Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 75:2 (Fall 2013)
Article: Missing, Presumed Misclassified: Hugh Binning (1627–1653), The Lost Federal Theologian
Author: Donald John MacLean

---

WTJ 75:2 (Fall 2013) p. 261

Missing, Presumed Misclassified:
Hugh Binning (1627–1653),
The Lost Federal Theologian

Donald John MacLean

Donald John MacLean is research supervisor at Wales Evangelical School of Theology and head of U.K. Actuarial for a multinational financial services group.

Introduction

Hugh Binning (1627–1653) has long been portrayed in the secondary literature on Scottish Reformed theology as simply one of a group of mid-seventeenth-century federal theologians. For example, classic writers on Scottish church history and theology such as John MacLeod, James Walker, and G. D. Henderson discuss him among the many leading seventeenth-century divines who held to a common theology embodied in the Westminster Standards.1 However, more recent readings of Scottish theology have challenged this understanding of Binning. Two significant examples are Charles Bell and Thomas F. Torrance. For Bell, Binning stood apart from the federal theologians of his day in a number of key areas, particularly in his lack of emphasis on limited atonement and election, in his expression of federal theology, and in his understanding of faith and assurance.2 Bell believes that in doing so Binning more closely reflected the theology of Calvin than did his contemporaries.3 Torrance takes a similar line, arguing that, in contrast to the federal theologians of his day, Binning held to a “biblically-grounded Christocentric theology in which grace was given priority over law.”4 For both

WTJ 75:2 (Fall 2013) p. 262

Bell and Torrance, their reading of Binning forms part of a larger argument that the theological system of the Westminster Standards was a distortion of the earlier Reformation theology, espoused by Calvin and enshrined in Scotland by the Scots Confession.5 This, again, is in contrast to the works of MacLeod, Walker, and Henderson, who highlight no such theological rift between the Scots Confession and later Scottish theology.

There are, then, two differing understandings of Binning operating within the broader framework of two divergent readings of historical Scottish theology. One reading has Binning standing apart from the federal theology of his day, as if he were the last rose of an earlier theological summer left blooming alone in the barren theological wasteland created by the theology of the Westminster Assembly.6 The other reading sees Binning embracing the same theological outlook as h...

visitor : : uid: ()