Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? XIII.

Marcus Dods, as he reached the end of his life, found himself more and more alone. Many of his friends were dead, and his students had not rested content in his teachings but had moved on to more 'advanced' views. Instead of the confidence that had once marked his life Dods was tormented by depression. His religion seemed almost gone. Writing to a friend in March 1908 he complained:
"I am at no time a religious person, and I seem during the last six months to have been unusually irreligious. At first I prayed a little for better health, but I soon stopped that and fell back on my text, which seems to me to contain the whole of religion, 'Who... though He were a Son, yet learned obedience by the things which He suffered.' To obey, that is, to accept the spirit of Christ in the only form I have any consciousness or knowledge of a spirit of Christ." (P. 280)
As the end drew near Marcus Dods found no relief.
"Funnily enough I do not remember to have ever been so irreligious, so little inclined to pray, so cold on the spiritual side, so content to let things slide. I wonder if that is a common experience in sickness. I can't quite understand it." (p. 300). He wrote that on 1st October 1909. Soon after he was dead, 'failure' written, as he saw it, across his entire life.

Was Marcus Dods a Christian? It is hard to tell. Sometimes as I read through his letters I catch a glimpse, a spark, that seems to answer yes. Yet his teachings seemed to undermine the Gospel. But then again, Dods himself did not think that they did! He seems to have genuinely believed that, by letting a few things go, he could make Christianity truly more attractive to the younger generation. By adapting Christianity to the spirit of the age he hoped that he could bring the age over to Christ. Instead he and those like him set Scottish Christianity on a fatal down-grade on which it was broken.
And Dods himself was broken. No-one can read the 'Later Letters of Marcus Dods' without feeling that they are the letters of an old man who had lost his way.

What can we learn from the awful experiences of Marcus Dods? Surely we learn that it is a deadly mistake to try to adapt the message of the church to the spirit of the age. Whether it is called 'modernism' or 'postmodernism', it is the same thing - the World. Modern Pagan Scotland is the direct result of Dods and those like him.
We are not in the business of anathematizing anyone. We are in the business of warning. And this series has been written with deepening concern that what happened in the later 19th century in the Churches is happening again. Recall that THIS is the end of it all.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? XII.

Marcus Dods had, in the 1860s and '70s, been an optimistic exponent of the 'New Evangelism'. But with old age came a different view of things. While publically he continued to preach success for his teachings, in private he sounded a more depressed note. In 1902 he wrote:
"I wish I could live as a spectator through the next generation to see what they are going to make of things. There is a grand turn up in matters theological , and the churches won't know themselves fifty years hence. It is to be hoped some little rag of faith will be left when all's done. For my own part I am sometimes entirely under water and see no sky at all." (P. 67)
Looking back on life the man who spoke so often of theological change could write, "College is a different place with Davidson gone and Rainy only occasionally appearing. I hate all changes, and the world is all change." (P. 70)
All confidence was gone. The movement that was to reshape the churches had done so - but those who followed Dods were not content to stop where he had, and he was left alone, a tragic figure.
"Across the whole of my life I see FAILURE written -failure in all the best things," Dods mourned in 1904. "We are left drowning, with but our lips underwater, and sometimes not that." (P. 154)
And, try as he might, Dods could not find support even in the Bible for what he was teaching. While he said that there were 'grave moral difficulties' with penal substitution he could not deny it was what Paul taught:
"Paul's view is quite clear - man is a guilty individual at God's bar, he is condemned to die, and Christ suffers in his room; and considering that Paul always recognised his union with Christ (as few others have recognised it), I don't think there is much repulsive in that. The writer to the Hebrews finds that men are excluded from God's presence, and that Christ by His holiness and sacrifice opens a way for them into God's presence and favour. A great deal in the Epistle seems to be written from the point of view that it is His personal worth (especially His obedience, see ch. v.), that constitutes Him priest, but that tenth chapter still rather seems to me to demand the supposition that the writer believed that Christ's death was a sacrifice in the then ordinarily accepted meaning of the word... I would like to think he only meant that Christ offered His body obediently to the law of death, but it is difficult to believe that. I go over the Epistle every year, and every year I try to find that meaning in that tenth chapter, and every year I fail." (P. 145-6).
Striving against God's Word, and knowing he did so, Marcus Dods could never be happy. Next time, God willing, we shall conclude this sobering tale.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? XI.

