the contrary!—see Rowan Williams, “Athanasius,” in RGG4 1, 870-73.

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The fact of ‘the survival of the fittest’ did not consecrate every facet of

the progress of dogma, however. Against the widespread interpretation “which

makes the majority of the Council belong to the Semi-Arian party, and

supposes that it was the Emperor’s will that forced on them the acceptance of

the homoousion formula,” Orr thought that the majority of bishops realized as

the council progressed that Athanasius was waging for the essence of faith,

and decided accordingly (117-19). Why would Orr exclude political

machinations from the triumph of orthodoxy at Nicaea if world history is a

divine process? It appears that his secessionist inheritance was qualifying his

philosophy of history—the baneful interference of the state in what had been a

“voluntary” church is repeatedly castigated (106, 120; also 196, 198).55 The

theologians of Erastian Germany could fuse state and church in the process of

dogmatic development but not a good UP churchman!

In contrast to Harnack, who had become entangled in controversy in

Germany over his support of a pastor who had removed the Apostles Creed

from his congregation’s baptismal liturgy—the so-called Schrempf Case—the

early church creeds remained for Orr the indelible foundation of the Christian

dogma of God.56 As such, he countered Harnack at every twist and turn of the

path of orthodox theologizing on God. The apologists and early theologians’

high Christology (what Harnack considered speculative) found its origin in the

Logos doctrine of John, not Philo, and the cosmic Christ of Paul, not Plato.

Orr agreed with Dorner that Justin and the apologists’ ultimate interest was not

speculative and cosmological as Harnack charged but “the Logos incarnate;

from this they moved back, with the New Testament, to the connection of the

Logos or Son with creation” (74, 76-87, 123-24). The connection between

cosmology and Christ needs to be underlined because it hints at Orr’s positive

understanding of the Hellenization of Christian belief. In a throwaway line

(directed at the Ritschlians) on the worth of the Alexandrian apologists, he

linked the logos Christology to history in such a way that legitimated the use

of philosophical concepts in the genesis of the dogma of the Trinity. “With all

55 See also The Early Church, 123-28. 56 Compare Orr, “Apostles Creed, The,” in ISBE 1, 204-206, to Harnack, “The Apostles Creed: An Historical Account with an Introduction and Postscript,” in H. Martin Rumscheidt, ed., Adolph von Harnack: Liberal Theology at its Height (London: Collins Liturgical, 1988), 299-303.

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its faults, I venture to think that the Alexandrian school had an ideal we do

well to cherish, and bore witness to a truth of no slight importance, viz., that

Christianity is the principle of transformation for all our humanity” (84). As

the gospel penetrated its Greco-Roman environment, the church came to own

and transformed all vestiges of the Logos in pagan philosophy in order to

articulate its traditional belief in God as Father, Son, and Spirit. This

fermentation may have been messy but, ultimately, it enabled a doctrine of

God to develop that faithfully conserved the church’s traditional belief in God

and resisted its complete subjugation by Hellenic philosophy.57

In analyzing the Council of Constantinople’s anathematizing of the

Macedonians’ denial of the Spirit’s deity, Orr convincingly argued for its

essentially relational rather than philosophical expression (130). Harnack’s

Hellenization thesis is yet again deemed generally unsustainable. Perhaps the

real issue at this juncture in his argument, however, is whether the Council’s

statement on the Spirit really completed the dogma of God in the sense that

Orr’s argument needs. We today would not be as hasty as a Victorian

evangelical to gloss over the controversial insertion of the filioque clause at

the Synod of Toledo in 589 (130-31). Is the dogma of the Spirit complete

without resolution between the western and eastern branches of the church on

this Trinitarian issue? And what of the widespread realization among latter

day theologians that the Spirit has been the neglected member of the Trinity?

It might have sufficed for Orr to appeal to the ongoing—even

delayed—realization of a dogmatic symbol in the life and thought of the

church. This is what others in his genus of Dogmengeschichte did and in fact

what he does with other dogmas in the final lecture. Then the dogma of the

Spirit could benefit from the debates between Joachim of Fiore and the

Dominicans in the thirteenth century or Luther and the Schwärmer in the

sixteenth, etc. But his concern to synchronize the historical and the logical

made him overeager to settle the dogma of the Spirit rather prematurely in the

fourth century.

57 E.g., the “relative Greek influence” in Origen’s impressive doctrine of God hindered a satisfactory account of the equality of the Son and Spirit with the Father.

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[5.4.5] The genius of Greek theology, wagered Orr, was its rapt

attention to the metaphysics of the Godhead. Yet baffling questions arise when

Christians begin to reflect upon themselves coram deo, questions which in

many ways are more vital because they touch the will and heart. “It is plain

that these questions could not be satisfactorily investigated till the general

doctrine of God had been firmly established—that, in logical order, they come

later than it. It is equally plain that till they had been raised, no satisfactory

progress could be made with either Christology or Soteriology.” In the fifth

century “the hour had come” for the church’s determination of a dogma of

humanity. On the ready ground of the Latin church, whose mindset was

distinguished from the Greeks by its less speculative and more practical

character, providence planted two great adversaries, Augustine and Pelagius,

to debate the human person as created and fallen (136-37).

The fifth lecture (133-70) largely concerned itself with Augustine as

the architect of Christian anthropology. The disparate and often superficial

thoughts of the fathers on original sin, the terrible bondage of the will, and the

need of divine assistance, were gathered up by Augustine and transformed into

a marvellously complete system of thought, vivified throughout by his own

pathos of sin and grace (138). The great African’s doctrine of predestination

remains problematic (162-70) but its diluted alternative, the so-called semi-

Pelagianism, utterly lacks logical integrity and was, accordingly, condemned

at the Council of Orange in 529 (143, 160-62). There is, moreover, a

“churchly side” of Augustine, marred by Cyprian’s ecclesiology as well as the

inherited doctrine of baptismal regeneration, which threatened the coherence

of his thought (141-45). It has nourished Rome’s tacit semi-Pelagianism. Yet

Augustine’s theology of humanity remains a “vast, epoch-making effort”

(138), the “doctrinal side” of which is Protestantism’s rightful inheritance.

Augustine was not Newman. “[W]e should greatly mistake,” opined

Orr, “that it was subjection to an external authority, and not inner experience,

and irresistible conviction of the truth itself, which really decided Augustine to

become a Christian, or gave his theology its distinctive colour” (142).

Ecclesiastical authority could not give him what he worked out through his

own spiritual turmoil and theological brilliance, and then gave back to the

church as a dogmatic achievement for the ages. This appeal to religious

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experience will later provide a crucial link in Orr’s wider argument for the

organic continuity of Protestantism with the early church. By locating the

essence of dogma in the record of Scripture and the church’s primal

experience of God and salvation rather than the letter of its formulations about

God and salvation, Orr can argue that the “best aspects” of Augustine were not

swallowed up by the semi-Pelagian medieval church but sustained the great

theologians—Bede, Anselm, Bernard, Aquinas, Bradwardine (162)—until the

Protestant Reformers properly balanced the spirit and the letter of this dogma.

[5.4.6] The sixth lecture (171-206) offers a lucid summary of the

Christological debates of the early church up to and including the great

ecumenical councils of the fifth, sixth, and eight centuries.58 Christology could

be approached via soteriology, as Anselm attempted. Logically fitting,

however, was the actual approach via the doctrine of God, after the fourth

century controversies had established the essential oneness of the Son and

Spirit with the Father but without probing how the union of the divine and

human in the person of the Redeemer was to be conceived. The theological

acrimony, political posturing, and even physical violence of this epoch should

not distract from the “real logic of the movement” as it did for urbane

rationalists of an earlier era like Gibbon. For the dogma of Christ could only

have been attained through a tempest of discernment, as solutions were

debated, discarded, or retained (173-75). This epoch climaxed in the definition

of the person of Christ offered by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Like

Harnack (whom Orr considered inconsistent on this point), Orr considered the

dogmatic symbol’s greater theological affinity with the Antiochian than

Alexandrian party proof that the church was not giving a philosophical

rationale of the incarnation but conserving its traditional belief in the mystery

of God-in-Christ (177, 190, 193). But that Orr held the Chalcedonian symbol

to be enduring again faced him against Harnack on the dogma that he

considered his generation’s supreme battleground.59

58 Compare to Orr’s treatment of the doctrine of the incarnation in The Christian View, 215-57. 59 Orr, “Some Recent Developments in Criticism and Theology,” PTR 5 (1907): 180.

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In tracing the logic of history through the church’s development of the

dogma of Christ, Orr again gave significant rein to a methodological dialectic.

Each failed attempt to hold together the divine and the human natures in a

single historical person had “its providential place and side of truth” to

contribute to the final dogma (178-79, 183). Apollinarianism defaulted into

docetism because it replaced the rational soul of Jesus with the divine Logos.

The ineradicable truth it protected was that the Logos “did not stand apart

from man, as something foreign to his essence, but is rather Himself the

archetype of humanity—has the potency of humanity eternally within

Himself”—a step toward recognition of the “inward kindredness of God to the

human soul” only achieved in the nineteenth century (180-81). The views of

Nestorius in the fifth century, which logically followed the church’s

condemnation of Apollinarius in the fourth century, discriminated between the

distinct natures of Christ but at forfeit of real incarnation for a mere

conjunction of the divine and the human in Christ (187-88). He was rightly

condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The slogan “of one nature of the

Logos incarnate” popular with Cyril of Alexandria’s triumphant party was

used recklessly by Eutyches and others to absorb the human into the divine

(189-94). The church’s mind could not rest with this option either.

Accordingly, a new council was convened in Chalcedon in 451 to resolve the

question of Christology. As with the dogma of the Trinity, Orr insisted the

dogma of Christ was not secured through the worldly “straws” of rivalry

between churchmen or patriarchies or the growing veneration for Mary as

theotokos but according to “the trend of theological development” that needed

a dialectic of one-sided truths championed by Alexandria and Antioch to find

resolution in a definition of the person of Christ as possessing two natures

without mixture, confusion, division, or separation (182).

The development of Christology does indeed lend itself well to the

heuristic deployment of a methodological dialectic. A less convincing aspect

of Orr’s argumentation is his artificial connection of the debate over the true

humanity of Christ to the dogma that logically and historically preceded it.

Augustine’s anthropology was predicated on a profound moral apprehension

of sin and grace; his dogma of humanity was connected to the doctrine of God,

yes, but more vitally with hamartiology and soteriology. But the Christological

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debates of the fifth century were concerned with the concept of human

personhood rather than ethical aspects of the human such as freewill and

“fallenness”. There may be good reasons why anthropology precedes

Christology in a theological system, but it strains the credibility of a logical-

historical progress of dogma in history to maintain that Augustine’s dogma of

humankind preceded the dogma of Christ.

Another aspect of this lecture that needs to be considered is how Orr’s

loyalty to the classical Christological dogma was being gently qualified by his

belief in the church’s ongoing realization of ancient dogmas. In this instance,

he held that the church needed to hear the Christological truth hushed at the

Council of Chalcedon but protected by the Alexandrian party, in the

Monophysite and Monothelite errors (194-205), and by the flawed Eucharistic

theology of the Lutherans. To its credit, nineteenth-century theology heard the

plea for a “richer view of the communion of the natures” in which the human

is thought of as receptive of the divine. Schleiermacher and Hegel opened up a

new avenue for Christology by breaking the weak link in the old Christology,

namely, considering “humanity and divinity as in a sense strange to each…”

The human is not annulled or robbed of its integrity by union with the divine

but is, in fact, completed by it (175, 193-95, 203; also 288, ftn. 1). Orr was not

wholly satisfied with nineteenth-century German Christology or so naïve to

think it solved all the unresolved issues of classical Christology. But like

Dorner, who heavily treads the footnotes of this lecture and whose own

mediation of Lutheran and Reformed Christologies was clearly a stimulus,60

he was optimistic that modern theology’s axiom of the “kindredness” of the

divine and the human could leave the older dogma of the two natures intact

and more truly realized (176; also 330-38).

