Who Was Sir Robert Anderson? Scotland Yard Chief and Bible Teacher
Sir Robert Anderson was an Irish lawyer and police official who lived from 1841 to 1918. For thirteen years, from 1888 to 1901, he was Assistant Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. He was also one of the best-known lay Bible teachers of his day. He never took a pulpit, but he preached for years, wrote more than twenty books on the Bible, and is still read for The Coming Prince, his study of Daniel's prophecy of the seventy weeks.
He's an unusual figure: a detective's mind turned on the questions of faith. Here's a look at his life, what he taught, and where to start reading him.
A Dublin boy and a sermon on the street
Anderson was born in Dublin on May 29, 1841. His father, Matthew Anderson, was Crown Solicitor for the city and an elder in the Presbyterian church, and the family was of Scottish descent. Robert later called himself "an anglicised Irishman of Scottish extraction."
He grew up in a Christian home, but in his late teens he had serious doubts. Ireland was then stirred by the revival of 1859, and his sister Annie urged him to go and hear the revival preachers. He wasn't much moved. Then one Sunday evening in his own church he heard the minister, John Hall, preach that forgiveness and eternal life were God's free gift, to be received at once. Anderson thought the doctrine wrong and caught up with Hall on the way home to argue. On the pavement Hall turned and asked him plainly whether he would accept Christ or reject Him. Anderson said that in God's name he would accept Christ, and he went home, as he wrote years later, with the peace of God filling his heart.
That conversion shaped everything he wrote. Grace freely given, received by faith, is the note he strikes in book after book.
Lawyer and intelligence officer
Anderson studied at Trinity College, Dublin, took his degree in 1862 and was called to the Irish bar in 1863. A few years later his father showed him papers on the Fenians, the Irish revolutionary movement, and he was drawn into the government's work against them. He became the leading expert on the subject. In 1868 he moved to London as an adviser on political crime at the Home Office, and later served as secretary to the Prison Commission. He married Lady Agnes Moore in 1873, and they had five children.
Scotland Yard
In 1888 he became Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of the Metropolitan Police, the post that put him over the CID. It was the year of the Whitechapel murders, and his name still turns up in every history of the Jack the Ripper case. He held the office until he retired in 1901, when he was knighted (KCB).
His police work taught him how to weigh evidence, and you can feel it in his books. He liked to say he was a skeptic by temperament. He wouldn't take anything on trust, not even the confident claims of scholars, and he treated questions about the Bible the way he'd treat a case: what are the facts, and what do they prove?
A layman who preached
All through his public career Anderson preached and taught the Bible as a layman. For years he was among the Brethren and preached alongside J. N. Darby in the west of Ireland; later he returned to his Presbyterian roots. He counted among his friends Horatius Bonar, E. W. Bullinger, C. I. Scofield, A. C. Dixon and James M. Gray. Near the end of his life he wrote for The Fundamentals, the set of booklets defending the faith (see What are The Fundamentals?).
He died in London on November 15, 1918, at seventy-seven, during the influenza epidemic.
What he taught
Anderson's books fall into three groups.
Prophecy. The Coming Prince, first published in the early 1880s and revised through many editions, is his best-known work. He took Gabriel's message in Daniel 9 and worked out the dates. Counting a prophetic year of 360 days, he found that sixty-nine weeks of years, 173,880 days, ran from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 445 BC to the day Christ rode into Jerusalem. The seventieth week, he taught, is still future, and belongs to the "prince that shall come," the Antichrist. Between them lies the present age of grace. Prophecy teachers have used his figures ever since.
Defending the Bible. Daniel in the Critics' Den and The Bible and Modern Criticism answer the Higher Criticism of his day. He argued that the critics' case rested on assumptions, not proof, and that the Lord Jesus treated the Old Testament as true. He put the point sharply:
In this Higher Criticism campaign, the witness who must be discredited is our Divine Lord.
The Bible and Modern Criticism, chapter VI
Grace and the Christian life. The Silence of God asks why heaven has worked no public miracle since the apostles. His answer is that the silence is not indifference. It's the silence of grace, the pledge that the door of mercy stands open:
It means the withdrawal of the amnesty; it means the end of the reign of grace; it means the closing of the day of mercy and the dawning of the day of wrath.
The Silence of God, Chapter XIII
The Lord from Heaven gathers the Bible's witness to the deity of Christ, and "The Way" turns to daily Christian living. Grace runs through them all, but Anderson never let grace make sin look small:
The lasting wonder of redemption is that sinners can approach a holy God; not persons who have been sinners, but those who are such.
"The Way": Chapters on the Christian Life, chapter IV
Why he's still read
Some of Anderson's controversies belong to his own day, and he wrote with a lawyer's taste for argument. But readers keep coming back to him for three reasons. He takes doubt seriously and answers it with evidence rather than scolding. He holds the whole Bible to be God's Word and shows why that matters. And under all the argument there's a man who never got over the grace that met him on a Dublin pavement.
Where to start
TheWay Library has ten of his books, all free to read.
- To meet him at his best, start with The Coming Prince, his famous study of Daniel's seventy weeks.
- If you're wrestling with God's silence or with doubt, read The Silence of God.
- For the person of Christ, read The Lord from Heaven.
- For daily Christian living, try "The Way": Chapters on the Christian Life, his shortest and warmest book.
- For the debate over the Bible, read Daniel in the Critics' Den and then The Bible and Modern Criticism. Pseudo-Criticism and Christianized Rationalism and the Higher Criticism carry the argument on.
- For the gospel stated plainly, read The Gospel and Its Ministry.
- For a skeptical friend, try A Doubter's Doubts about Science and Religion.
Our guide to Sir Robert Anderson's books describes each one, and our collection of Sir Robert Anderson quotes gathers his best lines. For more on the Lord's return, see the best Christian books on the second coming. All his books are on the Sir Robert Anderson author page.