Faith and criticism in post-disruption Scotland: with particular reference to AB Davidson, William Robertson Smith, and George Adam Smith

Abstract

The phenomenon sometimes known as believing criticism was the attempt in the last half of the nineteenth century to marry evangelical orthodoxy with modern. methods of biblical criticism. Those methods had long been considered inimical to faith, usually because of their association with either theological liberalism or plain unbelief.

Within the Free Church of Scotland three Old Testament scholars stand out as believing critics: George Adam Smith, William Robertson Smith, and A. B. Davidson. All three were charged with denying the inspiration and authority of the Bible, although only William Robertson Smith was actually tried for heresy. The relationship between their faith and their criticism is the subject of this study.

Chapter I is an analysis of the case and views of George Adam Smith, the last of those impeached. Chapter II is a retrospective survey of the views of faith and the Bible dominant, in the Free Church in the middle of the century, against which those of the believing critics were a reaction. Chapter III takes up William Robertson Smith, the most famous of the three, and Chapter IV A. B. Davidson, who taught the other two. Chapter V is an attempt to deal with the question, why it was the orthodox and evangelical Free Church which produced the most able, but also the most critical, of Scotland's biblical scholars.

The main arguments of the thesis are that the battle for the Bible in Scotland in the nineteenth-century had, fundamentally, more to do with the meaning of faith than with matters of criticism, and that modern views, both of the Bible and of belief, may have been implicit in traditional views; that is, the old, in some TT,,a ys, may have helped to create the new.