Professor Ronald Wallace

Born: 16 April, 1911, in Edinburgh. Died: 26 February, 2006, in Edinburgh, aged 94.

PROFESSOR Ronald Wallace, as a chaplain with the Church of Scotland Huts and Canteens, was in the early group to enter Berlin at the time of Hitler's downfall, and remembered having to wait while the allies allowed the Russians to enter first. In later life he served for thirteen years as Professor of Biblical Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.

Ronald Wallace was born in Edinburgh in April 1911 and educated at the Royal High School. He entered the University of Edinburgh at 16 and took a degree in civil engineering. Dissatisfied with that, and turning down a post in South Africa, he proceeded to the Faculty of Arts. He was in brilliant company, with David and Lionel Daiches as fellow students, and hoped to teach in one of the mission fields. It was while a student of arts in the early 1930s that he was drawn away from the current liberal Christianity and began attending the Evangelical Alliance meetings. Here he met Mary, Thomas and Grace Torrance, the children of missionaries in China, and joined divinity students and members of the Christian Association at Lauder on a mission.

Studies at Old College in divinity followed, where he was a pupil of Hugh Ross Macintosh and William Manson. After a brief appointment in Brora as a minister without charge, his first parish was at Crosshill in Ayrshire. In July 1937, he married Mary Monlin Torrance, his fellow student from Edinburgh. Theirs was a long, happy and constructive marriage. They shared a vision and were intellectual companions. A fluent and creative woman, Mary committed herself to the work of the church. They had a son, David, and with the outbreak of war, they found themselves inundated with evacuated children.

In 1940, Wallace was called to Pollock Church, Glasgow, and it was from there that he went to the war with the Church of Scotland's Huts and Canteens. Pollock was a responsive and encouraging parish, and Scotland, in the 1940s, saw a remarkable flowering of theology. Returning from the war, a group of young men, all friends, with a common brilliance, formed a group and created a virtual renaissance on their own.

Prominent in that group were TM Murchison (the great Gaelic preacher and former Moderator); John Heron (whose son Alasdair is now professor of reformed theology in Erlangen); James McEwan (the Scottish church historian); JKS Reid (subsequently professor of divinity in Aberdeen); GS Hendry (who subsequently went to Princeton) and Thomas Torrance (Wallace's brother-in-law, who was subsequently Moderator and professor in Edinburgh).

The group inspired each other and together founded the Scottish Church Theology Society, out of which the Scottish Journal of Theology emerged. All of this group were influenced by HR Macintosh, inspired by the work of Karl Barth, and committed themselves to constructive work in the new paradigm of biblical theology. It was to the Scottish Church Theology Society that Wallace read his first paper on how to expound the parables, which later became an influential book.

In a long life of writing, Wallace never deserted that paradigm of critical, intelligent and observant reading of scripture. Alongside his more strictly academic works, he wrote volume after volume of biblical commentaries which have been translated into many languages.

In 1951, Wallace moved to St Kentigern's, in Lanark. There were now three children, their son, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Heather. While there, he gained a PhD, and wrote his study, Calvin's Doctrine of the Word and Sacraments, which has become something of a classic for its clarity and learning. In 1958, he moved to Lothian Road Parish, in Edinburgh, where he served until 1964 when he accepted an invitation from Columbia Theological Seminary. Other volumes on Calvin followed.

He retired from Columbia in 1977 but still committed himself to writing, preaching and research. Utterly characteristically, he left his retirement to go with Mary to teach for a year at the Near East School of Theology, in Beirut, at the height of the war. The Lebanese marvelled at their courage and still speak of them with affection today.

Mary died after a short illness not long after.

A quiet and private man, always generous, both a pastor and a theologian, Ronald Wallace was unassuming and the soul of kindness. He was one of the shapers of 20th-century Scottish theology.

He is survived by his son and daughters.