Meanwhile a mere hundred yards away the Free Church holds its own Assembly, and we have problems enough of our own.  The most obvious is the recurring financial deficit.  The Board of Trustees are quite rightly insisting that this cannot go on.  The Church must match its expenditure to its income.

But this responsibility lies not just with the central spending committees, but with every local congregation.  Too many seem to take the view that the denomination’s financial problems are no concern of theirs.  Whatever the austerity at central level many local congregations are spending freely even if that means running up debts of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

This, of course, is what they have been encouraged to do by the Trustees themselves.  The old Free Church owed its survival and growth to Thomas Chalmers’s brilliant idea of the Sustentation Fund, whereby most of the people’s givings went straight into a central fund for the maintenance of ministers, guaranteeing each an equal stipend whether his congregation was large or small; and this was supplemented by monthly collections earmarked for such centrally-directed work as Foreign Missions, Training of the Ministry and Church Extension.

But a few years ago this venerable system was scrapped.  Givings were no longer earmarked, allocation of income was left to local Deacons Courts and congregations were encouraged to invest more of their funds in local activities.  They gladly proceeded to do so, erecting new buildings, refurbishing old ones and recruiting paid local staff.  Suddenly, the Church’s payroll was no longer confined to ministers and missionaries.  Instead, there were congregational administrators, youth workers, presbytery workers , development officers and drug-and-alcohol- support workers, all having to be paid out of the same pot.

By the time these costs are met there is little left to remit to central funds, apart from the statutory minimum a congregation has to pay if it wants to keep its minister; and in any case there is little will to send a penny more to Edinburgh than we have to.  Time was when there was a healthy rivalry between congregations and people scanned the Remittances pages of the Monthly Record to see if they were doing better than their neighbours.  These days have long gone.  Now the local church is everything, the denomination nothing.

Because, after all, did not the great Chalmers himself declare, ‘Who cares for the Free Church?’  There is something touching about the current popularity of this mantra.  Chalmers’s arrangements for the Sustentation Fund are dismissed because he lived before 2010 and came to church on a horse.  But if his views on church organisation are now only museum-pieces, how come his views on the irrelevance of his Church are so inspirational?

Of course it’s important that we see ourselves as part of the great worldwide army of Christian soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder with others of all denominations.  But as Gladstone remarked in his tribute to Alexander Duff, the first Church of Scotland (and later Free Church) missionary to India, catholicity of spirit doesn’t require us to be ashamed of our own regiment.  Duff, the greatest missionary Scotland ever produced, was certainly not ashamed of his.

In any case, Chalmers never said, “Who cares for the Free Church?”  What he said was, Who cares for the Free Church “except as an instrument of Christian good?”  And there’s the rub.  Chalmers’s vision was not only for his own parish, but for “the Christian good of Scotland”; and beyond that, for the Christian good of the whole world (it was Chalmers’s vision that inspired the young Duff to go to India).

That is the vision too many of our local congregations are now in danger of losing.  Their own buildings, their own parish: that is the vision, and the wider work, national and international, no longer counts.  Home and overseas missions are starved of funds, volunteers are no longer enthused to join our regiment; and even if they were, we could not afford to train them.

Or so we are told, because when the modern Free Church thinks austerity it thinks “College”, universally seen as the most useless unit in the whole regiment.  Yet no other unit has been so cost-conscious.  Already, it has voluntarily reduced its full-time staff by twenty per-cent.  Now the Board of Trustees have singled it out for yet further reductions.  The positions of College Principal and Professor of Old Testament are to remain vacant, to be “covered by way of temporary arrangements”.

There is something deeply disturbing about this proposal.  Some Trustees are known to be keen to “outsource” the training of ministers, and the two bodies most likely to benefit from such outsourcing are the Highland Theological College and the Porterbrook Institute.   Two members of the Board of Trustees are closely associated with these “rival” providers of theological education.  I’m sure they used no undue influence.  But did they (as would happen in any other area of public life) declare an interest and leave the room when the Free Church College was being discussed?

Hopefully the General Assembly will be sufficiently alert to its own procedures to note that this part of the Trustees Report is technically incompetent since it fails to instruct anyone in particular to make these temporary arrangements.  It certainly cannot be the responsibility of the College Board, who have no locus when it comes to making temporary staffing arrangements.  That responsibility lies firmly with the College Senate.  Has anyone thought this proposal through?

But, then, the Church’s whole approach to the College is beset with misunderstandings.

First, there is misunderstanding as to its function.  The charge (now repeated in the pews) is that it is losing money.  Was it ever designed to make money?  It was designed to train Free Church ministers, and from the very beginning it was accepted that this would be funded from ordinary denominational funds.  Additional income from non-denominational funds would be no more than a welcome bonus.  It’s a great pity that all the talk now focuses on the institution, ‘the College’.  The real budget-line is, ‘Training of the Ministry’, and if the Free Church is to have any future it must make this responsibility a priority.  It’s absurd to argue, ‘We have a financial crisis.  Let’s stop training our ministers.’  That should be the port of last resort, not of the first.

The College Board entry on the Free Church web-site conveys the impression that the Board is “tasked with reducing the College’s dependence on denominational support”.  There is no mention of any such task in the original (1995) remit of the Board.  But if the remit has been altered to include this task the Board have so far done little to fulfil it.  Virtually nothing has been done to raise awareness of the College and scarcely a penny has been raised for the College Endowment Fund.  Instead, the College has been pilloried as the Church’s great loss-maker, and the College Board, set up to ‘promote the interests of the College’, has too often taken a lead-role in the pillorying.  Apart from its early years under the chairmanship of Dr. Ian MacIver it has served mainly as a mouthpiece for the College’s critics.  It’s hardly surprising that morale among staff is at an all-time low.

Yet according to the “budget ceiling” proposed by the Board of Trustees, “Central” costs are twice as high as those of the College.  Central presumably means “Admin”.  Does anyone complain that the Offices (who provide an excellent service) are “losing money”?

From its very beginning in 1843 the Free Church emphasised the importance of providing its ministers with the best possible theological education and for the fifty years after the Disruption it was a world-leader in this field.  Nor was the passion for theological rigour confined to the Church’s academics.  On the contrary none were more insistent on it than the men of action like Chalmers and Duff.  Duff, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander (and what use are they?), was fit to govern an empire, and virtually did so through his influence on the administration of  India; and in addition to his thirty-three years’ service in the sub-continent he fired the whole of Scotland, England and even the eastern seaboard of the United States with unprecedented missionary enthusiasm.  But it was this same Duff who declared, ‘It ought to be counted one of the chiefest glories of our Church that, from the very outset, she resolved, with God’s blessing, to secure not only a pious but a learned ministry.’  What would he think of a Free Church which grudges to waste money on a Professor of Old Testament?

We may as well outsource our preaching as outsource the training of our preachers.  Free Church ministers need a very specific training not only because their core activity will be to translate and explain the scriptures, but because at the end of their training they have to make a very specific confessional commitment.  They have to affirm their sincere personal belief in ‘the whole doctrine’ contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith and, as William Cunningham once remarked, the business of the Church’s theological training is to put young men in a position where they can make that affirmation intelligently.  No other institution in Scotland has that as its mission; nor does any other institution stipulate that every member of its teaching staff must ‘sincerely own’ the whole doctrine of the Confession.  Many will argue, of course, that confessionalism doesn’t matter.  That may be.  What is certain is that the Free Church’s commitment to Westminster theology will not long outlast the outsourcing of ministerial training.

But misunderstanding is not confined to the function of the College.  It extends to the status of its professors.  They are not some special breed invented simply to irritate the Board of Trustees and bleed the Church of its resources.  As Alexander Henderson pointed out four hundred years ago they are simply ministers seconded to a special task; and they are not the only ones to be so seconded.  Three Free Church ministers are seconded to evangelism among Glasgow’s Asians; three others are seconded to theological colleges overseas; and another to the Home Missions Board as its Development Officer.  I grudge none of them to the work they are doing, but no one accuses them of losing money.  Yet, just as much as the College, they are dependent on denominational support.

