Fourth Centenary Observance: Scotland Celebrates Its Reformation

John Knox. Patrick Hamilton. George Wishart. Andrew Melville. James Guthrie. Richard Cameron. Ebenezer Erskine. Thomas Gillespie. Thomas Chalmers. To call these names is to quicken the heart of a Scottish churchman as he recalls the often turbulent course of Protestant history in Scotland. Last month a special General Assembly of the Church of Scotland was held in Edinburgh to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation.

In August, 1560, the Scottish parliament had ratified Protestantism’s victory over Rome by abolishing the papal jurisdiction and the mass in Scotland and approving the Calvinistic Scots Confession which Knox had helped write. Now in October, 1960, Queen Elizabeth with Prince Philip drove in state from the Palace of Holyroodhouse—scene of Knox’s famed dialogues with another queen, Mary Stuart—to St. Giles’ Cathedral, site of some of Knox’s fieriest preaching, to join nobility, churchmen, and some 2000 others in a colorful service of thanksgiving for the Reformation.

Queen Elizabeth later became the first sovereign to address General Assembly since union of the crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, the monarch customarily being represented by a “Lord High Commissioner.” Last sovereign to attend in person was James VI of Scotland in 1602, who became also James I of England the following year.

Although head of the Church of England, the Queen is a Presbyterian while in Scotland. But she is not head of the Church of Scotland, which proclaims the sole headship of Christ.

The Queen had some pertinent things to say to the Assembly, calling the Scottish Reformation a “distant turning point in the nation’s life”:

“In spite of the bitter quarrels of the past and the divided religious loyalties which still remain with us, I belive that what happened at the Reformation can be stated in terms on which all Christians may agree. Holy Writ was liberated to the people and as a result the Word of God was revealed again as a force to be reckoned with in the affairs of both public and private life.

“The gospel which has long been revered as a record handed down from primitive Christianity was once more seen to be also a living light by which men ought to direct their lives and remold their institutions. This lesson from the Reformation is one that all Christians may surely apply to the modern world.”

The Queen’s enthusiasm for the Reformation, which drew sharp attack from the Romanist press, excels that of certain of her churchmen. Some Church of Scotland ministers wonder whether it is possible in 1960 to have equal interest in celebrating the Reformation and in promoting the ecumenical movement. Some fear the former will heighten old divisions while others see the latter jeopardizing their doctrinal heritage. Energetic synthesists attempt to find indications that the Reformers would have favored the course of modern ecumenism.

Speaking in Edinburgh’s St. Mary’s Cathedral (Scottish Episcopal), the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev. Arthur M. Ramsey, noted losses as well as gains of the Reformation. “There was the loss of the historic succession of the ministry.… No longer was there observed the Christian year with Good Friday, Easter, the commemoration of the saints.…”

The Very Rev. George F. MacLeod, former General Assembly Moderator and colorful leader of the Iona Community, deplored as idolatry any attempt to “re-create” that earlier Reformation (“they would recover the old Confessions; reinstitute a catechism”). Inasmuch as the Renaissance gave “birth to the ecclesiastical Reformation,” asserts Dr. MacLeod, writing for The Glasgow Herald, we must not “try to recover” the Reformers’ insights, but rather “look at our modern environment and see what it says to us.”

Part of what it says to Dr. MacLeod, his fellow churchmen would find quite unsettling. To be in “the true line of the Reformers,” he calls for a renewed doctrine of man’s worth in a machine age, a recovery of a sense of mankind’s unity, and an energetic search for church unity. Then pacifist MacLeod seems to issue a tentative call for rebellion against a nuclear-armed government. He uses Knox’s words: “ ‘To which party must Godly persons attach themselves in the case of a religious nobility resisting an idolatrous Sovereign?’ We all know what his [Knox’s] final answer was.… Unless ‘the sovereignty of the monstrous regiment of the damned bomb’ is annulled soon, may it be that the real celebration of the Reformers will be seen in the witness of those who, for the freedom of men, and, indeed, for the continuance of civilization, unilaterally rise up against the possibility of its use? High treason? Yes indeed. And was not Knox a traitor?”

Dr. MacLeod has long had a considerable following, particularly among students, this being coupled with a long record of being voted down in General Assembly after making vivid and moving speeches for unpopular causes.