[5.4.7] The soteriological epoch (lecture 7, 206-39) sprouted on the

providentially prepared soil of the juristic western European mind. The

objective dogma of the atonement was the Middle Ages’ achievement and

honours go especially to Anselm’s masterwork Cur deus homo.61 Anselm built

60 In this connection see especially Orr, “Enhypostasis,” in ERE 5, 309-310. 61 Orr thought that Abelard was wrestling with the atonement apart from knowledge of Cur deus homo—proof that the eleventh-century church was being tarried by the Spirit to

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upon the established dogma of Christ as God and human as well as

Augustine’s deep grasp of human sin to reach heights not yet attained in the

church’s theologizing about salvation: “what there is in the character of God

which requires Him to react against sin in the form of punishment, and under

what conditions the forgiveness of sin is possible” (222). If the form of his

argument borrowed from some faulty categories “from the sphere of private

rights” peculiar to his age, the essence of his argument, that Christ’s death was

a necessary, propitiatory sacrifice for sin, was an achievement for the ages

(223). It would be ably refined by Aquinas and the scholastics, and

definitively determined through the Reformers’ trembling apprehension of sin

and grace (210, 231-34).

That the church dogmatized the atonement only in the Middle Ages

presents a problem, Orr admitted, even as he trumpeted this correlation of the

logical order of doctrine with the history of dogma as “a new proof of the

general soundness of my theory” (216). According to evangelicals,

Christianity is a religion of redemption: how could the church not have a

dogma of atonement in the hand until a millennium after Calvary? Further,

does the early church’s understanding of the death of Christ as a ransom paid

to Satan really point to Anselm’s satisfaction theory? Orr doubted that the

‘ransom theory’ of the atonement really was the predominant theory of the

early church, and plundered the apostolic fathers and the early theologians for

citations regarding the “blood of Christ” as a vicarious sacrifice (211-20).

More to the point: “On no subject is it more necessary to distinguish between

doctrine as it is held in the immediacy of faith, and the examination and

discussion which result in giving that doctrine scientific shape” (211). The

rudiments of the dogma of the atonement were in fact in place in the copious

theologizing on the death of Christ before the Middle Ages, but latently, as the

religious experience that Christ’s cross had a propitiatory effect that is the

ground of God’s gracious dealing with sinners. It found a perverse reflection

too. As Dorner had pointed out, the ransom theory is a grotesque witness to

divine justice (217); even the Roman mass evidences that the church knows in

its heart the Lamb who took away the sin of the world even if its mind failed

dogmatize this topic (229-30). This is false: see M. T. Clanchy, Abelard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 282-83.

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to grasp the full consequences of the cross (219-20). Thus could Anselm

himself claim Cur deus homo as not providing a new doctrine but a clear

statement of what has always been believed (211).

[5.4.8] The problem of historical continuity in regard to what he called

(like Thomasius) “subjective soteriology”, that is to say, the application of

atonement, looms up again in the eighth lecture (241-75) and requires all of

Orr’s dexterity to preserve the integrity of his argument for the progress of

dogma. “[E]very doctrine…has its ‘hour’—the period when it emerges into

individual prominence, and becomes the subject of exhaustive discussion,”

and the sixteenth century was the moment when the positive preparation

provided by the dogmas of sin and objective atonement coincided with the

negative state of the medieval church to drive hearts and minds back upon the

free grace of God in Christ (243-44, 256). The questions being raised in this

century in independent centres of reform clearly show how the Spirit was

awakening the church to the good news that sinners are made righteous solely

through the work of Christ, appropriated by faith rather than works (244-45).

But was the great Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone that

arose in this theological turmoil a novelty as the Council of Trent charged?

Orr considered the explanations traditionally offered by Protestants to defend

Luther’s theological breakthrough. Yes, Scripture teaches justification by faith

alone. But to make this the sole basis of the argument would wreck his case

for organic continuity (245). Yes, there was in all likelihood an “evangelical

chain of witnesses” holding out for free grace in Christ at the peripheries of

the medieval church—and all honour to them (250)! Yet Orr did not subpoena

them. The organism of Christian truth requires tangible continuity of dogma.

At the same time it was inadmissible that the Roman church had not gone

“seriously astray in its doctrinal and practical apprehension of the divine

method of the sinner’s salvation.” Especial blame should be laid upon “the

sacramentarian principle” that emerged early in the church’s history and

worked itself out logically in a hazy doctrine of justification as the making of

the sinner righteous through a sacramental apparatus rather than as a

declaration of the sinner’s righteousness through Christ’s death and

resurrection (246, 248).

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Yet the Reformers’ attitude to early church tradition, as well as their

recovery of the radical Augustinian doctrines of sin and grace (254-56),

sustain Orr’s conviction that the Reformation provoked no real rupture with

the past. Protestantism stands in direct continuity with what was deepest and

most vital in the theology and piety of the past, and was “its legitimate

outcome and vindication” (246-47). His argument hung on an appeal to the

“religious self-estimate,” in this case the consciousness of sovereign and

radical grace that was always present in the church’s deeper life and most

prescient theology but not explicated in its officially sanctioned doctrines,

decrees, and cult, indeed, sometimes even suppressed by it (251). “[S]aintly

souls,” finding the sanctioned penitential machinery and official doctrine of

justification in the medieval church insufficient to relieve guilt, sought

comfort in “the fountain-head of all mercy in the grace of God in Jesus

Christ,” tacitly affirming the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith in

spite of their formal theology (252).

Orr nabbed the notion of the “religious self-estimate” from Ritschl,

although it owed its parentage to Schleiermacher and found kinship with the

neo-Lutheran and mediating theologians’ attempt to unfold doctrine from the

comprehensive experience of faith. It provides the copestone to his argument.

The yawning chasm in the late medieval church between the consciousness of

utter dependency upon the grace of God in Christ and the quasi-Pelagian cult

and theology became so acute that resolution could only be found by

conforming doctrine to the root experience of grace. “…[T]rue breach of

continuity would have been to adhere, as the Tridentine Fathers did, to the

letter of Catholic dogma against the consciousness of salvation by grace alone,

with which that dogma stood in contradiction” (254). After the sixteenth

century, Protestantism, not Romanism, is the trunk of the Christian organism,

rooted in the apostolic testimony and infused with the living sap of the

religious consciousness of the past church.

[5.4.9] In the ninth lecture (277-308) Orr reviewed the religious

trajectories sprung by the Reformation: intra-Lutheran debates over

Christology (286-90); Reformed theological reflection on the doctrines of

election and the covenants (290-304); the development of deism, pietism, and

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rationalism in the wake of the Reformation’s “establishing of the principle of

private judgement” in place of churchly authority (285-86, 304-8).

While the vast territory traversed gives the ninth lecture a touristic feel,

the train of the original argument for a progress of dogma is maintained, which

set Orr on a final collision course with Harnack. He strongly disagreed with

Harnack’s understanding of dogma as something peculiar to the religious and

intellectual context of the first four centuries of the church. This had let

Harnack terminate the history of dogma in the sixteenth century so as to

underscore the distance of the “genius” of Protestantism from a dogmatic

conception of Christianity (see 4.3.1).62 Orr maintained that evangelical

theology stands upon the dogmatic attainments of the earlier epochs of the

church (279-80, 283). Even if no new dogma has been formulated since the

Reformation the development of dogma has not ceased. Not only is a dogma

of ‘the last things’ a desideratum, the flurry of confessions in the post-

Reformation era shows providence moving the church to take stock of the

progress of dogma (281). “[T]he Church had now the whole range of doctrine

before it, and could view the development from the commencement of its

close” (284). Confessions record the church explicating as a systematically

ordered organism of thought the unity of belief it has always known in the

depths of experience. Orr strikes the same note as “the scientific ideal”

[wissenschaftliche Ideal] of Kliefoth and Thomasius, which held that a final

step in the formation of a dogmatic symbol was an ongoing balance of system,

finesse of expression, and fullness of cultic and liturgical consequence.63 The

systematic expression of dogma which began in earnest in the post-

Reformation era was and is, he considered, a necessary and invaluable

component of the progress of dogma. And the fact that the great confessions of

the Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches remain largely

unadulterated and still authoritative is evidence both of their quality and the

organic continuity of Christian thought over the ages (284-85), wrote Orr,

glossing over perhaps some the major confessional differences in his

insistence on evangelical doctrinal consensus.

62 Harnack exempts the Roman dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854). 63 See Grahl, “Verklärung—Die Konzeption der Heilsgeschichte bei Theodor Kliefoth,” 28-32.

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[5.4.10] “This word ‘traditional’ does not alarm me,” Orr boasted

before the 1907 assembly of the Evangelical Alliance.64 Upon arriving at the

final lecture (309-54) of PD his traditionalism seems indisputable. Yet his

treatment of the last things not only lodges a hint of doubt about his

traditionalism, it threatens to unravel his tight case for the logical-historical

progress of dogma. It is not his formal treatment of eschatology that warrants

this judgement. Orr arrived at the doctrine of the last things toward the end of

the lecture fully out of breath and offered little by way of substance apart from

addressing Victorian squeamishness with the doctrine of hell (345-52).

Eschatology proper seems to be here a sidebar to far more central undertaking:

recapitulating the entire development of dogma from an eschatological

perspective.65

This appears to mean—and it must be noted that Orr’s thinking

throughout this lecture is uncharacteristically vague, almost as if he trembled

to systematize his thoughts for fear of what might happen—that with the

conclusion of the progress of dogma creeping close, a measured and

constructive revisiting of Christian fundamentals is possible. (The owl of

Minerva flies only at dusk?) Orr admitted the theological turmoil of his time

was unsettling. Yet he remained assured that the organism of dogma will

never be uprooted. The sure law of history will bring orthodoxy through this

stormy century of questions and criticisms with its foundations strengthened

and its edifice embellished (317-18, 352-53). “With God on our side, history

behind us, and the unchanging needs of the human heart to appeal to, we need

tremble for the future of neither” (353-54).

What distinguished this task from confessionalization was the

nineteenth century’s predestined place in the development of dogma. Enter

Christology. The theological renaissance of the nineteenth century has made

possible a view of the history of dogma as a unified organism growing toward

its appointed destiny in Christ: Schleiermacher’s influential definition of

64 Orr, “Evangelical Principles in the Bible,” in Maintaining The Unity. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference and Diamond Jubilee Celebration of the Evangelical Alliance. Held in London, July 1907 (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1907), 150. 65 Stephen Williams’ perceptive introduction to the Regent College edition of PD is the only assessment I am aware of that detects the path Orr appears to be opening up.

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Christianity as the religion in which all is referred back to Christ; modern

theology’s invaluable apprehension of the created receptiveness of the finite

and the human for the infinite and the divine; and Kant’s fecund

“conception…of the world as a teleological moral system, with God as its

author, and the Kingdom of God as its end” (312-15, 319, 330-38). Orr

revisited the progress of dogma to reread each step in God’s purpose for the

world as grounded in Christ as its apex and telos—an eschatological insight

made possible only in his century.

Orr left this ambitious proposal in draft form, although suggestive

leads are not lacking.66 In prolegomena (319-23), for example, everything

should refer explicitly to Christ—but not in the reductionist fashion of the

Ritschlians. As the incarnation reveals God’s purpose for the world is to be

gathered up into Christ (Eph. 1:10), Christ is the answer to all human longings

and strivings. Apologetics, accordingly, should seek points of contact with

other religions and philosophies. With the God-man as the ultimate disproof of

the “hard antitheses” between the divine and the created, the supernatural and

the natural, the church should not shy away from identifying analogies

between God’s special revelation and his continuous operations in nature and

history.

To take another example, the notes of divine immanence and the divine

fatherhood that the Hegelians and Ritschlians sound with indiscriminate

universality can, in fact, enrich, the dogma of God (323-27) if cast through

teleology, specifically, the gradual bringing of sons and daughters into the

kingdom of God. The old Calvinist shibboleth of divine election will find a

second lease on life in this teleological conception of Christianity (162-70,

291-95). “There is a sentence somewhere in Lange’s Dogmatics which acutely

says—‘Election presides at the making of its objects’” (169). Election

evidences God’s immanence in history, his raising up individuals and peoples

to be “centres of influence” to effect the spread of the transforming presence

of Christ.67 Orr expected the remedial dogma of the atonement (338-45) to be

complemented by the modern accent on the organic solidarity of the body with

66 This is pursued in The Christian View (summarized on pages 32-36). 67 Orr’s criticism of the Reformed doctrine of election is repeated in “Calvinism,” in ERE 3, 146-155.

