Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History. On this episode we are talking about James Buchanan, a Scottish Theologian who spans the 19th century.

So this is not the James Buchanan who was the 15th president of these United States. Our James Buchanan was born in Paisley.

Paisley, of course, was a vital weaving city in Scotland and it gave its name to the Paisley pattern.

But you can't end growing up there, studied briefly in Paisley and then he moved on to Glasgow and then to Edinburgh.

At Edinburgh he studied under Thomas Chalmers and in 1827 at the age of 23 he was ordained into the Church of Scotland.

A few years later he moved into a larger church. He was a compelling pastor in his congregation grew rapidly.

From 1828 to 1840 he passed through the church in North Leith. During this entire time while his church was growing he was in poor health.

Much of the pastoral work was carried on by assistance and so Buchanan could devote himself to study and to his ministerial preparation.

Well, in 1840 he went to St. Giles in Edinburgh, St. Giles Cathedral. This was a famous church. This was where John Knox served as pastor during the time of the Reformation coming to Scotland.

It is there in Old Town, Edinburgh and for three years Buchanan was in the pulpit at St. Giles.

Then came along a very significant moment in Scottish Church history. In 1843 we had the disruption or the Great Disruption.

About 450 ministers broke away from the Church of Scotland as probably about a third of the total ministers and they became ministers of a new denomination, the Free Church of Scotland.

Thomas Chalmers Buchanan's mentor was appointed the first moderator of the Free Church. This group saw itself not as a split but as the continuation of the original of the Scottish Church back to the Reformation.

These ministers and their churches James Buchanan among them did not leave their denomination so much as their denomination left them.

A year later in 1844 Princeton College all the way across the Atlantic there in New Jersey gave Buchanan an honorary doctorate and in 1845 he was appointed a professor of apologetics at New College Edinburgh.

New College was founded in 1843 and yes it was founded because of the disruption and it was founded to serve this new denomination and their Buchanan served as a professor first as a professor of apologetics.

Then in 1847 when Thomas Chalmers died Buchanan became professor of theology. He would hold that post until 1868.

He had many afflictions through his life, he suffered poor health throughout his life and by 1868 he was so ill and he was mostly deaf that he retired from teaching.

Two years later in 1870 James Buchanan died.

Well he had married, he had two children with his first wife, a son, a daughter and then back in 1832 his first wife died.

He remarried in with his second wife he had another daughter, she died just a few years before him in 1867.

In addition to his family and his teaching and his preaching he left behind quite a literary legacy of books.

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