Amongst the real treasures of Scottish theology, any responsible student of Scottish Christianity would be compelled to set the writing of James Denney, the quintessential Edwardian Scottish minister and scholar. I know. I've been known to mention this before! And it wasn't only Denney - there was James Orr, A. B. Bruce, Henry Drummond, T. M. Lindsay, Alexander Whyte, George Adam Smith, James Moffatt, and in England P. T. Forsyth. What a galaxy of theological talent. Now and then I'll post some brief reminders of those broad minded but Christ-centred thinkers. Denney was, in my entirely biased opinion, the most lucid, precise and in every important sense, one of the most evangelical of writers.
The Christian Religion is identical with Jesus Christ; if there is no accessible Christ, there is no Christianity. It is the Church's being to trust in Christ;it is her vocation to bear witness to Christ; if the shadow of uncertainty or of unreality falls upon Christ, her testimony is paralysed, the breath of her life is withdrawn. (British Weekly, 1902, p.73)
The primary function of the Church is to assert its origin: it is to bear witness to Christ as the author of all the blessings it enjoys. Its first duty, as its primal impulse, is worship; and worship is the adoring confession of the God revealed in Christ and possessed in the Spirit as the Redeemer of sinful men. There is nothing so characteristic of the Church's life as doxology.
(The Church and the Kingdom, p.7)
On 'wading' my way through several editions of the British Weekly it struck me that no other individual received two, 2 page articles at the time of his death than Denney. The first, by the editor and the second by James Moffatt. For William Robinson Nicoll, he could not remember a single occasion when Denney "acted below his high ideals" and for Moffatt his emphasis on the atonement meant that Denney "lived to make that faith in the unwithering grace of God real and near and dear to" [men] sic people.
I love that thought of the 'unwithering grace of God.'
Posted by: Ken Roxburgh | March 14, 2007 at 08:56 PM