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its crucified and resurrected Head, so as to cleave the death of Christ to God’s

original goal for the cosmos to be unified with him through the incarnation of

the Son. In spite of the perils for orthodoxy posed by nineteenth-century

thought, Orr’s ledger for his century’s theology records a net gain for dogma

(335)—this, from one reproved as a “diehard”!68

This is daring theologizing for evangelical Presbyterianism. But a

sense of regret for grand theological vistas opened but left unexplored lingers

over PD.69 At one point Orr whispered the possibility that the dogma of the

person of Christ might become the one organizing principle of the organism of

dogma, even though it would undermine his case for the progress of dogma

(336-7). He admitted his thesis would be also overthrown if the Ritschlians

succeeded in persuading theology to make the kingdom of God the

encompassing category for dogma (23), demurring: “the time is not yet ripe

for making it the one and all-inclusive notion in theology.”70 And yet, it would

seem that the kingdom of God, which he treated rather fleetingly in The

Christian View and not at all in PD, actually contours his understanding of the

teleological and Christological shape of history. It is worthwhile, if somewhat

messy, to excavate this subterranean role of the kingdom in his thinking

because it expands his meagre dogma of the last things in startling fashion.

Orr came out swinging at the Ritschlians for isolating Christ’s

preaching of the kingdom from the person of the preacher. The coming

kingdom was not only the central theme of the preaching of the historical

Christ, it is Christ’s present transformation of the world into the kingdom of

God. Marshalling Schleiermacher, neo-Lutheran and mediating theologians

for support, he defined the kingdom of God as a “new life proceeding from

Christ” that gradually permeates and transforms individuals and society.

Against the Ritschlians, Orr insisted on the kingdom’s reality as the rule of the

risen and ascended Christ. Against their wish to make all doctrines fit under

the aegis of the kingdom—which advertently excises all doctrines not explicit

in the preaching of the historical Christ—he argued that the “true place of the

idea of the kingdom of God in theology is as a teleological conception. It

68 E.g. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, 315. 69 Scorgie (51) comes to the same conclusion regarding The Christian View. 70 The Christian View, 353. For what follows see 36, 351-61. See also the overlooked article, “About Church and Sacraments,” The United Presbyterian Magazine 17 (1900): 62-65.

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defines the aim and purpose of God in creation and redemption.” The kingdom

is the gradual transformation of the world toward God’s cosmic end: “the

unity of all things natural and spiritual in Christ.” As such, the sundry

processes of world history find their point of reference and goal in the

kingdom, and Orr cannot help but add that the remarkable conditions of the

nineteenth-century likely “together portend some striking development of the

kingdom of God which shall cast all others into the shade—a crisis perhaps,

which shall have the most profound effect upon the future of humanity.”71

When we consider that the immanent law of history finds its terminus

in the eschatological kingdom a few aspects of the argument of PD become

somewhat more solid. First, the fundamental unity of the history of dogma

with the processes of world history is underscored. Second, the historian of

dogma must view the subject matter with an eye to its end: that Christ will be

all in all. Orr’s cursory recension of the progress of dogma in light of the

union of the human and divine that finds its centre and consummation in Jesus

Christ was, in fact, such a venture. Finally, it points to his bold anticipation of

the shape of the dogma of the last things. Alan Sell pounced on the last of

Orr’s Dogmenkreisen: “the eschatological debate of the late nineteenth century

hardly has the weight that Orr’s other ‘moments’ have: we can perhaps see

this from our vantage point more clearly than he could from his.” 72 This

criticism, however, fails to detect the implicit ‘kingdom thinking’ of the final

lecture.

But the Church has another and yet more difficult task before it, if it is to retain its ascendancy over the minds of men. That task is to bring Christianity to bear as an applied power on the life and conditions of society…in this sense to bring in the Kingdom of God among men. I look to the twentieth century to be an era of Christian Ethic even more than of Christian theology (353).

For Orr, eschatology is clearlz less about heaven and hell than the

transformation of society into the kingdom of God.

Victorian church historians have long recognized the so-called social

question, that is to say, the relationship of Christianity to culture, as the

burning issue for Scottish churches from 1870 onward. Industrialization’s

71 The Christian View, 360-61. 72 Sell, D&DF, 146.

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spawn of poverty, irreligion, and social vice challenged Presbyterian churches

to consider how to leaven the seething cities with the gospel.73 Orr’s

confidence that ethics would preoccupy the future church was not just

conservative smugness that the dogmas of the faith were settled for good. It

was the clarion call of an evangelical cultural Protestant to realize the kingdom

of God among ‘the dark satanic mills’ of industrial Britain.

As a final point, Orr’s ethicizing of the dogma of the last things makes

explicable (thought not wholly excusable) the utter absence of ecclesiology in

his schema—about which Sell rightly grumbled. By defining the church “as

the visible expression of this kingdom in the world…”74 the church’s

preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments, and working for the

healing of the nations aims to transform the world into Christ’s kingdom. Does

Orr’s subsuming of eschatology under “kingdom” rather than “church” owe

something to the reticence of his secessionist denomination to ascribe too

much civil and political power to the institutional church as the agent of

Christ? This was certainly not a problem in the mediating theologians and neo-

Lutherans’ similar kingdom vision for society.75 In any case, the dogma of the

last things, which first appeared in PD as trite and peripheral, becomes, when

linked to his scattered, embryonic thoughts on the teleological and

Christological nature of history, the capstone to the development of the

organic system of dogma. It functions in PD as ecclesiology did for neo-

Lutherans,76 as the speculum in which the entire development of the organism

of Christian truth can be seen anew in the brightened light of its goal: “Him

gathering up all created things into one in Himself,” as Orr put it in his

enthusiastic assessment of Irenaeus’ theology (70).

73 Welch, Protestant Thought, 2: 212-65. For the Scottish context see Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk, 110-53, Witherington, “The Churches in Scotland, c. 1870- c. 1900: Towards a New Social Conscience?”; Brown, “Reform, Reconstruction, Reaction: The Social Vision of Scottish Presbyterians c. 1830-c. 1930”; Johnston McKay, “The Kingdom of God and the Presbyterian Churches’ Social Theology and Action c. 1880-c.1914,” (PhD Diss., University of Edinburgh, 2007), 240-328. 74 The Christian View, 358. 75 See F. W. Graf, “Protestantische Theologie und die Formierung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,” in Profile des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus, Vol. 1, ed. F. W. Graf (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1991), 11-54. 76 Providence had prepared nineteenth-century theology to “place the doctrine of the church at the middle point of dogmatic development, from which the whole Christian life can be viewed” (Kliefoth, Einleitung, 89).

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5.5. Conclusion James Orr’s PD fittingly caps this study of the troubling of the old

doctrinal commitments of Presbyterians by the new historical sensitivity of the

Victorians. The Reformed and evangelical lifeblood of his tradition courses

through PD but its argument has been shaped too by the fresh intellectual

insights of Scottish Presbyterianism’s nineteenth-century environment, and

lines of critical adaption are also prominent. That Orr was able to work a vast

amount of historical material into a compact and credible argument is no small

feat. It testifies to his theological acumen and his passion to commend

Christianity to an age wracked by disbelief. Within his larger labour of

commending Christianity as whole, that is to say, as worldview grounded on

Christ, the study of the history of dogma plays an important part. Indeed, it

carries a sense of apologetic urgency: to root the church’s confidence in its

future progress in concrete continuity with its past rather than in suspect

intellectual trends of the present. “Christianity is, in short, its best apology.

The unfolding of it as in its essence embracing a view of God, the world, and

man, and bringing a provision for man’s spiritual needs, in which both mind

and heart can rest with fullest satisfaction, is the surest certification of its

divine original” (322-23). Orr unfolded his century’s dominant category of

history, organic growth,77 as a unified movement of Spirit and fused it with

several variables typical of his era of Victorian thought to achieve an

irreducibly nineteenth-century history of dogma, capable of affirming the

church’s progress in history along with the stability of its fundamental beliefs

over history.

A few of PD’s peculiar features beg for brief comment by way of

critical appreciation. First, Orr held together the religious authorities of

Scripture, tradition, and religious experience as sources of doctrine more

adeptly than might appear at first glance. That Scripture is the ultimate source

of doctrine is axiomatic, of course. But like most evangelicals of his era Orr

knew that the easy bridge between the Bible and systems of doctrine traversed

by the Protestant Orthodox and their descendants like Cunningham had been 77 Stöve, “Zeitliche Differenzierung und Geschichtsbewußtein in der neuzeitlichen Historiographie,” 30-37.

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detonated by Newman and German theology. His tradition’s high valuation of

doctrine and its sole sourcing in Scripture could now only be justified within a

theory of doctrinal development. As such, while he was bullish about the

doctrinal nature of Christianity he did not consider revelation as exclusively

propositional or the Bible as a storehouse of doctrines. There was a “sum of

truths…involved” (not contained) in the Biblical revelation that the church

needed to discern and unfold as doctrine (8). Like Rainy, he located the

genesis of doctrine in the church’s “thinking out” of the facts of revelation

recorded in the Bible, although his interest lay less with the beginning of the

process than its climax. And precisely here, “Hegeling” opened up for him a

dizzyingly wide vista: a system of doctrine developing over the centuries of

the church’s life in “genetic connection with the organic past” (329), and yet

manifesting an astounding adaptability and sensitivity to each age—and all

this under divine provision. Church tradition took on for him an aureole not

seen in Protestant theology since the Reformers’ appeal to the fathers.

It must be quickly added, however, that Orr’s idealist presuppositions

worked at the very same time to silence tradition as a ressourcement for

contemporary dogmatics and devotion.78 In contrast to Rainy, who lodged a

lonely objection to the Victorian cult of progress, and accordingly, thought

past theology might be dusted off to the present church’s benefit (see 3.3.6),

Orr’s scheme of the logical-historical progress of dogma treated tradition as a

fait accompli. Once a given epoch has accomplished its God given task, its

work was done. Lastly, insistence by Schleiermacher, Dorner, Newman, and

others that doctrine was second-order reflection on the fact of religious faith

reverberates throughout PD. This should dissuade from breezy

characterizations of Orr as a rationalist. Not only does dogma always resonate

with the converted heart, in some key instances, religious experience actually

carried certain dogmas in utero until their divinely decreed due date.

The sort of equilibrium Orr sought between Scripture, tradition, and

experience needs to be underlined because some of his interpreters presume

from his friendship with Princeton Seminary that he thought similarly of the

78 E.g., Irenaeus is singled out (70) as holding much promise for contemporary theology.

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nature of revelation and development of doctrine.79 This assumption is wrong.

If Orr’s attention to the propositional nature of revelation is overwrought, his

overall position is not far away from touching upon every aspect of McGrath’s

helpful taxonomy of doctrine as truth claim, interpretation of narrative,

interpretation of experience, and social demarcation.80 Indeed, the great

advantage of these nineteenth-century, idealist-wrought versions of salvation

history, whether Hofmann’s (see 3.3.3) or now here Orr’s genus of

Dogmengeschichte, was their ability to mute the dissonance between the

nineteenth-century religious authorities by integrating the record of salvation

(Bible) with the appropriation of salvation (experience and doctrine) as a

unified spiritual history. But given the Bible’s historic stance in Protestantism

as the Word of God over against piety and tradition, the cost of this advantage

must be considered high indeed.

Second, that Christ occupied the centre of Orr’s theology in itself is not

remarkable—he held such a place of honour for all major nineteenth-century

theologians. How he occupied the centre, however, reflects fascinating

changes in Victorian evangelicalism. Orr was one of the more capable

evangelicals seeking to broaden the traditional remedial focus of his heritage,

not by displacing Christ at the centre but by expanding him.81 Christianity

never ceased being for him a religion of redemption mediated through

personal faith in the Saviour. But now the scope of redemption has reached

beyond the pious individual to the social organism, and redemption transforms

the creature rather than merely forgives it. Hence a ‘Christian view of God and

the world as centring upon the incarnation’. Accordingly, Christ, whose role in

the development of dogma was conspicuously absent at the instigation of this

study in Newman and Cunningham (as also in Rainy), took over a prominent

role in Orr’s argument for the progress of dogma. He heard the pleas of

Ritschlians like Bruce for theology to be Christianized by closer attention to

79 This is especially true of Oldham, who lumps all nineteenth-century evangelicals under the views of Warfield and Carl Henry, and to a lesser extent Toon. 80 McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine, 35-80. 81 See the study of Abraham Kuyper by Peter Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Also important in this regard was the evangelical Baptist Augustus H. Strong’s widely read Systematic Theology, 3 vol., rev. ed. (Philadelphia: The Judson P, 1907). See the fine study by Grant Wacker, Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (1985; reprint, Macon: Mercer UP, 2005).

