‘The fact that such sorrow and wickedness could happen in the world, became the crucible in which my whole view of the world had to be tested.’

This reviewer read this book in Bangladesh whilst a national uprising was going on; thus he was drawn into this account of the distinguished, theologian, John Oman, his insights into the reality of violence and suffering, his view of authority and the dimensions of personal freedom.

Fleur Houston is an engaging host on this journey, from the moment she introduces his portrait at Westminster College, Cambridge: ‘he might have been an Orkney fisherman with a tiller in his hand’. She accompanies her readers through the life of a man who had a multi-layered hinterland. There are glimpses of Oman’s childhood in Orkney – a cosmopolitan environment linked to Hudson Bay and Australia through international trading routes, dominated by the sea and a constant risk of death. That environment and the Calvinist tradition prompted in Oman ‘a sense of the sovereignty of God, of reverent engagement in worship, zeal for the word of God, an egalitarian awareness of the fellowship of all the saints, and a perception of God’s loving grace available for all’.

We see, in the boy Oman, the early formation of a man with a lifelong interest in fundamentals, who always retains a connection with his fresh, curious mind as a child. ‘In these surroundings of great natural beauty, the child pondered questions such as these: What am I? What sort of universe is this in which I find myself? What is time? What is space?’

Houston shows Oman’s formation as a philosopher and as a Presbyterian minister, set in the context of wider intellectual and historical movements. There is a description of the intellectual influences of the University of Edinburgh, with the atmosphere of David Hume, Adam Smith and Scottish philosophical traditions engaging with wider international movements of thought in Germany and elsewhere. We see Oman’s European education, with his linguistic and philosophical openness to centuries of European thought, through early travel and study in Germany and beyond. There is his exposure through pastoral training to the reality of poverty in Edinburgh. Through his pastoral formation, Oman assiduously studies the art of preaching in the service of a search for truth. He grows impressed by the revival inspired by Moody and Sankey, emphasising personal salvation, observing a ‘quickening of church life across denominational boundaries, bringing permanent change to many people’s lives who were on the fringes of the church’.

Oman’s unyielding search for truth opens him to engagement with the intellectual and social ferment of the times, the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in the 1840s and the associated tensions working out in the Scottish Churches, the advance of new biblical criticism and scientific methods. Oman is disturbed by the removal of Professor William Robertson Smith from his chair within the Free Church in 1881. He is critical of the limitations of the institutional Church, writing in Vision and Authority about the dominance of a theology ‘more concerned with unanimity than veracity’. For Oman, there can be no retreat into assertions of the infallibility of the Church or the Bible.

That critical attitude to the limitations of religious institutions is balanced by Oman’s profound conviction of the spiritual value of the Church; ‘the communion of saints, the Body of Christ’. Yet the Church ‘is also a human institution, prone to failure … it has to learn to repent, to see the Cross as the hallmark of discipleship … how to fail, not in discouragement, much less in indifference, but in faith and hope and love’.

Oman’s breadth of education, insight, speculative mind and human sympathy, equip him for his later roles as an institutional leader and an ecumenical pathfinder, as Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge, and as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in England: ‘come let us reason together’.

The author describes Oman’s courageous engagement with the implications of the First World War. Oman dons a uniform (YMCA) and goes to the front-line, experiencing humanity across the warring parties. He risks ostracism at a fractured time, when so many other churchmen had attached themselves to tribal and nationalistic interests. ‘All our churches … have become mere national churches … in the sense of having no interest or charity beyond the national cause … the churches are not “able to speak to the present distress with any clear prophetic voice”.’ He recognises the ‘“central truth” of the Gospel … is the kingdom… which transcends the divisions of race and nationality, uniting … all peoples and tongues in a common brotherhood in the bond of peace and under the law of love’.

Oman has a lively sense of religious paradox: ‘every peace-maker is a fighter … yet he is not a peace-maker merely by fighting even in the cause of truth and righteousness. To make peace we must ourselves possess it’.

Above all, there is Oman’s driving preoccupation with freedom and grace. For Oman, ‘God does not intervene to prevent sin or fires or floods. God works through those who have caught the vision of divine order, often a small group of people, who in freedom will work towards the liberation of the world from oppression.’ For Oman, the universe is ‘not an impersonal process but a work of love …The ability to consciously participate in the loving purposes of God is the image of God in humanity; and the participation of the natural in the supernatural signifies the sacramental nature of the universe’.

Houston locates Oman’s place in theological and philosophical thought, standing influentially at the margins. Houston writes that his ‘profound vision of personal love was … also out of tune with the dominant view among moral philosophers in the forties that nothing was objectively good or bad, right of wrong, important or unimportant … values were held to be subjective opinions, expressions of bias, and this was widely supposed to be the only acceptably modern thing to think’. Yet from the margins comes enlivening insight. Oman anticipates the work of others, such as Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley and Charles Taylor, bringing a ‘value-laden … system of ethics … giving rise to the biggest change in moral philosophy for over a century, replacing arid scholasticism, with rich discussions of goodness, virtue, character’.

Fleur Houston has done a valuable service, completing her study while the dispersed archival sources were still retrievable. She has celebrated the memory of a radical theologian who still speaks freshly in a contemporary situation, many decades after his death. Houston displays narrative talent, combining an apt level of anecdote and colour with a solid foundation of scholarship, creating an account of interest not only to academic theologians but to a wider audience of those engaged in spiritual search. This is a living memorial to a creative, humane scholar and minister.