How to Read Ormond’s A Kirk and a College in the Craigs of Stirling
James Dodson
D. D. Ormond’s A Kirk and a College in the Craigs of Stirling is a book to be read with special care, because it preserves a dimension of Reformed Presbyterian history which is easily neglected. Many can understand the Covenanters as sufferers. Some can understand them as protesters. Fewer understand them as churchmen. Ormond’s value lies here: he shows the Reformed Presbyterians not merely as a persecuted remnant, nor merely as witnesses against national defection, but as an ordered ecclesiastical body maintaining ministry, presbytery, session, sacraments, theological education, discipline, finance, trust-deeds, libraries, and succession.
That is why the book is profitable. It helps deliver the reader from the modern caricature of the Covenanter as a religious dissenter whose identity was chiefly negative. The Reformed Presbyterian was not, in his own mind, first of all a dissenter. He was a Presbyterian of the attained Reformation, standing for the covenanted constitution of Church and nation after public judicatories had defected from it. His separation was not his essence. His testimony was his essence. Separation was the form which faithfulness took under conditions of defection.
This distinction must govern the reading of Ormond.
Modern thought commonly assumes that religious bodies exist by voluntary preference. A group holds certain opinions, gathers like-minded adherents, forms a congregation, and then exists as one denomination among many. On that assumption, the Reformed Presbyterians appear to be one more sect, stricter than most, but still merely a voluntary association. Ormond’s materials resist that reading. He shows men whose ideal was not a private religious society, but a covenanted nation and a constitutional government under a covenanted king. Their appeal was historical, constitutional, ecclesiastical, and moral. They looked back to the public attainments of the Scottish Reformation, not as antiquarian memories, but as binding obligations.
This is why Ormond’s phrase “High-Church Presbyterians” is so useful. It must not be misunderstood in an Anglicanizing sense. The point is not ceremony, hierarchy, or prelacy. The point is the high doctrine of the visible Church, her courts, her authority under Christ, her public confession, her attained obligations, and her national relation. These men were not low-church religious individualists. They did not imagine that any assembly of sincere believers could simply make a church according to convenience. They believed in Christ’s instituted government. They believed in a sent ministry. They believed in presbyterial ordination. They believed in lawful church courts. They believed that doctrine, worship, government, and discipline belong together.
The Reformed Presbyterian concern for ordination must not be mistaken for sacerdotalism. Ordination is not a magical conveyance of ministerial essence, nor does the absence of ordinary ordination in a case of necessity make all ministry impossible. The issue is order. Ordination belongs to the regular and peaceable government of the Church, and therefore to her well-being. Yet where lawful ordination cannot be had, and where a qualified man is visibly owned by the people through election, reception, and the opening of their hearts to his ministry, that extraordinary call may stand in the place of ordination until ordinary order can be recovered.
For this reason, Ormond should be read as a corrective to the idea that strict separation implies weak ecclesiology. In the Reformed Presbyterian case, the opposite is true. Their separation arose because their ecclesiology was strong. They could not treat the Revolution Settlement as sufficient because they believed the Church and nation remained bound to previously attained and sworn reformation. They could not accept Erastian compromise because they believed Christ is the alone King and Head of His Church. They could not reduce communion to pious sentiment because they believed communion is a visible act under visible government.
The modern reader often asks the wrong question: “Why would these men separate from other Christians?” The better question is: “What visible constitution, government, and testimony would communion have required them to approve?” Once that question is asked, the matter changes. Separation is not necessarily a denial that others are Christians. It may be a refusal to submit to unlawful ecclesiastical administration. It may be a testimony against constitutional defection. It may be the only remaining way to preserve the Church’s attained obligations until lawful reformation is recovered.
Ormond gives many details which illustrate this point. The settlement of John McMillan III at Stirling is not narrated as an enthusiastic popular appointment. It is a presbyterial act. The Presbytery examines the outward encouragement promised for his support, sends the edict to the congregation, proceeds by sermon, requires assent to the ordination formula, ordains by prayer and imposition of hands, gives the right hand of fellowship, charges minister and people, receives his subscription, and formally delivers the call. This is church order. It is not sectarian excitement. It is the visible government of Christ’s house functioning carefully under difficult circumstances.
The same lesson appears in the “Four Johns.” They were travelling ministers, enduring fatigue, weather, distance, scattered adherents, and limited resources; yet Ormond notes the care and correctness of their proceedings. Their minute book may have been battered and weather-stained, but their court was not disorderly. They united an evangel of grace with an evangel of detail. That phrase deserves to be remembered. In a healthy Reformed church, grace does not abolish order. Order serves grace. The precision of minutes, calls, edicts, subscriptions, trials, censures, and judicatory procedure is not contrary to spirituality. It is one way the Church confesses that Christ governs visibly and not by enthusiasm.
Ormond’s account of communion seasons must also be read in this light. The Lord’s Supper was not treated casually. It was petitioned for, appointed by Presbytery, supplied by ministers, and conducted with solemnity. The communion cups, the open-air gatherings, the assisting ministers, the tables, collections, and appointed services all show a church taking visible ordinances seriously. The reader should not romanticize every circumstance, nor excuse every excess of length or popular expectation. But he should see the principle: the sacrament belongs to the ordered ministry of the Church, not to private religious appetite.
The trust-deed material is especially important. Property was not held merely for whatever congregation happened to occupy the building. It was tied to adherence to the Testimony in favor of the Covenanted Reformation. This is the attainments principle in legal form. The building was not ecclesiastically neutral. Its use was morally conditioned. Those who declined from the Testimony had no rightful interest in it. That single fact rebukes the modern habit of treating church property as denominational real estate. For these people, a meeting-house existed for ordinances under a testimony. If the testimony were abandoned, the moral title was lost, whatever civil possession might remain.
