A. J. Scott and his circle

Abstract

Alexander John Scott, born in 1805, was the son of a prominent minister of the National Kirk in Scotland.

Scott, as early as the age of 22, began, as a licensed minister, to oppose the Kirk's reigning Westminster Calvinism by teaching a doctrine of God's universal love, based upon his belief that the Father had revealed Himself in the humanity of Christ. By 1828 Scott, T. Erskine, and J. McLeod Campbell, formed a small band of theological reformers, which, in its advocacy of unlimited atonement, increasingly incurred the enmity of Scottish orthodoxy. During an assistantship to E. Irving in London, 1828-30, Scott, attracted to the early Church's vitality, began to advocate a renewal of the charismatic gifts of the Spirit. His Spirit emphasis altered the course and direction of Irving's life and theology. Scott's preaching of the charismata on the west coast of Scotland in 1829 gave rise to the first appearance of modern pentecostalism. These extraordinary phenomena, however, which occurred both in Scotland and London, Scott, unlike Irving, rejected as inauthentic. In 1830 he accepted a call to Woolwich and applied to the London Presbytery for ordination.

His conscientious refusal to sign the Westminster.

Confession of Faith obstructed the ordination proceedings, and ultimately resulted in Scott's unanimous deposition from the Church of Scotland ministry by the 1831 General Assembly. Scott pursued an independent ministry in Woolwich for the next fifteen years, and publicly lectured throughout the country on theology, the harmony of religion and science, the socio-political systems of his day compared with Christianity, literary and philosophical subjects, and the extension of education to all classes. Scott became the close friend of T. Carlyle, F. D. Maurice, D. Macmillan, and J. C. Hare, the last three of whom were theologically indebted to Scott.

Also at this stage, James Baldwin Brown, one of Scott's closest disciples, came under his influence.

He returned to London in 1846 and continued to preach independently. Scott's London friends, now including Thackeray, F. Newman, and the Gaskells, were often among his hearers. In 1848 Scott's socio-political concerns led him, along with Maurice, Hare, C. Kingsley, and J. M. Ludlow, to become one of the founders of Christian Socialism. He was involved in the beginnings of Politics for the People, the Cooperative Tailors Association, and the London and Manchester Working Men's Colleges. Late in 1848 Scott became the Professor of English Literature at University College, London, the only place of higher education totally free from religious tests. In 1849, along with E. Reid, Newman and other friends, he began what later became known as Bedford College, the first centre of higher education for women based upon the principles of religious freedom. And in 1851 Scott became the first Principal of Owens College, later the Victoria University of Manchester, also a centre of university education committed to religious liberty. In 1853 Scott was joined in Manchester by his closest disciple, George MacDonald, who over the next fifty years reproduced much of Scott's thought in his literary works. During Scott's Manchester period he made a significant contribution to the development of Congregationalist theology, particularly through the lives of J. B. Brown, H. Solly and D. W. Simon. His theology was characterised by a belief in the spiritual conscience, the doctrine of Incarnation, the universal love and immanence of God, a thirst for the spiritually living and extemporaneous, and a search for a catholic unity. Because Scott's influence was largely personal, upon his death in 1866 and upon the death of those who knew him, the memory of Scott faded.

As a seminal influence upon many leading theological reformers, and as a window into the lives of prominent Christian thinkers of his day, Scott deserves a place in the history of 19th-century British theology.