Justified True Belief

(●) The Scottish theologian who taught English-speaking Christians to defend the faith as one connected view of the world rather than one doctrine at a time. + Ask a Christian today what he means by "the Christian worldview" and he will answer without hesitating, and without any sense that the phrase had to be invented. It did. The word behind it is German, Weltanschauung, and the man who carried it into English-speaking Christian thought was a Scot who had been orphaned as a boy, bound apprentice to a bookbinder, and admitted to his first university class at twenty-one. James Orr spent seventeen years as the minister of a mill town in the Scottish Borders and twenty-two more as a professor, and in between he wrote something close to twenty books. The argument he is remembered for, first made in a course of lectures in 1891, is that Christianity is not a row of separate doctrines that can be defended or surrendered one at a time. It is a connected account of God, man, sin, redemption and history, and it stands or falls together. The fact about him worth remembering is the company he kept on both sides of a quarrel that was only then getting under way, the long argument between conservative and liberal Protestants about how much of the old faith the new learning had made impossible to keep. He wrote four of the essays in The Fundamentals, the series that gave fundamentalism its name, and he was general editor of the International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, which sat on Protestant ministers’ shelves for most of a century. So far, so conservative. He also held that organic evolution could be the method God used. And the strict doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the claim that Scripture as its authors first wrote it contains no error of any kind, in history and science as much as in doctrine, he called a suicidal thing for a defender of revelation to stake everything on. Both halves are the same man.

(●) 1844 AD: Born in Glasgow, orphaned as a boy, and bound apprentice to a bookbinder. + James Orr was born in Glasgow on 11 April 1844. His boyhood was spent partly in Manchester and partly in Leeds, where his father died, and the family came back to Glasgow in 1853. Both his parents were gone while he was still a boy, and the years that followed were spent not in a classroom but at a bench: he was apprenticed to a bookbinder. There is an irony in that which he never seems to have remarked on. A binder’s apprentice handles other men’s learning all day long, folding and sewing and pressing books he has no time to read, and Orr would spend the second half of his life writing books for other apprentices to bind. What the trade left him with was a capacity for long, patient, unglamorous work, which is visible on every page he later wrote. Accounts differ on exactly how old he was when he lost his parents, and on how long the apprenticeship ran. What is not in doubt is that he arrived at a university late, and poor.

(●) 1865 AD: He entered Glasgow University at twenty-one and came out with first-class honours in philosophy. + Somewhere in those working years Orr was converted, during the revival that moved through Scotland at the turn of the 1860s, and he settled on the ministry. A bookbinder’s apprentice who means to preach has a long way to travel, and he travelled it: in 1865 he matriculated at the University of Glasgow. He was older than the boys around him, and he made the most of it. His teachers were as good as Scotland had: John Veitch in logic, and the brothers John and Edward Caird, who were among the leading British exponents of the philosophy of Hegel. That detail matters more than it looks. Idealism, the family of views Hegel belongs to, holds that reality is at bottom mind or spirit rather than matter, and Orr learned it from men who believed it and taught it well. For the rest of his life he argued against philosophies he had been taught from the inside rather than read about from a distance. In 1870 he took his M.A. with first-class honours in mental philosophy, which is the older name for what a modern syllabus splits between metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Divinity came next, and partly at the same time. The course at the Theological Hall of the United Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh overlapped the end of his arts course, running from 1868 to 1872, and alongside it he took a B.D., the Bachelor of Divinity, from the university. The United Presbyterians were a Scottish denomination formed in 1847 out of two earlier secessions from the established Church of Scotland: vigorous about missions, suspicious of state control of the church, and small enough that a man of real ability was noticed quickly.

