When Apologetics Goes Wrong - III.

Alexander Balmain Bruce's Concessive Apologetic was, in the eyes of Warfield, reducing the value of Bruce's books for evangelicalism. I said that I would discuss the effects of this on Bruce's faith, because the sources are not agreed. Some sources actually say that Bruce died "without a single Christian conviction" (R.A. Finlayson, How Liberal Theology Infected Scotland in Reformed Theological Writings (Fearn, Christian Focus, 1996) P. 198). Following Bruce's death, William Robertson Nicoll wrote to James Denney, Bruce's successor, that Bruce "abandoned the contention that Jesus was sinless. Christ he believed to have been a very good fellow, almost as good as Sandy Bruce, though less enlightened. But did he go any further than that?" (W.R. Nicoll, letter given in full in T.H. Darlow, William Robertson Nicoll Life and Letters (London, 1925) P. 349). On the other hand, both seem to be founding their opinions on an encyclopaedia article by Bruce, which some have contended was just another example of Bruce's one-sidedness. Was A.B. Bruce saved? I should like to think so, but I have to suspend my Judgement.

Which should not make anyone hold off The Training of the Twelve for a minute.

Our lesson rather is to stick to our guns, and to hold our ground. Bruce's mistake was to think that proclaiming a bare minimum of the faith would bring people into the Kingdom, but W.M. Macgregor, a later professor of New Testament at Glasgow, noted that:

"The victories of the Faith have commonly been won not by the proclamation of a bare minimum of belief but rather of things strange and hard to accept, because they are too full of God." (Persons and Ideals (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1939) P. 5).