And if the Professors were not Professors they would still be costing the Church money: a minister’s stipend, a manse, removal and re-location costs, expenses, Council Tax.  It’s time we stopped treating them as a class apart, viewed them simply as ministers and charged their stipends to the same account as we charge the stipend of the Minister of Golspie.   If we did that, the College’s so-called “deficit” would disappear since virtually all its costs are ministerial-salary costs.

Our financial problems are serious in the extreme.  But they can be addressed, and solved, on two provisos.

First, that we instil due pride in our own regiment.  At the moment, this is anathema, particularly in what seem to be our cutting-edge congregations.  The view seems to prevail that if you are to grow, you must disguise your Free Church identity (and lock every Gaelic-speaker in the broom-cupboard).  Indeed, one city minister remarked to me recently that when young people come to his city from such congregations they seldom attach themselves to a Free Church.  When challenged, they answer that the only Free Church they could attend is their home one ‘because it’s not really Free Church.’

Who is spreading this disastrous nonsense?  It is the most pressing challenge facing us.  What kind of church do we want to be?  The Free Church, with a theology of the cross and a worship suffused with a sense of the majesty of God?  Or a church where discipleship costs nothing (and especially not the opprobrium of being ‘Free Church’)?

The second proviso is that we make appropriate cuts.  The Trustees themselves are demanding a moratorium on “centrally funded” appointments.  This does not go far enough.  There must also be a moratorium on “locally funded” appointments.  It is not that long since congregations a thousand-strong survived with just one minister.  Now those with a hundred demand more “staff”.  What happened to volunteers (and labour-saving computers)?

Last evening I attended the Closing Service at the Free Church College.  It was a splendid occasion: marvellous setting in the Presbytery Hall, good attendance, brilliant speeches, warm camaraderie, easy rapport between staff and students, clear appreciation of the quality of the whole educational experience; and added to all this the poignancy of the end of an era.  John Scoales, the most learned College Officer any college has ever had, has now retired.  Principal Mackay, too, is leaving after thirty years as Old Testament Professor: thirty years during which he delivered OT courses unsurpassed anywhere in the world.  No man can step easily into his shoes, but a decision not to replace him would jeopardise the whole future of the College.

There are pundits in the Free Church (absolutely no experience of Higher Education, but confident that they alone are in touch with ‘the real world’), who roundly declare the College not fit for purpose.  The official representatives of the real world, however, have no such reservations.  Having assessed the College in the light of the very best academic practice, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the University of Glasgow and the UK Border Agency have not only given it their imprimatur, but added their special commendations.   This doesn’t mean that it is now the finished article.  Far from it!  But what a tragedy that just when it stands poised for further development the Church should be taking the axe to it.

Will there be anyone in the Assembly with the courage to resist the Board of Trustees and propose the appointment of both a new Professor and a permanent Principal (to appoint an existing member of staff to this vital role would cost the Church virtually nothing).

I fear not.  But for the first time in my life I would love to be proved wrong.

This is an expanded version of an article which first appeared in the West Highland Free Press, Friday 17 May, 2013.

This volume brought out the hidden statistician in me, and I found myself counting the proportions.  Of the twenty-one contributors only one, Karen Kilby from the University of Nottingham, was working, at the time of writing, in the UK: a sombre reflection, surely, on the state of Systematic Theology in Britain.  The provenance of the writers is not always clear, but at least fourteen are from the US.  Three are from Korea; and the editor, Peter Phan, is originally from Vietnam, though now living in America.

Equally interesting is the denominational distribution.  Nine appear to be Roman Catholic, with one each from the Lutheran, Greek Orthodox and Romanian Orthodox traditions, and another from the ‘Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)’.  The stimulus given to Roman Catholic trinitarianism by the work of Karl Rahner has clearly not been matched by a corresponding stimulus to Protestant theology from the work of Barth and Moltmann.  But then, the volume ignores both the late T. F. Torrance and the late Colin Gunton.

The distribution of the material, too, is fascinating.  Under the heading, ‘Retrieving the sources’, one single chapter is devoted to ‘exploring the Trinity in/and (sic) the New Testament’.  This is exactly the same as is devoted to Bonaventure; and once this chapter is completed Scripture is to all intents and purposes set aside.  Theologians accustomed to taking biblical revelation as their starting-point will find themselves, I fear, in an alien world.  All would agree with the Editor’s comment that the New Testament does not contain ‘a full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity’, but too many seem to be taking this to mean that it contains nothing, and that the doctrine itself is a later, post-biblical development with only the most tenuous connection to primitive Christianity.

The chapter itself (by Elaine M. Wainwright) clearly reflects this point of view and is deeply disappointing, though it is not helped by the irritating habit of referring to God as ‘G*d’: the sort of thing that brings feminism into unnecessary disrepute.  If all human discourse is, as has been said, quotation, it’s going to be hard to find anything to say about G*d.  Professor Wainwright warns us not to read the New Testament in the light of later Nicene theology.  This is fair enough, but would that theology ever have emerged without the New Testament (which is the same sort of question as whether the Gospel of John would ever have been written if the Jesus of history had not been also the Christ of faith)?  The doctrine of the trinity may not appear ‘full-fledged’ in the New Testament, but the deity of Christ clearly does.  It was this which Athanasius and his successors were determined to defend (to protect the integrity of their worship); and it was this that cried out for a trinitarian understanding of God.  How did the being of God the Son relate to the being of God the Father (and of God the Holy Spirit)?  For Wainwright, however, the link between theology and scripture is extremely tenuous, as indeed is the link between theological discourse and reality.  We can speak of God only indirectly and Scripture (like theology) is only ‘a finger pointing to the moon’ (the sub-title of Wainwright’s contribution): a metaphor which itself highlights ‘the metaphoric nature of the task of naming and imagining the Divine.’  But if ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are only three of a multitude of images and metaphors, does this mean that God is ‘Father’ only in the same sense as he is a rock?

On the face of things, this is an approach which smacks of humility, honouring the age-old principles that the finite has no capacity for the infinite, and that  our critical reason can know nothing of the noumenon.  But even supposing that we cannot do for God what Adam did for the animals (naming them), can God not give himself a Name?  Not according to much contemporary theology, which is in principle agnostic and confuses our inability to discover God with an inability on his part to reveal himself.  This is why, throughout this ‘Companion’, revelation is discounted and the Trinity presented simply as a human attempt to make sense of certain experiences or to lay a foundation for certain practices (particularly liturgical practices).  Even then, the New Testament, which contains the germ of these attempts, is allegedly so obscure that we have to approach it through an elaborate hermeneutical labyrinth, only to discover in the end nothing more exciting than a finger pointing to the moon.  Silly of Arius and Athanasius to fall out over it!

There follows a series of erudite studies on ‘Recovering the tradition’ (the Trinity in Aquinas, Bonaventure, the Protestant Reformation, after the Reformation).  These highlight one of the peculiar features of this volume.  The Word ‘Companion’ suggests a work of reference, which is exactly the genre of the corresponding Oxford series.  For example, if you want a brief factual account of Logical Positivism you can turn to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.  But this Companion to the Trinity is no reference work, but a symposium, and it’s hard to imagine crying out to it when suffering from information-deficit.  Its main value is as a montage of modern attitudes to the Trinity.

It also, particularly in these essays on recovering the tradition, highlights the extent to which the Logos concept quickly became a master principle in Christian theology: surely a mystery in view of the fact that it appears only in the Prologue to John’s Gospel; and fraught with consequences because it prompted a shift away from the cross to the incarnation, and from a pre-occupation with sin to a pre-occupation with meaning (where we all feel more comfortable).

The section on contemporary theologians covers Barth, Rahner, von Balthasar, Moltmann and Pannenberg (together), contemporary Orthodox theology, feminist theologies and ‘The life-giving reality of God from black, Latin American and US Hispanic theological perspectives’.  There is no corresponding article on ‘the life-giving reality of God from a white Anglo-Saxon perspective’, presumably either because it’s others who can offer only perspectives or because our perspective is not interesting.

