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Edited by Frank R.
Shaw, FSA Scot, Atlanta, GA,
jurascot@earthlink.net
Stuart Leyden has held
pastorates in Rumson, New Jersey, Easton, Maryland, and Waukesha, Wisconsin.
For the last ten years, before retiring in 1989, Dr. Leyden did interim work
throughout America. His last church ministry was at the Roseville
Presbyterian Church, a 2,000 member church in Roseville, California. He is a
former adjunct instructor at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort,
where he taught “Introduction to the Bible as Literature and
Comparative Religion”. He currently serves as part-time pastor of
Trinity Presbyterian Church near the border of Cherokee and Forsyth counties
in Georgia. He and his wife Donna have ten grandchildren with another on
the way.
Dr. Leyden earned the above
degrees respectively from Wheaton College, Edinburgh University, Princeton
Theological Seminary, and Temple University.
Rev. Leyden says, “I have
two cousins in Glasgow, and more distant cousins on the Isle of Skye where
the MacDonalds live in peace with the MacLeods. But I do have a great
grandmother who was a Campbell. I attribute all the peculiarities of my
personality to that MacDonald-Campbell union!”
Our readers should find his
article interesting and thought provoking. The Church of Scotland’s
Life and Work asks, “Was the free-loving, hard-drinking Robert Burns
a moral reprobate with no interest in his immortal soul, or a man for whom
Christianity was a powerful influence?” Our guest writer, as you will see,
is quite capable of drawing his own conclusions.
WITH PASSIONS WILD AND
STRONG
By Stuart T. Leyden, B.A., B.D., M.Th., Ph.D.
When it comes to examining Robert Burn's
Christian commitment, opinion is hotly divided. Some contend that he was a
sceptic, a hostile critic of Christianity, and at best a "wistful agnostic",
[1]
but not a believing Christian. The other side embraces him within the faith
once delivered to the saints in the Calvinist expression of the Scottish
Kirk. Perhaps I should not proceed any further without warning the reader
that the evaluators often find in Burns whatever suits their prejudice. My
case is made as a first-generation American of Scottish ancestry, and as a
Presbyterian clergyman.
The case against Robert
Burns as a sincere Christian believer is made on several grounds. Firstly,
Burns seems much more interested in Satan or Beelzebub than God. In his
'Address of Beelzebub' he takes the part of the devil in advising the
privileged to deal harshly with the poor and disadvantaged:
The young dogs, swinge them to the labour,
Let WARK an' HUNGER mak them sober!
[2]
And in his 'Address to the Deil' he reminds us of the devil's
appearance in the Garden of Eden incognito (as a serpent) and of Satan's
power over Job. [3]
An' how ye gat him i' your thrall,
An' brak him out o' hous an' hal'
Secondly, Burns is held to be a critic of church life rather
than a supporter. One of his most famous and delightful poems, 'Holy
Willie's Prayer', is a scathing criticism of one of the tenets of the
hyper-Calvinism of his era, namely, the doctrine of double predestination
whereby the Al(FRS: 3-20-07)mighty with considerable delight consigns some
to heaven and some to hell. This theology is placed in the imaginary prayer
of a consummate hypocrite.
O thou that in the heavens does dwell!
What, as it pleases best thysel,
Sends ane to heaven an' ten to hell,
A' for thy glory
O Lord--yestreen--Thou kens-wi' Meg--
Thy pardon I sincerely beg!
[4]
In one shot Burns blasts the despotic fatalism of
the ultra-Calvinistic wing of the Kirk and exposes the sexual exploits of
hypocritical Willie.
Thirdly, Burns is a
self-confessed sceptic in matters of religion. He lived in the era of the
continental Enlightenment in which Voltaire in France, Tom Paine in America
and David Hume in Scotland raked Christianity over the hot coals of
rationalism-empiricism. In a letter to Cunningham he says, "I hate a man
who wishes to be a Deist, but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced Enquirer must
in some degree by a Sceptic." [5]
Lastly, his lifestyle was
that of a self-confessed rake who gloried in his sexual promiscuity without
regard for the consequences, namely, bastard offspring. To be fair, he and
his wife Jean did take one of them into their home. While flagrant sexual
laxity is not proof of disbelief, it does seem inconsistent with a Christian
lifestyle. In addition his interest in baudy sex found expression in his
collection of ribald songs in The Scots Musical
Museum.
