In his debut monograph, Andrew Michael Jones places the remarkable recovery of the Church of Scotland after the ‘Great Disruption’ of 1843 in a fresh perspective. This dramatic event saw over a third of the Church's ministry leave their positions and stipends over the state's perceived encroachment on its spiritual independence. Taking many of their parishioners with them, they formed the Free Church of Scotland and posed a serious threat to the Church of Scotland's legitimacy as the ecclesiastical body established by law as the nation's moral and spiritual guardian. Yet, by the end of the century, the Church of Scotland had successfully navigated disestablishment campaigns, grown in vitality and increased in membership. As recent research by Stewart J. Brown and I. G. C. Hutchison has shown, church extension campaigns, liturgical reform, the decline of a rigorously conservative Calvinist theology and divisions within other Presbyterian denominations were crucial to these achievements. In this well-researched book, which builds on the author's doctoral thesis, Jones argues for the complementary importance of Evangelicalism, and the changes it underwent over the course of the nineteenth century, to this process of recovery and revival.
Adopting David Bebbington's definition of the ‘Evangelical quadrilateral’ and building on Timothy Larsen's research on transnational Evangelicalism, Jones identifies the Church of Scotland's Evangelicals as those who displayed a particular regard for the Bible, conversion, activism and Christ's atoning sacrifice on the cross, as well as a sense of belonging to global Evangelical networks. In three parts, the book guides the reader through different phases in the development of ‘established Evangelicalism’ between 1843 and the turn of the century and charts its contribution to the Church's revival. Along the way, it draws attention to major cultural, intellectual and social currents to which the Church's Evangelicals responded, including romanticism, biblical criticism and the challenges of impoverished urban-industrial communities. Each of the three parts is divided into two chapters, one comprising a case study of an influential Evangelical minister within the Church of Scotland and the other offering a close reading of a leading publication affiliated with its Evangelical wing. This effective combination of intellectual and spiritual biography with detailed textual analysis renders the book a valuable resource for scholars of Victorian ecclesiastical history and literary studies alike.
Part i explores continuity, drawing attention to the significant preservation of Evangelical beliefs and commitments within the Church of Scotland in the 1840s and 1850s. It focuses especially on the Edinburgh minister William Muir (1787–1869), the influential yet under-researched Evangelical ‘Middle Party’ to which he belonged and the Mission Record for the Church of Scotland. It demonstrates that during the Disruption crisis, the Middle Party charted a mediatory position between hard-line Evangelicals, who viewed disestablishment as essential, and committed Moderates, who deemed it necessary to acquiesce to state rulings on church affairs. The Middle Party are shown to have played an important role in the Church's post-Disruption revival, both by sustaining and growing Evangelical commitments in education and domestic and foreign missions, and by adopting a more conciliatory approach that left room for a broader spectrum of theological and liturgical perspectives to co-exist within the ecclesiastical establishment. Part ii considers how the increasing breadth of established Evangelicalism breathed new life into the Church in the 1860s and 1870s. It does so by turning to the influential life and work of Norman Macleod (1812–72) and his popular monthly magazine, Good Words, both of which are positioned as representatives of a new ‘romantic Evangelicalism’. Although the portrait of Evangelicalism might have been painted in greater detail, Jones effectively draws attention to its emphasis on divine immanence in nature, which helped to encourage Evangelical engagement with secular culture, and its sensitivity to organic development, which helped to cultivate a greater ‘catholicity of sentiment’ (p. 109) by encouraging a less rigid approach to subscribing to the Westminster Confession of Faith. As such, part ii makes a good case for the contribution of romantic Evangelicalism to the Church's ability to adapt to wider cultural and theological change. Part iii turns to the growing social impact of established Evangelicalism in the final decades of the century. Its foci are the minister and biblical scholar Archibald Hamilton Charteris (1835–1908) and the Church's Life and Work magazine, which he initiated. Both are shown to have contributed to the ‘democratisation’ of Evangelicalism, deepening Evangelical commitments and values among the Scottish population as a whole. Chapter v also contains a valuable discussion of Charteris's contribution to biblical scholarship, which contextualises his rejection of German Higher Criticism and makes illuminating comparisons and contrasts with the approaches of other conservative contemporary thinkers (p. 147).
The broadly sympathetic reading of established Evangelicalism and its contribution to the revival of the post-Disruption Church is tempered in the conclusion, which stresses its complicity in fostering anti-Catholicism and colonialism and in hindering systemic reforms to combat urban poverty that were seen to diminish Christian moral responsibility. Moreover, the author emphasises that ‘the evangelicals lacked the theological and social vision of the Church of Scotland's liberal wing and the ecclesiological and liturgical appeal of the high church movement’ (p. 201). These closing reflections might have been developed more extensively to add further contextual depth to the individual chapters (as might the interesting observations on the contribution of women to established Evangelicalism in chapters ii and vi). Yet the book as a whole does much to advance our understanding of the diversity of opinion within the post-Disruption Church of Scotland and thereby draws our attention to the varied contributions to its recovery and revival. Alongside ministers of more innovative and liberal theological persuasions, such as John Caird (1820–98), John Tulloch (1823–86) and Robert Flint (1838–1910), Jones reminds us of the importance of those who fostered and adapted longstanding, more conservative Evangelical beliefs and commitments.
In sum, this detailed book convincingly disputes any tendency to assume that Evangelicalism declined in significance in the post-Disruption Church of Scotland after the departure of many leading Evangelicals for the Free Church, including the talismanic Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847). In doing so, it opens new avenues for research, encouraging further reflection on the changing party dynamics and concerns of the post-Disruption Church of Scotland and its diverse members.