(●) 1874 AD: He was ordained to a Border mill town and stayed seventeen years. + In 1874 Orr was ordained to East Bank United Presbyterian Church in Hawick, a Borders town of woollen mills whose name most people outside Scotland meet for the first time on a knitwear label. He stayed until 1891. Nothing about the place suggests a research career, and that is the part worth holding on to. The scholarship came out of it anyway, and it was noticed. The University of Glasgow used him as an examiner in philosophy for its degrees from 1876 to 1879. Glasgow gave him a D.D. in 1885, an honorary doctorate of divinity, which in Scotland then meant that the universities had noticed a parish minister’s learning. That same year he wrote the lecture on Calvin for a volume of Reformation lectures delivered in a Paisley church, signing it simply "James Orr, B.D., Hawick." A year later, in 1886, an essay of his on the Sabbath took the third of four prizes offered by the Sabbath Alliance of Scotland, thirty pounds, in a competition open to anyone. All of it was done in the hours a busy minister has left over: sermons twice on Sunday, a congregation to visit, and a study at the back of the manse. The book that made his name was written the same way.

(●) 1891 AD: The Kerr Lectures made his name and became The Christian View of God and the World, and a chair followed the same year. + In the spring of 1891 Orr delivered the Kerr Lectures for the session of 1890-91, the first course of lectures ever given on that foundation, a lectureship then newly founded at his own church’s theological hall in Edinburgh. The students were his audience, and the public were let in to hear him as well. Then, in May, the Synod of that church elected him to its Chair of Church History, and the two came so close together that the lectures could not be got to press on time. He says so himself in the preface, apologising in advance for whatever oversights a reader might find: the book was prepared, he explains, under the burden of labour and anxiety connected with getting a second winter’s course of teaching ready. The Christian View of God and the World as Centring in the Incarnation appeared in 1893, carrying Paul’s doxology on its title page, "For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen." (Romans 11:36). It went through edition after edition on both sides of the Atlantic and was still being reprinted a generation later. It is the book people mean when they say Orr. He had gone from a mill-town manse to a professor’s desk at forty-seven, and the preface to the book is dated from Edinburgh, February 1893.

(●) 1901 AD: A church union moved him to Glasgow, where he taught apologetics until he died. + In 1900 the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church of Scotland joined to become the United Free Church of Scotland, and their colleges joined with them. In 1901 Orr took up the Chair of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at the United Free Church College in Glasgow, and he held it for the rest of his life. Apologetics is the reasoned defense of the Christian faith, the work Peter asks for when he tells Christians to be "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). Systematic theology is the other half of the same desk: setting out Christian doctrine in order, God first, then man and sin, then the person and work of Christ, then salvation and the last things. Orr taught both, and his books alternate between them all his life. The books came at a rate that is hard to credit. The Progress of Dogma and a short history of the early church in 1901; a study of David Hume and a volume of essays on Ritschl in 1903; God’s Image in Man in 1905; The Problem of the Old Testament in 1906; The Virgin Birth of Christ and The Bible Under Trial in 1907; The Resurrection of Jesus in 1908; Sidelights on Christian Doctrine in 1909; and in 1910 three at once, Revelation and Inspiration, The Faith of a Modern Christian and Sin as a Problem of To-day. A book a year for a decade, on top of a full teaching load.

(●) 1903 AD: America kept sending for him, and one of his books won a prize judged blind. + Orr crossed the Atlantic repeatedly, and the pattern was nearly always the same: an American seminary invited him, he gave a course of lectures, and the lectures came home as a book. In 1897 he gave the Elliot Lectures at Western Theological Seminary in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which became The Progress of Dogma, and the Morgan Lectures at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York state that October. From 28 September to 3 October 1903 he gave the L. P. Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, published as God’s Image in Man. In April 1907 he gave a course of lectures under the auspices of the Bible Teachers’ Training School in New York, in the chapel of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, and those lectures became The Virgin Birth of Christ. The prize is the better story. A former lieutenant-governor of Illinois, William Bross, had left money to Lake Forest College to draw out the best writing on the connection between any field of knowledge and the Christian religion. In 1902 the college offered six thousand dollars for it, a very large sum then, with manuscripts due by 1 June 1905. Three professors, from Yale, Princeton and Oberlin, read the entries without knowing who had written any of them; the sealed envelopes carrying the authors’ names were opened only after the award was made. The Problem of the Old Testament won. Orr was careful, in his preface, to say exactly what had happened. The book was not written for the prize, and he had not known of the competition; he had promised it to an English publisher long before, and submitting it in proof to the judges was an afterthought that held up its publication and inconvenienced his publishers, whose courtesy about it he took pains to record.

