A Reminder from John Knox

November marks the 400th anniversary of the death of John Knox, clerical leader of the Scottish Reformation. Knox was unquestionably a significant figure in sixteenth-century Britain, in England as well as his native Scotland. Has he anything to say to twentieth-century Protestant Christians?

In at least one respect Knox was out of tune with present-day Protestant thinking: in his attitude toward women, or at least toward women in government. In 1558 he published his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment (Government) of Women, in which he stated,

To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any Realm, Nation, or City is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice [Works, edited by Laing, IV, 373].

Protestant Christians have outgrown and repudiated this kind of male chauvinism; women hold some of their most responsible church offices.

In certain other aspects of Christian life and work, Knox does have something important to say to today’s Protestants, or at least something of which to remind them. For one thing, he did much to make Scotland a Bible-reading and Bible-loving country. The Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages did not encourage laymen to read the Bible, for it believed that an uninstructed reader of Scripture might be led astray into heresy and thereby imperil his immortal soul. But Knox believed that by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Bible was intelligible to the ordinary reader. As he put it to Mary, Queen of Scots, in one of his interviews with her:

The Word of God is plain in itself; and if there appear any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost, who is never contrary to himself, explains the same more clearly in other places; so that there can remain no doubt, but to such as obstinately remain ignorant [John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, edited by Dickinson, II, 18].

Knox encouraged Christian believers to read the Bible. One might say that he gave the Bible to the Scottish people, and it came to occupy the paramount place in Scottish religious devotion that it has retained almost down to the present day—the kind of thing immortalized in Robert Burns’s well known poem “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.”

Knox also believed that Christians should study the Bible in groups as well as individually. He said in his “Letter of Wholesome Counsel”:

Considering that St. Paul calls the congregation the Body of Christ, whereof everyone of us is a member, teaching us thereby that no member is of sufficiency to sustain and feed itself without the help and support of another; I think it necessary for the conference of Scriptures, that assemblies of brethren be had [Works, IV, 137].

In a day when many Christian congregations are being revitalized through the leavening influences of small groups that meet regularly for Bible study, this recommendation of Knox is much to the point.

Knox was a great preacher, deeply convinced of the value and importance of the pulpit in spreading the Christian Gospel and building up believers. The Protestant Reformation produced some outstanding pulpiteers—Luther in Wittenberg, Zwingli in Zurich, and Calvin in Geneva—but perhaps none more eloquent and effective than Knox. There is impressive evidence to the power of his preaching. The English ambassador Thomas Randolph wrote of Knox that “the voice of one man is able in one hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears” (preface to Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, edited by Dickinson, I, xlvii). When Knox labored as a minister in England between 1549 and 1553, he was offered not only the bishopric of Rochester but also the vicarage of All Hallows, Bread Street, one of the most important preaching stations in London at that time. After Protestantism was legally established as the state religion in Scotland in 1560, Knox became minister of St. Giles, Edinburgh, perhaps the most significant and influential Scottish pupit of that day.

Few of his sermons have survived, but from what is known of his pulpit ministry it is clear that he was a prophetic preacher: he based his sermons solidly on the Bible, the revealed word of God, and sought to apply its message to the religious situation of his day. In particular, he did much to alert his fellow Protestants to the menace of a resurgent Romanism in Scotland since Queen Mary, who ruled in Scotland between 1561 and 1567, was a devout Roman Catholic who would have liked to overthrow the Reformation settlement and restore Scotland to the papal allegiance.

Today the value of preaching is being questioned even in some Protestant circles. Knox can serve as a pointed reminder that the Protestant Reformation was fed and spread mainly by prophetic preaching. There is no reason to think that such preaching is any less influential today: it still pleases God “by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Cor. 1:21).

Knox placed a high value on the two Christian sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and especially the latter. The essential feature of the Lord’s Supper is, of course, not anything that Christians do but something Jesus Christ does for them and in them. Said Knox,

The Lord, Jesus, by earthly and visible things set before us, lifteth us up to heavenly and invisible things—He prepares this spiritual banquet—He witnesses that He himself was the living bread—He sets forth the bread and wine to eat and drink. He giveth unto us Himself—and all this he does through the power of the Holy Ghost [Works, III, 73].

Then he adds:

Herewith also the Lord Jesus gathers us unto one visible body, so that we be members one of another and make altogether one whereof Jesus Christ is the only Head.

Knox believed that the Lord’s Supper was primarily the sacrament and symbol of Christian unity and as such should be celebrated regularly by believing Christians, even if they were not yet fully organized into a functioning congregation. Ever since Knox’s day the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the Church of Scotland has been a very moving and meaningful Christian service.

Many Christian churches today are experiencing what has been called a liturgical renaissance. One aspect of this is a renewed emphasis on the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Knox would have fully approved of this development as a contribution to Christian unity as well as to Christian renewal.

George M. Marsden is associate professor of history at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has the Ph.D. (Yale University) and has written “The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience.”

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.