Edward Irving and the Catholic Apostolic Church

Affiliation

Minister of the Church of Scotland (deposed 1833); minister of the National Scotch Church, Regent Square, London; "angel" of the Newman Street congregation of the Catholic Apostolic Church

Appears in

Edward Irving and the Catholic Apostolic Church, The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

Profile

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Life

Annan and Edinburgh

Edward Irving was born on 4 August 1792 at Annan in Dumfriesshire, in the south of Scotland, the son of a tanner. A brilliant student, he entered the University of Edinburgh at thirteen and graduated MA in 1809. He became a schoolmaster at Haddington and then Kirkcaldy, where he befriended a younger teacher, Thomas Carlyle; the friendship lasted all his life. He was licensed to preach by the Church of Scotland in 1815 but could find no parish, and for several years his ornate, Miltonic style failed to win a congregation.

Glasgow and London

In 1819 Thomas Chalmers, the great evangelical preacher, took him as his assistant at St John's, Glasgow, one of the poorest parishes in the city. In 1822 he was called to the small Caledonian Chapel in Hatton Garden, London, a congregation of Scottish exiles. Within months he was the most fashionable preacher in London. Statesmen such as George Canning, writers such as Coleridge and Hazlitt, and crowds of society figures came to hear him; tickets were needed. In 1823 he married Isabella Martin of Kirkcaldy. A grand new church was built for him in Regent Square and opened in 1827.

Prophecy and Albury

Irving became absorbed in the study of prophecy. He translated the Chilean Jesuit Manuel Lacunza's The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty (1827) and took part in the conferences on prophecy held by the banker Henry Drummond at Albury Park in Surrey from 1826 to 1830. These gatherings concluded that the present dispensation was ending in judgement, that the Jews would be restored, and that Christ would return before the millennium. Irving preached and wrote on these themes and on the decline of the Church.

The gifts

In 1830 reports reached London of tongues, prophecy and healing in the west of Scotland, among the Campbell and Macdonald families at Fernicarry and Port Glasgow. Irving, who already held that the gifts of the Spirit had ceased only through unbelief, sent observers and welcomed the reports. Prayer meetings for the gifts began in his church. On 30 April 1831 Emily Cardale, wife of a member, spoke in tongues at a private meeting in London^†, and from October 1831 tongues and prophecies were heard during public worship at Regent Square, sometimes interrupting the service.

Trials and deposition

The trustees of Regent Square brought charges before the London Presbytery, which in May 1832 removed him for allowing people who were neither ordained nor licensed - including women - to speak in public worship. About 800 members followed him, and they met first in a hall and then in Benjamin West's former picture gallery in Newman Street.

Meanwhile his teaching that Christ took human nature in its fallen condition had been attacked since 1827. In March 1833 the Presbytery of Annan, which had ordained him, deposed him from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for heresy on this point.

Under the apostles

In the Newman Street congregation the prophetic utterances began to designate "apostles". John Bate Cardale was called as the first apostle in 1832, and Henry Drummond and others followed. Irving, who had been deposed, was not one of them. On the word of the prophets, he was re-ordained by Cardale in April 1833 as "angel" (bishop) of his own congregation, and found himself subordinate to the men his preaching had brought together. He accepted it humbly.

Key dates

• 1792 - Born at Annan, 4 August
• 1815 - Licensed by the Church of Scotland
• 1819 - Assistant to Thomas Chalmers in Glasgow
• 1822 - Called to the Caledonian Chapel, London
• 1826-30 - Albury conferences on prophecy
• 1827 - Translates Lacunza; Regent Square church opens
• 1830 - Tongues and healings reported in the west of Scotland
• October 1831 - Tongues and prophecy in public worship at Regent Square
• May 1832 - Removed from Regent Square by the London Presbytery
• March 1833 - Deposed by the Presbytery of Annan
• April 1833 - Ordained "angel" of the Newman Street church by Cardale
• 7 December 1834 - Dies in Glasgow

Teachings and claims

The humanity of Christ

Irving's best-known doctrine was that the Son of God took human nature "in its fallen state" - flesh subject to the same tendencies as ours - and was kept from sin throughout His life by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that He sanctified our nature from within. "The Son of God took our fallen nature... and wrought in it a perfect holiness." He insisted that Christ never sinned, but believed that unless Christ took fallen flesh, He could not redeem it.