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the historical Jesus and his preaching of the kingdom of God; his

Christianizing of the origin and development of dogma, however, hearkened

back to the Vermittlungstheologie’s understanding of the kingdom of God as

the ontological rather than merely ethical presence of Christ.82

Another way in which Christ holds the centre of the process of

doctrinal development is in how all heresy and error find ultimate reference to

him. Schleiermacher was favourably cited: “The natural heresies in

Christianity are the Docetic and the Nazaretic, the Manichaean and Pelagian”

(72). Modern theologians were accordingly categorized under old heresies:

Rothe and the Ritschlians repeat the Monarchian heresy that gives Christ the

predicate ‘God’ in a merely honorary way (89, 101-2), Schleiermacher and

even Dorner court the Sabellian heresy by treating the Logos as a mode of

revelation rather than the personal Son (95). But this seems contrived for

apologetic gain rather than for substantial argument. Given the importance for

Orr’s favourite theologian, Dorner, of the idea of Christianity’s ‘natural

heresies’, as well as his own theological suppositions, it is somewhat

surprising that he did not pursue this idea with more rigour.

Third, I resist the temptation to criticize Orr’s thesis for “a true law and

logic” that drove the development of dogma (9) simply because its smacks of

idealism. W. H. C. Frend charged that the discipline of church history was in

the thralls of ideological captivity when Harnack burst on the scene in the

1870s.83 The past two chapters have made clear, however, that the Ritschlians,

no less than Orr, held philosophical assumptions about history that directed

their steps through the field of the history of doctrine. There are serious

problems with Orr’s “Hegeling” on historical and theological grounds, but it

should at least be appreciated how he sought to employ the concepts of

development and evolution consistent with their actual philosophical or

scientific principles—this, in sharp contrast to the broad-church bleating for

82 Compare to Dorner: “Christianity is the higher unity, and thus the end, of heathenism and Judaism, through its fundamental idea and fundamental fact—the absolute divine Incarnation in Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, the source of which is the God-man and the aim the realization of the kingdom of God” (A System of Christian Doctrine, 2:180). 83 W. H. C. Frend, “Church Historians of the Early Twentieth Century: Adolph von Harnack (1851-1930),” JEH 52 (2001): 85-86.

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doctrinal revision in the name of development.84 In effect, he stole away

Victorian-era liberal theology’s greatest weapon against traditional

Christianity, its appeal to progress in theology. Because the church’s dogmatic

system was organically continuous and logically determined, it could not be

discarded without killing the creature.

If anything, Orr’s “Hegeling” can be criticized for not being as

thoroughgoing as it should have been. To an extent, PD’s admirable leanness

is achieved by a Procrustean historiography. It is not clear why Orr constantly

crimped the historical narrative to conceal or avoid non-intellectual aspects in

the progress of dogma. A real benefit to emphasising dogmatic history as one

movement of Spirit would be that the historian of dogma could draw equally

upon political, economic, and social factors to illuminate the history of

theological ideas in a manner amenable to modern historiography. One does

not need to agree with every aspect of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s work to

appreciate his contribution at this very point, nor to see the promise inherent in

his thinking for converting contemporary church history from its

methodological atheism.85

Earnest criticism of PD best starts at the end. Simply put, Orr’s

“dogma of eschatology” crystallizes all the problems of “Hegeling” in the

history of dogma. Hegel has always tempted thinkers to the arrogance of

“ending” history. Whoever takes such presumptuous place at the end

effectively transcends the flow of history. It comes as no surprise, then, that

Orr surveyed the logical-historical progress of dogma Micaiah-like in the very

throne room of Yahweh (I Kings 22)—a prospect that rendered the sort of

self-awareness enjoined by Rainy to the locality of the present interpreter of

revelation applicable only to past mortals.

84 E.g. note the vague appeal to ‘the progress of Spirit’ by the C of S broad churchman and theologian John Tulloch in Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth Century, 4, 334-35. A similar attempt to liberalize Reformed dogma from inside the C of S, but more influenced by Schweizer than Hegel, was William Hastie’s The Theology of the Reformed Church in its Fundamental Principles (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1904). 85 E.g. Pannenberg, “Hermeneutic and Universal History,” in Basic Questions in Theology, Vol. 1, trans. George Kehm (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 96-136. A key work from a Pannenbergian perspective, unfortunately not translated, is Ekkehard Mühlenberg, Epochen der Kirchengeschichte, 3rd ed. (Wiesbaden: Quelle & Meyer, 1993).

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Further, by holding the end of dogma nigh, does Orr finally default to a

merely logical view of the development of the organism of dogma? “[The

church] is complete in doctrine, she is incomplete in the consequences of

doctrine,” a prominent neo-Lutheran wrote in a vein not so far removed from

Cunningham and the Princeton theologians.86 This dogmatically conservative

genus of Dogmengeschichtsschreibung appeared to feel secure with the idea of

the historical progress of dogma only if the momentum of development had

been substantially exhausted before it arrived in their own epoch. Orr lived at

the heyday of Protestant missions, when many were awaiting the world

churches to make a positive mark upon Christian life and belief,87 yet never

once did he seem to contemplate the prospect that the spread of the gospel to

the ends of the earth might ripple through the church’s system of dogma.

The question raised earlier of this “Hegeling” genus of

Dogmengeschichte was this: when the history of dogma is framed through the

lens of classical Christology, is the church’s system of dogma “sinless”?

Unlike other members of his genus, Orr did not analogize the church or dogma

to the divine-human nature of Christ so as to transubstantiate either. In his

case, though, the locus of the kingdom of God sacralised the history of dogma

in everything but name. The eschatological goal of the kingdom—the growing

unity of all things in Christ—was interpreted through the category of organic

becoming, which had the effect of consecrating the various historical

processes that had created modern Christendom. It seems that Orr was not

clearly distinguishing between teleology and eschatology.

In this regard, it is worth observing how at the hands of many liberal,

neo-Lutheran, and mediating German theologians of this era, the Lutheran

doctrine of the physical ubiquity of the ascended Christ was coupled with

absolute idealism’s understanding of divine becoming in history to enflesh the

presence of Christ in the progressive movements of world history.88 In contrast

to much of the popular religious opinion in the late Victorian and Edwardian

86 Wilhelm Löhe (1808-72), founder of the Missouri-Synod Lutheran church, cited in Hornig, “Lehre und Bekenntnis im Protestantismus,” 179-80. In this regard see James S. McClanahan, Jr., “Benjamin B. Warfield: Historian of Doctrine in Defence of Orthodoxy, 1881-1921,” (PhD diss., Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1988). Warfield enthusiastically reviewed PD in PRR 13 (1902): 486-491. 87 See Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, 91-131. 88 See Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 192-93.

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era, Orr explicitly disavowed collating the Christianization of society with the

fullness of the kingdom that would come upon Christ’s parousia.89 Yet it is

noteworthy that he, along with all the Vermittlungstheologen of Reformed

background, was swayed over to the Lutheran Christology. By not carefully

locating the absence of Christ in his heavenly, bodily-circumscribed state,

Christ becomes bodily present in the growing kingdom, i.e., in various

historical processes of renewal and transformation. None of this is followed

through by Orr in a manner that should raise hackles—his treatment of the

kingdom of God was merely in an appendix in The Christian View—save in

its implications for the question we are considering of the infallibility of the

history of the church. Although Orr himself did not make the connection

explicit, his dogma of eschatology lays bare his thought process: the church’s

end tends to the consecration of its progress. The history of dogma, thereby,

becomes implicitly sacrosanct and the system inviolable—a “victorious

progress” and a “rapid march of the gospel to victory.”90

The bugbear of the metaphysical consecration of historical events or

processes long held against Hegel is, then, a very real problem in PD. If

Cunningham made doctrine too divine by too close proximity to holy

Scripture, Orr made it too divine by too close proximity to holy history. The

result is a reflux of Cunningham’s muscular dogmatism and unflinching

confidence in the triumph of orthodoxy, albeit secured by means that would

have the FC father rolling in his grave. Under Orr’s aegis, there is simply no

margin for error in church history. Does the very nature of conservative

“Hegeling” breed this deficiency? Kliefoth, Thomasius, Dorner and now Orr

shrank from going as far as Baur in making heresy and falsehood absolutely

integral to the dialectical course of dogmatic development. Within this weaker

methodological rather than ontological dialectic, sin remained accidental to the

89 The Christian View, 354-55. For good overview of European religious opinion at this time see Brian Stanley, “The Outlook for Christianity in 1914,” in Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 8: World Christianity c.1815-c.1914, ed. Sheridan Gilley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 593-600. 90 In Neglected Factors (70, 84; see also 34, 113-28, 201-2) and The Early Church (37) Orr favoured literary and archaeological evidence for the church’s rapid spread through the Empire and ballooning influence among the dispossessed but especially the powerful. He had an almost obsessive interest on recent excavations of catacombs in Rome that yielded dubiously high estimates of four million buried Christians before the time of Constantine! Dorner had similarly spoken of the “undisturbed assurance of victory” and “grand victorious career” of dogma (of Christ) (82-83).

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genesis of dogma and the history of the church in general. But one need not

pay the steep indemnity required by the dialectic of absolute idealism to find

sin riddling the development of doctrine. Nor does one need to maintain a “fall

theory” of church history to take with the utmost seriousness the nature of the

church as simul justus et peccator, which finds it, in its “falleness”, stumbling

into error of belief even as it seeks to go forward in truth.

“There is a theory about the history of dogma once impressively put

forward by Thomasius of Erlangen and Vilmar of Marburg,” Barth observed,

but now generally abandoned as obsolete, according to which each period of history is to be compared with a particular stage in the development of a living organism. Each age seems to have, so to speak, thrust upon itself and suggested to itself in a certain necessary sequence the special knowledge and the special confession of a quite definite side of revealed truth.91

Barth rejected this theory as one of natural theology’s insidious tendrils. And

yet he admitted that it maintained several important truths his peers were in

danger of overlooking in their mad scramble to break ranks with the

nineteenth century. “Every period of the Church does in fact want to be

understood as a period of the Church…” The history of doctrine manifests real

bonds of unity spanning time and place, as well as an abiding concern to

wrestle with the burning issues of each unique age in light of the one

confession of faith. Credo ecclesiam.

Clearly, Orr’s “bit of Hegeling“ in PD was linking those unique epochs

of the church’s confession of the one faith with bonds of unity so visible that it

would always likely disquiet the Word-centred Reformed tradition (see 30-2).

But what do we make of the fact that the history of dogma did seem to develop

in a logical sequence, although not so smoothly or neatly or decisively as its

proponents would like us to believe? The opinion of an eminent theologian

like John Macquarrie, namely, that there are simply too many lapses in the

historical record to sustain hope that the Spirit guides the process of dogmatic

development, might be the safer option but it is not the only conclusion

91 Barth, PT, 12-13, 15. The emphasis is Barth’s.

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possible.92 “One can hardly deny that the history of dogma follows an inner

trend,” concluded Lohse—a claim that a whole generation of resolutely

orthodox nineteenth-century theologians on both sides of the North Sea

impressively pursued with help from Hegel.93 If it is true, as Karl Löwith

asserts, that over the course of the nineteenth century “the metaphysical

historicism of the Hegelian system replaces the vanished doctrine of

providence of the Christian religion,” it is also true that it was no great stretch

for conservative Protestants who still believed in providence to find it written

in history in the manner dictated by idealist thought.94

92 John Macquarrie, “Doctrinal Development: Searching for Criteria,” in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine, ed. Sarah Coakley and David A. Paillin (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 161-176, especially 170. 93 Lohse, Epochen der Dogmengeschichte, 19. 94 Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 217.

