Sword & Trowel 2020: Issue 1 


of Scotland. So from 1900 onwards, what we think of as the Scottish Free Church was an extremely small body, the few ministers and congre- gations that declined to enter the amalgamation with the United Pres- byterian Church. This residual Free Church post-1900 was authentically reformed in character and untouched by doctrinal liberalism. We should not think, then, that the story I am about to tell applies to the post-1900 Free Church. Now to the story. How did the Scottish Free Church so swiftly move away from the evangelical Calvinism of its birth to the liberalism of its ma- turity? Perhaps the most helpful way to look at this is to give it a human face, or two faces. One of them is a less prominent player on the public stage, the other has a starring role. Both were Old Testament scholars in the Free Church. The less public player is Andrew Bruce Davidson (1831-1902). The star character is William Robertson Smith (1846-94).


You will immediately see from the dates of their births, 1831 and 1846, that neither Davidson nor Smith be- longed to the founding generation of the Free Church in 1843. They were men of the next generation. That generation had not experienced the heroic struggles and sacrifices that gave birth to their church. They took its existence for granted. They grew up in a Free Church that was already part of the accepted religious land- scape of Scotland. Robertson Smith, the starring char- acter in the drama, was born at Keig in Aberdeenshire. He was the eld- est son of the Free Church minister William Pirie Smith, a man of the founding generation. Smith grew up in an evangelical Calvinist home, and to a large extent absorbed its piety, at least on the emotional level. It seems by all accounts that he had a lively and powerful mind as a youngster. In 1861, at the age of 15, he began stud- ying at Aberdeen University; then, feeling the call to Christian ministry,


Edinburgh skyline, with the Castle dominating the city, and New College to the left.


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From Divine Revelation to Human Reason


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