Book Review
A Call For Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr
By Jeff McDonald, May 26, 2005
Glen G. Scorgie, A Call For Continuity: The Theological Contribution of James Orr (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998),
Reprint Edition (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004)
The thesis of this book is that James Orr helped defend evangelicalism by mastering the theological debates of his era and by presenting his arguments to other scholars and to the Christian public.
Orr (1844-1913) was a Scottish evangelical Presbyterian theologian who challenged theological liberalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scorgie’s book examines how Orr dealt with the rise of theological liberalism and advanced Biblical criticism.
As a child, Orr was orphaned and had a lower-class upbringing working as an apprentice to a bookbinder. As a young person, he identified with and become a member of the populist United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. In 1865, at age 21, Orr entered college at the University of Glasgow. After receiving his theological degree, Orr took a pastorate in a small Scottish town on the border of England, where he spent 17 years and became an outstanding pastor.
During this time, he learned German and began to study the arguments of German liberal theologians. In 1891, Orr was appointed a professor at the United Presbyterian College in Edinburgh and, in 1900, became a professor at the United Free Church College in Glasgow.
As a professor, Orr became an outspoken critic of Albrecht Ritschl’s theological liberalism, writing in 1897 the first book-length evaluation of Ritschlian theology by a writer from the British Isles. Unlike many other evangelicals, Orr possessed a comprehensive understanding of theological liberalism, which resulted in his impressive ability to defend orthodoxy. He wrote many outstanding books that defended such topics as the virgin birth of Christ, the importance of a Christian worldview, and the supernatural nature of faith and Biblical events.
“When I am asked, as sometimes I am, which of these articles of the Evangelical faith I am prepared to part with at the insistence of modern thought and in the interests of a re-constructed theology,” Orr wrote, “I answer with fullest confidence: None of them.”
In America, Orr largely has been forgotten, but he does have a legacy amongst some evangelicals, including Southern Baptists and other conservative Baptists. Specifically, Orr’s work has influenced the evangelical American Baptist theologian Carl F.H. Henry.
American Presbyterians of Orr’s time recognized him as an influential Presbyterian theologian, and he was invited to give lectures at several American Presbyterian seminaries, including Auburn and what is now Pittsburgh in 1893 and at Princeton in 1903. B.B. Warfield’s appreciation of Orr and his invitation to Orr to come to Princeton represents an alliance between evangelicals regardless of their stance on inerrancy.
This is an excellent book on an important Presbyterian theologian. Scorgie provides tremendous intellectual detail when describing Orr’s theological positions, which can be helpful to pastors and lay people by giving them an in-depth analysis of evangelicalism and theological liberalism.