With Doug Phillips In Scotland
How The Scots Saved Christendom

"How the Scots Saved Christendom" by Doug Phillips, Director of Vision Forum is a remarkable audio tour of the Scottish Reformation and struggle for independence. It is an inspiring tale narrated by a team of instructors, led by the Director. The subtitle is, "Tales of Bravehearts and Covenanters from the Scotland Faith and Freedom Tour."

Doug Phillips speaks from a deep reservoir of knowledge and passion for Scotland and its heritage of liberty. Quite often he breaks into a Scottish brogue to emphasize a point. He is ably supported by Pastor Joe Morecraft, who at one point was reduced to tears by the burden of his message. Other local experts address the entourage at various points and one of the CD's is a recording of Celtic folk music on the Isle of Iona by balladeer, Charlie Zahm.

The CD series covers the entire sweep of Scottish history through the Reformation, although it emphasizes the period spanning the 11th to the 17th centuries. This audio series contains over 900 minutes (15 hours) of tour recordings on twelve compact discs, featuring messages given on location. With certain precautions, it is well worth the investment of time to listen for its wealth of historic information and interpretation.

It is too bad that the Freedom Tour could not have been presented in DVD format to capture and portray visually the many historical sites on which the lectures are recorded. Perhaps a future tour can fulfil that expectation, but it would obviously be a much more expensive undertaking.

As it is, the speakers do a good job of painting a word picture of each site. In particular we recall the description of the grave of John Knox under an asphalt parking lot in Edinburgh and the defeat of the British at Stirling Bridge.

Historical Strength

One of the underlying themes of the Freedom Tour is the idea of intergenerational advance of the kingdom of God primarily through families. One great exemplar is of course William Wallace. His dedication and ultimate sacrifice laid the foundation for victory in the following phase of the Scottish War for Independence. Doug Phillips emphasizes the fact that the passion and purpose of men like Wallace were revived by the writing of Sir Walter Scott in the 19th Century.

Another example is John Knox, who is in fact the great hero of the Freedom Tour. Knox's willingness to challenge the civil magistrate in the person of Mary Queen of Scots is highlighted. Part of Knox's conversations with Mary are read and recommended by Doug Phillips as some of the greatest literature in world history.

Any church that is unwilling to engage local magistrates regarding their responsibilities to the Law of God the way Knox did has no business calling itself a Reformation church. Rev. Morecraft pointed out how Knox understood "how God worked in a national context" and urged the group to carry this message back to their churches.

Doug Phillips, Joe Morecraft and Bill Potter do a great job of interpreting and assigning relevance to the history recorded at each site. Phillips summarized the life of Knox with Knox own observation that his life was plagued by four Marys: Mary of Guise, Mary Queen of Scots, Bloody Mary, and the Virgin Mary of the Roman church.

The history and national identity of Scotland was rediscovered in the poetry and prose of Scott and Burns. This kindled a spirit of national pride in Scotland during the 19th Century. From this Phillips stressed the importance of those who tell the stories and sing the songs, for the restoration of Biblical culture in America.

Part of that story in Scotland was the preservation of truth and missionary zeal cultivated by St. Columba on the Island of Iona. Columba was a converted warrior who retreated to Iona to cleanse his conscience from atrocities committed in battle. Before the Roman Catholic assimilation, missionaries from Iona reached the equator and the western regions of North America. This is seen in messages carved in stone in the language of the ancient Scots.

Historical Weakness

The great weakness of the Freedom Tour is its failure to deal adequately – or really at all – with the Right Wing Enlightenment in Scotland. The Right Wing of the Enlightenment produced what is known as Scottish Common Sense Rationalism. This came in reaction to the extremes of the left-wing Enlightenment, whose herald in Scotland was David Hume. In the first half of the 18th Century, the Left Wing was making all sorts of radical claims and from his post at the University of Glasgow Hume even questioned the reality of human perception and knowledge.

Scottish Realism went to the opposite extreme in reaction to Hume. Hume notwithstanding, all men share in common a capacity for rational thought and the ability to make sense of rationality. However, philosophy does not adequately account for man's fallen intellect, and it excludes God as the starting point for epistemology and apologetics. It subtly elevated human reason above Divine Revelation. It's intellectual code words were concepts such as natural law, natural right of man, self-evident truth, and social contract theory.

The extent to which Scottish rationalism had infected John Witherspoon is not grasped by any of the Tour instructors, especially Doug Phillips. By the time of his invitation to the post of President of the College of New Jersey, Witherspoon had spent 20 years in Scotland, under the strong influence of the Right Wing Enlightenment, led by Thomas Reid.

