the scottish episcopal church

A New History, by gavin white

Preface

1
Tullochgorum

2
Eighteenth Century

3
Seabury

4
Worship

5
Edinburgh

6
Oxford Movement

7
Glasgow

8
Publications

9
Church or Province

10
'English Episcopal'

11
Schools

12
Social Service

13
Synods and Councils

14
Clergy Training

15
A Small Dog Barking

16
As Others See Us

17
Women

18
Society

19
Second World War and After

Selected bibliography

Links

When a small dog barks at a mastiff, the mastiff is not obliged to bark in return. And yet the mastiff may derive some satisfaction from being noticed. And the Church of Scotland did derive some satisfaction from the existence of the Episcopal Church. It confirmed its worst suspicions.

For the Church of Scotland, and before 1929 the United Free Church, believed itself to represent the Scottish character, which was self-reliant and democratic. And the Church of Scotland really was more democratic than either the Church of England or the Scottish Episcopal Church, even if not quite as democratic as it liked to believe. It was largely directed by an elite, though an elite based on ability and professional training, while the Church of England was directed by an elite drawn from the hereditary land-owning classes. If the English view was that all men are created unequal, the Scottish view was that all men are created equal but become unequal in school. Yet the overall view was that Scots were self-reliant and therefore did not need bishops.

However, Presbyterian Scots were not against bishops as bishops. Obviously bishops were not needed in Scotland, but there was no objection to there being bishops in England where the population needed to be told what to do. And Scots who had gone south of the border and become bishops were not considered traitors to Presbyterianism; it was right that there should be appropriate people to keep the English in order, and who more appropriate than Scots ? On the other hand, for the English to come into Scotland and claim to be bishops was utterly wrong. It might be all right for them to come into Scotland to direct English immigrants, but Scots certainly did not need such direction, and if Scots did seek such direction, it was probably for reasons of class. The historian Agnes Muir Mackenzie was dead on target when she attributed to Presbyterians the view "that the Episcopal Church is an English exotic brought in by the laird with his background of an English public school, or by the laird's English wife, and supported mainly by people who hope the laird will ask them to dinner." (1)

In fact Scottish church history has only really stuck in the Scottish mind when it is a series of events in which Scots defend their liberty from the English who use bishops to control them. And this, it must be admitted, was a real feature of Scottish history. The reformation was undertaken for the common man, if not for the common woman, and John Knox was a Scots patriot, even if he depended on financial subsidy from the London government. Thereafter bishops were only introduced as a device of government, and they are particularly noted for the "killing times" between 1662 and 1690. That 60,000 Scots died in the three Civil Wars, including a thousand Aberdonians massacred after the fall of that city, is of no significance. What matters is the Covenanter dead of the "killing times", whose numbers are a matter of controversy. A modern historian has come up with roughly one hundred. But however selective popular history may be, it cannot be denied that bishops were the mainstay of Stuart rule, and however devout some of them may have been, they were used to control the church. (2)

After 1690 the Episcopalians were out in the cold but London was still trying to undermine Presbyterianism. The 1712 Act of Toleration which gave Episcopalians some liberties if they swore acceptance of the new monarchy is now remembered for re-introducing patronage to Presbyterianism, though in fact patronage had scarcely been diminished after 1690. Stemming from this, the right of the patron to name the minister was to be seen as the root of all troubles in the Church of Scotland through the following two centuries. It was supposed to be behind the Secessions of the eighteenth century; it was undoubtedly a factor, but beyond that the jury is still out. When the Disruption of 1843 led to a third of the Church of Scotland leaving to form the Free Church, this was a response to interference by the civil courts. Yet the specific issue was largely patronage, and it could be blamed on landlords corrupted by London influence. In fact it was the rejected nominees who went to the courts, but this is not how it has been remembered. Finally, the other well-known event in Scottish church history is the union of 1900 between the Free Church and the United Presbyterians, in which a small Highland remnant of the Free Church claimed and won all the property of that body in a judgment of the House of Lords. A legal historian has recently held that the judgment was "right and legally correct", and the fault lay with the way in which the United Free Church, led by Principal Rainy, presented the case, but that will make no difference to popular opinion. (3)

