F.F. BRUCE
A LifeBy Tim GrassWilliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2011 Tim Grass
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8028-6723-0Contents
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
Background and Early Life (1910–21)
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 no means regarded as inimical to such vigorous growth. The seventeenth-century Westminster Shorter Catechism was one of the foundational documents of all Presbyterian denominations in Scotland, and at this time every child would have learned it at school. Ross had received a thorough grounding in its theology, to the extent that he was nicknamed 'the walking Shorter Catechism'. But he combined this with a stress on salvation as a gift which could be received in an instant (contrasting with the prevalent belief that the road to Christ was long and often agonizing as the sinner's heart was laid bare by the terrors of God's law), and on assurance as the normal experience of the believer (again, a contrast with the widespread belief that it was given only to those who had progressed far in the Christian life). He founded several magazines, most of which failed, but one, the Northern Intelligencer, would develop into The Witness, a respected British Brethren monthly. The motto of the Northern Intelligencer included these two emphases on instant salvation and assurance, and the combination of these with moderate Calvinistic theology marked many Scottish assemblies, both locally and further afield. Bruce described the Brethren circles in which he had been brought up as moderate ones which saw limited atonement (the doctrine that Christ died for the elect only, and not for all) and double predestination (the idea that God predestined some individuals to be saved, and others to be lost) as extreme. Their Calvinism, then, differed somewhat from that of the Westminster Confession and Catechisms; but it reflected the fact that these had come under increasingly critical scrutiny in Presbyterian circles from 1830 onwards.
We have noted that the revival ethos sat lightly to the order and polity of more established churches; the activity of the Spirit was held to justify departures from the norm. One such was the countenancing of women's preaching. Women played a prominent role in some local assemblies at a time when this was almost universally disapproved of in other parts of Britain. That at Rhynie in Aberdeenshire continued to allow women to preach, to the extent that one Brethren publisher, Henry Pickering (1858–1941), allegedly considered publishing a manuscript written against its practice. And Bruce himself remembered meeting as a boy the widow of an evangelist, Mrs Lundin-Brown (1829–1924), who had herself been a preacher in revival times and who still used to participate audibly in prayer in local assemblies as a regular visitor.
The new gatherings experienced ferocious opposition, especially from other evangelicals such as those in the Free Church of Scotland, and Brethren accordingly adopted quite a strongly separatist outlook, something which has persisted in most assemblies in the region. As Bruce explained, many of them had come out of churches which they considered to be hindered by human tradition from obeying the Scriptures fully and they had no desire to develop a tradition of their own; yet, paradoxically, that is exactly what they did. Such tradition, however, did not always align with that developed by assemblies 'down south'; there was a degree of robust independence of mind at work. This did not only relate to attitudes towards early Brethren history (which these assemblies did not see as part of their history); it related to a range of practices, most notably for Bruce their handling of the Scriptures. As he put it (referring to himself), 'no north-eastern Scot would change his opinion just because a respected authority held a different opinion!' And the graciousness for which Bruce became known in the academic world may have been the result of a deliberate attempt to counter 'the more abrasive individualisms that would pass unnoticed in my home territory'.
Nevertheless, for the most part this individualism only manifested itself on minor issues; local Brethren tended to follow the same approach to interpreting the Bible as their co-religionists elsewhere. This has become known as 'dispensationalism', and it teaches that God's dealings with humanity may be divided into a series of eras or ages; in each, salvation is by divine grace, and in each the professing people of God descend into failure and ruin. The believer's hope is to be 'raptured', caught up secretly to heaven to be with Christ; those left behind are to suffer a brief period of unparalleled tribulation during which the full extent of human opposition to God and its satanic inspiration is revealed, before Christ returns visibly with his saints to execute judgement and inaugurate the millennium, a thousand-year period of unimaginable blessing and prosperity. Such a scheme of interpretation served to shield its adherents from the inroads of critical thought on traditional belief; it also encouraged the belief that Christians should have as little as possible to do with the world around them. Attempts at 'world improvement' were seen as misdirected, since only God could 'improve' the life of a person by converting them, and doomed to failure because of the innate sinfulness of human beings. Brethren thus tended to be culturally conservative rather than open to change. Education was regarded with suspicion; politics was taboo; and life centred on the regular round of meetings in the assembly. The most important of these was the Sunday morning communion or 'breaking of bread', an unstructured service at which any male believer might pray, give out a hymn, or read and comment on a Bible passage. Sunday afternoons were often devoted to 'ministry meetings', at which extended teaching from the Bible would take place; in the evenings there would be a gospel service designed to provide an opportunity for unconverted people to hear the Christian message and respond. During the week there would be gatherings for prayer, for Bible study, and for evangelism directed at particular groups such as mothers or children. Each Open Brethren assembly was self-governing, but they enjoyed close fellowship with others in their area through such means as Saturday conferences, gatherings for ministry with a break for tea which provided an ideal opportunity for socializing.
