General Assembly of the Church of Scotland

2022 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-91
Author(s):  
Jason Lingiah
Keyword(s):  
General Assembly ◽  
Advocate General ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Liberal Democrats ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Church ◽  
Member Of Parliament

The General Assembly of the Church met in a ‘blended’ form, based at the Assembly Hall, from 22 May to 27 May. The Moderator on this occasion was an elder, rather than a minister, but with the distinction of being Lord Wallace of Tankerness PC QC FRSE, a Liberal Democrat life peer since 2007, who served as the Deputy First Minister of Scotland from 1999 to 2005. He was formerly Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats from 1992 to 2005 and of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords from 2013 to 2016. He also served as a Member of Parliament for Orkney and Shetland from 1983 to 2001 and a Member of the Scottish Parliament for Orkney from 1999 to 2007. He was Advocate General for Scotland in the Westminster Government from 2010 to 2015.

‘The Substance of the Faith’ A Clarification of the Concept in the Church of Scotland

1983 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-338
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Torrance
Keyword(s):  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
Reformed Churches ◽  
Nicene Creed ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Church

In determining the meaning of the expression ‘the substance of the Faith’, it seems right to go back to the act of the Scottish Parliament in 1690 which ratified the Westminster Confession of Faith ‘as the publick and avowed Confession of this Church, containing the summe and substance of the doctrine of the Reformed Churches.’ There the WCF was regarded as containing the sum and substance of some thirty Reformed Confessions, including the Scots Confession, the First and Second Helvetic Confessions. These confessions expressly acknowledged the ancient Catholic Creeds and Conciliar Statements of the Church, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Formulations of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and the so-called ‘Athanasian Creed’, and embodied all their main statements as essential articles of belief. This was true of the WCF which, as James Denney once pointed out, ‘contains everything that is in the Nicene Creed’ (Jesus and the Gospel, p. 39If). That is to say, there was no move away from what the Athanasian Creed and the Second Helvetic Confession called ‘the Catholic Faith’, although the basic articles of faith handed down through the Creeds were set within a confessional frame of distinctively Reformed character. It was inevitable, therefore, that a distinction was made between what Samuel Rutherford called (Due Right Presbyteries, p. 13) ‘a confession dejure, what everyman ought to believe, as the Nicene Creed, and the Creed of Athanasius’, and a wider summation of teaching common to ‘true Reformed Protestant religion’.

The Theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith in its Context

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-278
Author(s):  
Whitney G. Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Church

In 1643, England’s Long Parliament called theologians from every county of England and Wales to Westminster Abbey to revise the Thirty-Nine Articles, the foundational documents of the Church of England. As the divines commenced their revisions, they encountered a theological movement which they believed represented the greatest threat to the cause of Reformation. Somewhat surprisingly, it was not Roman Catholicism or even Arminianism; it was antinomianism, a new and powerfully growing sect. Concern to combat antinomian tenets drove the assembly into complex theological debates for the first six weeks of its meetings. Parliament’s signing of the Solemn League and Covenant, however, brought an end to the assembly’s revisions. The Covenant instigated the writing of a statement of faith that would function as the confession for a theologically united Church of England, Scotland, and Wales. To supervise the execution of this plan, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland sent commissioners to the assembly to serve as consultative members. Although written in London primarily by English theologians, the Westminster Confession of Faith would be repudiated by Restoration officials. Its true impact came through its acceptance and implementation by the Church of Scotland.

General Assembly of the Church of Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-83
Author(s):  
Jason Lingiah
Keyword(s):  
General Assembly ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
High Commissioner ◽  
The Church

The General Assembly met in Edinburgh from 19 to 25 May, with the Rt Revd Colin Sinclair BA BD, minister of Palmerston Place in the Presbytery of Edinburgh, installed as Moderator. Last year's Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly, Richard Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, was reappointed by HM The Queen.

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