Peter C. Phan’s article on Karl Rahner rightly devotes several pages to ‘Rahner’s Rule’ (‘The “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity.’  The struggle here is to identify what Rahner means by the identity between the economic and the immanent Trinity.  Is it that there is but one Trinity (economic, immanent or both)?  Or is it that there are two trinities but they are the same in nature?  He concludes: ‘Rahner’s point is that there is not an immanent Trinity lying hidden behind or above the Trinity that we encounter in history.  On the contrary, there is only one Trinity who gives himself to us as Father, Son and Spirit, exactly as they are related to each other in themselves.’ (198)

Closely related to his ‘Rule’ is Rahner’s well-known theologoumenon that of ther the three persons only the Son could have become incarnated.  This verges on speculation, raising a question to which revelation offers no answer.  It seems to rest on the assumption that if the incarnation of the Son (rather than of the Father or the Spirit) was entirely matter of the divine discretion, then it did not arise out of the divine being and therefore tells us nothing about the divine reality.  The assumption itself, however, is arbitrary.  Is it only necessary acts that reveal character?  But eventually this, too, comes back to the preoccupation with the Logos preoccupation: God can reveal himself only through his Word, therefore only the Word could come.  But the key trinitarian word is ‘Son’, not Word.  Can God speak only through his Son?  I am not convinced.  The thesis imperils the freedom of the Son to volunteer to come forth and become the world’s Saviour.  And in any case, according to the doctrine of (en)perichoresis, in the One the Three come.

The chapter on feminist theologies of the Trinity instantly raises the question why we always fall into the trap of such tokenism.  The premise of coherent feminism is that women are not different from men.  Can we imagine, then, a chapter on masculine theologies of the trinity?  When Mary Magdalene said, ‘My Lord’ to Jesus, was she saying something different from what it meant on the lips of Thomas (John 20)?  And do the contributions of the other five women scholars not constitute ‘feminist theology’?  They certainly show us women theologians going about their proper business; and if anything more specific were needed, Feminist theology would have been better served by an article on the trinitarian theology of Catherine Mary La Cugna.

The section on dialogue between trinitarian theology and other religions covers Confucianism, Hinduism, Pure Land Buddhism, and Judaism and Islam (taken together).  Here again, the proportions are startling.  There is a long history of dialogue between Christian Trinitarianism and both Judaism and Islam.  Surely, then, each of these deserves a chapter to itself?  As for the interest in the Confucianism and the rest, it is remarkable that a volume which can see scarcely a trace of the Trinity in the New Testament (and probably not even its shadow in the Old) can nevertheless see it everywhere in the religions of East Asia.  Presumably the ‘faith position’ of this volume is that all roads lead to God.  Even so, it takes a very special imagination to see connections between Hindu polytheism and trinitarian monotheism; and an even more special imagination to see hints of the Trinity in non-theistic Buddhism.  Granted, evangelism implies dialogue.  But if I arrange a dialogue with a Buddhist, do I begin with the Trinity?  It is certainly not what Paul did at Corinth; and this volume being witness, the only light Buddhism has shed on the trinity has apparently been to show that ‘a metaphysic of substance’ (that is, the homoousion) has ‘contributed in no small way to the defeat of the doctrine’ of the Trinity.

The comments (by David B. Burrell) on dialogue between Trinitarianism on the one hand and Christianity and Islam on the other are somewhat more illuminating, if only for a timely reminder that Rabbinic Judaism developed largely in reaction to the Jesus movement among Jews, and is thus a post-Christian development, which (to impinge on a quite different discourse) makes it hazard for the New Perspective to argue against the Old Perspective on the assumption that what Paul was familiar with was Tannaitic Judaism.

Even more interesting is the warning against comparisons between Jesus and Mohammed, built on the slender foundation that both were ‘prophets’: ‘the salient comparison,’ Burrell suggests, ‘is rather between Jesus and the Qur’an.’  He adds, by way of elucidation, ‘Christians believe that Jesus is the Word of God made human, while Muslims believe the Qu’ran to be the Word of God made “book”.’  Yet, for Evangelicals, the Book is the word of God written.  The Logos concept is again causing ambiguity.

These various sections are prefaced by an Introduction consisting of two chapters written by the Editor: one on ‘Developments of the doctrine of the Trinity’; the other on ‘Systematic issues in the doctrine of the Trinity’.  These raise interesting methodological issues, such as whether theology, following the pattern set by Aquinas, should begin by laying a philosophical foundation for belief in God and only then proceed to discuss the ‘truths of revelation’.  Time-honoured though it is this approach supposes that theology is incapable of laying its own foundation.  The Editor also takes up Rahner’s protest against the practice (again following Aquinas) of beginning theology proper with the treatise De Deo (on the divine attributes) and following this with a separate, and largely unconnected, treatise on the Trinity (De Trino Deo); which, Rahner alleges, once concluded is forgotten and plays no further part in the Summa or system.  Phan alleges that Barth and Rahner have solved this problem, Barth in particular by setting his discussion of ‘The Triune God’ at the head of his Dogmatics  (though it is preceded by three hundred pages of virtual Prolegomena).  It could be argued, however, that Scripture itself begins with De Deo.  The Old Testament has little, if anything, to say on the Trinity.  Only in the New Testament does God’s triune-ness come to light, incidentally to the work of redemption, as God shows himself Redeemer in a three-fold way as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  The doctrine of the Trinity is a modification of Old Testament monotheism demanded by the incarnation and the salvation-history which flowed from it.  Besides, the seminal element in Trinitarian theology is John’s statement that the Word was ‘God’.  That predicate could have had no meaningful content had not the New Testament been preceded by a long earlier treatise, De Deo.  When we say that the Word was ‘God’ we are saying that he is this God: YHWH, the God of the Old Testament.

The three remaining chapters deal with ‘Systematic connections’: specifically, the link between the Trinity and other loci such as Christology, between the trinity and liturgy and between the Trinity and socio-political ethics.  Of these, Anne Hunt’s contribution on ‘Trinity, Christology and pneumatology’ is notable for taking scripture and tradition somewhat more seriously than is typical of the volume as a whole.  She stresses that Jesus was what he was because of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and reinforces with a quotation from Yves Congar: ‘there can be no Christology without pneumatology and no pneumatology without Christology.’  But no less significant was the Father’s ministry to Jesus; and, equally clearly, all three are together at Calvary as the triune God acts perichoretically to save the world.

Hunt rightly stresses the triadic nature of New Testament worship, and this leads to  a reminder that, Christian faith in ‘the mystery of the Three was first expressed in prayer and worship before it was to find expression in dogma.’  True as this is, however, we must remember that before prayer and worship came revelation.  The Trinity is disclosed in the baptism of Jesus before it is expressed in Christian baptism.

Hunt also proposes that the interconnectedness between Trinitarian theology, Christology and pneumatology could serve as a useful way forward for inter-religious dialogue, which is hindered rather than helped by creeds and doctrinal formulations.  Drawing on the work of another Roman Catholic scholar, Raimando Panikar, she suggests that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are related, respectively, to three different varieties of global spirituality: the Father to the apophatic spirituality of Buddhism, the Son to the personalistic spirituality of Christianity and the spirit to the immanentist spirituality of Hindusim.  From this perspective the Trinity is the junction where all three spiritualities meet.

But does it not border on the perverse to take a distinctively biblical doctrine like the Trinity and put it to a use which flouts the Bible’s most fundamental command, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods beside me’?  In any case the value of inter-religious dialogue depends on whether these spiritualities are going anywhere.  Are they ends in themselves, without a future?  Or do they lead to eternal life?  If they do, then dialogue quickly founders, as Joseph Ratzinger once pointed out, on the fact that the different spiritualities have never been able to agree what they mean by eternal life.  Historical Christianity has been umambiguously clear about its own understanding: ‘This is life eternal, to know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’  Is it to this that Buddhism and Hinduism lead?

On the whole, a disappointing book, and not likely to be my Companion.  It is to be hoped that ‘the widespread revival of the doctrine of the Trinity’ will bequeath a more confident and more preachable legacy than this.

This review first appeared in the Evangelical Quarterly (Vol. 85, No. 1 [April 2013]), pp. 152-156.