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Conclusion 1. Introduction

On 19 June 1820 August Tholuck—not yet a “church father of the

nineteenth century” (Martin Kähler) of course—enjoyed an evening stroll with

his Berlin colleague August Neander, who was then preparing what would

become the nineteenth century’s most widely read history of the church (see

1.3.3).1 Tholuck’s diary reads: “In the evening I walked with Neander in the

Tiergarten. He spoke of how difficult it is to know exactly a single century.”2

A mere half-century of church history presents enough of a challenge

for a vastly inferior mind—even when that half-century covers only a single

church tradition and a single theological problem! So as we now proceed to

some summary observations on Scottish Presbyterian theologizing about

doctrine and history during the Victorian era, and suggest where this

tradition’s achievements has influenced present Reformed discussion of the

genesis and history of doctrine, it should be kept in mind that points are raised

tentatively and with no illusion of comprehensiveness. Rather, conclusions are

presented with wide ‘brushstrokes’—and these reflect, inevitably, my own

judgement as to the main themes.

No single “Reformed theory” of doctrinal origins or development rises

out of this tradition’s half-century of theological labour that could provide us

with a contained subject for appraisal. This is disappointing, perhaps, but

hardly surprising. The Reformed tradition lacks the centripetal force necessary

to create and establish a single theory of development. Calvinism has always

been “richly variegated, internally divided, and above all gradually yet

ceaselessly changing,” as the historian Philip Benedict observes.3 In contrast

to some other churches, the Reformed have not narrowed the scope of their

confessions to a single epoch or place; unlike some theological traditions, it 1 Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche (6 vol., 1825-52); ET: General History of the Christian Religion and Church (9 vol., 1850-58). 2 Witte, Das Leben Tholuck’s, 1: 105. On Tholuck’s massive influence see Hans-Walter Krumwiede, “August G. Tholuck,” in Gestalter der Kirchengeschichte, Bd. 9.1, ed. Martin Greschat (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), 281-292. 3 Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 546.

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has hallowed no single philosophical method with which to pursue theology.

And obviously the Reformed lack what Karl Rahner deemed “the

advantage…of the higher criterion, to decide in any concrete case where the

boundary lies between dogma and mere theologoumenon, between certainly

correct and merely probable explication,” which he considered to be a function

of the papacy.4

FC and UP theologians were middle-class Scotsmen. They were

steeped in Westminster Calvinism and consciously oriented to the tenets and

piety of the evangelical mainstream of Victorian Protestantism. Yet within this

homogeneity there was variety, division, and change. As the theologians from

these denominations wrestled with the ‘problem of dogma and history’, they

were pulled between antagonistic tendencies within their evangelical

Presbyterian inheritance toward biblicism and confessionalism, and presented

with a dizzying array of theological and philosophical choices with which to

pursue the problem. Above all they had to reckon with a category of the

historical that was far from monolithic. “So dominant has history become as a

way of understanding man and his world,” wrote Jaroslav Pelikan, “that

modern men need to be reminded, also by history, that the category of the

historical has itself developed and changed.”5 Clearly, that this tradition

pursued the “problem” of the origin and genesis of doctrine through a shifting

category of the historical frustrates attempts to find a consistent “solution”

arising from their scholarship that could intersect contemporary theological

discussion of dogma and history. For depending on the “category of the

historical” that was operative, their historical study of doctrine could either

vindicate church dogma or vanquish it—both “trajectories” of

Dogmengeschichte (see 1.3) thrived within this single theological tradition. In

sum, this tradition-in-transition gives us merely an assortment of typical

nineteenth-century Protestant responses to the challenge of the rise of an

historical consciousness for Christian doctrine.

In the absence of a consensual theory of doctrinal origins and

development we turn instead to how the responses by Cunningham, Rainy,

4 Karl Rahner, “The Development of Dogma,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), 75. 5 Pelikan, Historical Theology, 33.

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Bruce, and Orr to the claims of history on doctrine reveal the ‘wear and tear’

of history upon the theological foundation stones of their tradition.

Evangelical Presbyterian theologians in Victorian Scotland came to realize

that the fact of the historical development of dogma implicated beliefs about

Scripture, Christ, church, and confession. Consequently, discussion of

doctrinal development typically took place in explicit connection with matters

of foundational theology. The burden of the following section will be to show

how these foundations were touched and transformed by the rise of an

historical consciousness; then to suggest how these altered foundations shaped

this tradition’s forays into the study of the history of doctrine.

2. Scripture & Tradition “The nineteenth-century revolution in attitudes to the Bible”6

overturned many aspects of the doctrine of Scripture that nineteenth-century

Presbyterians had inherited from their Protestant orthodox forefathers,

including, significantly, the notion of what Rainy called “the direct delivery”

of doctrine in revelation. Newman’s unsettling appreciation for an

unfathomable ‘idea’ of revelation was important, but it was above all

nineteenth-century German theology’s increasingly bullish belief in revelation

in history that broke the evangelical habit of discovering polished systems of

doctrine in the Bible. That the whole counsel of God “concerning all things

necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is…expressly set

down in Scripture” (Confession, 1.6) was still vigilantly maintained by

evangelical Presbyterians as they rethought the nature of doctrine in light of

the claims of history (see 1.2.2). But greater attention was now paid to the

historical and hermeneutical dimensions of church doctrine. It was

hermeneutical because, as Rainy realized, when encountering the facts of

revelation in history, “I must select words which enable my mind to mark how

it is taught to think, as well as how it is taught to feel or act.”7 It was historical

because the hermeneutics of doctrine were written across the annals of the

church, or, as Orr put it, “in genetic connection with the organic past.”8

6 Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk, 37. 7 Rainy, DDCD, 115. 8 Orr, PD, 329.

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Recognition of the hermeneutical dimension of doctrine helped FC and

UP theologians after Cunningham come to apply the distinction always

formally held by Protestants between God’s revealed word and the church’s

words about God’s revelation. In doing so the importance of church tradition

came to be acknowledged. Their recognition of the historical dimension of

doctrine was obviously abetted by the father of modern theology,

Schleiermacher. Has the overwhelming theocentricity of the Reformed

tradition bred a lack of interest in the faith of the believer that disinclined

Presbyterians from taking seriously the role of church tradition in the genesis

of doctrine, i.e., doctrine as the human response to the divine? It is not

surprising, then, that it was evangelical Presbyterians who proved so receptive

to Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the horizontal dimension of doctrine. (At the

same time, in opposition to the emerging liberal Protestant traditions that

merely tolerated dogma as discursive symbols of religious sentiment, these

Scots insisted that church doctrine was not merely horizontal—it conveyed

real truth about God).9 The growing recognition of the historical and

hermeneutical dimensions of doctrine enabled nothing less than the recovery

of the Reformation’s ancillary view of Scripture and tradition (see 1.2.2).

True, the theologians who spearheaded the recovery of the ancillary

view remained deeply naïve about the problem of authority for the traditional

Protestant understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture. Further, its

nineteenth-century revival was rather fleeting. As Bruce’s deprecation of the

dogmatic tradition suggests, evangelicals are chronically prey to dishonouring

their fathers and mothers in the faith. It is their bequest from the

Enlightenment, which violently resisted the notion of historically and socially

embedded truth. And the sins of the fathers were visited upon their children in

modern evangelicalism as well as the neo-orthodox revolt in the twentieth

century. “There is no such thing as Reformed Theology… only a continual

reference to the Word of God in Scripture,” declared the neo-orthodox 9 On this type see George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984), 30-45. A recent example is Jörg Lauster, Zwischen Entzauberung und Remythisierung: Zum Verhältnis von Bible und Dogma (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlaganstalt, 2008), who argues that dogma is the church’s conceptual reflection on an ancient people’s recollection of the experience of transcendence. At the same time, I doubt that mainstream Presbyterians in the nineteenth century would be satisfied with Barth’s view of church dogma as “aiming” at the truth of biblical revelation, presumably without hitting target. “The Word of God is above dogma as the heavens are above the earth” (CD 1/1 §7, 266, 269) has a platonic ring to it.

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Presbyterian theologian W. W. Bryden (1883-1952). “A hankering after

tradition is a sign that the living thing in faith has been lost.”10

As imperfect as the Victorian recovery of the ancillary view of

Scripture and tradition was, it has enduring qualities. Orr’s reminder that

appeals to Scripture as the basis for doctrine cannot be divorced from growing

insight into Scripture, which itself requires the developing doctrinal tradition,

resonates with contemporary philosophical emphasis on the matrix of tradition

as the inextricable paradigm for individual and collective self-understanding.

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote: “The history of each of our own

lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in

terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions.”11 Orr’s

point is echoed too in contemporary theological accounts of doctrine as a

Christian community’s conceptual framework for reading the biblical

narrative.12 In the parlance of these recent accounts, sola scriptura means that

the “narrative” remains primary over the “conceptual framework”, yet the

framework remains inextricable from the community’s self-understanding in

relation to the gospel narrative: in other words, as tradition.

Furthermore, evangelical Presbyterianism’s newfound appreciation for

church tradition as the womb of doctrinal formation was a milestone in the

modern development of Reformed theology—one to which contemporary

mainstream Reformed theology stands in conscious reference. For example,

the ‘Bible religion’ that has so often blighted Reformed theology has been

formally disavowed during dialogue between the World Alliance of Reformed

Churches and Rome.13 The Reformed voices in this ecumenical dialogue

speak candidly of “the decisive though subordinate weight given in the

10 Cited by John A. Vissers, The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W. W. Bryden (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 27. For context see the important research by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Die ‘antihistoristiche Revolution’ in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre,” in Vernunft des Glaubens: Wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre, ed. Jan Rohls and Gunter Wenz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 377-405. 11 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1984), 222. Cited by Oldham, “Alister E. McGrath and Evangelical Theories of Doctrinal Development,” 67-68. 12 Orr, PD, 15. See especially McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine; Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: WJK, 2005); Anthony Thistleton, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). 13 See the Roman Catholic-Reformed Dialogue (First Phase 1970-1977), www.warc.jalb.de/warcajsp/side.jsp?news_id=883&part_id=59&navi=38#17.

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Reformed tradition to the ancient Ecumenical Councils in the transmission and

interpretation of the gospel.” Similarly, some recent Reformed catechisms

own the indispensable role of the church in the formation of doctrine. “Those

who seek to understand the Bible need to stand within the church and listen to

its teaching… We interpret Scripture properly as we compare passages, seeing

the two Testaments in light of each other, and listening to commentators past

and present.”14

At the same time, the regard for church tradition does not rise so high as

to compromise Scripture’s sufficiency or to obscure the “experience of

frequent errors and resistances to the Word on the part of the church.”15 The

Spirit directs the church back to the inscripturated words of its Lord as the

singular source, supreme norm, and final judge of its doctrine and practices.

“But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name,

will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you”

(John 14:26).

This study has contended that the old debate over the relation of

Scripture to tradition provided the lens through which Victorian Presbyterians

first perceived the “new” idea of the development of doctrine, and, secondly,

that this theological foundation remained a point of reference for how they

thought about the historical formation of doctrine (see 1.2). This point of

reference, namely, an ancillary view of Scripture and tradition, permitted an

intrusive voice to confront and criticize church tradition. But the sharp edge on

the Word of God cut somewhat unevenly. Bruce’s Ritschlian-inspired

suspicion of theological tradition was almost fanatical, while Cunningham,

Rainy, and Orr never really took seriously the possibility of substantial

reconstruction of the doctrinal tradition for the sake of contemporary

confession. Modern Reformed theology has reiterated and endorsed the critical

implications of the ancillary view of Scripture and tradition. “Only through the

Bible is the church given a knowledge of Jesus Christ which speaks to it from

outside itself about the one who indwells it. If the church were not so

addressed from outside itself, it would be unable to distinguish the indwelling

14 A Catechism for Today (The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 2004), Q. 66. 15 Roman Catholic-Reformed Dialogue (First Phase 1970-1977).

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Spirit from its own desires.”16 But as with the Victorian theologians looked at

in this study, the methodological principle of ecclesia reformata semper

reformanda secundum verbum Dei serves both “conservative” and “liberal”

Reformed theological agendas.

If Reformed thinking on Scripture and tradition evidences considerable

continuity between the nineteenth century and today, the topic in Roman

Catholicism—the outstanding alternative to the Protestant ancillary view of

Scripture and tradition—has a somewhat more complicated past. It is

worthwhile to quickly revisit this story because of its outstanding ecumenical

implications for contemporary study of the genesis and development of

doctrine.