All of this is admirably mirrored in the life of Rainy by P.Carnegie Simpson, which was once to be found in almost any Scottish household but is now relegated to car boot sales. It presented Rainy, who was a notable leader of the Free Church, as the national hero resisting English theories of unfettered Parliamentary sovereignty. That there was such a battle cannot be doubted, but Simpson overlooked the fact that many Scots accepted those theories, and that the Church of England fought against them as strongly as did Scottish Free Churchmen. Instead Simpson scoffed at the English bishops for "inditing endlessly futile episcopal admonitions to some priestling who wants to be a law to himself about his clothes or candles during Divine Service." There was to be no spiritual independence for people like the English. And he blamed the House of Lords judgment on the English not understanding the Scottish doctrine of churches having lives and rights apart from the state, "It may be, and it apparently is, difficult for an Anglican who is an erastian, habituated to the powerlessness of ecclesiastical convocations and congresses, to 'understand' this or take it seriously, and of course erastianism rejects it." Simpson's message was that Scottish churches should be free, but English ones should not. (4)

But behind all this barracking something was never examined. On both sides the division was seen to be social class, but nobody asked if religion lay behind social class. The Presbyterians could easily point out that Episcopalians, or most of them, wanted bishops who came from the elite of English society, even if they were drawn from the lower levels of that elite. Episcopalians, or most of them, assumed that the elite of English society was part of the natural order, and those who said otherwise were moved by envy. But what lay behind this was a question of "givenness" - - did God give his people a social order or did he allow them to work one out for themselves ? How permanent was society ? How deeply involved in human affairs was God ? Did he maintain a distant oversight or was he so close to government that, as it said in the Prayer Book, "the hearts of kings are in thy rule and governance" and that was that ? The belief in "givenness" played a part in support of the Jacobite cause, and it played a part in the Hutchinsonian teaching, and it may have played a part in Episcopalian acceptance of a traditional upper class throughout the Victorian period and after.

Something of the wider disagreement may be seen in a recent collection of interviews with leading English churchmen, including the then Archbishop of York, John Habgood. "After that I spent five years in Scotland... Being an Episcopalian, and Anglican in Scotland, meant that one was a non-conformist, and this was a good experience...". "We went there primarily because at that time it looked very much as though the whole ecumenical field was opening up in Scotland. The then Bishop of Edinburgh, Kenneth Carey, had been my Principal at Westcott House, and there were conversations going on between Episcopalians and the Church of Scotland, which were subsequently scuppered by the Scottish Daily Express, and no doubt by other factors as well, but the Scottish Daily Express ran a campaign against any plans for unity." What is astonishing is the assumption that church unity in Scotland would benefit from importing the Principal and Vice-Principal of a Cambridge theological college. Of course it had been a commonplace of Episcopalian thought that leadership came from Oxford and Cambridge, and perhaps it was thought that anything done without that leadership was contrary to the will of God. (5)

But if it all ended in tears, this had little to do with the campaign in the Scottish Daily Express. The campaign lasted four days. On Wednesday, January 5 1966, came the front-page headline, "Express reveals bombshell : Bishops Again ; Secret Plot", and a story about, "A top-secret bombshell plan which, if finally approved, could mean the destruction of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland...". "Anglican Diplomats : they have one rule - never, never, make concessions to any other churches." "They have arranged that Methodists are now to be forbidden to take Communion in Scottish parish churches." "The Methodist Church was a fine vigorous body. The Anglican negotiators have changed all that." On Thursday it was, "Traitors in the Kirk", a mystery woman having called out "traitor" when the committee met in St.Giles', and as for the Episcopal Church and its demands on the Kirk, "It is a little like the village grocer laying down the terms on which he will take over Marks and Spencer's." This was because "the committee has quite clearly disobeyed the Assembly's orders." By Friday the now thoroughly frightened population of Scotland were assured that help was at hand, "This afternoon the Express, on behalf of the Kirk's 1,268,000 members, will be keeping a vigilant eye." "The Church of Scotland is facing perhaps the gravest crisis it has met in the four hundred years of its eventful history." On Saturday the battle had been won, "Bishop - dismay at Express disclosures on Covenant", and "but for the disclosures of the Express", all would have been lost. On the following Monday the Scottish Daily Express moved on to another crisis, but it had managed to show itself as the defender of Scottish liberties against the old threat of bishops. It had also managed to imply that its readers were heroic in supporting its campaign, and it is by flattering readers that newspapers are sold. It had no effect on the actual outcome. The scheme had been dead on arrival. (6)