Marcus Dods had become known as one of the young radicals in the Free Church of Scotland. And publically Dods remained optimistic, the herald of a new 'age of faith'. Getting there, he admitted in public speeches, might be difficult, but the best was yet to come.
Was it? The volume 'Later Letters of Marcus Dods (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1911) reveals a rather different course of events. Dods taught that the New Testament itself was not final for the 'advanced' Christians: "The truth given us by the Apostles in the New Testament is merely, as Matthew Arnold said, 'thrown out towards the object,' and does not completely express it. But it helps rather than hinders, it keeps us in touch with reality until we outgrow it, and for those who never outgrow it it is the very truth" (letter in 1904, P. 101).

In fact Dods was by no means as optimistic as he appeared outwardly. "I am a backslider," the New College Professor admitted in 1898. "I used to enjoy prayer, but for years I have found myself dumb. Of course one can always make a prayer, as I do every morning for my class, but prayer in the sense of asking for things has not been in my case a proved force. The things I have chiefly prayed for all my life I have not got. Communion with the highest and consideration of Christ are of course efficacious to some extent; but I pray now not because my own experience fives me any encouragement, but only because of Christ's example and command." (P. 29). Should a man who regards the New Testament as less than final for faith expect any other experience, we ask? Can a man living in sin (the sin, namely, of disrespecting the Bible) expect answers to prayer? Or will he find himself under the chastisement of God.
Even the criticism that had once pleased him was now a burden. Writing to Henry Sloane Coffin of New York, a leading American liberal and later pastor of Riverside Church, he said: "I have been reading, with much enjoyment, Seeberg's 'Grundwahrheiten', which probably yoy have read long ago. It's a great relief from the worrying at the details of the Gospels which I need to read but of which I am sick and which only does me harm. I wish someone would stop the stream of criticism and say something convincing about the existence of a personal God." (P. 87).
And referring to a book by the Rev. James Moffatt, later a professor at Union Seminary New York, he wrote: "I wish there were more help in it. He leaves us just where Julicher and the rest leave us - and that, to my mind, is a most insecure position. It's rather striking how this type of literature should always spring from our Church?" (P. 42)
But it was unsurprising, seeing what Dods had been teaching.

Next time, God willing, we shall continue our look at the older Dods.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? X.

Having been accused of heresy Marcus Dods was forced to defend himself before the College sub-committee - a committee that consisted mostly of his friends, surely a gigantic abuse if there ever was one.
Questioned on the statement about the atonement he informed the committee that his views on the atonement were in no way in opposition to the Westminster Confession. This was not the point of the accusation. The accusation was that Dods' statements on the atonement tended to subvert the Confession, since he said that it really did not matter if a man believed the Confessional statement or some other view.
The Committee accepted Dods' statements that his sermon 'What is a Christian?" was addressed to those who were exposed to 'modern negative influences', and therefore were believed to have 'honest though imperfect and mistaken impressions of the Person of Christ.' True, but Dods seemed to suggest that an 'honest' Unitarian who denied the deity of Christ might nevertheless be a Christian. The Committee said Dods was thinking of an attitude towards Christ that 'practically makes Christ its God' without articulating His Divinity.
On the matter of Inspiration the Committee again excused Dods, saying that the Confession of Faith did not require a belief in inerrancy. This is an old canard, and even if true it missed the point. As Dr. Chalmers once said, creeds and confessions are "land-marks of old heresies," and the doctrine of Inspiration had not been questioned in any serious way before the Westminster Confession was written. Not that inerrancy was a new teaching - quite the reverse; it was the old teaching, and Dods' view of a 'limited inerrancy' (as it is called now. Dods denied it to be inerrancy at all) the new.
A defender of Dods declared that "It was criminal to shut their eyes to these things [the new views in theology]. Dr. Dods had gone down to the arena and tried to fight these men with their own weapons..."
Dods declared:
"I must do the work I am called to do. I am delighted that other men should put things differently, but I have also an evangelistic function which I cannot decline to discharge."