(●) 1913 AD: He died at home in Glasgow, with a Bible encyclopaedia of his own making still in proof. + Between 1910 and 1915 twelve small paperbound volumes called The Fundamentals went out free to Protestant ministers, missionaries, theological students, Sunday school superintendents and YMCA secretaries across the English-speaking world, paid for by two Californian oil men, Lyman and Milton Stewart. Copies went out in the millions, and the word fundamentalism comes from the title. Orr wrote four of the essays: on the virgin birth, on the early narratives of Genesis, on science and Christian faith, and on Holy Scripture and modern negations. He was among the most heavily credentialled contributors in the collection, a European professor writing beside evangelists and pastors. At the same time he was general editor of the International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, a reference work in five volumes with nearly two hundred contributors drawn from Britain, the United States, the continent, Canada, Syria, India and Australia, and from Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, with several Jewish scholars among them. Orr wrote the principal article on Jesus Christ himself, along with the articles on the Bible and on Criticism. He did not see it published. His heart had been weak for some time, and he died at his home in Glasgow on 6 September 1913, at sixty-nine; he was buried three days later at Cathcart cemetery. The encyclopaedia appeared in 1915.

What He Taught

(T1) Believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and you have taken on a view of everything else. + Here is an ordinary scene. A man at a kitchen table tells a friend, a little awkwardly, that he has come to believe Jesus was who he said he was. He thinks he has said one thing, and a fairly private thing at that. Orr’s opening lecture on the Kerr Foundation was about how much more than one thing he has just said. Believe that, Orr argued, and you are already committed to a view of God, who turns out not to be a force or a principle but someone who can take flesh. You are committed to a view of man, a creature worth that much trouble. You are committed to a view of sin, and to a view of what redemption is and what it costs, and to a view of what history is for, and to a view of where a human life ends up. None of those is an extra bolted onto a simple faith. They arrive with it, whether the man at the table has noticed or not. The German word for a package like that was Weltanschauung, a world-view: the whole picture a person carries of what is real, where it came from, what has gone wrong with it, and where it is going. Everyone has one, Orr said. The materialist who holds that matter in motion is all there is has a world-view. So does the positivist who organises all knowledge around the well-being of humanity, with man at the centre where God used to be. English had no good word for this, so Orr borrowed the German one, explained it to his hearers, and gave "the Christian view of the world" as his rendering. The practical consequence is the part that stuck, and it is worth putting plainly. If Christianity really is a connected view, then defending it doctrine by doctrine, conceding this one in the hope of keeping that one, is a mistake about what sort of thing it is. Nobody defends a house by arguing about one brick at a time while the walls come down.

(Q) "He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides." + Source: James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World as Centring in the Incarnation, Lecture I, pp. 4-5 (1893 edition). The sentence goes on to say what the commitment comes to: "He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity. This forms a 'Weltanschauung,' or 'Christian view of the world,' which stands in marked contrast with theories wrought out from a purely philosophical or scientific standpoint." (T1)

