The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W. W. Bryden

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• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781498276504
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A biographical study on the Theology of W. W. Bryden.

1

The Making of a Presbyterian Mind

There is no such thing as Reformed Theology . . . only a continual reference to the Word of God in Scripture . . . . A hankering after tradition is a sign that the living thing in faith has been lost.—Walter Bryden

I stand firmly by the Reformed faith, subject to Scripture which I believe cradles God’s living Word for those who have ears to hear it. That about sums me up, whatever lies before. —Walter Bryden

In lectures delivered to students in the early 1930s at Knox College on the nature of Presbyterianism, Walter Bryden spoke about denominationalism and ecclesiasticism as insufficient reasons for rejecting church union. “It has often been assumed that, being born and nurtured in the Presbyterian Church,” he said, “it is something like a moral and religious duty to die in it.”1 Aware that loyalty to a denomination and a church tradition might blind one to the truth of the Christian message and the importance of church unity, Bryden rejected the conviction that there was something sacred, absolute or final about Presbyterianism, “the simplicity of its worship and the democratic character of its government, the purity of its doctrine and the evangelical nature of its gospel.”2 Ecclesiasticism, he argued, was “the attempt to substantiate the validity of a Church upon purely ecclesiastical grounds, or by its ecclesiastical credentials.”3

His concerns notwithstanding, Walter Bryden was a Presbyterian, by birth and by choice. Like many of his contemporaries, he was nurtured and shaped by the ecclesiastical culture and ethos of The Presbyterian Church in Canada, and he labored within its bounds all his life. In 1925, unlike many of his contemporaries, he made the difficult decision to remain a Presbyterian minister, and he died in a church that was less than one third the size of the church into which he had been born. What was the nature of the Presbyterianism to which Bryden remained committed throughout his life? The purpose of this chapter is to examine the ecclesial ethos that shaped Bryden’s formative years. This will provide a basis for understanding his faith and life, his theological instincts, his influence as a theological teacher, his enthusiasm for Barth and the neo-orthodox theologians, his conception of revelation and the knowledge of God, and the decisive role that he played, at a critical moment in the history of the Presbyterian tradition, in reshaping the Church within which “he lived and moved and had his being.”

Church and Family, 1883–1902

The eldest of three children in a Scottish Presbyterian family, Walter Bryden was born in 1883 and raised on the family farm on the banks of the Grand River at Blair, just outside Galt in rural southwestern Ontario. An aptitude for study, accompanied by his mother’s desire to see her elder son pursue formal education (leading, perhaps, to the Presbyterian ministry) was confirmed by circumstance. Through either illness or accident Bryden’s right arm was disfigured. According to a family friend, Bryden’s father reluctantly agreed, “We shall have to give Walter a schooling; he will be no good now for the farm.”4 Bryden’s students remember the permanent disability as a distinctive feature of his presence in the classroom. “In appearance slight, one delicate arm held close, movements denoting energy—and eyes that pierced in eager dialogue.”5 It certainly added to the burden of his work, as he noted in the preface to The Christian’s Knowledge of God. He acknowledged his wife’s assistance in preparing the text: “It would be nothing more than just to say that this book could never have come to the light of day without the unrelenting labour of my wife. Because of a physical disability of my own, it was necessary for her to write practically all of the original manuscript.”6 A memorial tribute by the convener of the Knox College Board of Management in 1952 said much the same thing: “The untiring assistance and care of Mrs. Bryden undoubtedly helped to make possible the effectiveness of Dr. Bryden’s work in those years when his physical infirmities rendered such help imperative.”7

Despite the physical disability he lived an active life. As a student at the University of Toronto he was a member of the track team and captained a championship soccer team. As a Presbyterian minister he organized sports activities for young people. As a professor he coached Knox College teams in intramural sports, and Presbyterian legend has it that because he was such an ardent fan he was granted regular season passes to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs play baseball. The task to which he devoted the majority of his energy, however, was the life of the mind in the service of the church.

The Free Church Tradition. The Bryden family attended Knox’s Church, Galt, where Presbyterianism had flourished since the early nineteenth century through immigration from Scotland. Late in his life, Bryden recalled that as a teenager in high school he had read all kinds of old national Scottish history, as well as the history of the Kirk. “Indeed,” he said, “there was a time when I verily believed Scotland was God’s throne and the rest of the world His footstool.”8 Further historical study, he acknowledged, happily disabused him of this notion.

