Copyright Ian Ellis-Jones 2004 - All Rights reserved.

1. THE LEGACY OF DR SAMUEL ANGUS
by IAN ELLIS-JONES
ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE SYDNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
SUNDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER 2004
Introduction
There was a common formulation of Unitarian faith from roughly 1870 until the
late 1920s known as “The Unitarian Covenant”, that went like this:
We believe in:
The Fatherhood of God;
The Brotherhood of Man;
The Leadership of Jesus;
Salvation by Character;
The Progress of Mankind
onward and upward forever.
That covenant could easily have been written by Professor The Reverend Dr
Samuel Angus, M.A., D.Lit., D.D. (Queen’s Univ., Belfast), Ph.D. (Princeton),
D.D. (Glasgow), Professor of Exegetical Theology of the New Testament and
Historical Theology in the Presbyterian Theological Hall within St Andrews
College, University of Sydney from 1915 to 1943.
Samuel Angus was an Ulster Scott who spoke with a soft Irish burr. The man
who was often referred to as the arch-heretic of Australian Presbyterianism
was born at Craigs in the Braid Valley, the geographical heart of County
Antrim, Ireland, on 27 August 1881. He came from Scottish stock that had
migrated to Northern Ireland at the end of the 17th century following the
covenanting troubles.
Angus, who had a strict Calvinistic Presbyterian upbringing, attended Craigs
National School and was privately coached in Latin by his great-uncle William
Cowan. He went on to the Collegiate School, Ballymena, then won a
scholarship to Queen’s (University) College, Galway, affiliated to the Royal
University of Ireland (B.A. (Hons.), 1902; M.A., 1903; D.Lit., 1923). (There is,
at Queen’s University Belfast, in the Faculty of Humanities, the Samuel Angus
Fund, established in 1981, which derives from a bequest by the late Dr
Angus. The income from the fund is available to the School of Classics &
Ancient History and the Institute of Byzantine Studies, to be used for the
promotion of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Queen's University.)
Subsequently, Angus decided to study for the Presbyterian ministry and
enrolled for the divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, United
States of America, and also at Princeton University (M.A., 1905; Ph.D., 1906).
Interestingly, although he completed the seminary’s course, including honours
Hebrew, he refused to devote himself fulltime to theological studies, preferring

2. to specialize in North African Latin Christianity, Greek Inscriptions and Greek
Philosophy, thereby forfeiting the seminary’s degree. (Later, Angus’s
detractors would take delight in asserting, not entirely incorrectly, that Angus
had not completed his divinity degree.)
Angus tutored privately in classics at Princeton and lectured at Chautauqua,
New York. He then worked on Hellenistic Greek and New Testament criticism
at Hartford Theological Seminary, Connecticut, and also spent a semester at
Marburg, Germany. He later spent some time at Edinburgh before attending
the theological faculty at the Humboldt University of Berlin and, still later,
delivering the Gay lectures at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in
Kentucky. By this time Angus possessed a vast mass of classical education
in the fields of philology, archaeology, comparative religion and philosophy.
Angus was licensed as a probationer for the ministry by the United Free
Church of Scotland in 1912. In May 1914 the General Assembly of the
Presbyterian Church of New South Wales elected Angus by 105 votes to 55
to its chair in New Testament exegesis and theology within the faculty of
theology, at St Andrew’s College, University of Sydney. He was ordained and
inducted into the Australian Professorship by the Presbyterian Church of New
South Wales on 2 March 1915, later settling into a house in Ku-ring-gai
Avenue, Turramurra on Sydney’s North Shore. (His near neighbour was the
controversial Scottish-born philosopher Professor John Anderson, with whom
Angus would sometimes clash at the University of Sydney on the subject of
religion.) At the time of his appointment Angus was 32 years old, and had all
of 6 months pastoral experience. (He had been chaplain of the Scotch
Church in Algiers.)
Angus’s Writings
Samuel Angus was the author of a number of important publications, including
The Environment of Early Christianity (1914), The Mystery Religions and
Christianity (1925), The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World (1929),
Jesus in the Lives of Men (1933), Truth and Tradition (1934), The Auld Sinner
[published under the pseudonym of Cowan Harper] (1938), Essential
Christianity (1939), Man and the New Order (1942), and Alms for Oblivion
(1943).
Angus was a world authority on the ancient world, as well as being one of the
great scholars of Christian origins and the “mystery religions”, a group of
pagan religions, dating from roughly 600 BCE, that were distinct from the
more familiar pagan temple worship. The gods of the mystery religions had
differing names and myths, but the faiths themselves had many important
features in common: their gods died and came back to life; there were
initiation ceremonies that reenacted the god's death and rebirth and were
often described as giving salvation and even eternal life; they had ritual
celebrations including food and drink that reenacted a holy meal established
by the god. Then there was ceremonial washing, miracles, a pagan god who
could change water into wine, a pagan version of the great flood, and much,
much more. All sound familiar? Well, in Alms for Oblivion Angus wrote:

3. The truth is that it was paganism that carried me away from Christian
superstition and brought me back to the Christian religion … .
He also wrote, “I am a Christian because of the light that shines everlastingly
from the hill of Pallas Athene.”
The mystery religions centre on the story of a man who became a god, or a
god who became a man – the living, the dying and rising god as in the stories
of Isis, Osiris, Serapis and so on. These stories led Angus to seek the
historical Jesus, the Jesus of history. He always encouraged people to follow
the example of Jesus and imitate the life of Jesus, and firmly believed that it
was still possible to discover the historical Jesus of Galilee in the Gospel
accounts.
At the time of his death in 1943 Angus was working on a new book dealing
with the historical approach to Jesus. In 1962 the unfinished material, edited
by the good “Angus man”, the Reverend Ernest H Vines, was published in
book form under the title Forgiveness and Life. (Vines, who died in January
1979 aged 90, was a Past Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Australia
in the State of New South Wales. He also lectured at the Theological Hall,
teaching New Testament Greek, and, in his later years, guest preached at the
Sydney Unitarian Church on a number of occasions.)
Angus’s Theology
Initially, for the most part, Angus was well received by New South Wales
Presbyterians. For example, his leadership in the opposition to a proposed
church union during 1919-23 marked him as a "good Presbyterian". However
there were some concerns about his doctrine. In particular, an address
delivered to a Student Christian Movement conference in 1923 provoked
some controversy and aroused the opposition of theological conservatives
(both fundamentalists and others). To some extent, Angus collaborated in his
reputation for non-orthodoxy, helping to form in 1916 a private discussion club
jocularly known as “The Heretics”. He loved debate but had very little interest
in classical philosophical theology.
Angus found his faculty academically and theologically conservative, and by
its standards his theology was indeed radical. The Bible could not be
accepted as verbally inspired. Every doctrine had to have a basis in reason
or experience. Intellectual integrity was essential. Miracles he could not
accept; they had simply been attributed to Jesus to strengthen the case for
him. As for faith, in posthumously published Forgiveness and Life (1962)
Angus wrote:
Reasonable faith demands that any fact or facts which are represented
as producing faith or corroborating it should be established beyond the
possibility of cavil.
However, he immediately went on to say this:

4. It also raises the question whether faith, though it may be aided by
historic fact, can possibly rest securely on even the best-established
historic fact.
For Angus, the idea of the Trinity, which carried with it the idea of the Deity of
Jesus, was incomprehensible and irrelevant. “God cannot to-day be
apprehended or made real even to earnest men in those, now unintelligible,
abstract categories,” he wrote in Truth and Tradition (1934).
The Deity (as opposed to the divinity) of Christ was also to be rejected, along
with the so-called Sinlessness of Christ. What was important was the “moral
grandeur of Jesus, which can be proven and made redemptively relevant to
life, rather than the negation of sinlessness” (Truth and Tradition). He could
not say Jesus was God. God was One, he said, like a good Biblical Unitarian
of yesteryear, with God being conceived as immanent. There was very little
on the notion of transcendence.
Angus often referred to Jesus as being divine, but for Angus Jesus’ divinity
was inherent in his humanity. He believed in the basic goodness of each
human being and that all persons were divine in some measure. He said: “I
don’t know a mere man, we are all divine, God is our Father,” but he did not
believe that Jesus was God for a number of reasons. For example, Jesus
prayed to God. Jesus said, “Why callest thou me good? None is good, save
one, that is, God?” (Lk 18:19). For Angus, divinity referred to divine qualities
of spirit. (As Sir Julian Huxley pointed out on many occasions, the term
“divine” did nor originally imply the existence of gods.)
The Virgin Birth was historically impossible, and orthodox notions of the
Atonement in terms of substitution, expiation and propitiation were for Angus
entirely untenable. Jesus appeared to be ignorant of such things, and Angus
found no evidence whatsoever in the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels for
any single doctrine of the atonement; any supposed suggestion to the
contrary in the Scriptures (see, in that regard, Mk 10:45) had to be rejected as
an unauthentic interpolation. The only sacrifice required by Christianity (and
Jesus) was self-sacrifice. As for the Resurrection, there was no necessity for
a physical Resurrection, and none was likely. For Angus, the resurrection
accounts were not only contradictory but “haggadic” teachings to bring out the
value of Jesus. He spoke about the “resurrection faith” as a spiritual
experience which can be had in and with Jesus.
The “religion of Jesus” was contrasted with the “religion about Jesus”. The
humanity of Jesus was God’s personality. The personality of the Living Jesus
of Galilee was central to Angus’s religion; Jesus was “our only Lord”, primarily
because of his preeminent moral leadership. In Jesus in the Lives of Men
(1933) Angus had this to say:
Jesus is not accredited to us today by his miracles, or by a virgin birth, or by a
resurrection from an underworld, or by a reanimation of his body from the
grave, or by fulfillment of prophecies; he is accredited by his long train of
conquests over the loyalties of men, and chiefly by the immediate, intimate

