"OUR
STORY"
20.
John Knox and
Presbyterian
Polity (mid 1500s)
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How
was it that Protestantism first came to Scotland?
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Scotland's
interest in Protestantism came at a time when the Scottish were very sensitive
to their own national feelings. England had long been a problem for
Scotland. But by the mid 1500s France was just as big a problem.
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Scotland
had been under the rule of the Stuart family and now the rights of the
throne belonged to Mary Stuart, a young woman engaged to marry Francis,
the Dauphin or Prince of France. When she moved to France to be with
Francis the Scottish felt a bit betrayed. She left the rule of Scotland
to her rigidly Catholic mother, Mary of Guise, who would serve as regent
until Mary Stuart came of age. The Guise family was well known for
its hatred of Protestants.
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It was
also well understood that when Mary Stuart finally did marry Francis, Scotland
would be offered to him as a gift. Scotland would thus lose its position
as an independent nation and become merely a province of France.
The Scots did not like this idea at all.
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Rumors
about Protestantism were swirling through Scotland--and the people seem
sincerely interested. Even the noblemen were interested. George
Wishart preached the Protestant vision to the Scots--based on his own interest
in the ideas of Martin Luther. In essence Wishart was a Lutheran--and
a very prominent voice in the affairs of the Scottish church.
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One of
those who became closely involved in Wishart's preaching and teaching was
a young Catholic priest named John Knox.
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When in
1546 the Catholic Cardinal of Scotland arrested Wishart and had him burned
at the stake as a heretic, mobs of Scots went wild. They finally
attacked and killed the Cardinal and took over his castle at St. Andrews.
Others began to rally to their cause--including John Knox, who came to
St. Andrews to preach to and inspire the rebels against the Catholic cause.
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Mary of
Guise called in French troops to crush the rebellion at St. Andrews and
punish the rebels. Eventually they overwhelmed the Protestant rebels
and led them off to captivity, including John Knox who was put in chains
and forced to work as a galley slave on French ships.
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Through
the intervention of the pro-Protestant English King Edward VI, Knox was
finally freed--after having served 19 months of this horrible sentence.
Knox journey to England--now a Protestant minister rather than a Catholic
priest and a radical voice for the Protestant cause. For the next
few years Knox served as a pastor in some English churches, and then was
called into service as royal chaplain. It during this time that he
became part of the group that was assigned the task of rewriting England's
Book of Common Prayer (which in the end he felt had not gone nearly far
enough in the call for reform of English worship).
How
did Knox become such a supporter of Calvin's form of Protestantism?
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When Edward
died in 1553 and Mary Tudor ("Bloody Mary") replaced him on the
English throne, Knox decided that it was time to get out of England.
He eventually came to Geneva, Switzerland where he found Calvin's teachings
to be very much to his liking. The two men got on together very well.
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Here he
joined up with a number of other English and Scottish refugees living in
Geneva--and together they put together an English translation of the Bible,
known as the "Geneva Bible." (This would soon become the
Bible of choice of English Protestants--such as the Pilgrims and Puritans
who came to America to build a new Christian commonwealth in the early
1600s).
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And here
in Geneva Knox first outlined in the tract, Faithful Admonition
(1554) his fervently democratic views on the rights of common people to
overthrow godless rulers--a political view even more radical than Calvin's.
This was to find a sympathetic audience back in Scotland.
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In 1555
Knox dared to return to Scotland for six months and to preach his strongly
politicized gospel.
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But finding
the situation still very dangerous, he returned to Geneva in 1556.
There he became pastor of the English church (1556-1558).
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During
this sojourn in Geneva he also published his "First Blast of the Trumpet
against the Monstrous Regiment of Women" (1558), harshly critical of the
rule of the two female Catholic rulers: Mary of Guise, regent of
Scotland, and Mary Tudor, Queen of England. [His anti-female language
did nothing to endear Knox to Elizabeth who became Queen of England in
1558!]
How
did Knox and the Scottish Noblemen finally bring Protestantism to Scotland?
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Meanwhile
in Scotland in 1557, a group of Protestant Scottish noblemen, called the
"Lords of the Congregation," signed a covenant among themselves declaring
for Protestantism in Scotland. The motivations were mainly political--though
Knox, even from the distance away of Geneva Switzerland, had been writing
them and giving them ideas and understandings that they would need in order
to take such a strong position against established Catholic authority.
