The legacy of John Duncan.(Biography)

John Duncan was born in 1796 in Old Aberdeen, Scotland, to parents who were members of the Associate Presbytery, or Secession Church. When John was nine years old, he entered Aberdeen Grammar School, where from the outset he showed great interest in languages and metaphysics, the two subjects that were to be lifelong intellectual passions. He was once discovered, during class, furtively reading a copy of Aristotle hidden under his desk. (1) In 1810 he matriculated and, obtaining a scholarship, entered Marischal College, Aberdeen, from which he graduated with an M.A. in 1814. Despite the evangelical influences surrounding him, Duncan as a student had espoused the atheistic pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. He nevertheless became a student for the Christian ministry, studying at the theological halls of the Associate Presbytery (1814-16) and the Church of Scotland (1817-21). It was through the influence of one of his tutors, Dr. Mearns, that his skepticism fell away, and he was able to believe in the existence of God. This change happened suddenly, when he was crossing one of the bridges in Aberdeen. He later recalled the impact: "When I was convinced that there was a God, I danced on the Brig o' Dee with delight." (2)

Dalliance with atheism left a legacy of remorse, which Duncan summarized in the words of John Paul Freidrich Richter, "I wandered to the furthest edge of Creation ... and I heard the shriek of a Fatherless world." (3) His recovery of orthodox Christian faith was long and tortuous. Rejecting atheism, he first moved to Unitarianism and for nine years opposed all the central doctrines of Reformed theology, living, as he himself acknowledged, in habitual sin and without prayer. In 1825 he was licensed to preach, a step taken "in ungodliness and doctrinal unbelief and heresy." (4)

To supplement his meager income, Duncan became a private tutor to a number of wealthy families in Aberdeenshire, including a family called Towers. He became romantically attracted to their daughter, Janet, and notwithstanding the considerable disparity in their economic and social status, he proposed marriage but was refused. Two years later, on hearing that Janet Towers did in fact harbor an affection for him, he proposed again and was accepted. The letters that passed between them before their marriage reflect both Duncan's eccentricity and his scholarship. In one, having already written diagonally across his original tightly spaced sentences, he continued to fill "every available quarter inch of space in the margins and corners of the quarto pages." He then set "himself to teach her Greek ... illustrates this by a comparison with the structure of Latin ... and breaks off into French." (5) They married in 1837 and had one daughter, Annie. The following year Janet died, following the premature stillbirth of their second daughter. (6)

Duncan's conversion, under Cesar Malan in May 1826, brought to him an immediate sense of peace that nevertheless, in time, subsided into pessimism. He found help from his reading of John Owen, Hermann Witsius, and John Love, and from personal association with Gavin Parker and James Kidd. (7) These relationships led to a deeper experience he called his second conversion. As a consequence he retained a lifelong dread of superficial Christianity, often entertaining doubts as to the authenticity of his own faith. He never enjoyed a permanent sense of assurance, and although this experience proved painful for himself and his family, it gave him great empathy for others and unusual depth in his evangelistic ministry.

Duncan was a man of remarkable intellect. In October 1839 he applied for the chair of Oriental Languages in the University of Glasgow and could claim familiarity with Hebrew and all the cognate languages, as well as with Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindustani, and Marathi; furthermore, he had a high degree of fluency in European languages and an amazing facility to express himself in the most elegant Latin. One of Duncan's very few surviving fragments consists of scribbled annotations on 2 Corinthians 9:6. Of…