This book grew out of a chapter which Professor Torrance had been asked to write for a volume to commemorate the 150th anniversary of New College, Edinburgh. His remit was to write a brief history of Scottish theology from the Reformation to the Disruption. As he prepared and wrote, however, the project developed beyond the scope of his original remit. Soon it became a full-scale book covering the whole history of Scottish theology. Or did it?

Let me begin with a fable:

‘Once upon a time there was a young gardener named John. Unhappy with the methods of the gardeners of his day, he looked in old books and tried the ways of the gardeners of yore. And behold, he found that these methods worked and his fame spread through many lands.

Away to the north, in a small land where the mountains were high and the seas were wild, there were six gardeners, all named John, who followed the methods of the first John. And soon the flowers in that land grew tall and straight amid the blue skies and the sunshine. But ere long new gardeners came along who abandoned the ways of the first John. These men were named William and Samuel and David and James. And these men did reintroduce the methods which the first John had abandoned, and soon the flowers grew weak and twisted and bent.

But after many days had past, behold, another John came to that small land in the northern seas, and he called the gardeners to go back to the ways of the first John. The gardeners were angry and did cast John out of the garden, but some listened. After many more days, back in the land of the first John, a gardener named Karl watched his weak and twisted and bent flowers and knew not what to do. Then he tried the ways of the first John and behold, everything became beautiful in the garden. And this Karl knew how to write words and before long he made many great books and the whole world heard of the ways of the ‘gardeners of the first John’.

Back in the small country in the northern waters there were few who followed the ways of the first John, but there was one old gardener named Tom who told of his days as apprentice to Karl and called all gardeners everywhere to follow the old ways.’

Professor Torrance’s book is simply a scholarly development of this fable. It has a single, predictable message: the theology of John Calvin was received in Scotland by the writers of the Scots Confession, especially John Knox. This ‘older Scottish tradition’ was incarnational and inclusivist, like Athanasius, and held to a universal atonement, like Calvin. Unfortunately there was a return to a scholastic theological model through the creation of federal theology by High Calvinists such as Perkins, Rutherford, Dickson and Durham, a conditionalist, legalist and contractual theology which emphasized limited atonement and led to every conceivable problem, particularly the lack of assurance among Christians. John McLeod Campbell, recognizing this error, restored the ‘older Scottish tradition’ and suffered the consequences.

The problem with both the fable and the book is that they do not reflect reality.

In order to authenticate the ‘older Scottish tradition’ Professor Torrance has to reinvent Knox by arguing that he was quite different in theology from those who followed him. Indeed he says, ‘like Calvin, he stressed that predestination has to be understood strictly in Christ alone’. Professor Torrance goes on to give the impression that Knox’s doctrine of predestination was somehow different from that of later Calvinists and from that of the Westminster Confession of Faith. In fact, if anything, Knox’s treatise on predestination is even more ‘Calvinistic’ than that of the Confession. It is certainly not the christological reinvention of the doctrine as espoused by Barth and by Torrance.

After Knox, Professor Torrance has a chapter on John Craig, John Davidson and Robert Bruce—but no mention of Andrew Melville, whom James Walker says, in a classic book on Scottish theology, ‘was second to none in learning and hardly second to Knox in power and influence’.

After a chapter on Rutherford, Dickson and Durham, in which he is surprisingly kind to Rutherford despite his general view of Rutherford’s theology, there follows a chapter on ‘The Westminster Tradition’ which one would have to protest has more rhetoric than argument. The chapter is redolent with expressions like ‘hardline Calvinist’, ‘Scholastic theology’, ‘formidable Protestant scholasticism’, ‘rigid dogmatism’, ‘biblical nominalism’, ‘federalized and logicalized system of Calvinism’. He even accuses federal theology of ‘Nestorian dualism’ and ‘Arian and Socinian heresy’. By way of contrast, the ‘older Scottish tradition’ manifests ‘spiritual freshness’, ‘freedom’ and ‘evangelical joy’. The next chapters cover Robert Leighton, and James Fraser of Brae, demonstrating that they were in line with the ‘older Scottish tradition’.

When Professor Torrance then comes to Thomas Boston, he again engages in reinterpretation. His analysis of Boston is seriously flawed through a desire to demonstrate that Boston ‘fell in with’ (p. 205) the doctrinal system of federal Calvinism, while in reality his theology was in marked contrast to that system and represented a protest against its very heart and foundations. For example, he says that for Boston ‘the Incarnation was essentially a saving event’ (p. 210), implying that Boston shared Torrance’s view of incarnational redemption, which he did not. He also says that, in relation to the covenant of works, ‘Boston evidently realised that there is no clear warrant for this in the book of Genesis. However he regarded it as implied and so accepted the traditional teaching about it’ (pp. 214–15). Not so—Boston was quite convinced that Genesis 2 provides a solid foundation for belief in a covenant of works.

The following chapter is entitled ‘Eighteenth-Century Presbyterianism’ and is devoted largely to the ‘Marrow’ controversy and to the deepening divide between evangelicals and moderates. Professor Torrance argues that the ‘Marrow’ controversy was evidence of a ‘deep cleft’ which had opened up in the Church between the ‘evangelically earnest’ and the ‘formally Calvinistic’. He concludes that there were now ‘two traditions, the older Scottish tradition and the hyper-Calvinist tradition, which had set in with the imposition of the rigid framework of an abstract federal theology upon the authorised teaching of the Kirk’ (p. 243). Once again we note the biased language. The astonishing thing, however, is that Torrance places the ‘Marrow’ men, who were all federal Calvinists, within the ‘older Scottish tradition’!

It is when Professor Torrance comes to the nineteenth century that his selectivity becomes most striking. He devotes a chapter to George Hill and Thomas Erskine of Linlathen and then a concluding chapter to John McLeod Campbell. But what about William Cunningham, James Buchanan, George Smeaton and James Bannerman? Surely these men are among the greatest of our Scottish theologians and yet they do not even rate a mention in the book—apart from the negative use of one quotation from Cunningham.

None of the above comments should be taken to imply that the book is not stimulating. It is. Nor should it be thought that this is not a challenging contribution to the study of Scottish theology from a particular perspective. It is. But it fails in its stated aim of providing an ‘account of the development of Scottish theology from the Reformation to the nineteenth century’. It is, rather, partisan and polemical.

Professor Torrance has written a fine exposition of his central thesis, namely, that there was an ‘older Scottish tradition’ which can be traced to Calvin and which stands in direct opposition to federal Calvinism. It is not, however, a comprehensive and rigorous study of the history and development of Scottish theology. There remains a need for such a book—but this is not it.