Rev H M Cartwright
1The previous section of this paper appeared last month.
3. The echoes we can hear of the downgrade movement which destroyed the orthodoxy of the old Free Church, and indeed brought barrenness into the late nineteenth and twentieth century Church in the United Kingdom generally.
The Free Church fathers were familiar with a variety of views regarding the inspiration of Scripture. Thomas Chalmers accurately represented the position of the early Free Church theology teachers when he claimed that in the Bible “there exists but one ingredient of pure unmixed divinity, utterly separated and free from the contamination of all that is human”.
Dr N R Needham, whose book, The Doctrine of Holy Scripture in the Free Church Fathers, provides this quotation, comments that Chalmers certainly did not intend to deny the humanity of the Scriptures or their authors but “merely intended to emphasise that inspiration related so fully to what was written by their human authors that the documentary result perfectly expressed the whole mind and will of God, devoid of any human errors, misapprehensions, distortions, additions, etc . . . ‘perfect in its language as well as perfect in its doctrine’ . . . perfect . . . as a vehicle for God’s infallible truth. . . . ‘The Bible is divinely perfect; yet in one sense may be regarded as the compound result of the natural and the supernatural – not so natural as to have one tinge of nature’s infirmity adhering to it – not so supernatural as wholly to suspend and overbear the laws of man’s mental constitution.’ Chalmers, says Dr Needham, “repudiated the notion of different levels of divine assistance operating in the production of Scripture, and instead insisted that all Scripture was equally the product of inspiration – an inspiration which meant that ‘the mind of God, and that conveyed in the best possible expression, is in every sentence of the Bible'”.
Under the influence of German theology and rationalism and the desire to win the age to the truth by accommodating the Church’s view of the truth to the spirit of the age, an increasing body of the ministry of the Free Church entertained and then advocated liberal views of the nature of Scripture. H F Henderson, in The Religious Controversies of Scotland, explains that it was seen by some amongst “the more intelligent” members of the Free Church that the critical movement “arose from the new intellectual conditions of life at the present day, how in every department of human knowledge the methods and tests of historical science are being rigorously applied, and how the theory of evolution requires of everything that exists an account of its origin and development”. John Duncan, for example in a lecture as early as 1867, warned his students against the attacks of critics upon the Old Testament, which he perceived were really levelled at the Person, work and salvation of Jesus Christ, since their Old Testament exegesis impeached not only its authority as inspired but also that of Jesus Himself.
There is little evidence to suggest that Duncan was aware that his own assistant, A B Davidson, who succeeded him on his death in 1870 as Professor of Old Testament Language and Literature in New College, was opening the minds of his students to the views which he warned them against. A former student of Davidson’s said: “We scarcely realised that traditional notions were being questioned; rather we became conscious of a new perspective, outlined with caution and reverence, which in its main features appeared self-evident. . . . There were many details of the critical discussion to which Dr Davidson never referred. But in an almost furtive manner he would suggest certain broad fundamental ideas, which fermented in our minds all the more pervasively because he refrained from promulgating them as dogmas. He assumed and emphasised what was vital in contemporary criticism, not endeavouring so much to demonstrate its value as rather to indicate its fitness for elucidating the entire scheme of the history or literature of Israel.” He maintained that “the books of Scripture, so far as interpretation and general formal criticism are concerned, must be handled very much as other books are handled” and yet that the facts in the history of redemption are untouched by the most advanced critical theories.
William Robertson Smith, appointed in 1870 as Professor of Old Testament Language and Literature in the Free Church College, Aberdeen, was a student of Davidson, Wellhausen and other German scholars, and much more bold in his advocacy of critical opinions. He professed “to place faith in a position where it would be invulnerable to criticism.”
Dr Kenneth Ross, in his Church and Creed in Scotland, points out that Smith made three distinctions intended to accomplish this end: (a) a distinction between revelation and the Bible, which enabled him to assert the reality of a supernatural revelation in history while denying that the records through which knowledge of the history is conveyed were themselves supernatural or infallible, so that criticism could not touch the substance of revelation; (b) a distinction between personal and propositional revelation, giving the knowledge of a person not of facts; (c) a distinction between personal trust in Jesus and assent to a theological system. What we have in the Bible is a history, not so much of progressive revelation, as of the development of the religion of Israel. The authority of the Bible rested not on the character of the objective record but on the effect it had on the believing reader. Dr Ross, commenting on the effect of Smith’s teaching on his students, says that “it freed them to criticise the biblical text with the utmost liberty while professing to hold a very high belief in the authority of Scripture.”