Restoration of the gifts

He taught that the gifts of the Spirit - tongues, prophecy, healing - belonged to the whole age of the Church and had disappeared only through unbelief. He called tongues the "standing sign" of the baptism of the Holy Ghost, an idea later Pentecostals developed independently.

Imminent return

He believed that the Church was in apostasy, that judgement was near, and that the restoration of the gifts and of apostles was God's preparation for Christ's return.

Documented controversies

• Disorder in worship. The London Presbytery's case rested on the Westminster Directory: utterances by unordained men and women during worship were contrary to the order of the Church of Scotland.
• His Christology. Critics, including Marcus Dods (the elder) and Henry Cole, charged him with making Christ a sinner. The Church of Scotland deposed him for it.
• Robert Baxter's renunciation. Robert Baxter, a lawyer and one of the most prominent prophets, uttered predictions - including that the Lord would come within 1,260 days - and later concluded that his utterances had come from a deceiving spirit. His Narrative of Facts (1833) is the most important contemporary account by an insider.
• Failed prophecies. Several utterances in Irving's circle about events and timing did not come to pass.

Death

Exhausted and consumptive, Irving obeyed a prophetic direction to go to Scotland in the autumn of 1834, riding through Wales and travelling by sea. He reached Glasgow, grew worse, and died there on 7 December 1834, aged forty-two. His last words were reported as "If I die, I die unto the Lord. Amen." He was buried in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral. He and Isabella had lost several of their children in infancy.

Legacy

The Catholic Apostolic Church, which the apostles formed after his death, developed an elaborate liturgy drawn from Eastern and Western rites. It declined when its last apostle died in 1901; a German offshoot, the New Apostolic Church, has some millions of members today.

Irving is remembered as a forerunner of Pentecostalism and of modern prophetic and apostolic movements, and his circle helped shape the prophetic expectation from which dispensationalism grew. As a theologian, his view of Christ's humanity was later defended by Karl Barth and T.F. Torrance. Carlyle wrote of him: "the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with."

Measured against the creeds

Irving was orthodox on the Trinity and the deity of Christ, and he sincerely sought holiness and the renewal of a cold Church. But three of his positions are open to serious question. First, on Christ's humanity: the Church has confessed, with the Council of Chalcedon, that Christ is "like us in all things except sin" (Hebrews 4:15). The Fathers taught that He took our nature with its weakness and mortality, but whether He took "fallen" nature in Irving's sense is contested; the Church of Scotland judged that his language compromised Christ's sinlessness. Second, by treating spontaneous utterances in worship as the voice of the Spirit and allowing them to direct the Church - even to appoint apostles - he placed prophecy above the Church's order and the apostolic ministry. Third, the restoration of "apostles" after eighteen centuries implies that the Church had lost its apostolic foundation, which the creeds deny.

Major writings

• For the Oracles of God, Four Orations (1823)
• Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed of God (1826)
• Translation of Lacunza, The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty (1827)
• Sermons, Lectures and Occasional Discourses (1828)
• The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord's Human Nature (1830)
• Articles in The Morning Watch (1829-33)

Affiliation

Port Glasgow, Scotland; part of the 1830 charismatic revival in the west of Scotland associated with Edward Irving

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism, Edward Irving and the Catholic Apostolic Church

Profile

Link to this profile

Life

Port Glasgow

Margaret Macdonald was born in 1815 in Port Glasgow, on the Clyde in the west of Scotland, into a pious family of the Church of Scotland. Her twin brothers, James and George, were shipyard workers. Little is known of her early life except what appears in the accounts of the 1830 revival, written by sympathisers.

The west of Scotland revival

In 1828-30 a movement of expectation spread through parishes of the west of Scotland, encouraged by the preaching of John McLeod Campbell at Row (Rhu) and by Edward Irving's teaching that the gifts of the Spirit had been lost through unbelief and could be restored. Groups met to pray for an outpouring of the Spirit. In March 1830 Mary Campbell of Fernicarry, a young invalid, began to speak in tongues and was reported healed.