And there was the whole rationale for Dods' teaching - to reach the present age by trimming the Gospel to fit its views. The result promised for this teaching by men like Dods was a new age of Christian influence, a revival. Some said even the Millenium.
But what WERE its results? To that, God willing, we shall turn next.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? IX

While Marcus Dods' teaching in a church in Glasgow hardly made waves in Scotland, in 1889 he was appointed to the chair of New Testament Exegesis in New College, Edinburgh, to succeed George Smeaton, author of 'The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit', 'Christ's Doctrine of the Atonement' and 'The Apostles' Doctrine of the Atonement' (all currently published by the Banner of Truth Trust). Why Dods was appointed to this post we are not sure. Up to that point his most well-known work had been editing a translation of the Works of Augustine. But he was appointed to the post.
It was at that moment that the conservative party in the Free Church objected. Already A.B. Davidson was applying the destructive criticism to the Old Testament in New College, with the appointment of Marcus Dods to teach New Testament only the higher critical view of the Bible would be presented at the denomination's flagship theological college.
Pamplets were written calling the church's attention to the professor's teaching on the Bible, the atonement, even the divinity of Christ and the resurrection.
Which is not to say that Dods denied either the divinity of Christ or the resurrection of the Saviour. No, what he DID say was that neither belief was necessary for a man to be a Christian. Preaching on 'What is a Christian?'in the High Kirk of Edinburgh, St. Giles. Cathedral, Dods had said:
"If, then, we are accepting God's forgiveness, and living humbly in the sunshine of His favour, we need not be seriously disturbed in spirit if we cannot accept what is known as the orthodox theory of the atonement (the very view Smeaton had written to defend! - H.H.). That theory is that Christ took our place and bore the punishment due to us, so that we can now claim forgiveness in His name and on the ground that our sins have been punished in Him..." After acknowleding that this theory is supported by the Biblical evidence Dods went on:
"It is open, however, to obvious objections. Men are conscious... that they bear the punishment of their own sins all their life... they cannot believe that God needed to be propitiated, but rather accept the statement of our Lord Himself, that God loved and longed for His children even when they had strayed from Him. They consider Christ's life and death to be a manifestatio... of His redeeming love... In point of fact both theories of the Atonement produce good Christians." (Quoted in Henderson, 'The Religious Controversies of Scotland' Pp. 235-6. lightly edited for this blog.)
On the divinity of Christ Dods had said:
"We must not too hastily conclude that even a belief in Christ's Divinity is essential to the true Christian." (Henderson, P. 237) The same, he maintained, was true of the resurrection. Even if a man could not believe that Christ's body had risen from the tomb, if Christ was 'a living reality' to him, he was a true Christian.

Next time, God willing, we shall see what Dods had to say for himself!

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? VIII.

Finally called as pastor of Renfield Free Church, Glasgow, Marcus Dods found himself in a pastorate in Scotland's Western capital, a place of influence. Still a young man himself, Dods turned his attention towards the young in particular.
But not the poor. By the 1860s the Free Church of Scotland, like all too many of the English nonconformists, had become middle-class and respectable. The thoughts of many of the leadership were turning to politics rather than evangelism, and it was left to just a few, such as James Hood Wilson of the Barclay Church in Edinburgh and James Wells in Glasgow's Wynd Free Church to try to help the urban poor who crowded into the cities.
Men like Marcus Dods, however, looked instead to the future leaders of the nation, young students at Scotland's universities. They worried that the Church seemed to be losing her grip on those men, and they made efforts to reach them.
That is commendable, after all the middle classes need Christ too. Unfortunately Dods, in trying to make the Gospel appeal to these students, capitulated to rationalistic criticism of the Bible.
He worked quietly, taking Bible classes and preaching, making pastoral visits. But Dods was not the sort of man who can be unnoticed for long. The opportunity came in the tangled web of the Robertson Smith case of the late 1860s and the 1870s.
Robertson Smith took the same views of the Bible that Dods took, limiting inerrancy to 'religious matters', and teaching that the Pentateuch was a late, post-exilic product of various writers.
In 1877 Dods entered the controversy, preaching a sermon entitled 'Revelation and Inspiration'. In that sermon Dods argued that the element of inspiration in Scripture was limited to matters of Salvation. What was more, he insisted:
"If revelation is to be conserved, it must not be bound up and made to stand or fall with a special theory of inspiration."
The Bible record was not to be seen as one hundred per cent reliable.
"No careful student of Scripture can well deny that there are inaccuracies in the Gospels and elsewhere - inaccuracies such as occur in ordinary writings through imperfect information or lapse of memory, sufficient entirely to explode the myth of infallibility."
What, then, was inspiration? We tend to identify the subjective view of revelation with the Neo-orthodox of the 20th century, but they were not the first to propound such a theory.
"I do not believe what Paul says, because I first believe him to be inspired; but I believe him to be inspired, because he brings light to my spirit, which can only have proceeded from God."