I have no time to trace the decline further through the increasingly bold and unbiblical assertions of men such as A B Bruce and Marcus Dods, who in his inaugural lecture as the successor of George Smeaton in New College in 1889 described the doctrine of verbal inspiration as a theory “which has made the Bible an offence to many honest men; which is dishonouring to God, and which has turned inquirers into sceptics by the thousand – a theory which should be branded as heretical in every Christian Church”. He also suggested that belief in the historicity of the resurrection was a matter of indifference, that belief in substitutionary atonement or even in Christ’s divinity was not essential to Christians, and that there was defective morality in the Old Testament. The death of Christ was not propitiatory but a manifestation that there were no bounds to the love of God which He came to express. The case against Dods was dismissed by the Assembly in 1890. While he was cautioned as to carelessness in expression, which required the Assembly to reaffirm the divinity, atonement and resurrection of Christ, his view that there are errors in Scripture detail – so that the Bible is infallible substantially but not verbally – was specifically tolerated in the Free Church.
The Declaratory Act of 1892 had no article modifying the Church’s professed commitment to the Confessional doctrine of Scripture, as this had been resisted by Dr Rainy. But in response to agitation by some of the more conservative members of the Confession of Faith Committee, Rainy endorsed a statement by the 1891 General Assembly in which “the Assembly cordially avail themselves of the opportunity of recording their full and steadfast adherence to the doctrine laid down in the Confession as to the great truths of the inspiration, infallible truth and Divine authority of Holy Scripture, as proceeding from God, who is the Author thereof”. The same Assembly defeated a motion from more conservative members to the effect that the General Assembly “declare the steadfast adherence of this Church to the . . . Divine authority of Holy Scripture, as proceeding from God the author thereof, whereby it was free from all error as originally given”.
The statement adopted was intended to try to please all sides, but its worthlessness is clear from the statement made by James Denney. “He thought that to adopt such a form of words as something in which they could all agree – though they could only agree in it by taking it in totally different senses – something that did not compose, but only concealed, differences of opinion, was neither candid nor wise. The infallibility of the Scriptures was not a mere verbal inerrancy, a historical accuracy, but an infallibility of power to save. The Word of God infallibly carried God’s power to save men’s souls. If a man submitted his heart and mind to the Spirit of God speaking in it, he would infallibly become a new creature in Christ Jesus. This was the only kind of infallibility he believed in. For mere verbal inerrancy he cared not one straw.”
Kenneth Ross says of those in the old Free Church whom he describes as the New Evangelists, that they “criticised the traditional approach to the question of biblical inspiration as deductive and dogmatic, starting from an a priori assumption as to what a revelation from God must be. Blaikie wrote that ‘we have no right to assume that God will frame His revelation according to what we would wish for and desire. This were rationalism, pure and simple.’ Their own method they believed to be more biblical and evangelical, for it was inductive – constructing a theory of the nature of the Bible from the facts as to its own structure and contents. . . . Since apparent errors and inaccuracies are among the phenomena of Scripture, they must be accepted at face value and embodied in the Church’s doctrine of inspiration and authority. . . . Conceding the occasional fallibility of the structure of Scripture was a master-stroke which secured inviolably the infallibility of the substance. The truth of the revelation of Christ was no longer bound up with the accuracy of minor incidental details. Moreover, the Bible’s authority does not finally lie in a written text which is ever at the mercy of criticism but is to be found in the impression which it makes on the believer.”
The sad thing is that there were many prominent ministers in the Free Church of Scotland, like W G Blaikie, who were under the delusion that the Church could give free scope to critics who denied the essential inerrancy of the Bible and yet maintain the Evangelical doctrines of the Bible. They could reject the Bible’s doctrine of Scripture and yet authoritatively preach other doctrines which the Bible taught. History demonstrates the fallacy of that opinion, and will do so again. What happened in reality was, as Dr Ross puts it, that the majority “gave their blessing to a Christianity which was different in character from what had hitherto been found in the Free Church”. Blaikie himself, in 1889, was complaining of the change that had come over contemporary preaching.