Yet for all its length, the Report is indecisive.  While it rejects the idea of a polarized debate between those in favour of the ordination of people living in Civil Partnerships and those against, what it offers is precisely a choice between two polarised Deliverances: the Revisionist and the Traditionalist, leaving it to the Assembly to decide.

The first, the Revisionist, cunningly avoids endorsing same-sex relationships, contenting itself with saying that this is an open question which does not enter into the substance of the faith and can therefore safely be left to the individual conscience.  The practical effect, however, is the same as if it had trumpeted the legitimacy of gay ordination from the roof-tops: homosexuals living in Civil Partnership may be ordained.  The Commission has even prepared a draft Order for the Service.

The second, Traditionalist, Deliverance is almost equally eye-catching.  Its main clause condemns not homosexuality, but homophobia; and it secures for the anti-Revisionist position only the very minimalist protection that it is not homophobic to say that homosexual acts are contrary to God’s will.  We should be grateful, I suppose, for permission to speak.

The next thing that grabs the attention is the composition of the Commission itself.  It consists of three Revisionists and three Traditionalists, with a Chair to keep order.  No wonder the Commission couldn’t agree on a Deliverance!  But how fair is this ‘balance’?  Is it really true that fully half of the ministers of the Church of Scotland are Revisionists?  Quite possibly.  But is it also true that half of those who sit in the pews Sunday after Sunday, come rain, come shine, are also Revisionists keen to welcome openly gay clergy?  Or is the Kirk’s tail of minimally committed, non-contributing members, wagging the dog?  If so, there is a real danger that the tail will stay, but the dog will go.

But what the Report highlights above all is that this is first and foremost a debate about the place of the Bible in the Church.  Is it, or is it not, the Kirk’s Rule of Faith, the final, unchallengeable authority as to what we are to believe and how we are to live?

The Commission’s initial reply is that the Bible is the ‘supreme’ standard.  At first glance, this looks eminently satisfactory.  Even so-called ‘fundamentalist’ bodies like the Free Church sometimes speak of ‘subordinate’ standards.

Not, however, when they’re wide awake!  Such language is a betrayal of the Protestant principle of ‘sola scriptura’: the Bible is not the supreme rule, but the only rule.

The Commission is ill at ease with this, however, and wants to speak additionally of tradition, reason, the myriad voices of the contemporary church, and the inner voice of the Holy Spirit.  And then, over and above all these, we have the unspoken canon:  the voice of contemporary culture, always ensuring that the church moves with the times.

This is all very convenient if you want to create a fudge, but ever since God gave Moses the Ten Commandments the church has had a fixed, written Canon, which it revered as the word of God and which it felt bound to honour and obey.

This has been particularly true of the Reformed church, of which, according to the Commission, the Church of Scotland sees itself as a part.  Augustine once famously remarked, “Rome has spoken, the case is closed.”  Protestantism has said, “Scripture has spoken, the case is closed.”

Not quite, says the Commission: Society is leading us in another direction, the church is hearing a thousand other voices, and the Holy Spirit is leading openly gay people to apply for ordination.

This is an invitation to rejoice that the Spirit is keeping up with the times, and of course there is nothing new in the world outside the church rejecting and even rubbishing the Bible.  But this is not the world, but a Theological Commission representing the Christian faith of the Scottish people and now drowning out the voice of scripture with the clamour of private revelations, ecclesiastical mumbo-jumbo and secular individualism.

The Commission does not leave it there, however.  Not only is scripture merely a supreme standard: it is extremely difficult to understand, and certainly far too difficult to allow anyone to claim, categorically, that the Bible condemns homosexual practices.  Each of us sees the Bible through our own personal lenses.

This is at best only a half-truth.  We also read the Bible through the lenses of the very best biblical scholarship and (even more important) through the lenses of the interpretative tradition of the ‘holy, catholic church’ to which, in its 2000-year long history, it has never previously occurred that by merely changing the lenses you could get the Bible to commend homosexuality.

But supposing we do read the Bible though our own personal lenses, how far do we wish to carry this?  Am I not to believe my own eyes?  I read in last week’s papers that Charles Green has resigned as Chief Executive of Rangers; and I read in this morning’s papers that Liverpool’s Luis Suarez bit an opposing player in a match last week-end.  Am I to dismiss these reports as non-authoritative because I read them through my own lenses?  Or is it only to the Bible that the limitation applies.

I read in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that lesbianism is “contrary to nature”.  I may read this with disbelief, with fury or with a stung conscience.  I may dismiss the Apostle as a homophobic bigot or as a man struggling to come to terms with his own sexuality.  What I cannot do is convince myself that what Paul meant was that lesbianism is OK.

The biggest crime perpetrated by Protestant theologians in the last fifty years has been to convey the impression that the Bible is a fiendishly difficult book to understand.  This is in marked contrast to the position of Martin Luther, who spoke of the Holy Spirit as the simplest of all writers.  It is one thing to reject what the Bible says; quite something else to pretend we don’t understand it.

Assuming the Revisionist view prevails, Traditionalists will be granted some little protection: they will not be required to attend the ordination of someone living in a Civil Partnership.  But even this is subject to an ominous qualification: “in the foreseeable future”.  This clearly envisages a day when there will be no such liberty, and behind it there lies another well-established argument: we will get used to the ordination of gays just as we got used to the ordination of women.

But this is disingenuous.  There are still many in the Kirk who have never accepted the ordination of women.  More important, there is a world of difference between the Bible’s attitude to women and its attitude to homosexuality.  There were no homosexuals in Jesus’ inner circle, nor was it homosexuals that he chose as the first heralds of his resurrection.  Besides, the Apostle Paul declares that in Christ there is neither male nor female; he nowhere declares that there is neither straight nor gay.  The ordination of women can claim good biblical justification; the ordination of homosexuals cannot.

All of us accept that simply being homosexual should be no bar to leadership in the church, and we acknowledge the strength and self-denial of those who have chosen life-long celibacy as part of the price they pay for such leadership.  We accept, too, that the church must minister to all her members, regardless of sexual orientation; and, equally, that she must never again be a partner to denying homosexuals their full civil rights.

But ordination to the Christian ministry is not a civil right.  It is entirely in the gift of the church, which must appoint office-bearers in accordance with the rules her Lord has laid down in scripture.  On this point she must never, come what may, surrender her spiritual independence.

What is tragic is that at a time of global spiritual crisis we are distracted from our core mission by individuals concerned only for their own personal rights; and even daring as they claim those rights to invoke the example of Jesus, the Great Outsider.

This is nothing short of perverse.  Christ did not ask others to deny themselves on his account.  He denied himself, and made himself nothing; and anyone, straight or gay, who makes himself somebody, and claims his rights whatever the cost to the church, is at the opposite end of the moral spectrum from the Man of Calvary.

At the moment, all the media interest is in “splits”.  I am not going to meddle in that.  Leaving a church is a solemn business, and every Evangelical in the Kirk must decide for herself what would best serve the interests of Christianity, locally and nationally.

This is a slightly expanded version of an article which first appeared in the West Highland Free Press on Friday 26 April 2013.

Robert Rurns has shrouded in infamy the Edinburgh parliament which negotiated the union with England.  They were, he said, ‘a parcel o’ rogues’, and the expression has had the curious effect of casting a warm glow over the pre-Union parliaments, as if they were conclaves of public-spirited saints, intent only on safeguarding the rights and liberties of the Scottish people.

One of these parliaments, which opened on New Year’s Day, 1661, became infamous as the ‘Drunken Parliament’.  Stupefied by drink, spending their time in carousing and revelry, they passed no fewer than 393 Acts.  These gave the King (Charles II, once described as ‘a compendium of all the vices’), all he asked for: an income of £40,000 a year, almost the entire wealth of the kingdom; an annual Holy Day to celebrate his return from exile; and, above all, the repeal of every single Act securing the liberties of the Kirk.

That itself might lead to Ho-ro gheallaidhs in many a modern drunken carousel, but it was a serious business.  The King was bent on despotism, and the only obstacle to his ambition was the church.  Now, backed by an independent Scottish parliament (a real ‘parcel o’ rogues’) he could do as he pleased, and for the next thirty years Scotland suffered a Saddamesque reign of terror marked by torture, executions, banishment and extortion.  And had it been left to an independent Scottish parliament, the terror would never have ended.  Only the intervention of London’s Whig grandees, and the arrival of William of Orange,  brought deliverance.

