Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tim Grass is associate tutor at Spurgeon's College, London, and assistant editor for the Ecclesiastical History Society.,

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

F.F. BRUCE

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................viAbbreviations.................................................................................................viiIntroduction..................................................................................................ix1. Background and Early Life (1910–21)..................................................................12. Student at Elgin Academy (1921–8)....................................................................123. Setting Out on an Academic Career: Aberdeen, Cambridge, Vienna and Edinburgh (1928-38).....................184. From Classicist to Biblical Scholar: Leeds (1938–47).................................................325. Pioneering in Biblical Studies: Sheffield (1947–59)..................................................506. Developing His Written Ministry (1947–59)............................................................707. Rylands Professor: Manchester (1959–78)..............................................................1018. Books and the Book (1959–78).........................................................................1429. Productive Retirement (1978–90)......................................................................18310. Legacy and Evaluation.....................................................................................212Chronology of the Life of F.F. Bruce..........................................................................228Bibliography of the Writings of F.F. Bruce....................................................................230Select Bibliography of Other Items............................................................................266Index.........................................................................................................280

Chapter One

Our story begins in north-eastern Scotland. East of Inverness a strip of fertile farmland runs along the sandy coast for about 45 miles. The market town of Elgin lies towards the further end of this, 5 miles inland from the port of Lossiemouth. The fertility and the surprisingly mild climate combine to make this an excellent area for growing barley, essential for the distilleries populating the north-east of Scotland. To the south, the land rises steadily towards the Cairngorms, which, with the Grampians further east, long presented a natural barrier to communication with central and southern Scotland. Along the whole coast, towards Fraserburgh at the northeast's tip, are a string of small ports and fishing villages. Seventy miles to the south-east of Elgin lies the city of Aberdeen, whose university has for centuries received the sons and daughters of many local families.

Elgin itself has a long history, having been the county town of Morayshire from the thirteenth century until late twentieth-century reorganization. Its spectacular ruined cathedral, 'the lantern of the north', also dates from the thirteenth century. The nineteenth century saw the foundations laid for the town's more recent prosperity: Elgin Academy was founded in 1801, although its roots go back to the medieval period, and Highland gentry found the town an attractive place to spend the winter, more accessible than Edinburgh but with something of the capital's cultural life and neo-classical style. Significantly, the first railway to reach Elgin (in 1852) was not initially connected with the rest of the national network, but ran to Lossiemouth; for the local economy it was evidently more important to ensure easy access to shipping facilities than to Aberdeen or Inverness, although a railway linking Elgin with them followed. By the beginning of the twentieth century the town's population was about twenty thousand, and it has continued to grow since.

The relative isolation of the north-east from the centres of power further south has meant that it has always manifested a degree of independence in religious matters. In the seventeenth century, when Covenanting fervour swept much of the nation, relatively little impact was made on this area, and even now it has a higher proportion of local people belonging to the Episcopal Church than other parts of Scotland. To add to the mix, Roman Catholicism has retained a presence, and a variety of more recent evangelical traditions – Methodist, Baptist and Brethren – have also established themselves. To a considerable extent this was the fruit of revival from 1858 onwards and of subsequent vigorous outreach. One of the best-known figures in this movement was the gentleman Brownlow North (1810–75), whose residence lay at Bishopmill, just to the north of the town. His conversion in 1855 saw him becoming an itinerant lay evangelist; unusually, and in spite of his being from an Episcopalian rather than Presbyterian background, he received official recognition from the Free Church of Scotland in 1859. The revivalist ethos was one of warm, even enthusiastic, spirituality, and lay people tended to play more prominent roles in such traditions than in the Presbyterian denominations. A link has often been seen between this type of spirituality and the insecurity of life for many in the fishing communities, for whom the loss of boats at sea was all too common. Revivalism certainly remained part of the spiritual outlook of these communities, in some cases until the present.

Local Brethren had their roots in this revival, rather than in earlier gatherings at Dublin or Plymouth which have traditionally been seen as the movement's beginning. It begat a wave of activism which issued among other things in the formation of the North-East Coast Mission in 1860. During the 1860s Donald Ross (1824–1903) and other evangelists associated with him in these agencies came into conflict with the Free Church of Scotland, to which they belonged, because their way of working was not amenable to control by a denominational leadership; furthermore, they were outspokenly critical of the fact that many communicant members of the Free Church were unconverted. The evangelists accordingly withdrew from the NECM and founded another agency, the Northern Evangelistic Society, in 1870, to work in inland areas. Thereafter they gradually adopted views on church order and believer's baptism which paralleled those of the Brethren, leading to the formation of several dozen assemblies (as Open Brethren congregations were called) in the region as converts found it impossible to remain in existing churches. Only once this process had begun did significant contact develop with Brethren elsewhere. Exclusive Brethren also established a strong presence in the region, likewise largely independent at first of what was happening elsewhere in Britain. Further growth came through awakenings in the 1880s, the mid-1890s and 1921; intervening contraction was due to heavy emigration to Aberdeen and overseas. In 1893–4 along the Moray Firth 1,600 were converted, 300 of them in the fishing village of Hopeman, a few miles north-west of Elgin. Another outbreak of revival occurred in 1921–2, connected with Jock Troup of Wick and spreading as far as Lowestoft through the movements of workers in the fishing industry. Brethren shared fully in reaping the harvest at such times.

It should be stressed that solid theology was by...