James
Orr (Scottish Theologian)
The Person
James Orr was born in Glasgow in April 11, 1844. At his
early age, he became an orphan. For his survival, he worked as bookbinder. In
the age of twenty one only, he joined the university of Glasgow. He became a
member of United Presbyterian church and then he was ordained as a minister. In
the University of Glasgow, he passed with honors as a master of arts in mental
philosophy. He was granted a prestigious Ferguson Scholarship for his studies.
Though many Ferguson scholars chose Cambridge and Oxford, he remained at the
University of Glasgow and did his study divinity there from 1870 to 1872.[1]
Background
While he was a student
at Glasgaw, there were two philosophical giants competing each other in the
University of Glasgaw – John Veitch and
and Edward Caird. John Veitch is one of the last Scotland’s commonsense
philosophers and Caird is a champion of Hegelian idealism. Rather than following Caird, he followed
Veitch, who says that every human being has the potential to judge what is
true. Caird gave a commend on Orr’s an essay on David Hume’s philosophy and it
earned the university’s Lord Recto’s Prize in 1872. This essay became his basis
book entitled, “David Hume and His Influence of Philosophy and Theology.” (1903)
.[2]
Christian
Worldview
In
1891, Orr was invited to deliver lectures at the United Presbyterian
Theological College. Two years later, these lectures were published later as
his magnum opus entitled, The Christian
View of God and The World as Centering in the Incarnation. According to
Orr, Christianity is undeniably supernatural. This means it assumes the
existence of two realms: the supernatural and the natural. These two realms
intersect in the interest of religion. The supernatural is woven into the core
of Christian religion. For Orr, this is the nonnegotiable fact of Christianity.[3]
Christianity
is religion, not philosophy. It does offer its own worldview to satisfy the
people. This is the fact that Christians should proclaim its worldview with
force and appeal, otherwise people will look elsewhere for intellectual
satisfaction.[4]
Because of its coherency, Christian worldview has verisimilitude. Thus the
systematic presentation of evangelical doctrine is in fact the most comprehensive
apologetic for the Christian faith.
Unlike
other theologians, Orr focused on Incarnation as his theological theme rather
than the atonement of Christ. For Orr, incarnation was more than a mere
declaration of God’s purpose to save the world. In incarnation, God and man are
in a sense one.[5]
He implied that there is a natural kinship between the human spirit and and the
Divine and the bond between God and man is inner and essential. If there is no
a God-related element in the human spirit, no subsequent act of grace could
confer on man this spiritual dignity.[6]
For
Orr, Christianity is more than a source of ethical instruction, social reform
principles, and philanthropic impulse. It is God’s work to bring back man from
sin and guilt, and lead them to a state of holiness and blessedness in the
favor of God. [7]
Orr
said Christianity with its supernatualistic assumption was in cosmic struggle
with naturalism. He stressed the reasonableness of the idea that a personal,
loving God would take nature suspending initiatives to communicate with and
maintain fellowship with his creatures. In this way, theism makes supernatural
activity plausible.[8]
Ritschlism
In 1897, Orr published
a book entitled Ritschlian Theology and
the Evangelical Faith. According to Ritschlism, there is no possibility of
the Revelation of his grace in Jesus Christ. Natural theology and theorectic
proofs for the existence of God are tabooed. Along with Kant, Ritschlism also
says that the theorectic reason can give no knowledge of God, or proof of His
existence. [9] Religious
knowledge could be obtained through what he termed “value judgments.” The issue
for Orr was the Ritschlian claim that religious and theoretical knowledge
operate in mutually exclusive spheres and consequently cannot contradict one
another.
Herrmann, Orr named him
as the representative of the Ritschlism, claimed that the certitude of faith
springs from an immediate impression of Christ upon the soul. Orr agreed with
Herrmann on the immediate certitude of faith, which Orr called the
self-evidencing character of the Gospel revelation.[10] Where
Herrmann and the other Ritschlians went wrong, Orr argued, was in pushing
faith’s independence of critical results too far. He said, “Instead of using
their principle of faith as a check against the inroads of destructive
criticism – as, if it has any worth, they ought to do – they make concessions
to opponents which practically mean the cutting away of the bough they
themselves are sitting on.”[11]
For Orr, faith is a
means of knowing but reason is not the only power of human being because there
are some other things which nourished by many other elements. He said that the
confidence granted to faith cannot be sustained if it is subsequently
contradicted by other faculties of the intuitive soul.[12] Though
faith and reason can be distinguished but in the end the two have to harmonize. Orr believed that Ritschlian theology
demanded a violation of rationality itself.