There’s no reason to think that every independent legislature will turn out drunken traitors to the Scottish people; only, that independence is no guarantee against rogues.

Which prompts the question, What, then, is it a guarantee against?  It’s terrifying to think that for the next eighteen months our national energy is going to be wasted on irrelevant and sterile constitutional wrangling.  We have problems in abundance, but it’s hard to see which of them independence can even promise to solve.  It will make no difference to sectarianism, knife-crime, gangland violence, broken homes, drug-addiction, sink-estates or unemployment.

Mind you, it’s interesting to watch Nationalists doing contortions on this last one.  They desperately want Scotland to be a demilitarised zone.  They also want it to be neutral in any future international conflict:  Salmond would have sent no Scottish troops to Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq or Afganistan.  Yet, he wants defence jobs, squeals whenever Scottish regiments face being axed, cries ‘Foul!’ when the Ministry of Defence sends Leuchars fewer Army personnel than promised, and goes into denial when challenged as to the future of naval shipbuilding on the Clyde.

Which is it to be: soldiers or no soldiers; submarines or no submarines?  Presumably we don’t want to use a Scottish army just as an alternative to Jobseekers’ Allowance or as a mere tourist attraction.  If there’s to be no real fighting (a perfectly sensible policy) let there be no real defence jobs.

But though independence will make no difference to our endemic problems, perhaps it will bring great new, positive benefits?  If so, then, presumably, they can be listed in a series of bullet-points.  For example: independence might mean better pensions for the elderly, more GPs in remote rural communities, more teachers in inner-city schools, more libraries, weekly bin-collections, a rail-service to St. Andrews, a motorway from Perth to Inverness, a warm welcome for international students, and the guarantee of a summer every year (failing which you can claim compensation).

Or maybe independence will bring special tangible benefits to those of us privileged to live in the West Highlands?  If so, they should be spelt out: an air-service between Skye and Glasgow; a doubling of the budget for Gaelic television; civilised security-checks at Stornoway airport; a thirty-mile exclusion zone to give West Coast fishermen a monopoly on fishing in their own waters; guaranteed prices for crofters’ lambs; and designation of Shawbost’s Harris Tweed mill as a World Heritage Site.

If none of the above, what’s the point?  Is the mountain to heave, and bring forth nothing but independence?

Then, to add to my confusion, and give me even more reason to forget the date of the referendum, there is the mirage of the unparalleled prosperity we’ll all enjoy once we have control of Scotland’s oil.  Yet experts tell us that we have reserves for only 40 years.  Is that the life-expectancy of an independent Scotland; and shall we then have a referendum on re-negotiating the Union?

And finally: what about the idea of living with England as a foreign country?  That’s how things were before the Union.  The King lived in London, never visited Scotland, and listened gleefully to all the disinformation circulating about his northern kingdom.  At the moment it’s not clear whether every Act of the Parliament of an independent Scotland will need the seal of royal approval or whether the Sovereign will attend the annual opening of Parliament or have a ceremonial role in appointing a First Minister.  Nor is it clear what place Scottish peers will have in what, after independence, will be a merely English House of Lords.  Nor, again, is it clear what relation Scotland will have with Northern Ireland.  None, presumably; yet it was Scots who established Ulster.

But one thing is clear: there will be a border, as there is between the US and Canada, or France and Belgium.  It may be minimalist, but the respective Border agencies will still have the right to search and detain; and every international visitor who arrives at Heathrow destined for Scotland will have to negotiate that second border (and, possibly, be in possession of two separate visas).

All this commotion, and so little to show for it in the end!  Is independence anything more than a matter of national (or Scottish National) pride?

After all, we do produce the greatest footballers in the world.

This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press on Friday, 29 March, 2013.

It’s tempting to respond by asking, with C. S. Lewis, how many ancient myths and fables such people are actually familiar with.  Are they saying that from their vast knowledge of Accadian, Babylonian and Latin myths they can tell one a mile off, and know at once that the Gospel of John is no different from the story of Romulus and Remus, who were sired by Hercules, abandoned by their mother and suckled by a wolf, before Romulus went on to found the Eternal City, Rome?

This is certainly not the sort of stuff St. John thought he was writing.  He thought he was a reporter, answering, often in meticulous detail, the questions, Who? What? Why? Where? and When?  His gospel is not some once-upon-a-time thing set in a land-beyond-the-sea, but one where we meet real people, like the Reverend Professor Nicodemus, D.D., who hasn’t a spiritual clue; and the Woman of Samaria, who is now shacking-up with her sixth man; and the bachelor, Lazarus, who lives in Bethany with his unmarried sisters, Mary and Martha.  If these are mythological beings, they’re very odd ones: neither heroically evil nor heroically good, but so ordinary as hardly to be worth inventing.

Myths don’t suddenly appear overnight.  They develop over centuries at a safe distance from the world they purport to explain.  By contrast, the earliest New Testament documents were written not much more than ten years after Jesus’ death, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to debunk their ‘myths”.  Neighbours could have proved that Jairus’s daughter was never raised from the dead; local residents could have rubbished the story that once, near Tiberias, Jesus fed five thousand people with five scones and two sardines; and guests could have ridiculed the idea that at that wedding in Cana of Galilee Jesus turned water into wine.  Imagine the fuss if my admirers announced that forty years ago, at a wedding in Uig, I turned water into whisky.

And above them all stands the Myth of the Empty Tomb.  Just a few weeks after Jesus’ death, St. Peter is preaching the resurrection to thousands gathered in the open air.   Yet nowhere in either Jewish or Roman history is there any denial that the tomb was empty.    Jesus was buried only an hour or so before the beginning of the Sabbath (so precise are the chronological details of this “myth”), yet by early Sunday morning his body was gone; and no one’s seen it since.

Besides, the story of the Empty Tomb, particularly as told by Mark, has all the hallmarks not of myth, but of brilliant reporting.  Apart from all else, it gives the central, heroic role to women, even though in Jewish culture a woman’s testimony was not admissible in a court of law.  Why would a myth-maker choose such poor witnesses?

And the details of the story are so graphic!  They wait till the Sabbath is over (just); they set out as soon as the sun begins to rise; they’re dead-worried as to how they can ever move the stone from the entrance to the tomb; they press on regardless (“We’ll work something out when we get there!”  In a myth, one of the girls would have moved the stone with her little finger).

Most remarkable of all is the ending.  According to modern editors, Mark’s Gospel ends at verse 8 of Chapter Sixteen, with the statement that the women fled, “for they were afraid.”  Is there any myth in history with such an ending?

Not that it ended there, of course.  The alleged fabricators of the myth pledged its truth by being prepared to die for it.  They had seen him die, they had seen him dead, and they had seen him risen, and for him they would lay down their lives.  A novelist’s faith in her artistic integrity is one thing.  To let yourself be crucified (as St. Peter was) because you think the fictional character you have created is actually real, is a bit ridiculous.

The point of the gospel myths, presumably, was to prove that Jesus was the Son of God.  But this, too, is very odd.  Why, if this was their intention, did they not only place his death at the very heart of their message, but go out of their way to report that he didn’t die a “fine death”?  Stoic martyrs died “without fear and without hope”.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as he walked to the noose, took leave of his fellow prisoner with the words, “This is the end: for me, the beginning of life.”  By such standards, the makers of the Jesus-myth were downright stupid: their hero was frightened as he contemplated his end.  What was worse, he died disowned by his very own God, and crying,  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”

Such a man makes a poor myth, and as a god he’s not fit for purpose.  Imagine what Alastair Campbell would have said?  If there’s one thing dafter than “doing god”, it’s doing a crucified one.

Then there is the little matter of the myth-makers themselves.  Some parts of their “myths” are clearly not myths.  It’s not a myth that there is such a thing as the Sermon on the Mount.  Nor is it a myth that there are such brilliant parables as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, and such great stories as the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Wise and Foolish Virgins.

