AND
THE MODERN MIND
BY
JAMES DENNEY, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY
UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW
MCMIII
PREFACE
The three chapters which follow have already appeared in The Expositor, and may be regarded as a supplement to the writer's work on The Death of Christ: its place and interpretation in the New Testament. It was no part of his intention in that study to ask or to answer all the questions raised by New Testament teaching on the subject; but, partly from reviews of The Death of Christ, and still more from a considerable private correspondence to which the book gave rise, he became convinced that something further should be attempted to commend the truth to the mind and conscience of the time. The difficulties and misunderstandings connected with it spring, as far as they can be considered intellectual, mainly from two sources. Either the mind is preoccupied with a conception of the world which, whether men are conscious of it or not, forecloses all the questions which are raised by any doctrine of atonement, and makes them unmeaning; or it labours under some misconception as to what the New Testament actually teaches. Broadly speaking, the first of these conditions is considered in the first two chapters, and the second in the last. The title--The Atonement and the Modern Mind--might seem to promise a treatise, or even an elaborate system of theology; but though it would cover a work of vastly larger scope than the present, it is not inappropriate to any attempt, however humble, to help the mind in which we all live and move to reach a sympathetic comprehension of the central truth in the Christian religion. The purpose of the writer is evangelic, whatever may be said of his method; it is to commend the Atonement to the human mind, as that mind has been determined by the influences and experiences of modern times, and to win the mind for the truth of the Atonement.
With the exception of a few paragraphs, these pages were delivered as lectures to a summer school of Theology which met in Aberdeen, in June of this year. The school was organised by a committee of the Association of Former Students of the United Free Church College, Glasgow; and the writer, as a member and former President of the Association, desires to take the liberty of inscribing his work to his fellow-students.
GLASGOW, September 1903.
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James Denney, D.D. was a Scottish theologian and preacher, born in Paisley, Scotland, 5 February 1856, to Cameronian (reformed Presbyterian) parents. His father was a joiner and Cameronian deacon. In 1876 the family followed the majority of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland into union with the Free Church of Scotland. He was educated at the Highlanders' Academy, Greenock, University of Glasgow, from 1874 to 1879 and then at Free Church College, Glasgow until 1883. While still a student Denney published his first work, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, by a Brother of the Natural Man. It was a trenchantly critical review of Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World.
Denney was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Greenock on 16 May 1883 and was appointed Missioner to the Hill Street Mission of St. John's (Free Church), Glasgow. In 1886 he was called to be pastor of the East Free Church, Broughty Ferry. Denney was appointed Professor of Systematic Theology at his old alma mater, Free Church College Glasgow, in 1897, and spent the rest of his life teaching there. In 1900 he transferred to Professor Bruce's old Chair of New Testament Language and Literature, which he held until his death in 1917.