A Church for Scotland? The Free Church and Scottish Nationalism after the Disruption

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Mallon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
The Church

The 1843 Disruption of the Church of Scotland, which split the national church in two, was one of the most important events in Victorian Britain. The evangelical ministers who seceded from the Kirk to form the Free Church of Scotland did so in protest against the British state's intrusion in the church's affairs. The anti-English and patriotic rhetoric of the Disruption has led historians such as David Bebbington to argue that it represented something close to a nationalist movement. This paper questions this claim by assessing the nationalist characteristics of the Disruption and their role in shaping the political ‘unionist-nationalism’ of the mid-nineteenth century. It examines the kind of nationalist sentiment, if any, evident at the Disruption, the role of Free Church members in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, the short-lived proto-nationalist pressure group, and the nationalism of the Free Church minister James Begg, who called for Home Rule for Scotland in 1850. By assessing the influence of the Disruption's constructionist critique of the union on political nationalism, the paper argues that the religious nationalism evident in 1843 failed to translate to a political context in the mid-nineteenth century. The new religiously pluralist environment of the post-Disruption period saw the Free Church turn inwards and begin to focus upon its own denominational fortunes as a single Scottish national identity was replaced by a variety of competing confessional identities, each with their own claim to nationhood.

Liberal, Broad Church, and Reforming Influences in the Late Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 419-432
Author(s):  
Finlay A. J. Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Public ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
The Church

The second half of the nineteenth century saw something of a watershed as the post-Disruption Presbyterian Churches moved beyond the theology of the Westminster Confession. At the same time the Church of Scotland was forced to defend its role as an ‘established Church’, finding a ready champion in John Tulloch of St Andrews who stressed the role of religion in the public as well as the private sphere. Through the liberal and reforming influences of men such as Tulloch, John Caird, Norman Macleod, Robert Flint, and Archibald Charteris in the Church of Scotland, John Cairns in the United Presbyterian Church, and Robert Rainy in the Free Church the late century years witnessed a new theological engagement with the challenges of scientific discovery and social need. By such means Christianity was commended to mind as well as spirit, to reason as well as faith.

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.

Scottish Presbyterianism and the National Education Debates, 1850–62

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 363-380
Author(s):  
Ryan Mallon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
National Education ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Parish Schools ◽  
Religious Establishment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

This article examines the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish education debates in the context of intra-Presbyterian relations in the aftermath of the 1843 ‘Disruption’ of the Church of Scotland. The debates of this period have been characterized as an attempt to wrest control of Scottish education from the Church of Scotland, with most opponents of the existing scheme critical of the established kirk's monopoly over the supervision of parish schools. However, the debate was not simply between those within and outside the religious establishment. Those advocating change, particularly within non-established Presbyterian denominations, were not unified in their proposals for a solution to Scotland's education problem. Disputes between Scotland's largest non-established churches, the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, and within the Free Church itself over the type of national education scheme that should replace the parish schools severely hampered their ability to express common opposition to the existing system. These divisions also placed increasing strain on the developing cooperation in Scottish Dissent on ecclesiastical, political and social matters after the Disruption. This article places the issue of education in this period within this distinctly Dissenting context of cooperation, and examines the extent of the impact these debates had on Dissenting Presbyterian relations.

Christian Doctrine and Judicial Review: The Free Church Case Revisited

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (31) ◽  
pp. 318-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Cranmer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Church

In the latter part of the nineteenth century there were attempts to unite the various bodies which had split off from the Church of Scotland in the previous hundred years. In particular, there were great hopes for a union between the United Presbyterian Church [UPC] and the Free Church of Scotland [FC].

Between Nationhood and Nonconformity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Wallace ◽  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Dominant Feature ◽  
Small Measure ◽  
The Church

It tends to be assumed that the Anglo-Scottish relationship has defined modern Scottish literature. This chapter contends that religion rather than nationhood has been the dominant feature of Scottish literature within the Union, and that for most Scots, certainly from the mid-eighteenth-century Secessions, by way of the Disruption (1843), to the reunion of the Church of Scotland with the United Free Church in 1929, denominational allegiances within Scottish Protestantism, often within Presbyterianism itself, were the principal vehicles of identity. Scotland had a rich periodical press during the nineteenth century, but one splintered along denominational lines. Every denomination had its magazine, and Scottish reviewing, and literature more generally, bore marked denominational inflections. Moreover, the vivid characterization, claustrophobic Calvinism, and ingenious plotting of the Whig-Presbyterian novel have continued in no small measure—in works by Robin Jenkins and, more recently, James Robertson—to provide a narrative template for secularized, postmodern Scottish literature.

scholarly journals Reform, Reconstruction, Reaction: The Social Vision of Scottish Presbyterianism c. 1830-c. 1930

1991 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Social Vision ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Leadership ◽  
Cooperative Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

In 1929, after many years of consultation and compromise, the two largest Presbyterian denominations in Scotland — the established Church of Scotland and the voluntary United Free Church — were united. The Union was an impressive achievement, marking the end of the bitter divisions of eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish Presbyterianism. In particular, it represented the healing of the wounds of the Disruption of 1843, when the national Church of Scotland had been broken up as a result of conflicts between Church and State over patronage and the Church's spiritual independence. With the Union of 1929, the leaders of Scottish Presbyterianism, and especially John White of Glasgow's Barony Church, succeeded not only in uniting the major Presbyterian Churches, but also in establishing a cooperative relationship between Church and State. The Church of Scotland, itseemed, was again in a position to assert national leadership.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Communal Experience ◽  
In Christ ◽  
The Church ◽  
Francis Of Assisi

This chapter locates Rossetti in the context of the book’s ecotheological argument, which traces an ecological love command in her writing through her engagement with Tractarianism, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Church Fathers, and Francis of Assisi. It establishes her Anglo-Catholic imagining of the cosmos as a fabric of participation and communal experience embodied in Christ. The first section reads Rossetti in the context of current Victorian ecocriticism, which underplays the role of Christianity in the development of nineteenth-century environmentalism. The next sections question critical readings of Rossetti as a reclusive thinker and argue instead for an educated and politicized Christian for whom indifference to the spiritual is complicit with an environmental crisis in which the weak and vulnerable suffer most. This introduction also refers to the wider field of Rossetti studies and introduces her reading of grace and apocalypse as a major contribution to the intradiscipline of Christianity and ecology.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

‘This Romish business’ - Ritual Innovation and Parish Life in Later Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire

1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 384-395
Author(s):  
R. W. Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Mixing Water

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.

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.

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