(T2) The history of doctrine is not the gospel being buried; it is the creed being worked out in order. + Adolf von Harnack, born in 1851 and the leading church historian in Germany, taught that what happened to Christianity after the apostles was a burial. Jesus had preached something simple, the fatherhood of God and the infinite worth of the human soul, and the Greek-speaking world that took the message over wrapped it in its own metaphysics until the kernel was lost inside a husk. The husk was dogma: a doctrine the church has formally defined and made binding, like the ruling at Nicaea in 325 that the Son is of one substance with the Father. Orr answered with a pattern that he claimed nobody had pointed out. Open any standard textbook of systematic theology and look at the order of the chapters. It begins with groundwork about revelation and Scripture; then God; then man, including sin; then the person of Christ; then the work of Christ; then how salvation is applied to a person; then the last things. Now open a history of doctrine, and the centuries arrive in that same order. The second century fought about God and revelation against the Gnostics, teachers who held that the world was the botched work of a lesser deity and that rescue came through secret knowledge. The third and fourth fought out the Trinity. The fifth took up sin and grace, with Augustine against Pelagius, and then the person of Christ. Anselm, in the eleventh century, put the work of Christ on the table and asked why God became man. The Reformation fought about justification, which is how salvation is applied. What is left over at the end of the list, the doctrine of the last things, is exactly what the modern centuries have taken up. If that is right, Harnack has the story upside down. The church did not lose the gospel under a pile of Greek philosophy. It unfolded what was in the gospel already, and it did so in the order the subject itself requires, because each question can only be asked once the one before it has an answer. You cannot argue about the two natures of Christ until you have settled whether he is God. You might be thinking: a man who goes looking for a pattern will find one. That objection was pressed at the time and it is pressed still, and Orr did not pretend it had no weight. He granted that the parallel is not exact and that the history is a good deal untidier than the scheme. What he left on the other side of the table is harder to shrug off: a corruption does not usually proceed in logical order.

(Q) "The temporal and the logical order correspond. The articulation of the system in your text-books is the very articulation of the system in its development in history." + Source: James Orr, The Progress of Dogma, Lecture I, p. 21. He is speaking to the students of a Pennsylvania seminary in 1897, which is why he says "your text-books": the young men in front of him had the books open on their desks that week. (T2)

(T3) Where the Old Testament gives a record, the newer criticism puts a conjecture. + Julius Wellhausen was born in the same year as Orr, 1844, and by the 1880s his reconstruction of Israel’s history had carried the German universities and a good deal of Britain with it. On that account the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, is not the work of Moses but four documents written centuries apart and stitched together; and the elaborate priestly law of Leviticus, which the Bible places at Sinai, actually belongs after the exile, around 450 BC. Turn the order round that way and Israel’s religion becomes a natural growth, like any other: a rough tribal God at the start, then the great prophets with their ethical monotheism, one God who asks his people for justice rather than for sacrifices, then, late and last, the priests with their ritual and their law. Orr’s answer ran to five hundred pages, and it is not the answer people expect. He did not say criticism was impious. He granted that genuinely hard problems face every view of the Old Testament, and that criticism had done a service in setting them in the clearest light. His charge was narrower, and harder to shake off. The real leverage of the system, he said, is not literary evidence at all but a prior theory of how a religion must develop, and wherever the record will not fit the theory, it is the record that gives way. He kept the charge concrete. He went through Karl Budde on the origins of Israel’s faith, Bernhard Stade on the early history, the rewriting of the accounts of Samuel and the kings, showing in each case what was in the text and what had been put there instead. And he pointed at a symptom worth watching in any theory: its own practitioners could not hold the documents still. Wellhausen, Kuenen and Carpenter divided Deuteronomy differently from one another, until the unity of the book that criticism had started from was lost, as he put it, in a sort of dissolving view. A great deal of the detailed argument has moved on in the century since, in both directions, and Orr would have expected that. The question he pressed has not moved. Is the theory reading the history, or writing it.

(Q) "Stade and Budde are conspicuous examples of this fault; but few of the other best-known writers of the school are far behind in their wilful setting aside, or mutilation, of the Biblical accounts, and substitution for these of an imaginary history, built up from ingenious conjectures, and brilliant combinations on the line of what the critic thinks the history should have been." + Source: James Orr, The Problem of the Old Testament, Chapter V, p. 119. The sentence directly before it grants the other side its due: hard problems arise on any theory of Israel’s religion and institutions, and Orr says it is the service of criticism to have set them in the clearest light. This is what he thought the leading critics then did with them. (T3)