Who composed these remarkable pieces of literature: some unknown fisherman; a syndicate?  Everyone in the early church knew who the Great Preacher was, just as they knew who wrote the Gospel of John.

Of course, if it’s all a myth, they should have worshipped John, not Jesus, because if that fisherman spun that book out of his own imagination, the world has never seen his like, and never will.

This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press, 8 February, 2013.

This might be a great help when it came to social networking, but it carried its own risks.  Those who knew you when you were running about barefoot, and living, like themselves, on potatoes and herring, might take it ill when you returned home, pretended you hadn’t a  word of Gaelic in your head, and dripped such posh words as ‘shall’ and ‘actually’: words never heard in Garyvard.

This particular kind of Gaidheal is now extinct.  Indeed the wheel has come full circle.  Edinburgh’s professional elite now prize Gaelic-medium education, and instead of Lewismen haughtily denying that they have Gaelic, you have Morningsiders proudly telling you that they’re learning the language; and not only do they tell you, but they look you in the eye and challenge you to conduct a conversation without using a single word of English.  They don’t seem to understand how difficult it is for a Stornoway cove to speak Gaelic without words like ‘wonderful’ and ‘beautiful’ escaping his lips at regular intervals.

But the latest ecclesiastical news suggests that the misplaced sense of embarrassment which once crippled the Gaidheal has now been transferred to the church; or least to the Free Church, which is showing increasing signs of being ashamed of its own theology, history and traditions, and wishing it were somebody else.  Local congregations want to drop the name ‘Free Church’ from their notice-boards and give themselves some other handle.  They’re clearly scared that if their real identity comes out, ‘normal’, ‘contemporary’ human beings will run a mile.

There’s a magnificent irony here.  We expect people to be put off by our name, yet to be perfectly willing to believe that a Jewish criminal executed two thousand years ago is still alive and is the Saviour of the world.

Now the inferiority complex seems to be spreading even to the Church’s corridors of power.  At the last General Assembly someone suggested that the name ‘Free Church College’ be dropped and replaced with ‘Edinburgh Theological College’.  At the time few took the idea seriously.  Many silly things are said on the floor of the Assembly.

But rumour now has it that the suggestion is being taken up with deadly seriousness.  There is even a fair chance that the next General Assembly will be asked to approve the change of name; and the Assembly, if asked, will rubber-stamp it.

But why?  The thinking behind the suggestion is extraordinary: the name ‘Free Church’ puts people off, and if we change it we’ll attract thousands of new students.  The odd thing is that the only people who seem to be put off by the name ‘Free Church’ are Free Church people themselves.  This year, not one single student from this background registered at the College.  Free Church leaders who rubbish the College have clearly done a good job at home.  Fortunately, their disparagements haven’t reached America, Zimbabwe or Japan.

But the change of name is only part of a wider agenda.  A small, close-knit group of men, bent on what they proclaim as a ‘radical shake-up’, are determined to loosen the bond between the College and the Church.  The first stage in this will be to change the rules governing appointments to the College.  At the moment, the rules are crystal-clear.  Only Free Church ministers may be appointed to College Chairs; and, except by express permission of the General Assembly, only Free Church ministers may be appointed as part-time Lecturers.

Let me make clear where I stand on this.  A few years ago I drafted a detailed proposal to allow vacant Free Church congregations to call ministers from any Presbyterian church in the world; and the same proposal would have allowed vacancies at the College to be filled by suitable candidates from the same world-wide constituency.

But there was one proviso:  all such ministers would have to sign the Formula subscribed by Free Church ministers.  I don’t care whether he’s from brightest Africa or darkest Edinburgh, if he is able to sign the Formula I would have him eligible.

The Assembly in its wisdom threw out my proposal, which means that the old regulations are still in place.  Only Free Church ministers may teach at the Free Church College.  But rumour now has it that the rule is being ignored, and that there are moves afoot to appoint non-Free Church ministers without any doctrinal safeguards whatsoever: not a word about our Confession or our Formula.

This sends out a clear signal: these ancient documents are mere fossils; orthodoxy a luxury we can no longer afford.  And if it begins with College appointments, where shall it end?  Shall we open our pulpits to those who disdain our creed, and induct to our vacant charges preachers who have no passion for either our Calvinism or our Presbyterianism?  And shall we then go on to place the governance of the College in non-Free Church hands, because this is the only way to ensure change?

Yet under these ‘old’ arrangements the College has seen more change in recent years than any other department in the church.  It has been validated as a Partner Institution of the University of Glasgow.  It has secured degree validation for its core programme.  It has been able to offer two postgraduate degrees.  It has set up a part-time programme now taken by a hundred students worldwide (many of them on-line).  It has been licensed to sponsor overseas students.

Never at any of these stages has the name Free Church or the restriction to Free Church staff been a problem to the external bodies.  Only in the house of our friends have we suffered denigration.

Other changes bore more directly on the College curriculum.  We made Hebrew optional for the BTh degree (only one student ever took up this option, though the take-up rate would probably have been far higher had it been available to Free Church candidates).  Bearing in mind the urgent need for the Church to go on a missionary footing, we drafted a course for training Evangelists.  The church ignored it.  And bearing in mind the needs of our young people, we drafted a programme for training youth workers.  Again the Church ignored it (I understand that youth workers now have to undertake a course of training with the Porterbrook Institute).  Despite the perceptions now so widespread in the Church, the College has never been afraid of change.

But the changes now proposed are of a different order.  Not only do they threaten to loose us from our Confessional moorings: they are driven by an impatience with the historic Protestant vision of the minister as neither a priest nor a social worker, but first and foremost a ‘learned’ explainer of the scriptures (and able, as such, to translate them for himself).  We are losing faith in preaching because we are losing faith in the gospel itself, as if it were nothing like interesting enough to fill a church.

To revolutionise the ministry in this way, filling our pulpits with preachers who are skilled in speaking but deficient in knowledge (2 Cor. 11:6), totally uninterested in the grammar used by the Holy Spirit, and driven by no zeal for our creed, would be to change the Church itself.

If we must go down this road let us at least do it in an orderly way.  Let us do it through the General Assembly, and under the Barrier Act.  Let us do it, if that is the mind of the Church (which heaven forbid!) by repealing our ancient Formula and replacing it with something less rigorous.  But let’s not attempt to reform ourselves by breaking our own rules.

Some years ago I asked a former student with long years of experience as director of an international bank, for his assessment of the College.  He answered, quick as a flash:  ‘under-funded, under-used and under-valued.’

This is a slightly expanded version of an article which first appeared in the West Highland Free Press on Friday, 11 January, 2013. 

Many minds boggled besides mine, and there’s no need for me to add further words to the chorus of disbelief.  The position of American blacks before the Civil Rights Movement was most famously expressed in Billie Holiday’s song, ‘Strange Fruit’:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

In all my years of living in Scotland I have never seen Catholic bodies hanging with ‘bulging eyes and twisted mouths’ on poplar or any other trees.  Nor have I heard of a Scottish Ku Klux Klan burning Catholic homes, nor of local bye-laws requiring Catholics to travel on different buses and eat in separate restaurants.

The only segregation Catholics suffer is the one they’ve imposed on themselves by insisting on separate Catholic schools: a privilege secured for them by a Secretary of State born in a Free Church manse; and a privilege to which there is no Protestant equivalent.  Educationally, the handful of Protestants left in Scotland are second-class citizens.  The state subsidises the teaching of Catholicism and Secularism, but certainly not that of Calvinism.  Not that I’m complaining.  I was told that when I became a Christian that I’d be crucified.

But behind Dr. Kearney’s megaphone (as Professor Tom Devine called it) lies an interesting phenomenon.  Catholics insist on the freedom to speak out in defence of their rights, protesting against sectarianism, issuing public statements on moral issues, and crying, ‘Foul!’ whenever anyone questions the existence of Catholic schools.

I have absolutely no wish to deny them this right.  But they’ve gone further.  They think that theirs should be the only discourse in town and that none should dare contradict it; and they’ve been highly successful in constructing public debate in Scotland in such a way that any Protestant rejoinder is instantly condemned as sectarianism, and any criticism of Catholicism branded as bigotry.  Yet there are parts of Catholicism which I think absurd; and their public statements as a whole I regard as giving but a highly distorted view of Christianity, as if Jesus never opened his mouth but to condemn abortion, gay rights and sectarianism.

