Jeffrey R. Smitten, The Life of William Robertson: Minister, Historian, and Principal

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-236
Author(s):  
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Keyword(s):  
William Robertson

Gender

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
Vocational Training ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Independent College ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Ministerial Training ◽  
Free Inquiry ◽  
Slow Decline ◽  
Charles Haddon Spurgeon ◽  
William Robertson

Ministerial training throughout the nineteenth century was dogged by persistent uncertainties about what Dissenters wanted ministers to do: were they to be preachers or scholars, settled pastors or roving missionaries? Sects and denominations such as the Baptists and Congregationalists invested heavily in the professionalization of ministry, founding, building, and expanding ministerial training colleges whose pompous architecture often expressed their cultural ambitions. That was especially true for the Methodists who had often been wary of a learned ministry, while Presbyterians who had always nursed such a status built an impressive international network of colleges, centred on Princeton Seminary. Among both Methodists and Presbyterians, such institution building could be both bedevilled and eventually stimulated by secessions. Colleges were heavily implicated not just in the supply of domestic ministers but also in foreign mission. Even exceptions to this pattern such as the Quakers who claimed not to have dedicated ministers were tacitly professionalizing training by the end of the century. However, the investment in institutions did not prevent protracted disputes over how academic their training should be. Many very successful Dissenting entrepreneurs, such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Thomas Champness, William Booth, and Adoniram Judson Gordon, offered unpretentious vocational training, while in colonies such as Australia there were complaints from Congregationalists and others that the colleges were too high-flying for their requirements. The need to offer a liberal education, which came to include science, as well as systematic theological instruction put strain on the resources of the colleges, a strain that many resolved by farming out the former to secular universities. Many of the controversies generated by theological change among Dissenters centred on colleges because they were disputes about the teaching of biblical criticism and how to resolve the tension between free inquiry and the responsibilities of tutors and students to the wider denomination. Colleges were ill-equipped to accommodate theological change because their heads insisted that theology was a static discipline, central to which was the simple exegesis of Scripture. That generated tensions with their students and caused numerous teachers to be edged out of colleges for heresy, most notoriously Samuel Davidson from Lancashire Independent College and William Robertson Smith from the Aberdeen Free Church College. Nevertheless, even conservatives such as Moses Stuart at Andover had emphasized the importance of keeping one’s exegetical tools up to date, and it became progressively easier in most denominations for college teachers to enjoy intellectual liberty, much as Unitarians had always done. Yet the victory of free inquiry was never complete and pyrrhic in any event as from the end of the century the colleges could not arrest a slow decline in the morale and prospects of Dissenting ministers.

Sociology, Protestant Theology, and the Concept of Modern Religion: William Robertson Smith and the ‘Scientification’ of Religion

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 335-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dietrich Jung
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
William Robertson

This article looks at the intersection between Protestant theology and sociology in the construction of the modern concept of religion. Set against the theoretical background of the functional differentiation of modern society, it identifies the origin of this concept in the discursive ‘scientification’ of religion by the emerging disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. In taking the life and work of William Robertson Smith (1846–94) as an example, the article analyzes the transformation of some specific elements of liberal Protestant theology into a set of universal features that came to represent religion as a modern concept. In this way, it argues against confusing the modern concept of religion with a ‘Christian model’ as such, and also against rejecting the concept as a mere ideological tool of secularist ideologies.

William Robertson Smith and the study of religion

Religion ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margit Warburg
Keyword(s):  
William Robertson

IN DEFENSE OF THE COMPARATIVE METHOD

Numen ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Segal
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
William Robertson

AbstractWhile in some disciplines the comparative method is used unhesitatingly, in others it is spurned. In the field of religious studies, the method has long been rejected, and that rejection far antedates the anti-comparativist stance of postmodernism. This article identifies the main objections commonly lodged against the method and attempts to refute them all - as mischaracterizations either of the method or of the quest for knowledge itself. The article then considers the use of the method by the two figures in religious studies still singled out as the most egregious practitioners of it: James Frazer and William Robertson Smith. In actuality, not even they turn out to be guilty of any of the objections lodged against the method. At the same time they turn out to employ the method in contrary ways. Frazer uses the method to show the similarities among religions; Smith uses it as much to show the differences. The contrasting use of the same method by its most famous practitioners shows that the method is not merely malleable but indispensable to all scholars of religion - those seeking the particularities of individual religions no less than those seeking the universals of religion.

“Where is Sarah Your Wife?” Cultural Poetics of Gender and Nationhood in the Hebrew Bible

1998 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Seeman
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Cultural Poetics ◽  
Kinship Theory ◽  
William Robertson ◽  
The Way

William Robertson Smith wrote in 1885 that the biblical convention whereby aman is said to “go in” to his bride represents a linguistic trace ofonce widespread “beenamarriage,” in which men joined the natal households of the women who took them as husbands. It was an error of literalist reductionism, but one that lent support to an imposing infrastructure of systematic kinship theory and evolutionism that continues to excercise an influenceon some contemporary scholars. Another way of saying this is that Robertson Smith failed to recognize a significant biblical metaphor—that of men enteringwomen's tents—when he saw one. This misapprehension of biblical poetics has had important consequences for the way in which he and his successors have interpreted the Hebrew Bible.

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