Assemblies provided ideal opportunities for individuals to be active in Christian work; evangelism took a high place in their priorities, and British Brethren supported dozens of full-time evangelists who travelled from place to place, holding series of meetings in tents or borrowed halls and seeking to plant new congregations. It was through their labours that many assemblies came into being, especially during the late nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. Furthermore, evangelism overseas lay close to the heart of many Brethren, and from the 1870s onwards British assemblies sent hundreds of missionaries to all parts of the world. But Bible study was also prominent in assembly life, and many who had left school as soon as they could later became remarkable for their self-taught depth of insight into the teaching of Scripture, as well as their ability to communicate it, often in intricate detail. It was by no means unknown for them even to teach themselves the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek. Brethren were suspicious of worldly education, but they found alternative forms of intellectual stimulation which satisfied many. This world was the one into which F.F. Bruce was to be born.
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Bruce's father, Peter Fyvie Bruce (1874–1955), was born at Ellon, a small town about twenty miles north of Aberdeen. The sixth of a family of twelve, he became a farm worker as his father had been, that part of the region being good farming country; the farm where he worked was Netherleask, near Ellon. His mother was a Fyvie, with roots in the village of that name which lay some miles to the west. Peter's course of life was to change, however, as the result of his conversion at the age of 16: in discussion with a friend who was also spiritually concerned, he saw that it was simply by believing on Christ, whose work on the cross was complete and sufficient, that he could be saved. He joined an assembly in the nearby village of Newburgh which had begun through the work of Donald Ross, later transferring to one in Aberdeen (St Paul Street) when he found work in the city. Although he had left school at 11, he had a natural aptitude for study which he would pass on to several of his children. At the age of 24 he was asked to assist an itinerant evangelist for some weeks during the summer, so following the Brethren pattern of learning the ropes by spending time working alongside a more experienced colleague. Having more money at the end of the period than he had when he began, Peter Bruce felt he should continue evangelizing, which he did for fifty-six years, although from the 1930s he dropped tent work in favour of door-to-door visiting, which he did in virtually every county in Scotland, travelling often by bicycle. As a younger man, he would do seasonal farm work and then preach each evening, sometimes from a few headings jotted on the back of an envelope. He is recalled as having a good voice, but a rather monotone delivery. Nevertheless, his son reckoned that hundreds must have come to faith in Christ through his ministry. Fred sometimes commented that there was one ministry which he regarded even more highly than his own as a teacher, that of evangelist. Shortly before his death, Peter was urged to take things more slowly, but his only response was 'He'll get all of me there is to give', and he died while conducting a young man's funeral at Huntly.
Conducting a mission at Rosemarkie, a village on the Black Isle immediately north of Inverness, Peter met a young lady named Mary MacLennan (1883–1965). She was a nursemaid in the family of a doctor in Dingwall, and belonged to a newly formed assembly there. They were married on 26 November 1909 by another Brethren evangelist, Duncan McNab (with whom Peter had often worked), at the house where Mary had worked. They settled in Elgin, living in the first and second floors of a house in Rose Place; their part of the house had its own stair but, like most dwellings of that period, there was no electricity supply, neither was there a bathroom. There Frederick Fyvie Bruce made his entrance into the world on 12 October 1910, the first of seven children.
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