The Kirk and the Kingdom consists of the Chalmers Lectures for 2011, as delivered by Johnston McKay, and its aim is to explore, in the words of its subtitle, ‘A Century of Tension in Scottish Social Theology, 1830–1929’. The ‘tension’ referred to is between models of ‘Christ's Kingdom’ which assumes it has nothing to do with contemporary social problems – ‘the Kingdom [was] a distant objective which could only be realised in the future’, or it was something which ‘existed in the hearts of its citizens rather than in the objective world of events’, or it would be initiated by ‘a supernatural event, which it was beyond any human agency to fulfil’ (p. 3) – and the alternative proposed by Robert Flint in 1859, which ‘argued for cooperation with secular agencies’ in order that ‘the sweep of history’ could be harnessed ‘as a gradual progression towards the Kingdom of God, through the overcoming of evil’ (p. 28). Flint, who became a minister in 1859, the year of the publication of Darwin's The Origins of Species, adopted an evolutionary conception of the Kingdom of God, in which the improvement of social conditions, and the reduction of the evils to which poverty gave rise, represented a progressive movement towards the fulfilment of God's Kingdom on earth: ‘where evil exists, he said, God's kingdom has not been realised’ (p. 28), so that social progress and the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God become one and the same thing. For Flint, the Kingdom is not a future event but the process initiated by Jesus – ‘it is an ideal that emerged in Jesus and grew as human unreliability was replaced by divine law, human wickedness by divine holiness’ (p. 29) – which links, clearly, with the evolutionary conception of religious consciousness which was to be developed by William Robertson Smith in those articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which got him into so much trouble with the Free Church in the 1880s.

But, as McKay points out, the irony of Flint's position was that he was proposing an evolutionary conception of the Kingdom but was resistant to an evolutionary account of the Bible: ‘it is remarkable that over twenty years after the Free Church scholar Robertson Smith questioned whether Jesus’ attributing the authorship of the Pentateuch to Moses was sufficient grounds for accepting it’, Flint ‘had no hesitation in accepting the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch’ (p. 35). The argument of the book is therefore poised on a contradiction: Flint is its hero, because of his version of an evolutionary Kingdom of Christ which can develop through the social progress guided by a secular society, which unknowingly contributes to a religious end even if it is not propelled by religious motivations; at the same time, Flint is resistant to modernist accounts of the Bible and to evolutionary accounts of religion in a broader perspective. Flint's account of the Kingdom ‘enabled the Churches no longer to regard social improvements as dependent on religious commitment. His plea to include the work of secular agencies and movements in the work of the Kingdom of God allowed the Churches to regard other parts of civic society as partners, whose efforts were not to be feared as marginalising the Church's role’ (p. 40).

The story that McKay wants to tell is of how the churches in Scotland adopted Flint's teaching and so redefined their relationship with civic society in Scotland, and played a major role in addressing the social issues by which it was confronted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the story that it actually tells is of how the major figures in the churches after Flint rejected his views and resisted the churches’ engagement with civic society. When the Church and Nation committee was established in 1919, its Convener, John White, declared that:

The apparent narrative of the lectures is Flint's influence; the actual narrative is the failure of Flint's views to shape church policy, especially in the period of the reunification of the Established and the Free Churches in the 1920s:

McKay sees the Baillie Commission report as symptomatic of the rejection of Flint's ideas, since Baillie himself had an ‘antipathy towards the idea of progress’ (p. 119), leaving Flint as important only insofar as ‘he deserves credit . . . for laying down a basis on which the Church could again regard the engagement with society and its secular agencies as an integral part of its mission’ (p. 119).

What this narrative leaves out, however, is the broader intellectual context of which Flint was a part – a context in which Scottish idealist philosophy, through the influence of Edward Caird in Oxford and his older brother John Caird in Glasgow, dominated the intellectual sphere in both Scotland and England. Their philosophy was profoundly religious, thoroughly evolutionary and deeply committed to the transformation of society through direct intervention, whether by the establishment of extension classes for women and working people excluded from formal education or by demanding that the state exert its power to prevent the impoverishment of its population. The churches themselves may have resisted such influences but the engagement of Christians inspired by that philosophy was fundamental to the establishment of a new sense of responsibility on the part of Britain's educated elite for the conditions of the mass of the people. These thinkers were the products of the Scottish churches, even if they were not always involved in them at the height of their powers, and their vast influence – not only in Britain but throughout the British Empire, especially in Canada, Australia and New Zealand – offers a much more positive sense of how Scottish Christianity engaged with the problems of modern industrial societies than the one that McKay tells.