In his Cambridge days Carey had edited a volume of essays in which he distinguished between the esse (being) of the church and the bene esse (well-being) of the church, and said that episcopacy was of the latter and not the former. This distinction, which had been held by Dean Ramsay a century before, was not likely to endear bishops to Scots, and when Professor Ian Henderson inspired the articles in the Scottish Daily Express he was really flogging a very dead horse. Henderson then wrote a book about all this; it was slightly mad at some points, very perceptive at others, and rather funny. He ranged from one target to another, noted that of twenty-three Scottish Conservative M.P.s fully eighteen had been educated at English public schools, fired a few shots at Glenalmond for having an almost exclusively English staff, said of the Episcopal Church, "All its leading figures are the products of English schools and universities", "To all others the corridors of ecclesiastical power are strictly off limits", and generally enjoyed himself. If Episcopalians found him offensive it was because he was hitting home. (7)

And this has been the pattern throughout this century. Episcopalians cry "Apostolic Succession", and Presbyterians respond, "Social Class", and this is totally misunderstood. After the Scottish Daily Express affair, the Bishop of Peterborough complained that these reports tended "to arouse Scottish fears and animosity and to inhibit the rational", as if the English were reasonable but the Scots were not. It was taken for granted that Scottish fears were irrational, and that suspicion of bishops must stem from ancient history and not from contemporary social patterns in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church. (8)

In fact, a number of different things were confused, and not so much in the minds of Scots observers as in the minds of the English observed. Apostolic succession as a concept is universal in Christianity; it is the way in which it works that creates problems. The Bible is one form of apostolic succession, and so is the witness of the church, sacramental life, preaching, worship, and just about everything which is Christian. If we say that there is apostolic succession in ministry, that is not very radical, and if we say that a ministry which includes bishops has apostolic succession, that is not going to worry too many people. It is when apostolic succession is seen as something outside the church, or additional to normal church life, that questions arise. And it is when it is treated as scientific fact that the whole thing breaks down; Gladstone went to great lengths to calculate the mathematical probability of the succession not being broken, and if he may be excused because he was at the time President of the Board of Trade and therefore inclined to mathematics, it was still a pointless exercise. But that is how it was sometimes presented; Dean Ramsay said he did not hold with apostolic succession as it could not be proved - - though you might as well attempt to prove the Pacific Ocean. It is an attitude of fidelity to an historic Christ, and without that it is nothing. And Canon Broun was not the only Episcopalian to see this. (9)

But in the context in which it was presented, apostolic succession was a guarantee of certainty. It was the Anglican equivalent of the infallible Pope or the infallible Bible or infallible science, in an age when things had to be certain or they were totally useless. It was a recognition that this was a muddled way of looking at it which led to the distinction between esse and bene esse, though that distinction was a little too philosophical to cut much ice in ordinary life. But apostolic succession was also presented as class structure; if there was succession in ministry, there was also succession in society, and the two were united in bishops drawn from a single social class. And if, as Professor G.D.Henderson has noted of Scottish history from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, the dispute over bishops "may be said to have dominated not only the spiritual but also the political and social life of the whole community throughout the period", it has been simmering away in the background ever since. Bishops serve in the Scottish mind as a sign of English domination, and it must be admitted that the Scottish Episcopal Church has helped to make them so. It is impossible to argue that in a future united church bishops might be Scots when they have not even been Scots in the Scottish Episcopal Church. And yet, to quote G.D.Henderson on bishops again, "a Presbyterian scheme of Church Courts was a practical counterpart of this theory, providing a substitute for the bishop in certain connections." (10)

That raises new possibilities. Over the past century and a half the Church of England has been gently disengaging from the state, with the state being first outraged and then happy at this development. The ceremonial side of establishment has been prudently left untouched. This largely concerns the monarchy, giving a false impression to the uninformed, but the reality is something not far from Presbyterian claims of spiritual independence. The wider Anglican Communion has no state connection at all, and has relied on a system of synods, or church courts, instead of state ties, and these are now the form of government even of the Church of England. Bishops are still there, but they are not what they were, as a few of them have wryly noted. And the romantic movement which loved medieval garments and dim religious light and clusters of coats-of-arms on noticeboards has also gone. And so is the need for certainty. If bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church are no longer drawn from the English upper class, and no longer wear purple, and perhaps will wear black gowns instead of copes and mitres at meetings of the Lambeth Conference to show they are Scottish, things may at long last begin to sort themselves out. And if Anglicanism has gone a long way to become Presbyterian, in the last generation the Church of Scotland has virtually stopped using that word. The two may be coming nearer each other, or, in the usual perversity of Scottish church history, they may pass each other going in opposite directions.