Modern Roman Catholicism has witnessed a remarkable shift. The

‘supplementary view’ of Scripture and tradition reaffirmed at the First Vatican

Council, with its concomitant belief that Holy Mother Church possesses a

deposit of sacred dogmas formed according to “the unanimous consent of the

fathers” and permanently fixed, has given way to a ‘coincidence view’ of

Scripture and tradition and a theory of the development of dogma (see 1.2.1).17

The hostile conclusion drawn by the Ritschlian historian of dogma Krüger in

the wake of the Council was typical of nineteenth-century Protestantism: “The

Catholic Church knows no history of dogma: where one maintains the

unchangeability of dogma since antiquity and is of the opinion that Papal

infallibility is taught by the Scriptures, there can a history hardly come into

existence worthy of the name.”18 But Krüger’s criticism no longer hits target.

16 Timothy Ward, Word and Supplement: Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and the Sufficiency of Scripture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 1. See also John Webster, “On the Clarity of Holy Scripture,” in Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (London: T & T Clark, 2005), 33-68. 17 Decrees of the First Vatican Council, “On Revelation,” 8-9; “On Faith and Reason,” 13-14. Compare to the Council’s “Dogmatic Constitution of the Catholic Faith,” 4: “If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.” 18 Krüger, Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Dogmengeschichte?, 18. Leo Scheffczyk, “Katholische Dogmengeschichtsforschung: Tendenzen–Versuche–Resultate,” in Dogmengeschichte und katholische Theologie, ed. Werner Löser et al. (Würzburg: Echter, 1985), 21, contrasts the long history of the study of the development of dogma within Roman Catholicism to the very young discipline of the history of dogma. See also Rahner, “The Development of Dogma,” 43. Scheffczyk and Rahner were hugely influenced by Newman.

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For at the very same time that the Vatican decrees were promulgated a

dissonant note was being sounded within Roman theology. Newman had

argued as an Anglican against Scripture’s sufficiency; a key step on his road to

Rome was the truly radical realization that ‘Antiquity’ was equally

insufficient. The history of the early church discloses no such “unanimous

consent of the Fathers” that could guide the church in interpreting Scripture.

The thrust of his Essay, that “modern Catholicism…is the natural and

necessary development, of the doctrine of the early church,” aimed to solve

the difficulty that Catholic theology at the time of the Vatican Council was not

yet willing to consider, namely, that modern Catholic dogma directly mirrored

neither Scripture nor early church tradition.19

The aftershocks of Newman’s Essay on the old debate over Scripture

and tradition cannot be overestimated. His theory of doctrinal development

simply eliminated the need for an unchanging body of dogma to be housed in

the “written books and unwritten traditions” maintained by Trent and the First

Vatican Council.20 But neither was he simply renewing the ancient

coincidence view of Scripture and tradition. Its proponents had insisted upon

the explicit coincidence of a body of dogma with Scripture in the teaching of

the church. Newman, however, historicized the coincidence of Scripture and

tradition: doctrine coheres implicitly in the church’s grasp of the idea of

revelation—but the wages of time are needed to make it explicit through the

teaching of the church.

As Richard Bauckham argues, the problem for Protestants is that “the

theory of doctrinal development pioneered here by Newman and influential in

various Roman Catholic circles at the time of the Second Vatican Council

tends to place even more weight than its predecessors on the contemporary

teaching of the magisterium as the real norm for Christian doctrine, since what

is implicit in Scripture and earlier tradition reaches its fullest development

here.”21 It would be too much to say, as some of Newman’s Victorian critics

did, that the papacy functions as a deus ex machina in the proffered theory of

19 Newman, Essay, 78. Note: in this Conclusion, all references to the Essay are taken from the 6th edition. 20 Decrees of the First Vatican Council, “On Revelation,” 5. 21 Bauckham, “Tradition in Relation to Scripture and Reason,” 124.

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doctrinal development.22 Yet the formation of the Marian dogmas in modern

Catholicism would seem to indicate that the norm of doctrine has shifted from

Scripture or past tradition to the developing tradition of the church under the

oversight of the papacy.23

So from one angle, Newman’s theory of development appears to have

helped Protestants and Catholics move past the pre-Victorian impasse on

Scripture and tradition. Catholics have abandoned a supplementary oral

tradition; many Protestant churches have formally renounced ‘Bible religion’

for a more wholesome appreciation of church tradition. Further, many

Protestants agree in principle with the Second Vatican Council’s insistence

upon the “close connection between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture” as

well as the necessary medium of the church in the unfolding of the contents of

divine revelation.24

From another angle, Newman’s theory of development seems to have

exacerbated existing differences. Protestants consider that Rome’s adherence

to a coincidence view of Scripture and tradition cum theory of doctrinal

development leaves its profession of the material sufficiency of Scripture

toothless because it allows no external word to be directed against the

church’s heritage of doctrine from either history or Scripture. To claim as the

Second Vatican Council does that Scripture and the church’s doctrinal

tradition “merge into a unity and tend toward the same end” does not allow

what Barth called “the emancipated Bible, the Bible which confronts the

Church as an authority.”25 From the other side, even the most careful accounts

given to the classic Protestant doctrine of Scripture remain vulnerable to

criticism from Catholics that it cannot avoid the doctrinal indeterminacy that

troubles contemporary Protestantism. As Cunningham anticipated, the

acceptance of the fact of the development of doctrine by Protestants has made

the lack of a centralized authority to guide that development conspicuous.26

22 See the literature cited in chapter 1, footnote 87. 23 See Wilhelm Dantine and Erich Hultsch, “Das Mariendogma,” in HDThG 3, 379-97. 24 Verbum Dei, 9-10. A similar protest to what follows can be made against the World Council of Churches’ Montreal report on tradition, Tradition and Traditions (Geneva: WCC, 1963). 25 Barth, CD 1/1 §7, 257. 26 “Romanist,” 66.

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3. Jesus Christ “The most distinctive and determinative element in modern theology is

what we may term a new feeling for Christ,” began the Scottish

Congregationalist Andrew Fairbairn’s important book The Place of Christ in

Modern Theology (1898).27 And “Christ” was present even as evangelical

Presbyterians in Victorian Scotland investigated the history of dogma. In the

vintage evangelicalism of Cunningham, for example, central doctrines were

those that elaborated upon “the Lamb that once was slain/[who] washed us

from each spot and stain”: election, sin, grace, atonement.28 This oriented his

Historical Theology to the Reformers and the evangelical revivals of the

eighteenth century. The next generation of Scottish Presbyterians, reflecting

the remarkable shift in Victorian religion from the atonement to the

incarnation, began to order and arrange doctrine through an “epistemological

Christocentricism.”29 This was notable in Bruce’s reduction of doctrinal Stoff

to the (almost) exclusive revelation of God in Jesus. He was sounding the

retreat back to the historical Jesus so as to let the synoptic gospels

“Christianize” old dogmas. At the very same time an idealist theologian like

Orr was appealing to the union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ to

argue against the Ritschlian execration of the ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity

for the fittingness of the gospel’s “enfleshment” in the cultural and intellectual

world of the Roman Empire. Clearly, Christology was highly susceptible to a

shifting category of the historical! As such, although evangelical Presbyterians

came to share the general Victorian fascination with the doctrine of the person

of Christ, this foundation could not yield a identical blueprint for theories of

doctrine because FC and UP theologians committed themselves to different

historical epistemologies.

It is significant, however, that all the theologians under consideration

in this study were enthusiastic advocates of the old Presbyterian doctrine of

the headship of Christ over the church that had been revitalized at the time of

27 Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 3 28 Horatius Bonar, “Glory be to God the Father” (1866), http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/g/l/glorybet.htm. Even Socinianism was for Cunningham foremost a soteriological rather than Trinitarian heresy (HT, 2: 155-236). 29 The contrast between soteriological and epistemological Christocentricism is made by Richard Muller, “Karl Barth and the Path of Theology into the Twentieth Century: Historical Observations,” WTJ 51 (1989): 25-50.

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the Ten Year’s Conflict (see 1.4.6). This doctrine played an important (if often

implicit) role in broadly shaping how the mainstream of this tradition

connected doctrine with Christ and history.

The introductory chapter marked how Scotland’s antagonistic

relationship with the imperious claims of the British crown had bred a jealous

regard for the “crown rights” of Jesus Christ (see 1.4.1). Against the Erastian

claims of the C of E, the Second Book of Discipline from 1578 insisted on

Christ’s direct rule in the church. “For this power ecclesiasticall flowes

immediatlie from God, and the Mediator Jesus Christ, and is spirituall, not

having a temporall heid on earth, but onlie Christ, the onlie spirituall King and

Governour of his Kirk.”30 It was the evangelical churches of the eighteenth-

century secessions (later merging into the UP), closely followed by the FC in

the Victorian era that developed the doctrine of the spiritual headship of Christ

into a full-blown movement for the disestablishment of the church.31 By

insisting upon an immediate relationship between the King and his church that

bypassed the king, these free churches became flexible toward polity and

doctrine in a way that established churches could not.

The practical implications of this became clear in the wake of the

House of Lords’ 1904 decision to side with a rump group who, rejecting the

1900 church union that created the UFC, sued for the considerable assets of

the former FC on the grounds that they were the true FC because they upheld

the church’s theological position of 1843 [ch.3, 5.4]. To a group of children

Rainy explained what had happened by way of a story of two brothers who

quarrelled over an inheritance and sought mediation from the King of the

Fairies.

And the King of the Fairies…had them both brought before him, and he got a photograph of them both when they were little… And then he said to John, “Oh, this will never do! …Dear me, I think you have got a tail to your coat… You are not right.” But then he looked at Jack, and then he looked at the photograph and he said, “This one’s right. I do believe he has got the very jacket and trousers that he had sixty years ago! …He’s all right; he must get everything. And John is all wrong;

30 “1578 Second Book of Discipline,” in Donaldson, Scottish Historical Documents, 145. 31 A brief survey is provided in Stewart J. Brown, Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815-1914 (Harlow: Pearson, 2008), 262-67.

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he must get nothing.” But he said nothing of the people inside the clothes…32

In Rainy’s mind, the House of Lords was treating the church as a fixed entity

rather than a growing organism. His protest encapsulates the free church

development of the old Presbyterian concern for the immediate spiritual

headship of Jesus Christ over the church. The working thesis developed by

advocates of church union like Rainy, Bruce, and Orr held that the doctrine of

the kingship of Christ left church and doctrine bound only to its Lord and,

consequently, relatively “unbound” to develop in history. The acceptance of

the fact of doctrinal development and the need for confessional revision

among later Victorian evangelical Presbyterians was rooted in part in the

belief that there could be no confusion of the church in history—of an

historical body and its polity, structures, and doctrines—with its perfect and

unique Head. Church history remained profane.

This particular manner of relating Christ to the church abhors what

Cunningham called “vicarious religion,” that is to say, attributing to the

church what belongs only to the church’s Lord—what he predictably

denounced it in current Roman and Anglo-Catholic ecclesiologies. But it was

not only in Rome or Oxford where the church was made a vicar for Christ.33

Chapter 5 amply illustrated how leading conservative German Protestants

drew upon romantic and idealist leitmotifs in order to invest the church with

some of the attributes of Christ (see 5.3). Specifically, the prolongation of the

incarnation into the church made the historical progress of dogma part of the

divine life. “The line of thinking of Kliefoth, Vilmar and the still valuable

Dogmengeschichte from Gottfried Thomasius,” judged Friedrich

Kantzenbach, “points to a structural relationship with the Roman Catholic

judgment on the development of the history of dogma…”34

Given that the incarnation model of the church became very important

in twentieth century ecumenism, especially through the related model of the

32 Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, 2: 390; also 404. 33 William Cunningham, “Errors of Romanism,” 11-13. Originally published in The North British Review 17 (1852): 481-518; republished in Discussions on Church Principles, 1-34. 34 Kantzenbach, ED, 160.

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church as a sacrament of Christ,35 perhaps the unfashionable stance of

Victorian Presbyterians can draw attention to the problems inherent in

“vicarious religion” for the study of church history and Dogmengeschichte.36

On one hand, merging the history of the church with the history of Christ fails

to deliver the truly “human” church history it promises. No matter how

authentically “human” was the genesis and development of dogma it remains

under the thumb of the divine Logos. And on the other hand, as Claude Welch

argued, a massive credibility gap is inevitable whenever the attributes of

Christ are bestowed upon the church.