Surely other positions besides the ‘Catholic victim’ one have a right to be heard?  For example, I have a right to say that when I visited the Irish Republic in the 1970s the plight of Protestants in Eire was far worse than that of Catholics in Scotland , the only difference being that there were so few left that no one could hear their pain.  And while it’s true that in modern Scotland no one will have his throat cut just for being a Calvinist, every teacher, lecturer, novelist, poet, dramatist, sociologist and journalist has carte blanche to heap scorn and ridicule on Wee Frees, who, apparently, caused the clearances, muzzled the poets, strangled the singers and made the sun go home.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a single Protestant in Parliament, or on Quangos or local education committees.  Yet Catholics, for all that they’re being hung from trees, seem to flourish in all these sectors.

It looks, too, as if Dr. Kearney and his co-religionists take it ill when gays dare to answer back in defence of their own rights.  Indeed, just as black Americans had to paint their faces white to avoid discrimination, so, we are told, Catholics now live in such fear that they have to hide their religious colours and refrain from making public statements on moral issues.

But this again smacks of the idea that the Catholic discourse is the only one that should be heard.  To answer them back is to threaten their civil rights.  But gays, pro-abortionists and advocates of same-sex marriages have their own rights, and it is ridiculous to label the mere utterance of them ‘bigotry’.  They have a categorical right to conduct their own discourse, no matter how critical of the Church.

Yet there is a curiosity here.  The advocates of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-sexual Rights have themselves fallen into the same pattern of arrogance, as if theirs must be the only discourse allowed in town.  In today’s Scotland , it is hazardous to argue that there are limits to homosexual rights.  Try suggesting, for example, that homosexuality is an identity we choose, rather than one we are born with; or that gays have no intrinsic right to be married in church, or to have their life-style commended to primary-school children.  Or try inviting on to a university campus (or appointing to a university faculty) someone who will argue that homosexual practices are sinful.  You’d face a lynching.  Gay Rights is the only discourse allowed on campus.

The world is full of people who want to deny others the right to speak.  But to criticise the Vatican is not bigotry.  And to oppose gay marriage is not homophobia.

This article was first published in the West Highland Free Press on Friday, 18 January, 2013.

The 21st century is no exception.  True or not, the perception is that the church is in deep, deep trouble.  On this at least, believers and non-believers are agreed.  For the one, it’s time for a ‘ho-ro gheallaidh’; for the other, for lamentation, and with the lamentation comes panic: a panic which is equally pronounced among Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists and Presbyterians.  We have put ourselves in a dilemma.

It’s quite simple.  We either keep our identity, and become irrelevant; or we become relevant, and lose our identity.

But relevant to what?  To modern culture, of course.  The problem with this is that there is no one modern culture.  There are myriads of them.  There are the great ethnic cultures of Africa, Asia and England; there is rural culture; and there is urban culture.  Then, within urban culture itself there are the differing cultures of the city-centre, inner-city housing estates, and suburbia.  Besides, this urban culture spills over into rural areas, as more and more professionals choose to live in country villages and commute daily to their city jobs.  They have no interest in rural life as such, but by sheer force of numbers (and an incorrigible belief in their right to rule) they swamp the rural culture and render it powerless.

The signs are that it is to this urban professional culture that the church seeks to be relevant.  Very often, these professionals are completely unaware of having a culture.  Like fish in water, they swim in it, but give it not a thought.  It’s others who have a culture, with all the limitations that implies.  Yet, aware of it or not, they most definitely have a culture: one marked by academic achievement, professionalism and consumerism; and oddly enough it is within this culture that the church is currently most successful.  Walk into any Presbyterian church and this is what you’ll find.  The minister himself belongs to this culture, and so do nearly all of those around him.  They run the church, and they run it as they run local authorities, health boards and businesses.

There is nothing peculiarly Scottish or Presbyterian about this.  Anglican church-planters such as Joe Hasler complain loudly that ‘The Church of England plc’ has no idea how working-class culture works.  Bishops and their advisers know no culture except the professional, and spin even their innovations out of their own heads, with no regard for the situation on the ground.  They assume that working-class people would like the informality of ‘house churches’, whereas for the most part they like their religion ritualised, prefer the traditional hymns they learned in Sunday School to unfamiliar modern songs, and would prefer not to hear in church the same music as they hear at a pop-concert.  And the Church also forgets (according to Hasler) that working-class culture has its own way of ‘doing community’.  Women play a far greater role than they do in suburbia, the street is not only a thoroughfare but a meeting-place, and gossip plays a major role in setting and maintaining values.

It’s easy to parachute outsiders into such a community: ministers, assistants, youth workers, administrators, musicians, who all know better than the locals and who come complete with spread-sheets, targets, reviews, line-managers and the other paraphernalia of professional management.  But how will working-class people ever take ownership of such a church, as they did in the days when dockers and shoemakers and fishermen not only provided the leadership and the pastoral care, but also did the minutes and kept the accounts?   Do churches have to become so mono-cultural that only professionals can fit in?

But the problem is not simply that there are so many different cultures that we cannot be relevant to them all.  The deeper problem is that there is not, and never has been, any culture which is naturally sympathetic to Christianity.  Urban professionals may be the dominant culture in the church, but most of their class are more likely to be ‘football casuals’ than church members.  It’s hardly surprising, after all.  How can you expect people to believe that a Jewish criminal executed for treason and blasphemy 2000 years ago is still alive and is the world’s Saviour?  If relevance is to be our criterion, we’ll have to change our message; and with our message, our identity.

Political parties can face the same challenge, which is why Tony Blair invented New Labour.  Do we need New Christianity?  The church is certainly tempted.  But just how radical will the change have to be to make us relevant?  Adaptation will always be a part of evangelism.  What suited the past will not always suit the present; what is Scottish may not be vitally Christian; and what makes for the church’s convenience may not always promote the gospel.

But even to adapt, we have to have a theological framework.  Otherwise, we can never identify priorities.  If we base our preaching on sociological research, and simply ask, ‘What will bring people in?’ there will be little Christianity left.  Creation will have to go, and the virgin birth, and the empty tomb and all those stories about miracles.  Above all, the cross will have to go, because it’s repulsive and ridiculous; and so, too, will all that talk of self-denial, completely out of place in an age which expects us to ‘be all we can be.’

Of course, we can still be aspiring social workers, and we can do ping-pong, and we can march against capitalism.  But what’s that got to do with being a church?

As for my own church, the question is whether, for the sake of relevance, it must give up its Calvinist identity and allow itself to be assimilated into Evangelicalism.  There, on the face of things, breadth and tolerance prevail, and theology doesn’t matter.  Behind the face, however, is a determined army of Baptists, Pentecostals and Dispensationalists, who wouldn’t give up one of their cherished beliefs for anything in the world.

I am happy to learn from them, but my culture is as valid as theirs, and I see no reason why its voice should be silenced.

This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press on Friday 14 December 2012.

Few institutions are more amazingly complex than the Church of England, where Evangelicals, High Catholics and Unitarians always manage to create a fudge big enough to include all three of them, while at the same time producing some of the best Christian scholarship in the world.  There’s certainly nothing black-and-white about last week’s decision.  To the question, “Should there be women bishops?” I can categorically answer, “No!”, because there shouldn’t be bishops in the first place: not the modern sort, anyway.  The New Testament church never had any anyone who lorded it over other presbyters (the big English word for priests).  Instead, all priests were equal and functioned together as local church councils to look after the church.  Each priest was subject to the council, but no individual was subject to any other.  Even St. Peter was happy to call himself a “fellow elder” and, in the same breath, to warn his colleagues not to lord it over their flocks.

But then, if the Church already has women priests, why not women bishops?  The two words refer to the same office, as Anglican scholars know full well.  In this instance, however, the Church of England has decided to defy its bishops, the vast majority of whom are dead keen to admit women to their bench.  One of the oddities of the situation is that opposition to women bishops is strongest among the laity. Odder still is the number of women opposed to the measure, and oddest of all is that many of these women are high-powered professionals in their day-jobs.  In that world, they are all for equality.  But in the Church, not!  They know they’re more likely to get their own way with men than with women.