Witherspoon carried Scottish Realism, or Scottish Common Sense Rationalism to America where it infected not only the men who would become America's founders, but the Presbyterian Church. This strain of Scottish Realism has reduced the influence of the law of God in Presbyterian theology to the present day.

Bill Potter made a very interesting observation at Kilmartin, among the cairns and burial mounds of Scotland's ancient capitol. He noted that "one of the challenges is that the people who occupy the land and leave the most relics are the ones who interpret the history. Thus, it is important to gather as much history as we can."

This is a universal problem, sometimes expressed in the phrase, "the victors write the history books." This is why so many Christian historians misinterpret America's Constitutional era as essentially Christian. The instructors of the Freedom Tour have failed to follow their own prescription at this vital point. They have permitted the "relics" of the American founding and patriotic zeal to cloud their perception of American history.

Doug Phillips asserts (with most other Christian America historians) that "Knox [Presbyterian] approach to politics shaped opinion of the founders of United States and is the reason we have the Constitution and Declaration of Independence." It is true that Witherspoon personally taught Moral Philosophy to all the graduating seniors from the College of New Jersey, including James Madison, the Father of the Constitution.

However, a brief review of Witherspoon's senior class notes reveals how weak a link this is. It is Witherspoon's affinity with Thomas Reid's Scottish Common Sense Realism that permeates "The Lectures." Rarely does Witherspoon interact with Biblical law, relying instead on the rationalism of the right-wing Enlightenment to attack the left-wing (Hume, Descartes, etc.).

The same mistake is made with regard to the influence of Samuel Rutherford on the American founders. For example, Joe Morecraft asserts at St. Andrews that Rutherford [via Lex Rex] is one of the greatest men in history, particularly in shaping the minds of the men and women who founded our country. It may be true as Pastor Morecraft points out that "Lex Rex" was a best seller in America in 1776.

Be that as it may, it emphatically did not shape the thinking of the Constitutional Convention. There are many proofs of this, but consider for one that (with the exception of Franklin's prayer request) there is no mention of God or the Bible in the voluminous set of Notes From the Federal Convention. The same is true of the Federalist Papers, of which James Madison, the Father of the Constitution was a primary author.

The one great chink in Knox and Rutherford's political theory was the assignment of governing authority and hence the right of revolution to "the people" themselves. This was a departure from Calvin's doctrine of the lower magistrate and an overreaction to the prevailing Divine Right of Kings theory. Moreover, this theory was secularized by their immediate successors. For example Douglas Kelly notes that, "Buchanan followed Knox in granting the whole people the right of revolution, but differed in making it more of a natural political right than a scriptural, covenantally defined religious duty ("The Emergence of Liberty In The Modern World," P&R Publishing, 1992).

Nor does the series deal with the somewhat pathetic surrender of Scotland to England at the creation of Great Britain. After all the blood that was spilt in the cause of Scottish independence it is ironic that Scotland should give it all back with scarcely a whimper in the Act of Union of 1707. The sweetener offered by England was a sum of money equivalent to the vast loss Scotland had suffered in the aborted commercial venture on the Isthmus of Panama.

Admiration for the Scottish martial spirit at one point gets carried away in misguided patriotic fervor for Scotch contributions to the wars of humanism. It is noted with some pride that Scottish loss of life was proportionately the greatest of any of the nations involved in World War I.

The trench warfare of WW I was brutal and pointless and its futility was recorded in the book and film, "All Quiet on the Western Front." It all sprang from humanistic, government education, especially in Germany. However, the Scotch-Irish have never hesitated to offer their sons as cannon-fodder for the wars of humanism in America. This calls for much greater discernment and a moderated patriotism.

Christians such as Doug Phillips typically overlook the ultimate purpose of WW I (and WW II) in the great drive for humanistic world government. Woodrow Wilson allowed America to be drawn into the War in order that he might guide the peace process toward a humanistic "League of Nations." Failure of that dream drove Wilson insane and quite literally killed him. Wilson a Presbyterian, had been President of Princeton, and succumbed to the rationalism of his pious predecessor, Witherspoon.

Doug Phillips and Vision Forum typically overlook this broader context in treatment of America's Wars, focusing instead on individual patriotism in the struggle against a local or regional tyrant. There is even a tendency to present these humanistic wars as Christian crusades.

In light of Witherspoons's sell-out to Scottish Commonsense Realism and Rutherford's pious inclusion of democracy at the heart of his Biblical theory of government it seems appropriate to rename this CD series. Unfortunately, it would be better titled "How the Scots Almost Saved Christendom." Christendom has yet to be saved. And with so many Christian America historians touting God's mortal enemy as his devout friend it looks like it might be a while yet.

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