(T4) The virgin birth is not a spare part of the creed. + The proposal Orr set out to answer sounded reasonable, and serious Christians were making it. Nothing important hangs on the manner of Jesus’ birth, they said. Faith in him as the divine Redeemer, faith even in his sinlessness, does not depend on it. So the article could be quietly dropped from the creeds, and one more obstacle to belief would be out of an honest man’s way. Orr’s reply came in two parts, and the first is an argument about modesty. The record stands there in two Gospels, independently: the angel’s answer to Mary, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God." (Luke 1:35), and Matthew’s account of the same event told from Joseph’s side. We are poor judges, Orr said, of what may or may not be bound up with something as far beyond us as the Incarnation. If this is in fact how God brought his Son into the world, the wiser assumption is that there is a connection we have not yet seen, rather than that the fact is a matter of indifference. The second part is an observation about the people doing the arguing, and it has the feel of something noticed rather than constructed. The men who denied the virgin birth almost always denied the rest of the miraculous in Christ’s life as well; the men who defended it were the men who held the Incarnation in the full sense of the word. Two things do not keep company that faithfully by accident. And, as he put it, people do not spend their energy demolishing a fact they sincerely believe does not matter. He conceded the other side of that coin in the same breath, quoting the Anglican theologian Charles Gore: if the rest of Christ’s life was miraculous, and his manner of leaving it too, then that conditions the evidence about his birth. The reasoning runs in both directions, Orr said, and he was not going to pretend otherwise.

(Q) "I indicated that the very zeal of the opponents points in this direction; for people do not usually waste their energies in efforts to overthrow a fact which they deem of no importance." + Source: James Orr, The Virgin Birth of Christ, Lecture VII, p. 183. Delivered in New York in April 1907, at the opening of the lecture in which he takes up the claim that no doctrine is involved in the article one way or the other. (T4)

(T5) Inspiration is shown from the revelation Scripture carries, not from a prior guarantee that no detail can be wrong. + There are two ways to establish that a witness is worth believing, and the order you take them in decides a great deal. You can begin by proving the witness incapable of error and then accept whatever he tells you. Or you can begin with what he reports, find that it holds up under examination, and conclude that he is the sort of witness to trust. The older apologetic took the first road with Scripture: prove the inspiration of the book, and receive the revelation through it. Orr turned the order round and worked from the revelation to the inspiration. Behind that was a live quarrel among people who agreed about almost everything else. In 1881 two Princeton theologians, Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Warfield, had defined inerrancy: the doctrine that Scripture, in the original manuscripts as the authors wrote them, contains no error of any kind, in history and science as much as in doctrine. Orr thought highly of both men and quoted them fairly. What he would not do was rest the case for revealed religion on that claim, because it puts the hardest thing at the bottom of the pile. It is a far easier matter, he said, to show that God revealed himself in the history of Israel and in Christ than to demonstrate the errorless inspiration of every part of the record through which that revelation has reached us. He was not giving up inspiration, and it is worth being exact about this, because he has been read both ways ever since. Orr held that Scripture is breathed out by God, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16), and in the very chapter where he calls the inerrantist’s starting point suicidal he adds that there is the best reason for believing Mark and Luke had an exceptional inspiration in the writing of their books. What he refused was to let the whole edifice of belief hang on a claim about minute details, a claim he thought could not be demonstrated and did not need to be.

(Q) "This, on the face of it, is a most suicidal position for any defender of revelation to take up." + Source: James Orr, Revelation and Inspiration, Chapter X, pp. 197-198. The position he calls suicidal is stated in the sentence before: that unless we can demonstrate what is called the inerrancy of the Biblical record, down even to its minutest details, the whole edifice of belief in revealed religion falls to the ground. (T5)

