No Second-hand Religion: Thomas Erskine's Critique of Religious Authorities

Abstract

After practicing law in Edinburgh for six years, Thomas Erskine (1788–1870) inherited the estate of Linlathen upon the death of his brother, James. Thereby freed to devote his time to theological reflection and writing, he wrote five books between 1820 and 1837 which stated opinions sharply at odds with the prevailing religious positions of early nineteenth-century British thinkers. In his first book,Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion, he maintained that the surest sign of Christianity's truth is not to be found in the traditional evidential sources–miracles, fulfilled prophecies, the veracity of the apostles, and so on–but in the intimate relation, or “fittingness,” which inheres between the mode of being recommended in the Bible and the moral, physical, and mental constitution of human beings. This emphasis on the internal and subjective aspects of religious experience characterizes all of Erskine's works and places him, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the forefront of a new way of theologizing in Britain which was to come to fruition in the so-called “Broad Church.” Erskine represents an indigenous British “turn to the subject” antedating the widespread appropriation of continental thought by English and Scottish theologians.