His Renaissance-flavored article is silent on such great Reformation themes sounded by Knox as justification by faith and not works, an Augustinian view of sin, the sole mediatorship of Christ, and the unique authority of the Scriptures.

The oft caricatured John Knox, besides having a strong sense of humor, possessed a conviction that the Scottish kirk was in doctrine and in fact part of the true Catholic Church, from which the Church of Rome was deviate. Listen to him as he answers a Jesuit: “… Our kirk is no new found kirk (as the writer blasphemously rayleth) but it is a part of that holy kirk universall which is grounded upon the doctrine of the Prophets and Apostles, having the same antiquitie that the kirk of the Apostles has as concerning doctrine, prayers, administratioun of sacraments and all other things requisite to a particulare kirk.… And, therefore, albeit we have refused Rome and the tyrannie thereof, we think not that we have refused the societie of Christis kirk; but that we are joynit with it, and dayly are fed of our mother’s breastes, because we imbrase no other doctrine than that which first flowed furth of Jerusalem, whose citizenes be grace we awen ourselves to be.…”

The great power of Knox’s speaking led the first Queen Elizabeth’s very critical ambassador to write from Edinburgh that this “one man” was “able in one hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears.” Onetime galley slave of the French and later faithful student of Calvin in Geneva, Knox was to lead the Scots people, says Philip Schaff, “from medieval semi-barbarism into the light of modern civilization” as he gained his place in history beside Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin.

Though he brought Scotland closer to England in helping to break up the “auld alliance” with France, his countrymen have through the centuries believed that to Knox more than any other man Scotland is indebted for its political and religious individuality. Mary Queen of Scots had hoped to use Scotland as an instrument in the international Roman Catholic reaction, to the injury of the national welfare. In contrast, since the union of Scottish and English crowns (1603) and parliaments (1707), the Church of Scotland has acquired popularity as one of the few surviving witnesses of an independent Scottish nationality. Scottish Presbyterianism has stood for freedom from ecclesiastical tyranny and corruption, and also for the rights of the middle and lower classes against the crown and the aristocracy.

Its constitution as contained in the Church of Scotland Act, 1921 (a preparatory act toward the 1929 church union of the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church) sets forth an unmistakable antithesis to Erastianism, “a free Church in a free State”: “Recognition by civil authority of the separate and independent government and jurisdiction of this Church in matters spiritual, in whatever manner such recognition be expressed, does not in any way affect the character of this government and jurisdiction as derived from the Divine Head of the Church alone, or give to the civil authority any right of interference with the proceedings or judgments of the Church within the sphere of its spiritual government and jurisdiction.” While establishment in Scotland has no great practical importance, its emotional value as a perpetual recognition of national Christianity is considered to be large.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Schaff referred to “the Presbyterian Church of Scotland” as the “most flourishing of the Reformed Churches in Europe,” unsurpassed in “general intelligence” and evangelistic and missionary zeal. Indeed, the church bears a distinguished record in the field of biblical exposition through great preaching and enduring commentaries. Yet, more recent assessments have usually been considerably less optimistic than Schaff’s. The church does not pretend it has been “setting the heather afire.” Theological dilutions have dulled the old keen sense of mission. Divinity professors on the same faculty offer widely varying views on basic matters of doctrine. Church attendance is proving a worrisome problem. With some 1,300,000 adult communicants, two of every three members do not attend services with any regularity, a record inferior to that of the smaller Protestant churches and Roman Catholics.

Calvinism is no longer strong, though in Barthian form it has gained new friends through theology professor Thomas F. Torrance of New College, University of Edinburgh. The writer, when a student at New College, recalls a Scots student assuring him of “new life to come” in the church due to the coming of dialectical thought in place of a theology which mediated between Continental neo-orthodoxy and American liberalism. But neo-Kantianism still survives, and Bultmannism is on the horizon.

Friends of Scotland will desire the best for her kirk. The Glasgow Herald was warily hopeful when it recalled the Reformers’ aim to be the making of every citizen into a “profitable member of the commonwealth.… To their success … qualified indeed as it was, Scotland owes the godliness and integrity which once were the marks of her people.… No better celebration of the fourth centenary of the Reformation could be imagined than the return of Scotland, Church and nation, to the ideal of the godly commonwealth.”

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