Because of the raging Robertson Smith case, Dods' sermon was hardly noticed at the time. But it was a sign of things to come. There was, Dods and his friends thought, a change in the way people were thinking. They had to adapt the way they preached, and their teaching on the Bible, to those views.

God willing, we shall continue with Dods' teaching next time.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? VII.

11th November 1863 saw Marcus Dods writing to A. Taylor Innes, an old college friend who had felt unable for doctrinal reasons to enter the Free Church ministry and who was now a member of Renfield Free Church, Glasgow, about the inauguration of A.B. Davidson (whose Hebrew Grammar has nearly killed many students) as successor to ‘Rabbi’ Duncan.
“At the opening of the College here Davidson made an Introductory full of pretty fancies, and one might almost say rich in gems of thought, not all his own, but finely wrought together. He showed, as was expected, a decidedly liberal tendency [‘liberal’ did not then have the narrow meaning it has today. It still meant ‘generous’ - H.H.], and yet was guardedly orthodox, without letting it be seen that he was guarded, or careful to conciliate...” By this time Dods was in close agreement with Davidson on the Old Testament - that the Pentateuch, for example, was not a product of the time of Moses.
But we must be careful. Apart from his views on the Bible Marcus Dods was THEOLOGICALLY just where he had always been. He was not going to deny the doctrines of Grace any time soon. He would never have dreamed of denying the deity of Christ. But he thought that the doctrine of an inerrant Bible would be a stumbling-block to others. He had read ex post facto accounts by certain German rationalists who claimed that it was the doctrine of inerrancy that had made them so. He was beginning to think that inerrancy had to be abandoned to present the Gospel to the Modern world.
In March 1864 he went to preach at Renfield, staying with his friend A. Taylor Innes. “I think this must and ought to be the last time I shall ever preach as a candidate,” he wrote, on the verge of giving up all thought of the pastoral ministry.
Well, it WAS, but not for the reasons he thought. After his visit they extended a call to him! By June it was settled, the Presbytery had sustained the call and Marcus Dods had accepted. He was officially the pastor of Renfield Free Church of Scotland.

And thus the first volume of letters ends. But our series goes marching on. Next time, God willing, we shall see how Marcus Dods finally presented his theological opinions to an unsuspecting world.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? VI.

1863 was an important year in the life of Marcus Dods. Firstly, it was in that year that he met Alexander Whyte, then a student in Edinburgh. Of him Dods wrote on 14th May , “Whyte is a very high Calvinist and a lover of the Puritans, and would talk doctrine for a year on end.” The likeness is perfect. Whyte urged the unhappy probationer (whose status was fast becoming that of the ‘stickit [failed] minister’, to set up a “barracks for students”, a sort of private hall of residence.
Rainy tried to encourage the young Marcus Dods, apparently sensing all was not well.
It wasn’t. Writing to Marcia on 13th March he confided that he had been reading ‘Colenso’, probably the work on the Pentateuch by the notorious liberal Bishop of Natal. Commenting on the book Dods wrote: “I think our views of inspiration will be greatly altered in future years. Indeed mine are very different from those I recieved from Gaussen twelve years ago.” Colenso had helped to convince Dods that the Pentateuch had in fact been written centuries after Moses and was in fact a poorly-assembled hodge-podge of disparate writings scarcely worthy of the name of literature (this is our opinion of the ‘assured results of the higher criticism’).
Another post came to his notice in 1863. William Hetherington, Professor at the Free Church College, Glasgow, had been unwell for some time, and the Assembly decided it would be best to appoint a man to be his colleague and eventual successor. Dods’ name was mentioned in connection with the post, most probably by Rainy. Dods was a well-read man, but in the end his lack of experience told against him, and the post went to another.
In September he refused an invitation to preach at Renfield Free Church, Glasgow, since there were three other vacancies for which he was already a candidate. Renfield extended a call to Rev. John Kennedy of Dingwall, but that gentleman resolutely remained ‘of Dingwall’, so the church remained vacant for a little longer.