5. and inevitable appeal made by him to everything that is best and God-like in
each of us, and by his ability to “make men fall in love with him”, and “to
win the world to his fair sanctities”.
In an article by Dr Angus on “Faith in God through Jesus” published in the
Australian Intercollegian of 2 April 1923 Angus expressed his view that no
statement of Christian faith could properly insist on demanding more than
Jesus himself asked people to believe, nor should any such statement claim
finality or infallibility. For Angus, a Christian was one who was inwardly and
whose life was molded after that of Jesus, who was Lord because he has
shown us ourselves in the light of God and also because he has shown us the
Father. Christianity was the religion of the Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, and
Christian character was entirely independent of any particular orthodoxy.
Christianity should be determined rather by its fruits than by its dogmas.
Like a good Biblical Unitarian of yesteryear, Angus spoke almost in terms of
salvation by character. In Christianity and Dogma (1933) he wrote:
The world realizes that character is the supreme possession of man and
believes that religion should steady man in his purposes and guide him in the
arduous task of character-building; whereas this controversy has given the
impression that the Church exists not primarily to promote Christian
character but to produce and conserve dogmas.
As for Christian guidance, in Essential Christianity Angus wrote:
In the last resort, Divine guidance can come only through a man’s conscience
and reason in the presence of God, and no external authority can alter that,
one way or the other.
In Truth and Tradition Angus had this to say about Christianity and
Presbyterianism in particular:
Are the alleged doctrines of Presbyterianism static? Is it simply a question of
deciding whether a statement is orthodoxy or heresy? Or is truth the supreme
quest for both orthodox and heretics. Are we to fear the new because it is
new, or revere the old for its sheer age? … Are we bound for ever to the
forms and beliefs of our predecessors? Nay, more, are we bound forever
even to the contents of those beliefs? Must we accept and uphold all the
beliefs that have been admitted by the Presbyterian Church during the past,
and are the past practices of our Church, including the axe and scaffold, to be
maintained to-day?
Angus postulated what he described as a “unitive Christianity” that would
band together Christians of all churches, however diverse their theologies.
Too long had Christianity been divisive. Competitive Christianity had to yield
place to co-operative Christianity.
The Conservatives Fight Back
Angus’s orthodoxy was questioned first in the Presbytery of Sydney and later
at the 1932 General Assembly of the Church. However, the battle began in

