A Tribute to James Denney
Thomas Henry Walker (1856-1945)
After serving eleven years as minister of East Free Church in Broughty Ferry, Scotland, Denney was appointed to the Chair of Systematic Theology in Glasgow Free Church College. “Now recognized as one of the most distinguished theologians of his generation, possessing that remarkable combination of qualifications—even for a professor—great scholarship, deep spiritual insight, keen critical power, and a unique gift of lucid and effective statement…[Denney] responded to the summons of his Church with the full intention of making not merely scholars and ministers, but also believers…. His presence in the classroom at once created a feeling of the reality of the innermost, deepest, and most sacred things in religion—the holiness and love of God, the riches of the great salvation, the authority and decisiveness of the voice of Christ, the ineffable worth and incomparable happiness of the Christian life, the wonder of the immortal hope.
There was no kind of ignorant narrowness about Denney. He was as critical as he was conservative, and knew when to be agnostic, as when to be dogmatic; all his thinking had moreover the spacious and furnished background of not merely ample philosophical, theological, and critical knowledge, but also a really wide humanistic culture.
—-T. H. Walker, Principal James Denney, D.D. (London, Marshall Brothers, Ltd., 1918), 60-61, 66.
T. H. Walker, minister of Uddingston Congregational Church in Glasgow, was himself a student of James Denney’s at Glasgow University and wrote a “tribute” to his former professor entitled Principal James Denney, D.D. (London, Marshall Brothers, Ltd., 1918).
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