The Free Church Defence Association
THE Free Church Defence Association has published the first issue of its magazine, Free Church Foundations. The Association is “distressed and concerned that cherished Biblical principles and practices are being broken down and swept aside” in the Free Church of Scotland. “We would emphasise,” it says, “that the issues at stake are far greater than Free Church distinctives, important though they be. At stake are the very foundations of Christianity: the Bible, truth, honesty, fairness, justice, morality and the gospel.”
In tracing past contending in the Free Church, one article in the magazine speaks about the infamous Declaratory Act of 1892 which made it no longer necessary for ministers to accept all the teachings of the Confession. Having mentioned the Act, the article then leaps forward to the rescinding of the Act in 1906. Not a word is breathed about the opposition to the Act by the Rev. Donald Macfarlane and others during 1892, his efforts to preserve the testimony of the Free Church, his endeavours to have the Act rescinded, his Protest against it in 1893, and his departure from the Free Church, with the result that thousands of people left the Free Church and formed the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. One would think that “truth, honesty, fairness [and ] justice” which the Association says is at stake in the Free Church would have induced the writer to at least acknowledge what was a most significant defence of the truth.
The same less than honest ignoring of historical facts is seen on the Free Church website on the Internet. Referring to the late nineteenth-century movement for the union of Presbyterian Churches in Scotland, it says that “union was found to be possible only on the basis of compromise – an agreement to adopt a confession of faith sufficiently vague and elastic as to allow those holding different views to subscribe to it with good conscience” (a reference, we presume, to the Declaratory Act of 1892). “When the Free Church was confronted with this dilemma, a minority took the view that the doctrines which were being treated as open questions were so vital to the faith that the duty of Christian unity had to yield to the higher duty of fidelity to the truth.” The minority he refers to is not Mr Macfarlane and others in 1893, but the minority of ministers and elders who claimed to continue as the true Free Church, when the Free Church entered the union of 1900 to form the United Free Church.
The fact is, that those who were opposing the Declaratory Act, but who continued in the Free Church after 1893, when Mr Macfarlane separated, were under the Act although they argued otherwise. In One hundred Years of Witness, we read on page 53, “While it is true that the post 1900 Free Church did ultimately rescind the Declaratory Act she did not, as far as can be ascertained, resile from her claim that she was never under the Act. By implication this claim cast aspersions on the rightfulness of the Free Presbyterian separation from the Declaratory Act Free Church and constituted an insurmountable barrier to union so long as it was maintained. Perhaps there is an element of truth in the verdict of Drummond and Bulloch [in The Church in Late Victorian Scotland] regarding those who remained in the Declaratory Act Free Church: ‘Deeply unhappy, they felt in their hearts that the Free Presbyterians had been right and that they had allowed themselves to remain in a Free Church which had slipped its moorings and was adrift in uncharted seas’.”
Another study of the punishment of children
The issue of the punishment of children has again come to the fore with the publication of a study by, among others, American sociologist Murray Strauss. They conclude that “when parents use corporal punishment to reduce [antisocial behaviour], the long-term effect tends to be the opposite”. Therefore, they suggest, if you spare the rod you will help reduce the overall level of violence in American society.
Appearing in the journal Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, and including careful analysis of the data gathered in their research, this study sounds persuasive, especially at a time when there is so much concern about the physical abuse of children. However, it has been pointed out that the study is seriously flawed. The source of their information was a series of telephone interviews conducted with 807 mothers of children between the ages of 6 and 9, but these mothers were confined to the age-range 14 to 21 – scarcely a representative selection. Yet too often it is flawed studies such as this which attract attention and sometimes influence whole generations for the worse. Now that a second look has been taken at the research methods of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, it is easily seen that the foundations of his God-dishonouring theories were far more shaky than anyone realised.
Certainly the unwillingness of many parents to apply moderate physical punishment to their children has given us a thoroughly violent generation. And it is a generation which stands convicted of no small degree of abuse – physical and worse – of children, some of them shockingly young.
This most recent study has come out against the spanking of children, but other “experts” support the moderate use of chastisement, at least for young children. According to one American paediatrician, more sophisticated studies have consistently shown that corporal punishment is effective, and not harmful to long-term development, if it is confined to youngsters between 18 months and 6 years. But let us go beyond the experts of this world to the wisdom of inspiration: “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame” (Proverbs 29:15). K.D.M.