Sword & Trowel 2020: Issue 1
Criticism was not itself condemned. A B Davidson continued in his own sub- tle way to teach his liberal views to students in the Free Church College in the Scot- tish capital. To that extent, we might even think that Smith’s real sin in the eyes of his church was that he was too up-front about what he believed.
It was the end of Smith’s
career in the Free Church, but by no means the end of his academic career. He left Scotland to become Reader in Arabic at Cambridge Univer- sity, and at last Professor of Arabic in the same university from 1889. He continued to publish books about the Old Testa- ment advocating a Higher Critical view; in his latter years, he turned away from the Old Testament as such, to comparative religion. His last book, The Religion of the Semites, sets the Old Testament in the context of a comparative study of Middle Eastern religion. Smith treats Israelite religion as a thing of slow human growth, rather than (or at least more than) a direct, supernatural, and redemptive revelation from the one true God. At length, in 1894, Smith died young, aged a mere 47. We can say it was a short life with a long legacy. But let us retrace our steps. Let us go back to the time when the Smith drama was being played out in the Free Church. Right up until the last minute, when Smith exasper- ated everyone (including his friends and including the Free Church’s
Left: The Lord’s Pattern for Prayer by Dr Masters has been translated into Arabic. Right: How to Seek and Find the Lord by Dr Masters has been translated into Farsi. (Both available in the UK from Tabernacle Bookshop.)
unofficial leader, Robert Rainy) by continuing to publish controversial material despite the official rebuke of 1880 – until that very last phase of the controversy, his church was more or less evenly divided between those who opposed and those who supported him. For instance, in the key vote in the General Assembly of 1879, which committed the church to press ahead with serious proceedings against Smith, the decision was taken by the hair’s breadth of only a single vote – 321 to 320. That surely speaks for itself. It shows how widespread the sympathy for biblical criticism had become in the Free Church, in so short a time. Robertson Smith’s departure from
the Free Church in 1881, as I said, sacrificed the man himself as an im- possible troublemaker, but preserved the cause of Higher Criticism. Nine years later in 1890, when similar
From Divine Revelation to Human Reason page 27
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