Nineteenth-Century Free Church Apologetics Reconsidered

This article argues that the negative influence of Common-Sense Realism on Scottish Free Church evidentialist apologetics has been exaggerated. Mainstream scholarship claims that many nineteenth-century Presbyterian evidentialists, having uncritically imbibed Common-Sense philosophy, overemphasised natural reason’s role in evangelisation. In recent years, some scholars have argued that this interpretation does not apply to Old Princeton, since its major figures taught that to reason rightly requires moral renewal, which only the Holy Spirit can provide. This article shows that the same analysis holds true for the Scottish Free Church tradition. It uses James MacGregor’s trilogy of apologetics as a case study.