John Lawrence RENTOUL

RENTOUL, JOHN LAWRENCE (b. Londonderry, Ireland, 6 July 1846; d. Melbourne, Vic, 15 April 1926). Presbyterian minister and theology professor.

Educated at Queen's College, Belfast Queen's University, Dublin, and Leipzig University, Rentoul came from Lancashire to be minister of St George's Presbyterian Church, St Kilda, 1879-84. Rentoul first taught Presbyterian theological students as a 'temporary professor' at Melbourne's Ormond College in 1880. The J D Wyselaskie bequest financed two permanent theological chairs in 1883, and Rentoul became professor of Biblical Studies and Apologetics. His vitriolic role in opposition to the Rev Charles Strong's liberal theological tendencies during the early 1880s contributed to his appointment.

However, Rentoul proved less conservative than many Presbyterians had assumed, and his introduction of German theories of biblical criticism to Victorian theological students aroused loud hostility. Biblical studies as taught at Ormond College by Rentoul and Andrew Harper in the 1890s was as open to German innovations as any such teaching anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world. Rentoul remained a staunch Presbyterian, and could be plain rude to Methodists or colleagues who sought ecumenical links with other denominations.

Rentoul also opposed the movement to form a national Presbyterian church, at the time of Australian federation, fearing that Victorian theological-education standards would be adversely affected by a 'lowest common denominator' union agreement. He was moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Australia in 1912. By the early twentieth century Rentoul had the responsibilities of principal of Ormond College's Theological Hall. That worked well while his Ulsterman friend and fellow-fisherman John McFarland was master, but 'Fighting Larrie Rentoul' took almost immediate exception to Ormond's new master, D K Picken (q.v.), in 1915.

Ormond College's Theological Hall owed some debt to Rentoul's pugnacious adherence to causes, not the least being sound-proofing of lecture rooms extorted from the patron Francis Ormond under threat of a public personal attack. During the Boer War Rentoul made himself very unpopular within his church and society by loud public agitation against British 'concentration camps' in South Africa. The same man could launch vitriolic attacks against the Catholic church hierarchy in Victoria. Some found it hard to cope with this Irishman who was both a Home Ruler and an Orangeman.

There is no simple label to fit Rentoul. Although himself 'pro-conscription' and passionately opposed to the newly installed Catholic bishop, Daniel Mannix, Rentoul made himself anathema to his own church by strongly opposing D K Picken's attempt to impose a conscription policy upon Ormond College during Melbourne's 'Conscription' debates of World War One. Several of Rentoul's Presbyterian theological students were encouraged to move from Ormond into Mannix's newly-constructed Newman College. The supreme Irish ecumenical irony is that Rentoul's greatest personal tragedy, the insanity of that only son from whom he had hoped much, was ameliorated by an older Mannix who took the son into the Catholic Church's institutional care when Rentoul's daughters could not cope.

Rentoul lectured on at Ormond College for forty-three years, but latterly became more theologically conservative and more obstreperous. His disputes with the Scottish liberal, Professor D S Adam, are legendary. Intellectually, Adam had much in common with the Rev Charles Strong against whom Rentoul had earlier waged theological warfare. Adam was also a pioneer of church union in Australia, and his attempts to be nice to Methodists and others were not appreciated by Rentoul. In his last years (to Adam's discomfort) Rentoul strongly supported the appointment of the aging fundamentalist, T J Smith, to Ormond's chair of Old Testament Studies. Smith was one who had formerly loudly railed against Rentoul's introduction of German biblical criticism into Victoria.

DON CHAMBERS