Among the various aspects of Scottish Presbyterianism that shaped Bryden’s thought, one left a deep imprint. Knox’s Church, Galt had been organized as a congregation of the Free Church in 1844 under the leadership of The Rev. John Bayne. The Free Church congregations exercised a robust form of Presbyterian polity with a particular understanding of church-state relations. Presbyterian polity was shaped by the conviction that the role of the elder (presbyter) in the New Testament was essential to good church order. This conviction resulted in a system of church government in which ordained ministers (as teaching elders) and ordained lay people (as ruling elders) participated equally. The church’s governing structures consisted of a hierarchy of courts (sessions, presbyteries, synods, and general assemblies), each appointing representatives to the higher courts. As Bryden later noted critically, for many Presbyterians this meant that the constitutive principle of Presbyterianism “is held to inhere in the Presbyter, or in the corresponding order of the Presbytery.”9 The system rested upon two equally-held principles. First, all those who participated in the government of the church, whether clergy or lay, were to be elected to their offices, making the system in some sense democratic. At the same time it was believed that this form of church government was divinely ordained by Jesus Christ who ruled the church as its only king and head, giving the system a theocratic character. Holding these two principles in tension, ministers and elders were not only representatives elected to their respective offices with an authority derived from the people, but they were also called by Jesus Christ and set apart by the courts of the church to govern God’s people. The implication was that the church (particularly the presbytery) functioned not merely as an elected representative body of the people, but under a divine right which was not, under any circumstance, to be infringed upon by other church bodies or by the state. Thus, Presbyterian polity had implications which went far beyond ecclesiastical organization.10

In Scotland, where Presbyterianism had been established since the sixteenth century, the church frequently came into conflict with governing authorities over these principles. When the monarch or local laird attempted to dominate the church, for example, by appointing a local minister, many Scottish Presbyterians resisted in the name of “The Crown Rights of Jesus Christ” or “The Crown Rights of the Redeemer.”11 Christ alone, they argued, ruled the church as its king and head. Resistance to government intrusion, aided and abetted by aristocratic patronage, was not only justified, it was demanded. In the course of Scottish church history, some Presbyterians rejected the principle of establishment altogether and moved towards voluntarism. In the Canadian church, to cite a later example of this argument, opposition to church union in 1925 was justified by the argument that the new church was being created through parliamentary legislation, The Church Union Act of 1924. In the eyes of those who resisted the proposed union, this was viewed as an illegitimate usurpation of ecclesiastical authority by the state. The parliament, they argued, had no right whatsoever to create and establish a church, and the churches had no right to ask them to do so.12 Furthermore, this emphasis on the “kingship of Christ” was limited not only to ecclesiastical matters. If Jesus Christ was king, his sovereign lordship extended over all of life, his will was to be the concern of Christians in every sphere of society, and his moral law was to be obeyed by all. Presbyterians, therefore, not infrequently found themselves at odds with the civil authorities.

This was the spirit of Presbyterianism within which Walter Bryden’s understanding of church and society was shaped at Knox’s Church, Galt. The congregation had been founded as a direct result of a major division in Scotland over just these principles. The pressure had been building in the years leading up to 1843. Then Scottish Presbyterians, representing the strict Calvinist evangelical party within the Church of Scotland, charged that the church had denied the headship of Christ by allowing the church to become subject to the governing authorities in matters purely ecclesiastical. Although there had been increasing tension between the evangelicals and the deistic and latitudinarian moderates in the Church of Scotland on a variety of theological emphases, the matter was brought to a head around the patronage appointments of ministers to parishes by lay patrons, whether individual landowners or the state itself, thus negating the congregation’s call.13 As Canadian historian John Moir notes, these developments within Scotland found support in Canada. The disruption was reduplicated in the colonies: “Even before that fateful day, 18 May, 1843, when Dr. Thomas Chalmers led 202 other commissioners out of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to found the Free Church, considerable colonial sympathy had been expressed for the cause of these protesters.”14 Moir also notes that this was entirely explicable because “in the wake of the Napoleonic wars a flood of Scottish immigrants fled depressed condi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Word of God and the Words of Walter W. Bryden
• Chapter 1: The Making of a Presbyterian Mind
• Chapter 2: The Emergence of a Neo-Orthodox Voice
• Chapter 3: The Judging–Saving Word of God
• Chapter 4: A Theology of the Spirit
• Chapter 5: A Church Reformed and Reforming
• Chapter 6: The Witness of W. W. Bryden and the Neo-Orthodox Legacy
• Bibliography