(Q) "Like the ark above the waters, Christ’s religion will ride in safety the waves of present-day unbelief, as it has ridden the waves of unbelief in days gone by, bearing in it the hopes of the future of humanity." + Source: James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World, Lecture IX, closing words, p. 398 (1893 edition). The last sentence of the last lecture, spoken to the students of his church’s theological hall in the session of 1890-91, at a moment when a good deal of educated opinion in Britain and Germany expected the Christian view of the world to be gone within a generation. A few lines earlier he had said he did not believe that one single truth of it would need to be withdrawn.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He gave English-speaking Christians the word world-view, and the habit of mind that comes with it. + Weltanschauung was a technical term of German philosophy. Kant coined it in 1790, and by the nineteenth century it was ordinary currency in German lecture halls. Orr brought it across in 1891, explained it patiently to a Scottish audience who had never met it, and put it to Christian use: not a believer’s private opinions, but the whole connected account of reality that follows from the Incarnation. He was not alone in the work. Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian who would be his country’s prime minister three years later, was arguing much the same case in Dutch, and laid it before an American audience in his Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898, five years after Orr’s book appeared in English. Between the two of them the idea took root in the English-speaking Protestant world, and it has never left it. A century later a Christian college advertises a worldview course and a Christian school lists worldview formation among its aims, and nobody has to explain the word to anyone. What travelled with the word was a method. Take the whole of Christianity as the unit rather than one doctrine at a time, and then ask which total account of the world makes better sense of everything a person has to explain. That is recognisably the shape of a great deal of Christian apologetics written since.

(†) Two projects of his last years carried a scholar’s work into ordinary ministers’ studies. + The work Orr did at the end of his life was mostly distribution rather than original argument, and it is the reason his name outlasted his controversies. The Fundamentals reached an audience no academic book of his ever could. Twelve volumes went out free between 1910 and 1915, in the millions of copies, to ministers, missionaries, theological students and Sunday school teachers who would never have bought a five-hundred-page monograph on the Pentateuch. Orr’s four essays gave that collection a contributor with a European reputation and a professor’s footnotes, and they are among the most substantial pieces in it. A good deal of what ordinary Protestants knew about the virgin birth, about Genesis, and about the relation of science to Christian faith came to them in his sentences. The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia did the same thing for the next seventy years. Five volumes, nearly two hundred contributors, deliberately gathered from many countries and many churches so that no one party owned it, with Orr’s own article on Jesus Christ at its centre. Eerdmans published a thoroughly revised version between 1979 and 1988, and the 1915 original is still reprinted and freely available online, which means Orr is quietly answering questions in Bible studies that have never heard his name.

(†) Where fellow Christians have faulted him: he let evolution in the door, and he would not defend inerrancy. + Orr is claimed as an ancestor by Christians who would not willingly share a room, and the reason is that his own record hands each of them something. Two positions in particular have drawn fire, and both are his, in print, under his name. - Evolution as a method of creation. In the Stone Lectures at Princeton he said plainly that no religious interest is imperilled by a theory of evolution "viewed simply as a method of creation, provided certain conditions are fulfilled, and certain limits are observed." He meant the limits seriously. He argued that the origin of life, the origin of consciousness and the origin of man were three points where natural process alone would not do, that evolution need not proceed by insensible gradations, and that the mental and moral distance between man and the animals had not been bridged by anybody. But the door was open, and readers who took up The Fundamentals expecting a defense of Genesis against Darwin found one of its contributors granting organic descent. Christians who hold that Scripture teaches a special creation of the biological kinds answer that he gave away ground that was not his to give, and that limits of the sort he drew are exactly the ones the next generation does not keep. - Refusing to make inerrancy the foundation. Calling the inerrantist’s starting point suicidal was not a slip of the pen; he made the judgment deliberately and repeated it. Those who hold the position defined at Princeton in 1881, and restated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978, reply that Orr’s line cannot be held for long: once a book may err in some detail it reports, somebody has to decide which details, and the deciding gets done by the reader rather than by the text. Orr’s answer, given in advance, was that he was licensing nobody to sift Scripture, that he held its inspiration to be real and pervasive, and that the argument was about which ground a defender should choose to stand on, not about whether the ground was holy. Both disputes are still live among Christians who agree about a great deal else, and on neither of them is either side arguing for less than the authority of Scripture. What can be said fairly about Orr is that he was willing to give up a position he thought could not be held in order to hold one he thought could, and that this is a temperament with real risks in it as well as real uses. He knew that, and he was not evasive about it. "If any are stumbled on this account, I can only plead that I must speak as I believe," he wrote in the preface to God’s Image in Man, to readers he fully expected to be stumbled.