Here is a worthwhile collection of essays whose coherence means that it is close to a usable textbook on Early Modern Scottish Theology. In the first section Donald MacLean's piece on Knox is an exercise in much-needed revisionism: predestination was indeed central to Knox's project and self-understanding, although the question why Knox the theologian appears to have been scarcely influential compared with Knox the character remains tantalising. The chapter on Melville and Christian Hebraism by Ernest Holloway is erudite and informative, perhaps without quite getting to the core of Melville's thinking. Also pleasingly revisionist and yet also accommodating of the criticisms of ‘covenant theology’ by the Torrances in the latter twentieth century is Brannon Ellis’ essay on Rollock: a lot hinges on whether ‘in Christ’ of Ephesians 1:4 necessarily implies Christ as instrument in a covenantal scheme. Beza and Turretin might have been guilty of this charge, but possibly not Rollock. In turn, Nicholas Thompson gives a persuasive if not totally convincing account of the early seventeenth-century ‘Aberdeen doctors’ as holding the middle, even mainstream of Scottish Reformed theology, not least by highlighting their adversarial responses to the claims of Roman Catholic theologians.
Aaron Denlinger's essay on that neglected Aberdeen doctor, Robert Baron, is a fine piece of ‘getting under the skin’ of how Baron read 1 Timothy 2:14 and Romans 1:20 to present a grace-filled and hopeful gospel, which allows for some to reject and be rejected, given that the cross has some effect on the reprobate, even as its effective power to convert is restricted. Baron was thus within the camp of the orthodox at the Synod of Dort, although closest to the position of Martinius, the delegate from Bremen. Donald Macleod rounds off this first section with a fine essay on Alexander Henderson's desire to see the spiritual union take form in the realm of the senses: the National Covenant was the response from the human side to the divine initiative in the covenant of grace and its representation in communion.
In the second section Simon Burton relates brilliantly how for John Cameron adiaphora were typically things which are good only because God commanded them, and in a sense therefore ‘less good’. To Rutherford (in the tradition of Bradwardine) that seemed to insult the foundational character of the creating divine will, which fixed what was good once and for all. This ‘voluntarism’ would safeguard divine freedom (even to disregard the second table of the Decalogue), whereas Cameron identified more with the intellectualist strand stemming from Aquinas. Aza Goudriaan supplies a fine supplement to that by considering Rutherford's 1649 teaching (in his Disputatio de Providentia) on possibilia, again with a debt to Bradwardine. God loves creatures ‘in himself’ and so ‘possibility’ is something founded in God rather than in the things themselves, at which level the law of non-contradiction should apply. Just as interesting is the sketch of the reception of Rutherford, not least the defence by John Brown of Wamphray against the douce criticism of John Strang at Glasgow in 1657, that Rutherford set divine will against divine nature at times, although there does seem some weight to this charge. Guy Richard then follows through on the mystical aspect of Rutherford's theology with an account of how the Song of Songs is a key to understanding it.
A. Gootjes’ contribution is more about Saumur after Cameron and Amyraut, seen in the figure of Pajon. We do learn that Cameron in lecturing on Philippians 2:13 argued that God works to persuade the intellect in a way that sounded too ‘remote’ for other Reformed divines such as Rivet. Pajon took this further by holding that ‘all’ that God supplied was illumination for reason to work in. This is also a very well-researched piece: the one drawback is that it is more about French than Scottish Protestant theology. Joel Beeke then discusses John Brown of Wamphray and claims him as the most significant Scottish theologian between Rutherford and Thomas Halyburton. This is done by way of comparison with Calvin on ‘justification’ and concludes in favour of continuity of content (personal faith is no more than ‘instrumental’), whatever the differences in terminology.
As Paul Helm explains Thomas Halyburton's position in his Natural Reason Insufficient (1714), the light that pours into reason allows it to grasp more. Richard Muller considers Thomas Blackwell the Elder's Ratio Sacra of 1710 (against Bourignonisme) and the Methodus Evangelica of 1714 as founding the counter-offensive to the Marrowmen and judges that the Enlightenment-sounding language was dressing rather than the meat of the theology. Whether one agrees, these are both fine and informative essays, with Gerrit van den Brink supplying the closing chapter with a consideration of that Scottish export to the Netherlands, Alexander Comrie (c.1735), for whom faith is the formal cause of the union with Christ, but as such is more habitual than actual, a view propounded by John Cotton, but condemned by the majority of Scots theologians from Robert Baillie to Halyburton and Boston, with Witsius and Voetius behind them.
Perhaps an afterword which aimed at some synchronic view would have been useful. Otherwise this impressive book is a commendable achievement by all involved.
