Donald Macleod has died at the age of 82. For six decades he was widely considered to be one of Scotland’s most important theologians and teachers.
Macleod was born into a working-class, Gaelic-speaking home on the Isle of Lewis in 1940, leaving to study at the University of Glasgow and then the Free Church College in Edinburgh. Aged 22, he became minister of Kilmallie Free Church of Scotland in the Scottish Highlands. In 1970, he moved to Glasgow to serve as the pastor at Partick Highland Free Church, where he usually preached six times a week in either English or Gaelic. A few years later he served at the Free Church College (now Edinburgh Theological Seminary) as Professor of Systematic Theology, becoming Principal in 1999. He remained a full-time member of staff until 2011 and continued to teach there for years afterwards.
Macleod was known for his emphasis on historic Scottish Reformed theology and his fervent defences of the Westminster Confession. But his main theological interest was the cross of Christ and the love of God there demonstrated.
Macleod also developed a reputation as an outstanding journalist, from when he began to edit the Free Church of Scotland’s Monthly Record. He gave space to some of Scotland’s most thoughtful (if also controversial) cultural and theological commentaries. As Hunter Nicholson, minister-in-training at St Columba’s Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh says in a Gospel Coalition article: ‘One month, Macleod would be engaging in a theological critique of T.F. Torrance’s view of Christ’s fallen human nature. In the next, he’d be taking his chief political antagonist Margaret Thatcher to task for ignoring the plight of the poor.’
He was no stranger to difficult, painful conflict. In the 1990s he became a controversial figure within the Free Church of Scotland when denominational tensions, ostensibly to do with Macleod, came to a head in 2000 when some ministers and churches left the Free Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing).
Macleod was also accused of assaulting several women between 1985 and 1993. But Edinburgh Sheriff Court ruled all the witnesses unreliable and the cases were dismissed.
Preaching was what Macleod did best, stretching the English language to its utmost to present the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Nicholson says that ‘his style was idiosyncratic – he never made eye contact, and his thick Lewis accent was often impenetrable – many who knew him as theologian, journalist and preacher said it was in his sermons that he left his most indelible mark’.