6. earnest in 1933 when growing concern over Angus's teaching at St Andrew's
College led the conservatives to attempt to have him removed from the
Professorship.
Angus’s chief opponent throughout the years was one Robert John Henry
McGowan who for many years was the minister of the Ashfield church.
McGowan was a staunch evangelical who held fast to the doctrinal standards
of Presbyterianism. Be that as it may, Angus’s supporters would continue to
affirm, as would Angus himself, that Angus’s teaching was nevertheless in
accord with all that was true and valuable in Presbyterianism.
The Rules of the Presbyterian Church required a long process for such a
charge to be sustained. "Brotherly conferences" with the alleged offender
needed to be held. The advice of the Procurator, the church's barrister,
needed to be obtained. A libel (charge) needed to be framed and agreed to by
the Presbytery.
It was a slow process made more difficult by the fact that the Westminster
Confession of Faith, the subordinate doctrinal standard of the church, says
little about how the Scriptures are to be interpreted. The Presbyterian Church
at the time, and ever since, has been unable to determine exactly what beliefs
were essential to the faith.
In addition, there always have been a number of questionable legalities about
the formulation of the required libel. Those problems have never been
settled.
The “Angus affair” (aka the “Angus case”) dragged on for 12 years, in church
courts, presbytery, the NSW and Australian general assemblies and the
latter’s judicial commission, with the heresy issue being pursued - at times
vigorously - even though no formal legal charge of heresy was ever laid. (The
Church itself never brought charges, and the conservatives lacked the
numbers to take decisive action against him.)
In September 1939, following the revival and subsequent postponement of the
Angus case in the General Assembly, Angus suffered a stroke that left one
side of his face paralysed and affected both his sight and speech. In
February 1940 his jaw was wired up to make speech possible, but he suffered
considerable discomfort from thereon. He had been greatly affected by the
attacks that had been made upon him in more ways than one.
Although the case was never finally resolved, it effectively ended in 1942
when the Church’s procurator, Bryan Fuller QC, successfully moved in the
Australian Assembly that “all communications dealing in any way with the
case of Dr Angus be discharged from the business paper, without prejudice to
the rights of any of the parties; and that any of the parties concerned may
obtain the restoration of any of the matters to the business paper by motion
passed pursuant to notice.” By that time Dr Angus was very ill although he
read, with the greatest difficulty, a paper on the Christian ministry at the NSW
General Assembly in May 1943.

7. Dr Samuel Angus died of metastasised cancer in the Scottish Hospital,
Paddington, on 17 November 1943, and was subsequently cremated at the
Northern Suburbs Crematorium where his cremains, as well as those of his
dear wife, are located. (His wife Katherine, whom he had married in 1907,
and who had been an invalid confined to a wheelchair for many years, had
predeceased him in 1934. They had no children.)
Throughout all of the Angus case Professor Angus continued to teach,
influencing great numbers of Presbyterian as well as Methodist and
Congregational candidates for the ministry, for Angus was also President of
the United Theological Faculty of all three Christian churches. (A United
Course of Training had been in place for many decades when the Uniting
Church came into existence in 1977.)
At the University of Sydney Angus was a councillor of St Andrews College
from 1926, sometime curator of the Nicholson Museum of Antiquities, and
was prominent in the foundation of the board of studies in divinity in 1936. He
also served on the council of Knox Grammar School, Wahroonga, from 1926
to 1943. (There is a school house named after him at Knox.) Professor
Bruce Mansfield, in his book Knox: A History of Knox Grammar School 1924-
1974 (Sydney, 1974), refers to Angus’s “cultivated attachment to the classical
literary traditions on which the School was founded”. Angus was also active
in the affairs of St Margaret’s Presbyterian Church, Turramurra, where the
Reverend Ernest Vines would serve as minister for a number of years, and
also found time to occasionally play golf at Avondale Golf Club, Pymble. By
all accounts, Angus was a man of considerable charm and undoubted
religious devotion, qualities that were acknowledged by even his harshest
critics and detractors.
History Repeats Itself
In the early 1990s the Presbyterian Church of NSW was again rocked by a
heresy trial known as the “Cameron case”.
On 2 March 1992, the Reverend Dr Peter Cameron, Principal of St Andrew's
College at the University of Sydney, preached a sermon at a Dorcas Society
Rally in the Ashfield Presbyterian Church entitled "The Place of Women in the
Church". As well as supporting the principle that women should be ordained
to the ministry, it argued a case that the Bible had to be understood within the
context of the times in which they were written, particularly as regards such
matters as homosexuality. In due course, the Presbytery of Sydney decided
to try Dr Cameron on a charge of “preaching a sermon which contained
statements inconsistent with Chapter I of the Westminster Confession of
Faith".
The Presbytery found Dr Cameron guilty of what, in effect, was heresy. It did
this in the face of the Procurator's advice questioning whether Dr Cameron
had any case to answer. Further the Procurator warned the church against
the danger of a majority imposing its beliefs on a minority.