Next time, God willing, we shall see Dods rushing, all unsuspecting, towards Renfield.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? V.

Marcus Dods continued his career as a probationer, preaching in some churches that were "very hard to please", where a couple of hundred people sat in a chapel seated for at least a thousand. At the same time he had started writing articles for T. & T. Clark's 'North British Review', articles which he assured a friend "will appear as soon as Cunningham comes to a colon and lets anyone else get in a word." [the earler version of this post contained a sentence here which has been removed due to inaccuracy]
He even contemplated going abroad, and was asked to go to Sydney, but the fact that it was only a possible appointment made him understandably wary of going in the days when it meant a very long ocean voyage.
His first book was published in 1862, a volume of selection from Augustine entitled 'Manual of Devotion'. At the same time he writes in a letter to Marcia: "Would you ask Stevenson (in Maclaren's [bookshop]) if he thinks he could get the first series of Robertson of Brighton's sermons second-hand. I feel the want of genius just now."
But Robertson of Brighton was not exactly orthodox. Dismissed by 'Rabbi' Duncan for believing that Christ did on the cross "something or other that somehow or other had some connection or other with salvation." For a man who read Owen and Augustine, Robertson was quite a come-down!
And it was in that year that Simeon Macphail, a friend of his, began to question the doctrine of inspiration. Unfortunately the most important letter on the matter appears to have been mutilated, probably deliberately ('Early Letters of Marcus Dods', P. 232). Dods wrote: "I wish now I had spent MORE than I did upon it. I now see that what I maintained, and what Cunningham approved, was mere infallibility." (10th September 1862)
His friend's problems led Dods to study the subject. What the results were we shall see in some future post, God willing. In the meantime some of his other friends were urging him to publish his sermons on the Lord's Prayer (published as 'The Prayer that Teaches to Pray') - and Rainy, who had just been appointed to succeed Cunningham at New College, was recommending Dods for the pastorate at the Free High Church, Edinburgh. Dods thought this was a silly idea, but he was still willing to try.
And so Marcus Dods went on, hoping, praying, preaching and writing, like many another man in his position, before and since.

Of which more, God willing, next time.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? IV.

Marcus Dods attended New College in the enthusiasm after the Disruption of 1843. But the reality of a call to the ministry can be years of 'probationership', life as a prospective pastor, preaching around churches seeking a pastorate. So it was with Marcus Dods. From 1858 to 1864 he was a minister without a settled charge. Sometimes he would be called as a 'temporary pastor', to take an extended series of services. One of the earliest of these places was Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There he stayed, desperately unhappy in a room in a "dingy brick house, one of a series of dingy brick houses, which series is one of a grand collection of dingy brick houses, the name whereof is Newcastle" (letter dated 18th November 1858). Not surprisingly, Dods was not called to that church!
1859 was another year of disappointments. In a letter to his sister Marcia Dods wrote: "Mr. Miller thinks I would be pretty sure of a call from the Baptists, if I professed my doubts as to the efficacy of infant Baptism - but that, unfortunately, is one of the few points on which I am rather inclined to be dogmatic" (letter dated 17th March 1859). In another letter from the same place (31st March 1859) he said: "I wish Dr. Cunningham was here for a week; he would go back and append some fierce denunciations to his lecture on the Arminians. Everybody here almost is Arminian, and won't get out of it."
His constant companions in those early years were the 'Olney Hymns' and Augustine's 'Confessions'.
After Newcastle came Hexham, and then he returned to Edinburgh, where 'Rainy's' (the Free High Church) was the family church. Marcus Dods was kept busy, however, preaching elsewhere.
"Were I to tell certain friends of mine what I am," he wrote to Marcia, "they would aghast hold up their hands and say 'You in the Church!' Tell me, if you can, if this is honest, this way of life." (May, 1860). He was also irritated by the General Assembly, declaring that if he had to be an ecclesiastical statesman "it would kill me."
It was also at this time that he began to contemplate what many p;eople regard as his greatest service to the Church (whether this outweighs his disservice to her is another matter), a new edition of the Works of Augustine. In a letter to Marcia dated 14th June 1860 he wrote: "I can't understand why Augustine's 'Confessions' are not UNIVERSALLY read; they seem to me to be just THE biography, and I am strongly inclined to write a new translation. I know it could be no better than others, but there ought to be lots circulating, and I don't know of any circulating at all."
He suffered terribly with indwelling sin. There are some tortured passages in the 'Early Letters' that are written in tears, like Romans 7. If this series was more general I would give all of them. However, this one must suffice:
"Whatever Paul says of the law in the 7th of Romans I have found true of the ministry; no doubt it is holy in itself, but in me it has revealed and EXCITED an amount of sin that has slain me. Other people with stronger natures may have, doubtless have, endured more, but I could not have endured more misery than I have since I began to preach. When I look at the two years as a whole, I cannot but wonder how I have got through it so long. The mercy is it comes pieve by piece... I know that no man's sufficiency is of himself, but I can't ACCEPT; to-day I do it, and to-morrow I am unable..." (letter to Marcia, 26th June 1860).
But things were soon to change. Just two days later Mr. Clark (of T. & T. Clark) approached him after he had preached, asking Dods to write an article for the 'North British Review', a magazine that Clark had just taken over.
Marcus Dods was launched as an author.