The college in the Craigs is perhaps the most important feature of Ormond’s book. Here the Reformed Presbyterians appear not as relics of a suffering age, but as a church providing for a learned ministry. Professor McMillan instructed students in theology, apparently following the order of the Confession of Faith. Students boarded among the people. Congregational funds helped establish a library. Ministers who later served the church were trained there. This is a decisive answer to the caricature that Covenanter testimony was merely backward-looking protest. A church that trains ministers is looking forward. A church that collects books is preserving doctrine for future use. A church that teaches theology in the order of her confession is not living on sentiment, but transmitting a system.
This also guards the reader against another modern error: the belief that “history” and “hope” are opposites. Ormond calls the Reformed Presbyterians a party of history and hope. That phrase is excellent when rightly understood. They were a party of history because they believed the Church’s past attainments were morally binding. They were a party of hope because those attainments pointed forward to national reformation, not backward to nostalgia. True historical testimony is not antiquarianism. It is the refusal to let the Church’s sworn light die. Hope without history becomes innovation. History without hope becomes mere memorial. Covenanter testimony requires both.
Still, Ormond must not be read uncritically. He writes from a later standpoint, and at times uses the language common to that age: sternness, want of charity, party spirit, and the supposed hardness of the old Dissenters. Such language must be tested. The reader must ask whether “sternness” means sinful harshness, or whether it means moral seriousness unintelligible to a softer age. He must ask whether “charity” means true catholic recognition under lawful order, or whether it means the relaxation of visible terms of communion. He must ask whether “party” means sectarian self-will, or whether it means a public testimony carried by a remnant when the majority has defected.
This is the necessary rule: do not allow later labels to interpret earlier principles. Let the principles interpret the labels.
One must also beware of mistaking outward development for theological improvement. The later history of a congregation may show better buildings, more settled finance, greater social respectability, wider public usefulness, and more ordinary institutional recognition. These things are not evil in themselves. But they do not prove faithfulness. A church may become more comfortable and less faithful at the same time. It may gain regularity while losing testimony. It may exchange hardship for usefulness and still suffer spiritual diminution if the terms of that usefulness require silence concerning covenanted obligations.
Likewise, poverty and smallness do not prove purity. A struggling remnant may also err through narrowness, suspicion, or defective application of its own principles. The question is never whether a body is large or small, poor or wealthy, admired or despised. The question is whether it maintains Christ’s truth according to Scripture, confession, lawful government, and attained obligation.
The profitable reader of Ormond must therefore hold several distinctions firmly.
First, distinguish the visible and invisible Church. Saving faith is invisible and cannot be the term of visible communion. Visible communion must be governed by visible profession, doctrine, worship, discipline, government, and freedom from scandal.
Second, distinguish validity and lawfulness. A ministerial act may be valid and yet unlawfully administered. A court may possess historical continuity and yet act defectively. An ordinance may be real and yet bound up with a compromised administration.
Third, distinguish personal charity and ecclesiastical communion. One may hope well of persons while refusing submission to the authority under which they act.
Fourth, distinguish the national church principle from mere legal establishment. A body is not morally the national church simply because the civil law recognizes it. A true national church must own Christ’s crown rights and the lawful attainments of reformation.
Fifth, distinguish testimony from party preference. A party preference begins with men’s choices. A testimony begins with Christ’s truth already received, confessed, sworn, and historically embodied.
Sixth, distinguish usefulness from warrant. A thing may appear useful and yet lack divine institution. The Church must not measure her practices by convenience, success, or social approval, but by Christ’s revealed will.
Seventh, distinguish history from nostalgia. To remember the Covenanted Reformation is not to indulge a romantic past. It is to receive a moral inheritance.
Read with these distinctions, Ormond becomes very profitable. He shows a church burdened with history but not imprisoned by it. He shows ministers travelling, preaching, ordaining, catechizing, teaching, and governing. He shows elders representing scattered quarters and assisting in oversight. He shows people giving out of poverty, maintaining communion seasons, supporting students, and holding property for a testimony. He shows theological instruction carried on humbly but seriously in the Craigs of Stirling. He shows a body that understood the Church as visible, ordered, confessional, and historical.
The reader should come away from Ormond with a chastened judgment. The Reformed Presbyterians were not flawless men. No faithful history requires us to canonize every habit, every tone, every application, or every later development. But neither may they be reduced to narrow sectarians whose strictness was eventually softened by progress. That reading belongs to an age which has forgotten what a church is.
The Reformed Presbyterian testimony was not mere dissent. It was a claim about Christ’s visible kingdom. It asserted that the Church has a constitution under Christ, that nations have duties to Christ, that covenants bind posterity, that attainments cannot be lawfully abandoned by neglect, that government matters, that communion has terms, that ministry must be sent, and that theology must be taught.
That is how Ormond should be read: not as a sentimental sketch of an old congregation, nor as a museum account of a vanished peculiarity, but as a witness to ecclesiastical order under the burden of covenanted history. He helps us see that the Covenanter was not merely a man of the moss-hag, the scaffold, or the field-meeting. He was also a man of the presbytery minute, the ordination formula, the communion cup, the trust-deed, the theological lecture, the library, and the lawful succession of ministry.
In short, Ormond teaches us that the Reformed Presbyterian Church, at her best, was not a sect trying to survive, but a church trying to remember, preserve, and transmit the attained Reformation under the crown rights of the Lord Jesus Christ.