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James Orr: British Evangelical Theologian of the Twentieth Century
To celebrate the launch of our new Apollos title, British Evangelical Theologians of the Twentieth Century, we are sharing brief biographical sketches drawn from classic IVP resources.
In the entry on James Orr in The New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, G. G. Scorgie writes:
A Scottish theologian, apologist and polemicist, Orr was educated for the most part at Glasgow University, where he distinguished himself in philosophy and theology. After seventeen years of pastoral ministry, he delivered a lecture series which was published as The Christian View of God and the World (1893). This work, which proved to be his magnum opus, was widely acclaimed and launched him on a prolific academic career. He was the leading United Presbyterian theologian at the time of the United Free Church of Scotland union of 1900, and he came to exercise a significant influence in North America.
Orr’s adult life corresponded to a particularly dynamic period in Protestant theology, and within this milieu he sought to defend evangelical orthodoxy in the face of various challenges. He was one of the earliest and principal British critics of Albrecht Ritschl’s thought. In The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith (1897) and elsewhere, Orr insisted that Ritschlianism was opposed to genuine Christianity, and was intellectually untenable because of its limitation of the role of reason in Christian thought and experience. He also opposed Julius Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis on the Pentateuch. In The Problem of the Old Testament (1905), Orr argued for the ‘essential Mosaicity’ of the Pentateuch, and for the traditional construction of OT history. Further, Orr treated Charles Darwin’s theory of man’s origin as a serious threat to the Christian doctrines of man and sin. Initially he appeared comfortable with theistic evolution (see *Creation), but later, in God’s Image in Man (1905), he stressed the necessity of supernatural interruptions of the evolutionary process to account for man as an embodied soul, and still later, in Sin as a Problem of Today (1910), he argued that the idea of moral evolution undermined the seriousness of sin and man’s accountability for it.
There are some distinctive elements in Orr’s apologetical thought. In The Progress of Dogma (1901), for example, Orr tried to counter Adolf Harnack’s negative verdict on the history of dogma by arguing that it has unfolded according to a recognizable inner logic. By regarding this logical movement as a manifestation of God’s hand in history, Orr sought to vindicate the orthodox doctrines that the movement produced. With respect to *Scripture, Orr affirmed its plenary inspiration and remarkable accuracy, but regarded inerrancy as apologetically ‘suicidal’ (see Revelation and Inspiration, 1910). Finally, in such works as The Virgin Birth of Christ (1907), Orr defended theologically as well as biblically the virginal conception of the Mediator.
The significance of Orr’s theological contribution lies in neither its brilliance nor its originality, but in the breadth of his grasp of orthodox theology, the exhaustiveness of the reading upon which his conclusions were based and the vigour with which he defended and diffused his views. His voice seemed omnipresent in his day, and his last great work as editor of The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (1915) constituted a substantial and enduring means of extending conservative orthodoxy’s line of defence. He was also a contributor to the twelve-volume series The Fundamentals (1910–15).
Three themes pervade Orr’s work. The first is an appreciative insistence that evangelical orthodoxy offers a unified and coherent worldview, a satisfying Weltanschauung. The second follows from the first: since Christian doctrine is an interconnected unity, no part can be negated or even altered without serious consequences for the whole. This determined Orr’s apologetic agenda, and he ranged with remarkable competence across many disciplines in his efforts to buttress orthodoxy. The third decisive theme is the conviction that virtually all modern deviations from evangelical orthodoxy are prompted by anti-supernatural presuppositions.
As one of the British Evangelical Theologians from the earlier part of the Twentieth Century, Orr's influence is well worth reflecting on. A. T. B. McGowan's chapter in British Evangelical Theologians of the Twentieth Century, edited by T. A. Noble and Jason S. Sexton, is a good place to start. You can order your copy in paperback or ebook now.
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