At this point I am reminded
of Harry Truman's comment that he only wanted to talk to one-handed
economists. Economists, he said, always hedged their advice by saying, "On
the other hand…" As you would suspect there is another way to interpret
Burns' relationship to the Christian faith.
The fact that he wrote so
much about the Devil testifies to his knowledge of the Bible where that
unholy figure appears in the Garden of Eden and in the life of Job to tempt
and to test. One wonders if such a prominent symbol in his poetry might
suggest some inward struggles with temptation in Burns' own life.
Certainly, he was familiar with the teaching of the Bible on Adam's Fall and
the reality of evil in the world. Burns had fun with the Devil in more ways
than one, and he would not be the only believer who was more conscious of
evil than of grace. Moreover his compassion for the poor, and insistence on
human dignity ('A man's a man for a' that') may reflect not only his own
humble origins, or Enlightenment independence, but a grasp of the Biblical
teaching that humanity is made in the image of God.
Burn's criticism of Holy
Willie, the Unco Guid and all forms of religious self-righteousness put him
comfortably in the company of all the great prophets of the Bible and
especially in the camp of Jesus, who blasted the hypocrites over and over
again in the Gospels.
That he was a sceptic should
not surprise anyone. All sincere enquirers are bound to be sceptics,
doubters of God's goodness in a world where the innocent suffer. His
letters often fluctuate between belief and unbelief. He struggled. Late in
his brief life he wrote to a friend, Mrs. Dunlop, about his son Francis
Wallace and her godson: "I am so convinced that an unshaken faith in the
doctrines of Christianity is not only necessary by making us better men, but
by making us happier men, that I shall take every care that your little
godson, & every little creature that shall call me Father, shall be firmly
persuaded that
'God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing unto men their
trespasses'." [6]
A cynic might say that Burns
was simply trying to reassure a good Christian friend - telling Mrs. Dunlop
what she wanted to hear. But there are at least two reasons why I think
that kind of cynicism is unfair. When it was discovered that Jean Armour
was pregnant by Robert Burns, the Kirk Session disciplined them both, and
Burns appeared before the congregation. As far as I can discover he was not
coerced. In spite of that humiliation, he continued to attend worship in
his Kirk all his life: I assume repentant and forgiven.
Furthermore, Burns was
brought up on the Bible in his home and wrote two paraphrases of the Bible,
one on the first Psalm and another on 'Jeremiah 15th Ch. 10V'.
But familiarity with the Bible does not necessarily prove belief in its
teaching. There is one poem of Burns' that reveals profound Christian
belief. It is 'The Cotter's Saturday Night'. While it is true that you
cannot find anything else quite like it in any of his other poems, we must
not confuse quantity with quality. This poem has the quality of faith.
It is commonly assumed that
Burns is to some extent recreating a scene in his boyhood home where his
father, as priest in his own household, leads the family in worship. In
this poem Burns includes the sacred history of Abraham, Moses, alludes to
David on the lyre, Job's suffering, Isaiah's prophetic fire, the atonement
of Jesus' blood for the guilty, the triumph of God over Babylon in the book
of Revelation, the joy of family worship in the cottage and divine grace in
their hearts. If you find that this poem soars with the Spirit both
Christian and patriotic, perhaps it is because the author had a Christian
spirit as well as a love for his native soil. Listen to it:
The priest-like Father reads the sacred page…
Perhaps the Christian Volume is the theme,
How guiltless blood for guilty man
was shed;
How He, who bore in heaven the second name,
Had not on Earth whereon to lay his
head:
How his first followers and servants
sped;
…
Then kneeling down to Heaven's Eternal King
The Saint, the Father, and the
Husband prays
Hope 'springs
exulting on triumphant wing' [7]
Perhaps in a more profound way than many of his
ecclesiastical contemporaries, Robert Burns understood human failing and
Christian redemption. If his self-confessed doubt eliminates him from the
Christian fold, who then can claim "Grace divine"? (FRS: 3-20-2007)
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