6 - Biblical Scholarship and the Sermon

Summary

The central pillar of intellectual life in seventeenth-century Scotland, the Bible, also lay at the heart of Robert Baillie's writings. Study of early modern Scottish thinkers has, however, often risked historiographical neglect precisely because of a perceived myopic fascination with the Bible. The Victorian scholar Henry Buckle thus dismissed seventeenth-century Scotland as dominated by a ‘monkish rabble’ – ‘the Baillies, the Binnings, the Dicksons … the Hendersons, [and] the Rutherfords’ – who blindly defended Scripture's authority. For Hugh Trevor-Roper, Scotland's four universities were ‘the unreformed seminaries of a fanatical clergy’, whilst for T.C. Smout, any innovation at Glasgow University was suppressed by ‘the most crushingly Calvinist ecclesiastics, such as Robert Baillie’. Even the presbyterian minister and erstwhile Historiographer Royal George Henderson felt obliged to apologize for the fact that ‘Scottish culture in the seventeenth century was not very impressive’. More recently, Alasdair Raffe has argued that, in 1660, Scotland ‘possessed a common religious culture, the legacy of two decades of presbyterian dominance’. Such assumptions have, in turn, perpetuated a tendency to cast ‘Calvinist’ or ‘Presbyterian’ writers as invariably inimical to intellectual diversity whereas ‘heterodox’ thinkers are portrayed as driving intellectual change. Consequently, our understanding of how Scottish theologians such as Baillie interpreted the Biblical text remains limited to polemical caricature. How did Baillie interpret the Biblical text and from what intellectual traditions did he derive his exegetical approach? Why was teaching and scholarship at the Scottish university so focused on critical and practical analysis of the Bible? And how did a minister's understanding of the doctrinal concept of Scriptural self-sufficiency inform their preaching?

To answer these questions, this chapter illuminates the place of the Bible in Scottish intellectual and religious culture through a study of Baillie's writings. In particular, it addresses Baillie's analysis of the Bible in his Biblical chronology and in his sermons.