OT Criticism
Orr believed that the
only sure grounds for Christian conviction was authoritative supernatural
revelation. He sharply distinguished supernatural from all forms of natural
revelation. Not like his colleague George Adam Smith,[13]
Orr refused to label as supernatural any instance of revelation that worked
itself out through natural processes. For Orr, genuine revelation was something
altogether different, it was unabashedly miraculous. It was God himself taking
personal revelatory initiative that cut through and suspended the operations of
natural law.
For Orr, the
profitability of Scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16 implies a very high degree of
historical and factual accuracy. He stated that the degree of accuracy is so
high as to be itself an argument for the supernatural origin of scripture. The
doctrine of inerrancy is in line with the teachings of apostles and the
tradition of the church.[14] In
1906, he wrote a book entitled Problem of
the Old Testament. Orr rejected Wellhausen hypothesis[15]
and other theory that postulated a synthesis of documents to account for the
Pentateuch.
Orr charged German
criticism was rationalistic and consequently approached the Old Testament with
a naturalistic bias. It adhered to a non-supernatural model of the development
of religions and then forced the data of the Old Testament to fit that model.
It not only contradicts the concept of supernatural revelation but also
hostiles to the high view of its written record. To keep the authority of the
Scripture, we need to hold its historical structure of the Bible.[16]
Evolutionary Theory
In
1859, Charles Darwin published his book, Origin
of Species. Many theologians of those days gave responses to the theory in
many different ways. No theologian could ignore Darwinism and its implications
for the faith. For Orr, religious truth claims are completely independent of
science and invulnerable to scientific refutation. He believed that
evolutionary theory challenged certain doctrines like creation, humanity and
sin. Orr agreed that evolution of some kind or other is likely. He holds this
position throughout his life.[17]
Though
Orr did not deny evolutionary theology totally, he said the basic assumption is
that God controls the world because he created it. When we accept the
teleological nature of the creation, we must recognize the dependence upon God
the creator. Regarding human beings, he said human beings were created by God
distinctively different from other living beings. It seems that Orr and other
theologians of his days, did not deny the fact that there could be some other
living beings created by God. According to Evolution theory, sin is only a
natural necessity. Orr argued that if sin is just a moral evolution, sin would
not be the result of humanity’s free volition, but of God-given constitution,
and our liability to punishment would be unreasonable. Moral evolution theory
makes human beings not as hopeless and helpless. At a point of time, they could
be in a better stage. In evolutionary theory, sin is an relative standard
rather than a fixed norm. however, Orr argued that sin is a violation of an
absolute standard and affront to the living God.
The Quest of the historical Jesus
The quest of the
historical Jesus challenged the traditional understanding of the doctrine of
Christ, especially the divinity of Christ. Orr argued that the Christology of
Chalcedon creed is adequate. Any deviation from creedal Christology would bring
disaster to the church. According to the Quest of historical Jesus movement,
Jesus could be either human or divine. He could not be both divine and human at
the same time. Orr argued that because of virgin birth of Christ[18]
and the resurrection,[19]
the divinity of Christ is approved. The historical Jesus is truly God.
In conclusion, Orr is a
theologian who stands on the authority of the Bible and want to defend Christian
faith from others. Unlike many theologians of his day, even today, he strongly
believe that the Bible is not outdated book, compare to the new discovery in
scientific world.
[2]
http://www.ccel.org, accessed on February
20, 2012.
[3]
James Orr, The Christian View of the
World (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1893), 10.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Ibid., 296.
[6]
Ibid., 119-121.
[7]
Ibid., 287.
[8] James Orr, David Hume and His Influence on
Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1903), 192–216.
[9]
http://www.ccel.org, accessed on February
20, 2012.
[10] James Orr, Ritschlianism: Expository and Critical
Essays (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1903), 14.
[11]
Ibid., 16.
[12]
Ibid., 256, 260,
[13]
George Adam Smith, T. M. Linsay, and James Denney were colleagues of the
Glasgow United Free Church College. Later, they became world renowned faculty
members of the college.
[14]
James Orr, “Revelation and
Inspiration,” Thinker 6 (1894): 216-217.
[15]
This theory holds that Moses collected existing materials to construct Genesis.
This is known by the use of different names of God, stylistic differences,
patterns.
[16]
James Orr, The Problem
of the Old Testament (New York: Scribner, 1906), 4–20.
[17]
James Orr, Christian
View of God and the World, 99, 182–183.
[18]
James Orr, The Virgin
Birth of Christ (New York: Scribner, 1907), 192.
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