| dc.description.abstract | Influenced by contemporary English Dissent's lay itinerancy, Scottish aristocrats Robert and James Alexander Haldane brought to Scotland in the mid-1790s pan-evangelical revival that produced a separatist, Congregational connection. Subsequent disagreement caused by the Haldanes' primitivist, restorationist interest in a New Testament pattern of church government and worship dispersed the movement after 1808. Their biographer, James Haldane's son Alexander, editor of the Anglican Evangelical Record , minimized his father and uncle's restorationism; but throughout their careers the Haldanes balanced complementary, yet conflicting, evangelical and restorationist values. Moderates controlling the eighteenth-century Church of Scotland maintained Calvinist orthodoxy while participating in the Scottish Enlightenment; opposing patronage, populist-tinged evangelicalism grew. Economic modernization, evangelicals' appropriation of Enlightenment perspectives, and French Revolutionary ideology set the stage for the Haldanes' revival. A new meliorist Calvinism facilitated the revolutionary-era missionary enthusiasm that inspired the Haldanes and others to sponsor Sunday schools and establish home mission societies. Professor John Robison and the Church of Scotland's General Assembly publicly accused the politically quietist Haldanes of revolutionary conspiracy. The Haldanes built Tabernacles and established seminaries to train itinerants. Many factors, besides Establishment hostility, led the Haldane connection to embrace a new Scottish Congregationalism influenced by John Glas and Robert Sandeman's earlier Independency. The Haldanes, more committed to New Testament patterns than their associate Greville Ewing, adopted believer's baptism, splitting their movement. Aligning with Scottish Baptists, both Haldanes remained active in home missions and in defending evangelical Calvinism. Promoting missions in Switzerland and France, Robert Haldane fought liberalism, defended the traditional Protestant scripture canon, and published a theory of full plenary inspiration. Some historians link Robert and James Haldane to post-Napoleonic Romantic evangelicalism, but the restorationist evangelical legacy the Haldanes bequeathed to Scottish Baptists, American Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ, British Churches of Christ, and the Brethren was Enlightenment-based. | |