His theological career continued, of which more, God willing, next time.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? III.

Marcus Dods began his theological course at New College, Edinburgh, in 1855. In one of the earliest New College letters in the first volume of his letters he reflects on some of the professors:
"I have a thing to write for Dr. Cunningham, which I must work at in the holidays. I enjoy his class very much, but find Dr. [James] Buchanan painfully prolix. However, there are some very fine passages in his lectures, and I think his course is in itself more uninteresting than Cunningham's. Dr. Duncan is going through Job just now, and gives some most valuable notes, a good many queer [odd] stories, and a great quantity of minor matter difficult to carry away." (Letter dated 8th December 1855)

"[Dr. Duncan] is getting fonder of us every day, and seems inclined to teach us all languages, living, dead, buried, and a few which might be but are not yet; and he keeps ominously before us a book printed in seventy-two languages, and called 'The Napoleon Polyglot', towards which he every now and then casts a loving grin, as much to say, How I wish I had lived at the time of Babel, or been interpreter at the court of Shem. You can't blame me fo being so wordy when Dr. Duncan is the theme." (Letter dated 'Nearly August' 1857.)

Where, our readers may ask, is the 'Emergent' in this series. Well, seeing as Brian Maclaren was in his forties when he became 'emergent', and Marcus Dods was twenty-four when he left New College, he still has time. Going through the staunchly conservative New College of the 1850s, Marcus Dods came out as conservative as his father had been. And Dr. Duncan never did teach the class 'all languages'. Dods, like many students before and since, was intimidated by the square characters of Hebrew. In another letter he confesses to using his lexicons as dumb-bells to exercise the body, rather than the mind (a mighty lexicon in each hand would certainly do the trick).

But in 1858 Marcus Dods graduated from New College to the ranks of the probationers of the Free Church of Scotland. A minister without a charge has an obscene amount of time for reading. As well as a tendency to depression when he reflects how many churches he has preached at without being called to the pastorate of any of them.

But THAT, God willing, shall be our subject next time.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? II.

[Note: My recent absence from this blog is due to a preaching engagement last Lord's Day at Witton Chapel, Droitwich Spa. I traveled there by train, necessitating one day to get there (Sat.), one day to get back (Mon.) and one day to recover (Tues.)]


