12 March 2026

In ‘Common Order’ authorised by the General Assembly in 1994, there are five liturgies for the celebration of the Sacrament. In the  introduction to the book, we learn that the second Order ‘reflects the Celtic tradition’. Of the five orders for morning worship, the fourth ‘contains material from the   Celtic tradition’.

In his history of worship in the Church of Scotland, Bryan Spinks records that Peter Thomson in his critique of ‘Common Order’ ‘believed that since the Celtic tradition is only a small part of the whole, the Celtic material stood out somewhat awkwardly.’

The Iona Community has been instrumental in popularising what has become known as Celtic Christianity. George MacLeod was the romantic exemplar. But Professor Donald Meek in ‘The Quest for Celtic Christianity’ considers it ‘one of the great illusions of our time’.

Criticising the elasticity of this  phenomenon and its dependence on Alexander Carmichael’s ‘Carmina Gadelica’, Meek writes, ‘In terms of philosophy, however, it may signal that rationalist frames are being displaced by experiential models which make feeling and sense (rather than reason) the basis of knowledge.’

In Meek’s analysis, ‘the writings which have done most to popularise the product are at pains to emasculate ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints’. The product doesn’t demand much of its customers. It stimulates the imagination and romanticises the past.

The real distinguishing marks of Celtic Christianity are more likely to be things that are less attractive to our age like ‘a heavy emphasis on judgement, retribution, penance, self-denial and mortification (the ‘doing to death’ of the flesh and its desires), leading to (sometimes) severe asceticism’. Anyone for Celtic knots?