The vision

Margaret Macdonald was seriously ill in early 1830. During her illness, in the spring of that year, she experienced a series of visions of the coming of Christ and of the Church filled with the Spirit, which she described at length to visitors and wrote down. Soon afterwards, in April 1830, her brother James commanded her in the name of Jesus to rise, and she was reported to have been healed. James and George began to speak in tongues and to interpret, and visitors came from England and Scotland to see the Macdonald household. Among them, in the summer of 1830, was J.N. Darby, who later wrote that he had found the phenomena unconvincing.

Irving and London

Reports of Port Glasgow reached Irving's congregation in London, where tongues and prophecy broke out in 1831. The Macdonalds remained in Port Glasgow; the movement there was closely watched and widely discussed. James and George Macdonald both died in 1835.

Later years

Margaret is said to have married, possibly to a member of the movement, and to have died young. Almost nothing about her later life is documented.^†

Key dates

• 1815 - Born in Port Glasgow
• 1828-30 - Revival in the west of Scotland
• March 1830 - Tongues and healing reported at Fernicarry
• Spring 1830 - Her illness and visions
• April 1830 - Reported healing; her brothers begin to speak in tongues
• Summer 1830 - J.N. Darby visits Port Glasgow
• 1831 - Tongues in Irving's London congregation
• 1835 - Death of James and George Macdonald
• 1840 - Robert Norton publishes her account
• c. 1840 - Dies
• 1861 - Norton's second, altered version of the vision
• 1970s - The vision becomes the centre of the rapture-origins debate

Teachings and claims

The vision of 1830

As published by Robert Norton in 1840, her account describes a vision of the coming of the Lord "in glory", seen not by the natural eye but by those filled with the Spirit; a fiery trial to come upon the Church, in which the wicked one would be revealed; and the need for the Church to be filled with the Spirit to be ready. She wrote that "the trial of the Church is from Antichrist" and that it is "by being filled with the Spirit that we shall be kept".

The restoration of the gifts

She shared the conviction of the revival that God was restoring the gifts of tongues, prophecy and healing in preparation for Christ's return.

Documented controversies

The rapture debate

In the twentieth century some writers, beginning with an American journalist in 1973, argued that her 1830 vision was the source of the pre-tribulation rapture - the doctrine that believers will be removed from the earth before the tribulation - and that Darby took the idea from Port Glasgow. Most historians, including those sympathetic to neither side, have rejected this. Her account speaks of the Church passing through the trial of Antichrist, which is the opposite of a pre-tribulation rapture, and Darby's own teaching developed from his reading of Scripture and his ecclesiology over several years.

The two texts

The debate is complicated by the fact that Norton's 1861 version of the vision omits passages, present in the 1840 text, about the Church's trial under Antichrist. Writers on both sides have used the differences. Scholars have generally concluded that the 1840 text is the more reliable.

The phenomena

Contemporary observers, including Darby and later the Church of Scotland, disputed whether the Port Glasgow tongues and healings were genuine. McLeod Campbell was deposed by the General Assembly in 1831 for his teaching on the atonement, and Irving in 1833.

Death

She died young, around 1840. The date and place of her death are not recorded in the standard sources.^†

Legacy

Her significance is almost entirely posthumous. Within the Catholic Apostolic Church that grew from Irving's movement, the Port Glasgow events were remembered as the first signs of the restoration of the gifts. In the twentieth century she became the centre of a dispute about the origin of dispensational teaching on the rapture - a dispute that says more about modern controversy than about her.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead", a single, public return. Margaret Macdonald's vision, as first published, expects the Church to pass through trial and to be kept by the Spirit - closer to the historic expectation than the dispensational scheme with which she has been linked.

The difficulties lie in the setting of her vision. The historic churches have always tested private revelations by Scripture and the Church's faith, and treated them with great caution; they do not receive them as guidance for the Church's teaching about the last things (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1). The movement of which she was part claimed a restoration of gifts that the Church, through its ordinary means, had never lacked, and its teaching was examined and rejected by the Church of Scotland.