…[W]hile the historical figure of Jesus Christ is such as to make intelligible to faith the conviction that he is the Incarnate Word, the historical life of the church is not evidently such as to make intelligible many of the claims made for it. Certainly it is called to be the people of God and the body of Christ, and it is affirmed to be a holy nation and a royal priesthood, but the call seems to have met with distorted response and the theological claim seems quite inconsistent with the facts of its life.37

The doctrine of the spiritual headship of Christ that figured so pervasively in

the ecclesiastical wrangling of Victorian Scotland (if not always explicitly in

the theologizing about doctrine and history) prompts unsettling questions to

past and contemporary proponents of an incarnational model of the church:

does the conflation of the history of Christ with the history of the church

achieve at best a Eutychian Dogmengeschichte? Can an historian raise critical

questions against the history of dogma only at risk of being a blasphemer?

4. Church One need not accept Kliefoth and Thomasius’ timetable for the

unfolding of dogma (see 5.3) to admit the supreme place accorded

ecclesiology in nineteenth-century Christian thought. A swarm of religious,

social, and political factors had come to the fore in the first half of the century

that threatened the churches’ vested interests. The neo-Lutherans in Germany 35 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2002), 26-30. 36 Orr tottered on the verge of letting the goal of world history—union with Christ—divinize all the processes therein, including that of the history of dogma, but he did not fall. 37 Welch, The Reality of the Church (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 122-23. Cited in Reformed Reader, Vol. 2, ed. George Stroup (Louisville: WJK, 1990), 250.

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and the Tractarians in England were the most high profile champions against

the encroachment of the state on the ancient rights of the national churches

and the ravages of industrialization on the old order upon which the churches’

place in society rested. Along with the fleeting Mercersburg theology in

America, these restorationist movements also decried the corrosive effects of

the evangelicals’ ‘anxious bench’ and pragmatic ecclesiology on the seasoned

piety of pulpit, altar, and catechism (see 2.3.1). Theirs was a vindication of the

church visible—its visible place in society and history, its visible authority,

the visible means of grace.

Within the scope of this dissertation, the Tractarians warrant special

attention for their spirited and sophisticated response to generic Victorian

evangelical thinking about the church. Frank Turner rightly deems Newman as

the most probing critic of evangelical religion of his generation—many of his

criticisms struck at the Protestant bias for the invisible church (see also

1.3.1).38 As Newman put it pithily in one of the Tracts for the Times: “true

doctrine and warm feelings are not enough.” Correct belief and piety require

“the Church visible, with its Bishops, priests, and deacons,” and the visible

gifts of salvation—baptism and Eucharist—which they alone are sanctioned to

dispense.39 Newman changed churches after he wrote those words, but his

obsession with the church visible remained unchanged. Indeed, it sired his

theory of doctrinal development by making the problem of church history

unavoidable. As a real, objective fact in history, the church was “public

property,” and all honest publicans could see that over the centuries the

church’s mind had clearly developed.40

Victorian evangelicals were profoundly troubled by the Essay in part

because their pragmatic emphasis on the invisible church had bred a church

historiography largely uninterested in “that external continuity of name,

profession and communion” that weighed so heavily on its author.41 In fact, as

Cunningham argued in his article “The Errors of Romanism”—a critically

appreciative review of Newman’s old Oxford mentor, the latitudinarian 38 Turner, John Henry Newman, 9. 39 Newman, “No. 11. The Catholic Church,” in Tracts for the Times, Vol. 1, 1-2. 40 Newman, Essay, 1. 41 Ibid., 5. Important in this regard was the widely read church history by Joseph Milner (1743-97). See John Walsh, “Joseph Milner’s Evangelical Church History,” JEH 10 (1959): 174-87.

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Richard Whately (1787-1863)—the principles of Protestantism “tend directly

to counteract” the hallowing of the visible structures of the church “by urging

the necessity of men coming into direct and immediate contact with God

Himself and His word in the matter of their salvation….”42 Moreover, the

classical Protestant doctrine of Scripture was so tightly joined with Victorian

evangelicalism’s partiality for the invisible church that the “problem” of the

historical development of doctrine found no foothold. If Scripture is a

sufficient source of saving doctrine, what need is there to locate a doctrinally

authoritative epoch of the church or to prove the historical continuity of a

system of dogma? Ergo Cunningham’s easy concession to Newman that

Protestantism was not historical Christianity but rather biblical Christianity

(see 2.3.2; 2.4). The church is visible in history to the extent that the faithful

gather close to the lamp of the Word of God. In fact, in the extreme form

encountered with Bruce, the disjunction between biblical ideal and historical

actuality was so great as to turn the entire history of the church into ‘the dark

ages’.43

Victorian evangelical ecclesiology combined an overconfident

Biblicism, a problematic doctrine of God’s secret election of individuals, and

an outdated Christendom model of the church in which a distinction between

believers and nonbelievers seemed imperative.44 It would find few defenders

today amongst Reformed theologians. The ‘Bible religion’ typical of that time,

which left church tradition purely extrinsic to the task of doctrinal formation,

has been formally repudiated by many Reformed churches as unhistorical and

theologically naïve. And recent Reformed thinking on the invisible church is

clearly sensitive to criticism from Catholics and Anabaptists that the

predestinarian basis of their confessional ecclesiology tended, among other

things, to a functional docetism: the “real” church is invisible while the

historically visible church is somewhat less than “real”. Not unlike Rainy and

Orr, contemporary Reformed ecclesiologies strongly disavow popular

42 Cunningham, “Errors of Romanism,” 19. 43 Bruce, Apologetics, 504. 44 E.g. in Cunningham’s New College colleague James Bannerman, the author of their generation’s definitive work on Reformed ecclesiology, The Church of Christ, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1863), 29-41.

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Protestant tendency to treat the historical visibility of the church as

nonessential.45

This is not the place to scrutinize these fresh Reformed accounts of the

visibility and invisibility of the church—although admittedly even these new

versions remain prone to Catholic criticism that Protestant ecclesiology simply

cannot avoid a sort of historical “occasionalism” of the church visible. The

interest here, once again, is to trace the repercussions of this particular

theological foundation on how the Presbyterian tradition in Victorian Scotland

investigated the historical formation of doctrine. And once again we observe

how different categories of the historical rendered this foundation malleable

for two very different approaches to the history of dogma.

First there is the critical trajectory. Here, the deep distinction between

the church visible and invisible made by Bruce and Cunningham maintained

an eschatological tension between the church in history and the church in

glory. With Cunningham, the emphasis fell on the freedom of the historian to

investigate church history unencumbered by the need to prove that the

eschatological promises Christ made to the church of victory, power, and

glory are necessarily visible over the course of its history.46 The church in

history existed ‘under the cross’. Similarly, for Bruce, the Ritschlian view of

the origins of doctrine to which he broadly adhered underscored church

tradition as the story of the victorious. Doctrines roll forward through history

with the weight of the ages, crushing new thoughts about God and flattening

fresh ways of confessing his truth.47 But are the fittest ideas about God the

best? Do theories of the development of dogma that function as a divinely

ordained course of natural selection own up to the fact that church tradition,

like nature, is red in tooth and claw?

45 Impressive restatements of the Reformed doctrine of the church are: John Webster, “On Evangelical Ecclesiology,” Ecclesiology 1 (2004): 9-35; idem, “The Church as Witnessing Community,” SBET 12 (2003): 21-33; R. Michael Allen, “The Church and the churches: A Dogmatic Essay on Ecclesial Invisibility,” EJT 16 (2007): 113-119; Christian Link, “The Notae Ecclesiae: A Reformed Perspective,” in Toward the Future of Reformed Theology: Tasks, Topics, Traditions, ed. David Willis and Michael Welker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 239-61. For a Lutheran view on ecclesial invisibility see Wilfried Härle, Dogmatik, 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 570-72. 46 See especially Cunningham, “Errors of Romanism,” 18-19, 21. 47 See Bruce, Apologetics, 503-6; The Christian Church, passim.

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The eschatological tension in which the church lives dissipates not only

through pretensions to ecclesiastical perfection48 but also through too great a

trust in the genius of history. Orr was especially tempted this way because the

dominance of the organic in his thinking—his century’s dominant category of

the historical49—entailed a sort of ‘all or nothing’ approach in the history of

dogma. “Christianity is, in short, its best apology,” he wrote. “The unfolding

of it as in its essence embracing a view of God, the world, and man, and

bringing a provision for man’s spiritual needs, in which both mind and heart

can rest with fullest satisfaction, is the surest certification of its divine

original.”50 As the organism of Christianity is undoubtedly true, the growth of

that organism also must be true. This means that the dogmatic system of

evangelical orthodoxy must have been present in the past church. Yet how to

account for evangelical standards that clearly were not present as dogma in the

earlier church? Orr’s solution was to submerge a stubbornly absent doctrine

like justification by faith into the unarticulated religious consciousness of the

church past. Hence, “true breach of continuity would have been to adhere, as

the Tridentine Fathers did, to the letter of Catholic dogma against the

consciousness of salvation by grace alone, with which that dogma stood in

contradiction.”51

There is an evident circularity to this line of argumentation.

Evangelicalism is true: therefore the church must always have had evangelical

doctrine (even if it was held in the heart rather than the head). Indeed, an

abiding problem with this “second trajectory” of Dogmengeschichte—be it

Protestant or Catholic—is that by assuming divine sanction on present systems

48 Protestants worry that the remarkable development of Mary in modern Roman Catholic theology as the eschatological icon of the church has tended precisely in this direction. John Paul II’s 1987 encyclical Redemptoris Mater reiterated the Second Vatican Council’s claim “that the Mother of God is already the eschatological fulfilment of the Church: ‘In the most holy Virgin the Church has already reached that perfection whereby she exists without spot or wrinkle (cf. Eph. 5:27)…’.” (Redemptoris Mater, 6, http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0224/__P2.HTM; see also Catechism of the Catholic Church, 967-72). If the bodily-assumed Mary is an eschatological icon of the church, does the church body tend to think of itself as perfect here and now? In regard to the history of dogma: as the church enacts its Mariological function of treasuring up revelation and pondering it in her heart (Luke 2:19), is it possible for “Mary” to err? 49 Stöve, “Zeitliche Differenzierung und Geschichtsbewußtsein in der neuzeitlichen Historiographie,” 30-37. 50 Orr, PD, 322-23. Compare to Newman, Essay, 94: “You must accept the whole or reject the whole; attenuation does but enfeeble, and amputation mutilate.” 51 Ibid., 254.

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of dogma, they are obligated (to use Rahner’s expression) “to discover the

possible from the real.”52 But does not the history of dogma then risk

becoming just a clever justification for what a given church venerates as real?

Within Victorian Presbyterianism’s problematic ecclesiology was a

valuable feature: a refusal in principle to ease the tension between the church

in history, which confesses God’s truth in hope and faith, and the church in

glory, which sees no longer ‘through a glass darkly’ but, finally, face to face.

Some of the theologians looked at in this study intuitively realized—although

it has needed to be teased out—that honest criticism of the system and history

of church dogma can only take place within the eschatological tension of the

visible and the invisible church. This is a key insight born of the Reformation,

although not always adhered to by nineteenth-century Protestants, and by no

means Protestantism’s exclusive possession. “The church is a concrete

historical reality,” wrote Cardinal Kasper. “Under the guidance of God’s

Spirit, it unfolds in history; to history, therefore, we must turn for sound

theology.”53

5. Confessing the Faith [5.1] The evaluation up until this point has summarized the effects of

the rise of an historical consciousness in the nineteenth century upon

Presbyterian foundations of Scripture, Christ, and church. In regard to

Scripture, although many Scottish Presbyterians had a greater esteem for

church tradition at the end of the century than at the beginning, the voice of

tradition was not confused with the voice of God in revelation. In other words,

the history of doctrine was held apart from Scripture. Second, the theologians

assessed in this study shared in the Scottish free church renewal of the

doctrine of the spiritual headship of Christ over the church. By insisting upon

a qualitative gap between the history of Jesus and the history of the church, the

history of doctrine remained merely human. Third, ecclesiology: evangelical 52 Rahner, “The Development of Dogma,” 41. 53 Kasper, “On the Church,” America (23 April 2001), http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=1569.

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Presbyterians found the church sometimes more, sometimes less visible in

history in a manner that continued to justify Newman’s charge of historical

superficiality. But the classic Protestant disjuncture between the church as

visible in history and the church as God alone knows it ensured that they could

handle the history of doctrine without having to force “the facts of its life”

(Welch) into lofty dogmatic claims about the church.

