Scenes of Ecclesiastical Theatre in the Free Church of Scotland, 1981-2000

2000 ◽  
Vol 20 (First Serie (1) ◽  
pp. 125-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

scholarly journals The Bantu Presbyterian Church of South Africa and Ecumenism: 1923–1939

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Duncan
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
The South ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Presbyterian Churches

The Bantu Presbyterian Church of South Africa (BPCSA) was birthed out of a quest for union amongst Presbyterians, which began in the 1890s more than 30 years before it was actually established as the fruit of the mission of the United Free Church of Scotland in 1923. From that date onwards church union hardly ever disappeared from the agenda of the highest court of the denomination, the General Assembly. During the twentieth century such discussions involved two of the three other Presbyterian churches and the Congregational Union of South Africa. In addition, the BPCSA has maintained a high ecumenical profile in both the South African and global contexts. The main thrust of this article describes and analyses the vicissitudes of Presbyterian conversations during the period 1923–39

Redaction Criticism on Trial: The Cases of A. B. Bruce and Robert Gundry

2014 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
Michael Strickland
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Synoptic Gospels ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Redaction Criticism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article deals with the trials of two evangelical scholars, one from the late nineteenth century, Alexander B. Bruce, and the other from the late twentieth, Robert Gundry. Both faced accusation and judgment from their peers because of their redaction-critical remarks about the synoptic gospels. Bruce was tried by the Free Church of Scotland, while Gundry’s membership in the Evangelical Theological Society was challenged. After considering the cases of both, consideration is given to potential lessons that evangelical scholars who use redactioncritical methods may learn from the experiences of both men.

Isaac Nelson

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
William Lloyd Garrison ◽  
History Of ◽  
County Mayo ◽  
Member Of Parliament

This book reconsiders the career of an important, controversial, but neglected figure in this history of Irish Presbyterianism. The Revd Isaac Nelson is mostly remembered for his opposition to the evangelical revival of 1859, but this book demonstrates that there was much more to Nelson’s career. Nelson started out as a protégé of Henry Cooke and as an exemplary young evangelical minister. Upon aligning himself with the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society and joining forces with American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Nelson emerged as a powerful voice against compromise with slaveholders. One of the central objectives of this book is to show that anti-slavery, especially his involvement with the ‘Send Back the Money’ controversy in the Free Church of Scotland and the debate over fellowship with slaveholders at the Evangelical Alliance, was crucially important to the development of Nelson into one of Irish Presbyterianism’s most controversial figures. His later opposition to the 1859 Revival has often been understood as being indicative of Nelson’s opposition to evangelicalism. This book argues that such a conclusion is mistaken and that Nelson opposed the Revival as a Presbyterian evangelical. His later involvement with the Land League and the Irish Home Rule movement, including his tenure as the Member of Parliament for County Mayo, could be easily dismissed as an entirely discreditable affair. While avoiding romantic nostalgia in relation to Nelson’s nationalism, this book argues that Nelson’s basis for advocating Home Rule was not as peculiar as it might first appear.

scholarly journals William Stewart Duke-Elder, 22 April 1898 - 27 March 1978

1980 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 85-105
Keyword(s):  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Family ◽  
Style Of Writing ◽  
The Town

William Stewart Duke-Elder was born in Dundee, 5 miles south of his home, the Manse at Tealing, the second of three sons of the Rev. Neil Stewart Elder, Minister of the United Free Church of Scotland, and his wife Isabella, née Duke, the daughter of the Rev. John Duke, also a Minister of the United Free Church of Scotland at Campsie, Stirlingshire. Stewart’s father—the son of John Elder, a merchant in Thurso, Caithness, and his wife, Anne Sutherland—was a scholarly man. Among the prizes he gained was a book given in the Annual Competition in the Town of Thurso, 1871, for ‘the greatest Proficiency in Highest Greek’. Perhaps with others it may have laid the foundation for Stewart’s own fluent, lucid style of writing. There were no eminent scientific or literary forebears in the family, but he relished the thought of an ancestor hanged for sheep-stealing. The Elders are a sept of the Clan Mackintosh whose Coat of Arms bears the Cat o’ Mountain (the Wild Cat of Caithness) and their motto ‘Touch not the Cat bot (without) glove’. Duke-Elder’s own Arms bear the Caithness cats as supporters, and his motto ‘Concilio et labore’.

Scotland and England: Our next task in church union

1955 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
David C. Lusk
Keyword(s):  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church

I have chosen a subject both common and extremely difficult. Where is God leading us, in the matter of Church union? What is our next task, in the Church of Scotland? We older members remember two Church unions. I do not expect to see a third—unless it be with some of our own separated fragments in the Highlands, or with the United Free Church. May God grant these in His time. For the moment these hardly appear to be tasks. What can we do but pray for the Spirit of God to move both these Churches and ourselves, and live as ‘visible Christians’ alongside them?There are more perplexing problems. We know that our unions of 1900 and 1929 have been part of something greater, a ‘movement’, a ‘vision’ (we say) of our era. But the next steps for ourselves, what are they to be? Our unions of 1900 and 1929 were ‘cheek by jowl’ re-unions. Those towards which we are now being drawn, are mostly strange to our people. I imagine everyone who has tried to prepare our people, in any way, for whatever ‘drawing closer’ may be God's will, has found that. The difficulty of ‘ecumenism’ is not just the name. It means other churches that are strangers to the vast majority of our folk. Societies aiming at Church union not infrequently find, that eager members of a few years back have left them, feeling that they were ‘getting nowhere’.

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