In his university days Marcus Dods was an ordinary (if there be such a thing) Reformed evangelical presbyterian. The following extract from a letter is instructive:

"I am reading Bogue's essay [on the inspiration of Scripture - H.H.] just now, and intended to read Gaussen's 'Theopneustia' (which you mention) and Chalmers on the same subject. I hope with my studies I shall be able to act upon your advice, and always look for assistance from God. I have not yet made up my mind about becoming a member of the Church: in your next letter could you mention some book which would help me to prepare myself?" (Extract from letter to Rev. George Wilson, 16th November 1850)

Dods believed fuly in the traditional evangelical doctrine of providence, witing of a friend who had lost all three of his children in one month: "I had a very delightful letter from him, showing that God has been pleased to teach him that it is done by the loving hand of a Father." (letter dated 5th September 1853)

He read Calvin daily, and in one letter he criticised Sir J. Stephens for not believing in eternal punishment thus:
" But no man is without his faults, and he does not believe in Eternal Damnation. Yet he believes in Eternal Bliss, i.e., he believes that God is merciful, but he cannot believe that He is just." (letter dated 'Natural Philosophy Classroom, Pouring rain, 28th January, half-past 2 [1854]')

But after university came theological college. And that, God willing, shall be the subject of our next post here.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? I.

Marcus Dods was born on April 11th 1834 in Belford, Northumberland, to the Rev. Marcus Dods, pastor of the Church of Scotland congregation there.He had two brothers and four sisters. Marcus Dods senior was a conservative Reformed evangelical who had written in defence of the doctrine of the Westminster Confession, which he believed with all his heart. He was grieved that there were men in the Church of Scotland's ministry who did not believe the Confession, but who signed it simply to obtain pastorates or other posts. He was a friend of the leading Church of Scotland devangelicals, Thomas Chalmers, Andrew Thompson, and others. He was held in high esteem by the local Church of England ministers as well. His love for the Bible was deep , for he had been led by the Holy Spirit on a long and difficult pilgrimage from the darkness of rationalism into the glorious light and liberty of the sons of God.
Probably Marcus Dods senior would have joined the Free Church of Scotland at the Disruption of 1843, but we shall never know that for certain, since he died in 1838, leaving his widow with seven children. Since they had lived in the manse belonging to the church they were effectively served notice to leave their home.
Although Mrs. Dods was a native of Northumberland by birth, she was Scots by marriage, and she moved to Edinburgh, where she took boarders - mostly schoolboys - to support her family. We can never know how much Marcus Dods lost by the death of his father, but the loss was considerable.
Mrs. Dods worked hard to support her children, and to give them the education which their father would have desired for them. Marcus was sent to the Edinburgh Academy, which he left in 1848 to be apprenticed to the National Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh. But he was not suited to the office of a bank manager, and after two years at the bank he left with the intention of studying for the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland, to which the family had adhered at the Disruption in 1843.

Next time, God willing, we shall see how Dods fared at the unversity.

Marcus Dods - Victorian Emergent? Introduction.

Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D., fifth principal of New College, Edinburgh, is remembered today as a liberal theologian - and rightly so. Any man who declared that the Old Testament contained 'errors and immoralities' was no Evangelical. And yet throughout his life Marcus Dods protested that he WAS an Evangelical. And he believed it. Dods was part of what historians have dubbed 'The New Evangelism', a movement particularly within the Free Church of Scotland that sought to make the church more appealing to 'modern' people - particularly young people.
It is my contention that this New Evangelism, which eventually became theological liberalism, fatally compromised the very Gospel proclamation that it sought to reinforce, and instead of making Christianity seem more 'relevant' to late Victorian man, it made the Church seem completely irrelevant.
It is my further contention that the Emerging Church movement of today in many ways replicates the Victorian 'New Evangelism', and that its results, if the movemnt continues on the route it is on now, will be every bit as catastrophic.
So I have taken Marcus Dods as an example. As a leader in the 'New Evangelism' who developed his thought, and as one of the more radical, I find him quite enlightening.
Secondly, many of Marcus' Dods' personal letters, not originally intended for publication, were collected and published by his son (also Marcus Dods) in two volumes in 1910 ('Early Letters of Marcus Dods') and 1911 ('Later Letters of Marcus Dods'). 'Early Letters' covers the period 1850-1864, from Dods at university through to his being called to his first and only congregation, Renfield, Glasgow, 'Later Letters' the period from 1895 to 1909, when Dods was at New College, Edinburgh, as Professor of New Testament, and latterly as Principal also (very briefly). Although it will be noted that there is a long period - a little over thirty years - not covered by these volumes, that was the period during which Dods' work was most public, so we lose little by the gap.
God willing, then, this series will begin next time.