8. The case went on appeal before the General Assembly of New South Wales
and after a long hearing the appeal was dismissed with voting figures
following factional lines. An appeal was lodged with the final court of appeal
in the Presbyterian Church, the Judicial Commission of the General Assembly
of Australia. There was arguably a better likelihood of the appeal being
sustained because the Judicial Commission was less factionally weighted.
However, before the matter came to hearing, Dr Cameron resigned from the
Presbyterian Church of Australia, eventually returning to Scotland. His appeal
lapsed and the original decision was sustained. He is now an Anglican
minister in Scotland.
The same Church and the same procedure dealt differently with both the
Angus affair and the Cameron case. The difference was the theological
climate in which the matters were considered. However, both cases, as well
as a 1975 charge of heresy brought against the Reverend Ted Noffs by the
Methodist Church of the day which came to little, illustrate the futility of trying
to determine theological truth by the votes of the majority. A heresy trial
superimposes the rule and will of the majority, rendering practising ministers
open to attack because of the shades of difference between their beliefs and
those of the so-called orthodox majority.
For Unitarians, and most thinking people, heresy trials have absolutely no
place at all. They also strike an anachronistic chord in Australia's tolerant
society, putting up barriers between the church and the people to whom it is
trying to speak. Different theological ideas should be dealt with in open
debate, rather than through legal or judicial action.
The Legacy of Samuel Angus
And what, then, is the legacy of Samuel Angus? Not his theology, which was
almost entirely derivative. Not even his scholarly writings on the mystery
religions, important though they remain to this day. What is singularly
important is a way of thinking, a way of acting. He was committed to the task
of establishing and presenting the “reasonableness” of Christianity and its
relevance to the whole of life. He had a love of truth for truth’s sake,
expressed in his total willingness and commitment to bring rationality to bear
on all the doctrines of the Christian faith. In Essential Christianity (1939) he
wrote:
There is a very real danger of believing too much and being too little and
doing too little. A religion shines better in its simplicity than dressed in
metaphysics. It can be better apprehended in action than in theological
formulation …
True religion is not adherence to any particular dogma or loyalty to any
church standard. True religion is the daring faith in the reality of the things
that are unseen and eternal, and the devotion of life to these things, for the
enlargement of our personalities and the enoblement through us of other
personalities. …

9. In the view of Samuel Angus, the New Testament writers gave us a distorted
presentation of Jesus and his teachings. Angus, like Albert Schweitzer,
sought the “real” Jesus, the historical Jesus, the man behind the New
Testament accounts, the man beneath the enormous overlay of Greco-
Roman mythology. For Angus, what became Christianity was an
amalgamation of certain mistaken and apocalyptic conceptions held by Jews
of that age regarding the Messiah and even more certain ideas from
Hellenistic religion, especially from Gnosticism and the mystery cults, and
none of the alleged cardinal doctrines of historic Christianity (including but not
limited to the Deity of Christ and the Atonement) originated with Jesus
himself.
It has been said that Angus’s chief desire as a teacher was to set the minds of
his students free to deal with evidence without bias. Often verbally
aggressive and even sarcastic, he sought to make his students seekers after
truth, and to be intellectually honest in the face of widespread prejudice,
bigotry and narrow-mindedness. In the words of one former student, quoted
in the late Susan E. Emilsen’s biography of Angus entitled A Whiff of History
(1991):
[H]e taught me to think and to judge everything said or written as to whether it was
true or false, reasonable or unreasonable, and above all he infused me with a
passionate love and loyalty to the real Jesus of Nazareth.
Angus was a courageous man, who towered above the pettiness and
viciousness of his detractors. In his own words:
I cannot change my message; the Church can repudiate it. I shall go on
teaching and writing as I have been doing in the interests of religion, but
whether within the Presbyterian Church or without it, is for the official
Church to decide. … If my Church refuses my services, ‘lo, I turn to the
Gentiles.’ It is in the Church’s power to expel me as her teacher, and I make
no plea as to what the Church should do; but it is not in any ecclesiastical
hands to expel me from my prophetic calling or to cause me to cease to be a
teacher of the truth of the Divine Master whom I have chosen as Lord and for
which I am prepared to stand against any institution on earth, even if
necessary against the Church to which I belong by tradition and by loyalty.
That is how we should remember Samuel Angus. That is his legacy.
Defiant and courageous to the end, he shone … even in darkness.
-oo0oo-