There was no one reason for the negative vote.  Some were clearly concerned that a Yes-vote would split the Church and lead to a serious secession.  Such a risk should always make Christians pause, but in the current state of the Church of England it was particularly serious.  After all, if you categorically refuse to recognise a bishop because she’s a woman, where can you go as an Anglican?  Any priest she ordains is not really a priest, any teenager she confirms is not really confirmed, and any bishop she consecrates is not really consecrated.  The strength of feeling on this runs deep: deeper, even, than the feeling on psalms-and-hymns among Scottish Presbyterians.  There can be little doubt that thousands would leave Anglicanism for Romanism because of what they see as the importance of the Apostolic succession (an unbroken chain of male hands-on-heads going back all the way to Peter and Paul).

Evangelicals have different reasons for their opposition.  For them, as Tom Wright, the former Bishop of Durham pointed out, it is a purely biblical issue.  Where does the New Testament point us?  The problem here is that Evangelicals aren’t entirely sure.  For some it is a simple matter of listening to the words of St. Paul, who categorically forbade women to exercise authority over men.  The Guardian sneeringly referred to such poor souls as ‘literalists’, even though, presumably, Guardian journalists also expect to be taken literally.  That said, it may well be that when the Apostle wrote these words he was merely trying to accommodate the culture of his own day, where any outspoken woman would be seen as a virago or worse, and any congregation which harboured her as a threat to society.

But, then, this was not the only word that Paul spoke on the place of women in the church.  He also said that gender didn’t matter and that men and women are equal spiritually.  There is neither male nor female: we are all one in Christ Jesus.  For many, including myself, this is the key text, and it explains why leading Evangelicals such as Tom Wright and Archbishop-elect, Justin Welby, wholeheartedly support the idea of women bishops.

In the very same breath, however, they dismiss the idea that the Church must fall-in behind secular views on ‘equal opportunities’.  This has greatly disappointed the Prime Minister, David Cameron, who naturally cannot understand why the Church is prepared to risk losing so many votes.  Mr. Cameron’s theological authority can safely be discounted, but on this issue, as on same-sex marriages, the Prime Minister is in tune with the public.  In fact, that’s why he’s singing the tune in the first place: leaders with a mistaken view of charisma always follow their followers.  Every hack in the country is crying out that the Church must get in line, and strident voices are even calling on Parliament to intervene.

This would certainly not be beyond its powers.  The Church of England lost her spiritual independence long since, with the result that her Supreme Governor is not the General Synod, but the Monarch.  Today, under our very limited monarchy that means Parliament; and Parliament won’t meddle, not because it may not, but because Mr. Cameron is too busy governing his own back-benchers to take on the women of the House of Laity.  His sound-bites have already exhausted his wisdom on the subject.

What will linger on, however, are the pleas for the disestablishment of the Church of England.  ‘Church and state must loosen their bonds,’ cried Matthew Parris in The Times.  This would have rejoiced the hearts of my own 17^th century spiritual forebears, who went to the scaffold rather than concede Royal Supremacy over the church; and there would have been a veritable ‘ho-ro gheallaidh’ among the 18^th century Dissenters who were banned from English universities because they weren’t Anglicans.

But disestablishment would put an end to more than the special position of the Queen (who would probably make the best bishop of the lot).  The privileges of Anglicanism still guarantee a place for Christianity at the centre of British national life.  Once we lose them there will be no barrier between us and a purely secular state; and then heaven help minorities.

This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press, 30 November 2012

By contrast, the coverage drooled over the Professor: a master of logic, evidence, bluntness and wit.  In fact, if we really have to dispense with God, this particular Dawkins would make an excellent substitute.  And, not to be outdone, Isles FM decided that they, too, must join in the obeisance, and humbly recorded the Doctor’s lecture for future airings.  Listeners will then be able to hear for themselves the standing ovation which brought the atheist ‘orduighean’ to a fitting conclusion.

I suspect that Dawkins is a good deal more serious and greatly more courteous than this report of his Stornoway visit suggests.  His eminence in his chosen field is beyond dispute and his membership of the Royal Society clear proof that he commands the respect of his scientific peers.  He has even given the world a whole new concept, ‘memes’: genetic somethings which, I think, pass on ideas.

But it’s far from clear that just because a man is an expert in microbiology he is also an expert on theology, religion, metaphysics and ethics.  Science as such can never settle the question of God.  Its greatness lies in its use of the experimental method, whereby it can watch, listen, record, count, weigh and calculate, and thus verify or falsify its own theories.  There is no conceivable laboratory experiment that can verify or falsify the existence of God, any more than the lab can prove or disprove the Dawkins Hypothesis that Charles Darwin is more influential than Jesus Christ or Mohammed.  Science deals with ‘physics’ (nature’), and is out of its depth when it pontificates on what is beyond and above nature (‘metaphysics’).  It can describe nature, but it cannot tell us why it’s there in the first place.

Even less can science explain the mystery of comprehensibility.  As Einstein pointed out, in a universe as vast as ours we would expect chaos.  Instead, we have order, and with every passing decade we see that order more clearly.  We no longer have to say, with the writer of Ecclesiastes, that, ‘we know not how the bones grow in the womb of her that is with child’.  Instead, we know (in people-speak) that the living cell contains DNA, that the DNA orders the production of proteins and that the proteins produce organisms.  But we still have to be amazed that it all makes sense, and that the universe is so kindly disposed to the human mind and prepared to tell us about itself.  Letting the universe talk is the first principle of science.

Many years have passed since Richard Dawkins last worked at the cutting-edge of biological research.  That particular phase of his career seems to have ended with his PhD thesis, ‘Selective Pecking in the Domestic Chick’.  This was not as trivial as it looks.  The distribution and timing of chick-pecks can shed light on co-operative behaviour among animals, and supports the idea that an individual bear of a ‘selfish gene’ can sacrifice himself for the greater good of the gene as a whole.

But Dawkins’s true genius lies elsewhere.  He is not a ground-breaking researcher, but a brilliant populariser, and this is now his real profession.  The last time I looked, the Chair he held at Oxford was the Chair of the Public Understanding of Science, and the measure of his success in this department is, as one reviewer remarked, that he makes the reader feel like a genius.  You put the book down feeling you now know everything.

But Dawkins is not alone in this.  The books of John Polkinghorne, John Lennox and Alister McGrath (all of which I’ve plundered to write this column) have exactly the same effect.  Yet these three are not only Oxbridge professors, but Christians.

Not that you can decide for or against God by counting the Oxbridge heads on one side of the question or the other.  Most scientists are atheists.  But then so are most of the world’s dolts, and even some professors of theology.  What is much more interesting is that such a science-worshipper as Dawkins can sometimes speak in a most unscientific way.  The best example is his famous remark, ‘It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who does not believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.’

There are very few ‘absolutes’ in this postmodern world, but here, according to Dawkins, is one of them.  But where is the proof: the ‘scientific’ proof?

The truth is that for Dawkins anyone who questions evolution is touching the apple of his eye. His passion for it knows no bounds, because it has long ceased to be (as it was to Darwin) merely a mechanism to explain the origin of species, and has become, instead, a Theory-of-Everything.  The problem is, as Darwin also recognised, that things must be made before they can evolve.

But Dawkins is not alone in his obsessive sensitivity on the question of evolution.  John Lennox tells a story about a Chinese palaeontologist who once addressed an audience of American scholars, but expressed some reservations on evolution.  This went down like a lead balloon, and when he asked why, he was told that American scientists don’t like to hear criticisms of evolution.  ‘Oh!’ said the Chinese scientist, ‘now I see the difference between America and China.  In China, we can criticise Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticise the government, but not Darwin.’

I cannot recall a time when evolution caused me problems.  But I’m still uncomfortable with the idea that if you have reservations about Dawkins’s very personal version of it he will have you pronounced insane (scientifically).

This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press, Friday 23 November, 2012.