When Harry Whitley announced his retirement in 1972 from the High Kirk of Edinburgh (St. Giles’), his street-corner newsvendor complained it would be bad for business. “When I wanted to get to the pub before six o’clock,” he explained, “I only needed to shout ‘Whitley in trouble again!’ In no time my papers were snapped up.”
“What’s going to happen now?” the vendor demanded of the offending pastor. “Couldn’t they find you another job? I hear the Pope’s in poor health.”
Dr. Whitley’s appointment to St. Giles’ in 1954 had been unexpected. Brought up in the Catholic Apostolic Church, and a biographer of Edward Irving, he did pioneer youth work in Edinburgh’s slums, then entered the ministry after coming under the spell of Dr. George MacLeod. During his first two pastorates on Clydeside he scandalized the fashionable by dirtying his hands painting dreary tenements and consorting with the poor.
At St. Giles’ he encountered blighting opposition. For eight years his ministry was incredibly inhibited when his senior minister tried to resume the full control he had formally relinquished. From him Whitley two years later received the following letter: “I have never invited you to call me by my Christian name, and I would prefer that you would not do so. So perhaps you will do me the courtesy of continuing to address me in the future as you have done in the past.” Here is the unacceptable face of Presbyterianism wherein some ministers are more equal than others.
This letter is quoted in Harry Whitley’s newly published work Thorns and Thistles (Edina Press, £4), a sequel to his Laughter in Heaven (reviewed in this journal June 19, 1964, p. 25). To launch the book the publishers gave a small reception. Harry Whitley died last May, but his old friend Lord George MacLeod was there and led off with some inimitable comments. “The great thing about the church today,” he suggested, “is that it is not being persecuted, because there is nothing to persecute it about. Even where there is enthusiasm [here he cited some modern movements] it is sometimes more airborne than reborn.”
MacLeod added that it was extraordinary the lengths people will go in talking about ecumenicity—but few of them made the mistake of practicing it. Here he advocated a careful reading of the sixteen pages Whitley had devoted to what became known as “The Tirrell Affair.”
The Reverend John A. Tirrell, an Episcopalian from the diocese in California then presided over by the late Bishop James Pike, came to pursue postgraduate research in New College, Edinburgh. He needed a job to help pay his way, and none was forthcoming in his own denomination. He worshiped regularly at St. Giles’ and so commended himself that Whitley invited him to fill a vacant assistantship there. Bishop Pike, asked for permission, wired back, “O.K.—this is a great opportunity.” John Tirrell (to anticipate a little) made a big contribution to the St. Giles’ team. It was on Whitley’s part an imaginative gesture, an ecumenical action nevertheless doomed to failure because it had not originated in the official ecumenical stables where they know about such things.
Whitley found himself in the middle of what Ian Henderson once called “this ghastly internecine strife among Christians which the Ecumenical Movement has brought about.” From the Episcopal side the bishop of Edinburgh threatened sanctions upon the young Californian; in the Kirk’s general assembly an elder statesman said that brotherly love had nothing to do with the case—it was a question of right procedure.
By this time Tirrell was seeking to exercise “a full ministry,” and wanted permission to dispense the sacraments. Alas, upon that rock the project foundered.
The Tirrell Affair was referred from presbytery to general assembly and then back to presbytery, which finally decided that Tirrell could administer the sacraments in St. Giles’ if Bishops Pike and Carey (of Edinburgh) concurred. By this time it had become a cause célèbre. The Church of England assembly at West-minster heard a very slanted account (I was there) from a canon who turned out to be a friend of the bishop of Edinburgh. The archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Ramsey, not Dr. Fisher as Harry Whitley says) wrote personally to the moderator, not realizing this was quite the wrong way to deal with a Presbyterian church. Bishop Pike, on a visit to England, was persuaded to change his mind.
Not only was the ecumenical battle lost, but the impression was given that a bishop of the tiny Episcopal Church in Scotland (with communicants making up less than 1 per cent of the population) could tell the national Church of Scotland who could administer the sacraments in the mother church of Presbyterianism.
An earlier controversy in which Whitley was involved arose from his dismay at finding John Knox’s burial place marked by a plaque in Parliament Square over which the lawyers of Edinburgh parked their cars. He determined to restore honor to his illustrious predecessor, who is now sadly ignored by Kirk and capital. His attempt to move a statue of Knox out of St. Giles’ and into the square outside met official obstruction, but he and his colleagues did it just the same—“early one morning.”
Altogether, Whitley’s book is a fascinating account of establishment pressures on a nonconformist who disliked “wafflers and God-botherers.” True to form, he took his farewell words to Edinburgh Presbytery from Edward Irving, himself deposed from the Kirk’s ministry in 1833 for alleged heresy but now partially rehabilitated. I quote in full:
“Be of no school; give heed to none of their rules or canons. Take thy liberty, be fettered by no times, accommodate no man’s conveniency, spare no man’s prejudice, yield to no man’s inclinations, though thou should scatter all thy friends, and rejoice all thine enemies. Preach the Gospel: not the gospel of the last age, or of this age, but the everlasting gospel; not Christ crucified merely, but Christ risen; not Christ risen merely, but Christ present in the Spirit, and Christ to be again present in person. Preach thy Lord in humiliation, and thy Lord in exaltation; and not Christ only, but the Father, and the will of the Father. Keep not thy people banqueting, but bring them out to do battle for the glory of God, and of his church; to which end thou shalt need to preach them the Holy Ghost, who is the strength of battle.”
Both Irving and Whitley remind me of an ancient writer who said (I quote from memory): “No man has attained to the degree of truth until a thousand righteous men bear witness that he is a heretic.” It must be disturbing to the establishment that God does not always choose to relay instructions through proper channels.
