Disruption (1843)

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The separation of the Free Church of Scotland from the Church of Scotland in 1843 is referred to as disruption ( English disruption , "disruption, splitting") . It was of great importance to Scottish society and influenced church history in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe. Church historian Stewart J. Brown called it the most important event in all of Scottish history in the 19th century.

prehistory

In the Act of Union 1707 , the Presbyterian Church of Scotland was confirmed as a state church, but had at the same time received the assurance that it would retain its traditional independence from the British Crown and the British Parliament. Nevertheless, on the initiative of Queen Anne, Parliament reinstated the Scottish nobles in their patronage rights in 1712 , which also included the right to fill the parish. The moderate party , which dominated the church in the 18th century and was shaped by Enlightenment theology, accepted this without major protests, so that there were only two smaller splits in 1733 and 1761.

course

The St Andrew's Church in Edinburgh, the scene of the Disruption

In 1834 the Evangelical Party first won a majority in the General Assembly, the legislative body of the Church, and immediately enacted the Veto Act , which gave congregations the right to reject pastors appointed by the patrons. Complaints before secular courts were decided in favor of the rejected pastor. The Court of Session, the highest civil court in Scotland, declared the congregations' right of veto invalid in 1838 and expressly denied the Church the right to appeal against state regulations. A protest by the General Assembly was rejected by the House of Lords in 1839 . Thomas Chalmers , the leader of the Evangelicals, initially tried to find a compromise, but found no accommodation with Prime Minister Robert Peel . In 1842, the General Assembly lifted the patronage rights entirely, but the London government rejected this. Chalmers saw the reformed creed, according to which Christ alone should rule in the church, endangered by the influence of the state , and he prepared the foundation of a free church .

After the opening of the General Assembly on May 18, 1843, led by outgoing moderator David Welsh , more than half of the delegates left St Andrew's Church to found the Free Church of Scotland in a neighboring hall. In the following week the constitution was officially sealed by the deed of demission, signed by 474 of around 1200 pastors, i.e. more than a third. About half of the members joined the free church, although the existing church (since then often called Auld Kirk , old church ) kept all churches, schools and rectories. Chalmers, who acted as the first moderator, attached importance to the fact that the new church also adhered to the claim to be the national church and to represent the true tradition of the Scottish Reformation. After just four years, 730 churches and almost as many schools were built from voluntary donations from the congregations. Its own theological training center was founded in November 1843 and, as New College (now part of the University of Edinburgh ), it moved into a prestigious building on the edge of Edinburgh's old town in 1846.

Effects

Engraving after the painting Quitting The Manse by George Harvey , 1847

Since state services such as As the poor relief at that time largely at the level of parishes ( parishes ) were organized, but now were split and often its leading personnel were forfeited, the split led to severe disruptions in the Scottish society. To make matters worse, the division largely ran along social lines; the large landowners and the lower classes largely remained in the state church, while the middle class (in the Highlands also the dispossessed) joined the free church. In 1851 the membership of both churches was about 32% of the total Scottish population; it was not until 1870 that the Church of Scotland was able to increase its share to 44%.

Because the Free Church showed a special commitment to mission , the split also affected the Presbyterian churches in the British colonies. From 1847 emigrants from the Free Church founded the first European settlements in the Otago region on the South Island of New Zealand . Within British Protestantism, however, the new church sought good relations both with the evangelicals in the Church of England and with the free churches and thus brought about their rapprochement. Chalmers was the driving force behind the establishment of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846.

In the years after 1843 both sides tried to achieve sovereignty over their view of the conflicts. This applied to both historiography and popular culture. The painting Quitting The Manse by George Harvey from 1847, which shows a pastor's family forced to move out of the rectory, became widespread through copper engravings .

On the European mainland, the disruption promoted efforts for the evangelical churches to become more independent. She became the model for the establishment of the Église évangélique libre du Canton de Vaud in 1845. In Prussia , the pastor Adolf Sydow , who had been an eyewitness to the disruption and had written a documentary representation on behalf of Queen Victoria , stood for one Self-government of the church through synods .

In 1874 the patronage rights were revoked; but only after the Church of Scotland had regained full independence from the state, the majority of the United Free Church of Scotland (which had come into existence in 1900 through an association of the Free Church with supporters of the older secession) returned to it in 1929 .

literature

  • Stewart Brown, Michael Fry (Eds.): Scotland in the Age of the Disruption. Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
  • Alan Rodger: Courts, the Church and the Constitution: Aspects of the Disruption of 1843. Edinburgh University Press 2008.
  • Stewart J. Brown: After the Disruption: The Recovery of the National Church of Scotland, 1843–1874. In: Scottish Church History 48 (2019), pp. 103-125 ( Internet Resource ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stewart J. Brown: The Ten Years' Conflict and the Disruption of 1843. In: Stewart J. Brown, Michael Fry (eds.): Scotland in the Age of the Disruption. Edinburgh University Press, 1993, pp. 1–27, here p. 2: “the most important event in the whole of Scotland's nineteenth-century history”.
  2. ^ Andrew TN Muirhead: Reformation, Dissent and Diversity. The Story of Scotland's Churches, 1560-1960. Bloomsbury, London 2015, p. 50 below.
  3. ^ PC Kemeny: Presbyterians, Schisms, and Denominations. In: The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism. Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 277.
  4. ^ Numbers from Alan Rodger: Courts, the Church and the Constitution: Aspects of the Disruption of 1843. Edinburgh University Press 2008, p. 2; elsewhere also somewhat lower numbers.
  5. Harald Beutel: The social theology of Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) and its significance for the free churches. A study on the diakonia of the revival movement. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2007, pp. 91–93.
  6. Stewart J. Brown: The Disruption and the Dream: The Making of New College 1843–1861. In: David F. Wright, Gary D. Badcock (Eds.): Disruption to Diversity: Edinburgh Divinity 1846-1996. T&T Clark, Edinburgh 1996, pp. 29-50.
  7. Stewart J. Brown: Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815-1914. Routledge, New York 2008.
  8. ^ Esther Breitenbach: Scots Churches and Missions. In: John MacDonald MacKenzie, TM Devine (Ed.): Scotland and the British Empire. Oxford University Press, New York 2016.
  9. Donald J. Withrington: The Disruption. A Century and a Half of Historical Interpretation. In: Records of the Scottish Church History Society 25 (1993), pp. 118-153 ( full text in the Internet Archive ).
  10. Quitting The Manse on the website of the Scottish National Gallery .
  11. Later translated into German as The Scottish Church Question. Potsdam 1845.
  12. Martin Friedrich : "I became more ecclesiastical there and at the same time much freer". Adolf Sydow in England and Scotland 1841–1844 . In: Yearbook for Berlin-Brandenburg Church History 60, 1995, pp. 137–154.
  13. Charlotte Methuen : UK - Scotland 1929: The Scottish Union 1929. In: Johannes Ehmann (Hrsg.): The churches of the Union. History - Theology - Perspectives. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2019, pp. 244–249.