How then did the ‘wear and tear’ of history on these foundations

dispose the evangelical Presbyterian tradition in Victorian Scotland to the

study of the genesis of doctrine? Clearly the tendency was to give history a

certain autonomy “over-against” doctrine—a position grounded in theological

foundations themselves characterized by Scripture over against tradition,

Christ over against the church, the invisible church over the visible church.

This result could be seen as wholly negative and, therefore, “typically”

Protestant. Positively considered, however, the Victorian Presbyterian

tradition identified the most vital ingredients for a Protestant historical-

hermeneutic of doctrine, in which Scripture, tradition, and history all have

essential (although unequal) roles in the genesis of doctrine. In sharp contrast

to a “closed hermeneutical circle” (as an Orthodox theologian described his

church’s understanding of Scripture and tradition)54 in which any one of

Scripture, the doctrinal tradition, or history could be marginalized or even

ignored, here, each would maintain a relative independence vis-à-vis the other,

and each would be permitted to “cross question” the other.55 The church forms

doctrine as it listens to the Spirit speaking through Scripture. It “re-embodies”

(Rainy) the meaning of the Bible in a historically particular context, but also

within a historically continuous framework of interpretation. Doctrinal

criticism occurs as the church revisits its past speech about God’s truth to

discern how and where the contextual ‘static’ has affected its re-embodiment

of God’s word. What Bruce called those “simple, naïve questions” of the

biblical narrative are permitted to interrogate the historical development of the

church’s system of doctrine in the name of scriptural fidelity and the needs of

contemporary proclamation.

54 John Breck, Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary P, 2001), 10. See also Hugh Cunliffe-Jones, “Scripture and Tradition in Orthodox Theology,” in Holy Book and Holy Tradition, 186-209. 55 The idea of “cross-questioning” was Rainy’s (e.g. DDCD, 215).

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Undoubtedly, only the rudiments of this paradigm come into sight

amongst Victorian Presbyterians. Contemporary Reformed theology needs to

devote sustained attention to the topic of the formation of doctrine in order to

develop these rudiments—and they need to do so with greater consistency

than their Victorian forbearers. In the conservative evangelicalism of

Cunningham, for example, his doctrine of Scripture tended to mute the voice

of tradition and history. The result was a confessionalism devoid of any

authentic awareness into its own historical conditionality. It was an antiquary

of a past epoch of the Reformed church.56 To take another example, the

trademark of conservative synergies of doctrine and history in this era—from

Newman to neo-Lutheranism to Orr—was to appeal to the “organic” nature of

the church to anchor the normative status of doctrine. This tended to reduce to

a formality both history and Scripture’s role in cross-questioning the church.57

Yet the value of such a historical-hermeneutical approach to the study

of doctrine is obvious, perhaps especially for letting history intrude into the

“splendid isolation” (Barth) that occurs when churches pursue dogmatics

without giving outside voices a genuine hearing.58 It would also be timely. The

recent trend to approach the nature of doctrine through hermeneutics, i.e. as

the church’s grammar of faith, has much to offer. But its uninterest in how

doctrine actually came to be silences history’s ability to voice uncomfortable

questions against the doctrinal status quo. The “text absorbs the world, rather

than the world the text.”59 Alister McGrath’s characterization of theories of

doctrine that refuse interrogation from outside the church as “self perpetuating

ideolects” appears justified, if harsh; his alternative should be heard by liberal

and conservative Christian traditions alike.60

While the suggestion, implicit with much Dogmengeschichte, that doctrine is an outmoded form of articulating Christian insights must be regarded as implausible, the assertion that history must be permitted to

56 Some recent examples of this tendency from inside conservative Presbyterianism include R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confessions: Our Theology, Piety, and Practice (Phillipsburg: P & R, 2008); Darryl G. Hart, Recovering Mother Kirk (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003). 57 For this reason Barth suggested Hofmann was only “playing at history” (PT, 598). 58 Barth, CD 1/1 §7, 267. 59 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 118. Note that ‘text’ for Lindbeck is the church’s interpretative tradition. 60 McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine, 29. The quotation below is taken from page 151. McGrath’s work provides a Protestant theory of doctrinal formation very much within the trajectory suggested by the Victorian Presbyterians examined in this study.

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criticize doctrine remains valid, to the point of being of crucial importance in the contemporary task of evaluating and reappropriating the doctrinal heritage of the Christian tradition. The intellectual and historical credentials of this heritage must be investigated, with a view to ascertaining how and why a given doctrine gained its plausibility within the community of faith, and with a view to eliminating those found to be deficient. The ecumenical and apologetic implications of this process are potentially considerable: how many doctrines which divide the churches from one another, or which cause bewilderment to outsiders, owe their origins to presuppositions alien to the gospel? Theology needs its Harnacks, if it is to address such questions.

[5.2] The lengthy quotation from McGrath helpfully raises the issue of

the “ecumenical…implications” of the historical study of doctrine. Given the

diversity of secessionist Presbyterian responses to history’s claims on church

doctrine, it is somewhat surprising that the theologians analysed in this study

seemed to have in sight a clear goal. The historical criticism of doctrine aimed

to contract the inherited body of Reformed dogma to essential articles of faith

around which evangelical Protestants could unite. Consciously or not,

Victorian Presbyterians came to stand in the shadow of attempts in the

seventeenth century to rally together Lutherans and Reformed around

fundamental articles of faith (see 3.4). True, their ecumenical vision was

crimped.61 What Orr referred to as “the great heritage of truth which has come

down to us from the past…and is embodied as the expression of the faith in

the historical creeds in which our Churches rest,” what Rainy designated as

“the substance of the Reformed Faith,” and Bruce simply called “Catholic

Presbyterianism” could be largely assumed given the hegemony of Victorian

evangelicalism and the lingering adherence of Presbyterians to the

Confession.62 Yet their desire for an evangelical catholic faith remains a

worthy aim of the critical examination of the genesis and development of

doctrine.

Late Victorian Scottish Presbyterianism was troubled by especially two

related theological concerns. First was the question of the lack of “relevancy”

61 Although the World Missionary Conference in 1910—and through it the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century—owed something to this humble beginning. See Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, especially 320-24. 62 See Rainy, DDCD, 67; Orr, PD, 4; Bruce, “Progress in Theology.”

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of traditional church doctrine to a secularizing society. Second was the lack of

unity among Scotland’s fractious Presbyterians.63 For Rainy, Bruce, and Orr,

revisiting the genesis and history of doctrine clearly had an urgent apologetic

element. In a manner not unlike Newman’s second test (continuity),

Presbyterians in the later Victorian period sought the historically durable core

of the church’s faith that could bring Presbyterians and evangelicals in

Scotland together in the unity of faith to defend and commend the gospel to an

age wracked by growing disbelief.

Because all the progenitors in this study evidenced the longstanding

Protestant concern to handle dogma in relation to confessions of faith, the

search for fundamentals directly implicated the Confession.64 Unexpectedly,

the indomitable Cunningham stands (if uneasily) at the headwaters of the late

Victorian surge to revise the Confession. Cunningham professed unflinching

allegiance to the seventeenth-century Reformed confessions, but frankly

admitted the impropriety of burdening all church office-holders with every jot

and tittle of the Reformed symbols. With a touch of dry humour, he reopened

for evangelical Presbyterians the issue of fundamental articles of faith.

When a church is arranging her terms of communion, other considerations, in addition to that of the mere truth of the statements, must be brought to bear upon the question of what it is right, necessary and expedient to do, or of what amount of unity in matters of opinion ought to be required. The principles applicable to this branch of the church’s duty, have never been subjected to a thorough discussion by competent parties, though they are very important in their bearings; and the right application of them is attended with great difficulty. Calvin would probably have made a difficulty about adopting precise and definite deliverances on some points, concerning the truth of which the great Calvinistic divines of the seventeenth century had no hesitation. But it will probably be admitted that he was qualified of the office for a minister in a Calvinistic church, even in this advanced nineteenth century. The great general objects to be aimed at in this matter, though the application is, of course, the difficulty, are embodied in the famous maxim, which Witsius adopted as his favourite motto—‘In necessariis unitas, in non necessariis libertas, in omnibus caritas’.65

63 For an overview see Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk, 60-87, 110-156. 64 In reference to Protestant Orthodoxy see Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics, Vol. 1, trans. Darrell Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 28-33. 65 Cunningham, “Calvin and Beza,” 412.

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Cunningham’s call was heard by his tradition. Scottish Presbyterians

pursued the search for unity in necessary doctrines with alacrity in the later

Victorian era. It is important to note how their pursuit of fundamentals was

invigorated by the historicizing of their tradition’s theological foundations.

Nineteenth-century theology’s newfound sense for revelation in history

focussed attention on the plotline of biblical history rather than the Bible’s

encyclopaedic breadth (i.e. what Cunningham called “the mere truth of the

statements”). The result was that doctrine was prioritized according to its

proximity to the centre of the story: Christ. And the partial erosion of

evangelicalism’s habitual disregard for the heritage of the church opened up a

catholic horizon. Truly, the full effects of their rehabilitation of tradition is

detected only when we look beyond the written words of Rainy, Orr, and even

Bruce, to their work in committees, commissions, and church courts to try to

steer their tradition away from local or Presbyterian peculiarities to the ‘great

tradition’ upheld in the Reformed confessions.

In necessariis unitas—“the application is, of course, the difficulty,”

mused Cunningham. Doctrinal criticism for the sake of fundamental Christian

truth is difficult; when pursued through the category of history it is downright

risky. The risk is especially acute for those Christians who partake of

“Christianity’s dangerous idea”—Protestants.66 They cannot predict,

determine, or control the process once it is unleashed. Raising the question of

which doctrines are fundamental and which are not, which parts of the

Christian doctrinal heritage are achievements for the ages and which are not,

necessarily invokes historical and systematic criticism of the genesis of

doctrine. A tradition’s foundational beliefs on revelation, authority, church,

and so forth, which determine in part its dogmatic system, must be reviewed.

Do those foundations still appear hale in the light of deepened or merely

different knowledge and insight? Then, the historical development of doctrine

must be revisited. Do old doctrinal quarrels still hold? Did hot rhetoric in the

past obscure common understandings? What was essential in past confessions

of faith and what were accidents of context? Perhaps what a past generation

66 Alister E. McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: the Protestant Revolution—A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: Harper, 2007).

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set up as the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae, though no less true, has

slipped from the centre to the periphery of Christian experience.

Can this risky process be avoided? On one hand, the global explosion

of Christianity is raising uncomfortable questions as to which parts of the

hoary dogmatic heritage of Christendom need to be accepted as central or

essential by the younger churches of the ‘majority world’. How will

Christianity’s traditional ‘God-talk’ change as it is translated into the cultural

vernacular in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere?67 Missiologists are especially

emphatic about the sheer risk involved in “translating” Christianity into other

cultural vernaculars. When the message of Scripture and the church’s

established doctrinal tradition are interpreted through an almost infinite variety

of cultural specifications, the results can be unpredictable and deeply

disconcerting to established interests.68 Given their theological foundations,

Protestants can be uniquely accommodating of this looming dogmatic

redaction in the global church, even as they keep hope that this process will

enhance rather than eradicate the established consensus fidelum. On the other

hand, the dwindling faithful in the West are aware as never before that a lack

of doctrinal unity has severely compromised the church’s witness. For we who

“live in a world that no longer asks ‘What kind of Christian should I be?’ but

‘Why be Christian at all?’,” an account of the formation of doctrine that can

unite Christians on fundamentals seems imperative.69 To this end, perhaps the

neglected theological labour of two smallish evangelical Presbyterian

denominations in Victorian Scotland can make a humble contribution to

Protestant thinking on the subject.

67 Brian Stanley, “The Reshaping of Christian Tradition: Western Denominational Identity in a Non-Western Context,” in Unity and Diversity in the Church, ed. R. N. Swanson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 399-426, illustrates how questions regarding the viability of western dogmas and church institutions were being raised already on the mission fields of the Victorians. 68 Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1989); Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996), 26-42. 69 H. Ashley Hall, “The Development of Doctrine: A Lutheran Examination,” Pro Ecclesia 16 (2007): 277.

275

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