Even from a distance Knox was shaping events in Scotland
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Then in
1558 Mary Stuart finally married the Dauphin of France (future King Francis
II of France) finally putting Scotland in the position of one day becoming
merely a French province under a French king. Anti-French, and thus
anti-Catholic, feelings now grew stronger throughout Scotland.
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Realizing
that the situation was now ripe for Protestantism in Scotland, Knox, who
had been in close correspondence with the "Lord's of the Congregation,"
returned to Scotland in May of 1559.
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His first
sermon ignited the flames of anti-French and anti-Catholic revolt.
In the town of Perth where he had delivered the sermon, mobs destroyed
monastic buildings--provoking Mary of Guise to strike back with her French
troops. But the result was only a deadlock. Meanwhile the mobs
grew even more enraged, burning and plundering monasteries and churches
(to the horror of Knox who had not intended for things to get so completely
out of hand).
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Then in
July of that year (1559) Henry II died and his son Francis (Mary Stuart's
husband) became French king. More French troops were then rushed
to Scotland to help Mary Stuart's mother, Mary of Guise, put down the Protestant
uprising. Things began to look grim for the Reformers.
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Then in
early 1560 Elizabeth, realizing that a Catholic victory in Scotland would
give her a Catholic enemy to the North as well as to the East (France),
sent English troops to help the Protestants. This proved to be very
important help.
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But even
more helpful to the Protestant cause was the death of Mary of Guise in
June of 1560. With her death the French and Catholic cause was left
helpless.
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A treaty
signed in Edinburgh in early July between France and England called for
the removal of all French troops from Scotland and the barring of all Frenchmen
from political posts in Scotland. But Scotland was also to remain
free from English influence.
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This treaty
not only secured national independence for Scotland, it opened the way
to Protestant control of the nation.
How
did Knox reshape the Scottish Church into a "Presbyterian" form?
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In August
the Scottish Parliament declared itself a Protestant nation and adopted
the Scots Confession prepared by Knox and five other clergy at the
Parliament's request. Catholicism was not to be practiced in Scotland,
under penalty of death.
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Knox then
set about the task of reorganizing the Scottish church. In December
of 1560 a General Assembly of the Scottish church was held. The following
month, January of 1561, the first Book of Discipline was presented
to the Scottish Parliament in which Calvin's "Presbyterian" system of church
government in Geneva Switzerland was adopted for the entire Scottish nation.
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Each parish
was to be governed by a pastor and council of Elders (forerunner of the
church "session"), elected by the congregation in recognition of
their "call" by God to leadership.
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In larger
towns containing several parishes, joint meetings of representatives of
those parishes would be called as "presbyteries."
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Regionally
the church was to be supervised by even larger councils called "synods."
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And the
entire Scottish church was to be supervised by a national council called
the "General Assembly."
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Knox also
attempted to define in the Book of Discipline a system of education
and welfare to be supervised by the reformed Scottish church--financed
from the proceeds of the sale of church abbeys, landholdings and other
assets. Here he was following the Calvinist vision of the church
as the leading instructor and caregiver of the faithful, even more vital
to life than the civil authorities.
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But Parliament
balked at this idea. Instead the money that came from the confiscations
of the former Catholic church went directly to enrich the Lords.
Consequently in Scotland the church was unable to give support to the social
vision that Calvin had outlined and Knox had taken up as his hope for Scotland.
Indeed, the Scottish church became notable for its great poverty.
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Knox busied
himself with reforming the nature of worship in the Scottish church--most
of the reforms having been first formulated in Geneva when he was pastoring
the English congregation there. These reforms he published in 1564
in his new Book of Common Order. Following the teachings and
practices of Calvin's Geneva (and Zwingli before him), Knox took the stand
that if there could be found no support in scripture for a particular practice
of the church, then it was to be done away with.
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Thus among
other things he did away with all of the old feast days, leaving only Sunday
as a holy day.
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And also
with Calvin, he moved to free up worship from its long-held ritualism--though
worship was still to be conducted "decently and in order."
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For instance,
sermons were to be the result of the personal inspiration and careful preparation
by the pastor--not the fixed lectionaries ("readings") which the old church
used to distribute to its relatively uneducated clergy.
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Also,
ritualized prayers were to be discouraged--to be replaced by prayers uttered
from the heart.
Copyright
© 2002 by Miles H. Hodges. All Rights Reserved.