Eglinton, James

Burton, Simon

Nicholson, Hunter Owen

2024-03-11T11:21:19Z

2024-03-11T11:21:19Z

2024-03-11

Donald Macleod (1940-2023) has been called by James Eglinton one of the two most outstanding Scottish Reformed theologians of the twentieth century. As a long-time journalist, preacher, and professor at the Free Church College (now Edinburgh Theological Seminary), Macleod has left a lasting mark on the religious and cultural landscape of Scotland. To date, however, his work has received little attention in the academy. This thesis marks the first significant step towards interpreting Donald Macleod’s theology by considering his doctrine of divine passibility and its key role across his thought. That the first major foray into Macleod’s work should come by way of this view might sound surprising given Macleod’s well-established reputation as an ardent defender of the Scottish Reformed tradition of Westminster federalism. This research demonstrates, however, that rather than being a doctrinal anomaly unrelated to his larger body of work, Macleod’s doctrine of divine passibility is inseparable from some of his core theological commitments. In order to contextualize Macleod’s doctrine of divine passibility (and for the benefit of future Macleod studies) this research opens with a biographical account of Macleod followed by an overview of his critical engagement with his own tradition’s doctrine of God. In the subsequent three chapters, we explore in turn three key loci in Macleod’s theology—the image of God, Christ as the image of God, and Macleod’s doctrine of sin as anomia—in order to show how these aspects of Macleod’s theology either inform or are informed by his view of passibility. In the final two chapters, we show the distinctive expressions of this doctrine in Macleod’s preaching and his journalism. These latter chapters reflect a key premise of this research, which is that proper interpretation of Macleod’s theology requires engagement not only with his strictly theological writings but also with his sermons, his journalism, and his classroom lectures.

https://hdl.handle.net/1842/41608

http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/4340

en

The University of Edinburgh

Nicholson, Hunter. ‘Donald Macleod: Free Church liberation theologian?’ Scottish Journal of Theology, 1-15. Doi:10.1017/S0036930623000054

Donald Macleod

Divine Passibility

Scottish Reformed tradition

Westminster federalism

Donald Macleod's doctrine of divine passibility

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy