239 - The Faith of John Knox

The Faith of John Knox
By James I. McCord

IN late November, 1972, in Scotland's old capital, Edinburgh, the four hundredth anniversary of the death of John Knox will be commemorated. Thomas Carlyle once said that Knox "is the one Scotchman to whom of all others, his country and the world owe a debt." But while the place of Knox is undoubtedly established in the history of Scotland, his personality remains an enigma and his detractors in every generation outnumber his admirers. Earlier this year Knox was portrayed on Broadway as a character in Robert Bolt's Vivat, Vivat Regina!, a drama of the two queens Mary Stuart and Elizabeth, and his image remained the same as the public has come to expect. He was Mary's irascible opponent, a malignant spirit, somewhat crude, a loud and bombastic schemer.

There is another Knox, one with far greater verisimilitude, who will be remembered this fall. This one is primarily a preacher, one who "coveted peace, but lived and died in strife," a reformer who led the transformation of his nation and church in a single generation, a private person thrust into a public role, a Christian sustained by a warm, mystical piety that was strikingly revealed on his deathbed.

I

It is not surprising that Knox is being officially remembered in the year of his death, for that date, November 24, 1572, is well known. The date of his birth remains uncertain, although it is now generally believed to be 1514. Almost nothing is known about his early life. Though he was long thought to have been a student at Glasgow, it is now fairly certain that he studied with John Major in the University of St. Andrews. He was ordained to the priesthood, acted as a notary in and around Haddington, the neighborhood in which he was born, and served as tutor to children of lairds in that region

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Knox first appeared on the scene carrying a two-handed sword and ready to use it in defense of George Wishart. Wishart was a gentle, peace-loving man, a "blessed martyr of God," who profoundly swayed Knox. An evangelical preacher who had been influenced by the Swiss reformation, he was betrayed and handed over to Cardinal Beaton, taken to St. Andrews, put in the dungeon, tried for heresy, and executed at the stake. He was not Scotland's first martyr for the faith, nor would he be the last, but his preaching and his deep piety were decisive in confirming Knox in the Reformed faith.

Events moved rapidly after the death of Wishart. Three months later St. Andrew's Castle was taken, Cardinal Beaton slain, and the stronghold on the North Sea was occupied by a small band. Later Knox was persuaded to enter the Castle and almost literally forced to become a preacher of the Word of God. Knox was now thirty-two. He was, in the words of T. M. Lindsay, "a silent, slow ripening man, with quite a talent for keeping himself in the background." Now the die was cast, and from the time of his first sermon, an exposition of the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel, it was clear that the Protestant cause had a formidable spokesman, one whose voice could bludgeon and flail against the papacy and its allies, against idolatry and all else not conformable with the Scriptures. At this time it was said, "Master George Wishart spake never so plainly, and yet he was burnt: so will he be."

Knox's fate was to be otherwise. The remainder of his life was to be spent in the cause of the Reformation, and J. S. McEwen suggests that he may have lived "beyond the hour of [his] triumph, to see the inevitable tarnishing of his vision, and to grow bitter in disillusionment." But all this was ahead as Knox surrendered with the other members of the garrison and began a sentence as a galley slave, which lasted nineteen months until his release early in 1549 through the intervention of the English government. There followed a period of nearly five years as minister in Berwick, Newcastle, and London, until with the accession of Mary Tudor, "Bloody Mary," he was forced to flee for safety to the Continent, but not before castigating the crowds for the warm welcome given the Queen when she entered London. It is common knowledge that Knox during his sojourn in England declined preferment twice, once the bishopric of Rochester and again the living of All Hallows, London, just as later he would decline appointment to superintendency in Scotland.

He remained on the Continent during the years between 1554 and 1558, save for a brief visit to Scotland in 1555, preached to the stormy congregation of Marian exiles in Frankfurt, to English refugees in Geneva, visited Bullinger in Zurich, kept in close touch with events in Scotland, and was said to have faster and

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more reliable intelligence in political matters than Cecil, who had a network of informers at his disposal. Without doubt Calvin's influence on Knox was powerful at this time, but modem historians such as Hugh Watt and James McEwen refuse to allow that Knox was a mere reflection of the thought of the Frenchman. Jasper Ridley insists that while "Knox took his ideas of Church organization and moral discipline from Calvin, [he] differed from him completely on the question of resistance to authority."

In May, 1557, Knox received a letter inviting him to return to Scotland. The Protestants were finally organized, the Queen Regent, Mary Guise, seemed disillusioned with the friars and was not persecuting Protestants, and the faithful whom he had left behind were prepared to "jeopard lives and goods in the forward-setting of the glory of God." Even this summons did not move Knox to leave Geneva and his congregation until more than four months later when, as he later wrote, "he could not refuse that vocation, unless he would declare himself rebellious to his God and unmerciful to his country." He traveled as far as Dieppe, where he planned to take a ship immediately to Scotland, but here a new letter arrived with information of more recent events and with the advice that the time was not ripe for his return.

II

It was here on the French coast, frustrated and fuming, that Knox wrote his famous manifesto, "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women." It is this ill-advised document that has done so much to discredit Knox in the eyes of the world, just as Calvin's role in the burning of Servetus is the one event that is so often associated with his career and is used to illustrate his real character and views. "The First Blast” was aimed at Mary Tudor and Mary Guise, but unknown to Knox Mary Tudor was dead. Elizabeth, without friends and with her legitimacy challenged, took his attack personally and never forgave the author.

Knox's outburst was a mistake. He had let his temper get in the way of his cause. When a friend criticized him for his attack, he acknowledged his error: “My rude vehemency and inconsidered affirmations, which may appear rather to proceed from choler than of zeal and reason, I do not excuse." But he added, characteristically, ". . . to have used any other title more plausible, thereby to have allured the world by any art, as I never purposed, so do I not yet purpose; to me, it is enough to say that black is not white, and man's tyranny and foolishness is not God's perfect obedience."

Knox returned to Scotland in 1559, and by this time events had moved to such a state that it has been said, "It was Knox or nothing." The nation faced civil war, the masses were unruly,

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and all this in what has been called “the most critical [period] in the whole history of the Reformation,” 1559 to 1567. Knox’s cause triumphed, and a nation was reformed, “with the sudden ness of a lightning flash,” in the space of fourteen months. The confrontations with Mary were to follow after the widowed queen returned from France in 1561, but the General Assembly of the Church had already begun to meet, the Scots Confession had been approved, and Knox had been settled into his congregation in Edinburgh. A decade of frustration was to ensue before his death, for the re-organization of the church had gone awry, but the tide had turned, and the Reformed faith was recognized in Scotland.

III

No attempt has been made here to do justice to the life of this stubborn and complex man. His story has been often told, lyrically by Lord Eustace Percy more than thirty years ago and comprehensively by Jasper Ridley in a volume published in 1968, to mention only two favorite biographies. And Principal Hugh Watt’s Stone Lectures, John Knox in Controversy have done much to put the Scottish reformer in a more balanced perspective. But the riddle of Knox and his significance remains. Was he primarily a political leader, a precursor of revolutionaries who were to follow down to the present? Or was he first and last a preacher of the Word of Cod, a powerful, freeing Word that unleashed the new impulses of freedom that were a by-product of the church’s Reformation?

Lindsay sees in the interviews of Queen Mary and Knox “the first clash of autocratic kingship and the hitherto unknown power of the people.” This was “the question of questions between them,” and “modern democracy came into being in that answer.” Ridley similarly maintains that “Knox was one of the important theorists of modern times,” who went beyond Calvin in his doc trine of resistance to rulers by placing “far more emphasis on the duty of the individual, whatever his rank, to resist evil rulers by all means at his disposal, including armed force.” Ridley traces the revolutionary political philosophy of the English Puritans to the ideas of Knox.

Each generation should be reminded that an incalculable political debt is owed to Calvin and to Knox. Percy contends that the word “Reformation” is incorrectly used and has led to the writing of much bad history. “Protestantism was not a reform; it was a revolution . . . a shifting of the seat of authority.” But the tendency today is to attribute far greater importance to the influence of the left wing of the Reformation in the rise of modern democracy. The writing of history is selective, written in the context of the historian and his period, and, as George H. Mead

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suggests, each new generation sees a different Caesar crossing the Rubicon. Perhaps today’s revisionists are reflecting more accurately twentieth-century Protestantism than the movement in the sixteenth century and are reminding us that whatever revolutionary character our forebears had has long since been lost or compromised by their descendants who have settled for a domesticated national religion.

IV

The key to Knox, to my mind, does not lie in his political philosophy. The major issue for him was the life and wholeness of the church, and his aim was to build up rather than to tear down. He was an exponent of the Word of God, a parish preacher, a re-builder of an ancient edifice that had fallen into disrepute and near-ruin. His work can be commemorated in 1972 without fuel ing the old fires of religions controversy by scoring points on medieval Roman Catholicism, since all traditions of the Christian church today face the urgent need of reform and reflect many of the problems Knox faced when he returned to Scotland. These problems are basically how can the church’s confession be renewed so that she may faithfully confess the gospel in her time; how can the church be re-structured so as to be faithful to her Lord and flexible to meet the needs of the present; and how can personal faith and vital Christian experience be rekindled in the life of the people.

To each of these questions Knox addressed himself, directly to the first two, and throughout his ministry, to the third. The Scots Confession written by the “six Johns,” of whom one was Knox, was completed in four days and was the response to the first. It is unmistakably sixteenth century, in harmony with earlier Reformed confessions, ecumenical and catholic in character, and warmer and more personal than the Westminster Confession that was destined to displace it in the next century. Its Preface still cannot be read without experiencing something of the joy of its authors (“Long have we thirsted, clear brethren, to have made known to the world the doctrine which we profess and for which we have suffered abuse and danger”) and of their humility (“pro testing that if any man will note in our Confession any chapter or sentence contrary to God’s Holy Word, that it would please him of his gentleness and for Christian charity’s sake to inform us of it in writing; and we, upon our honour, do promise him by God’s grace we shall give him satisfaction from the Word of God, that is, from Holy Scripture, or else whe shall alter whatever he can prove to be wrong”).

It is small wonder that such a document continues to he influential. It is the basis of Karl Barth’s Gifford Lectures in 1938 and was included in the Book of Confessions of the United Presby-

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terian Church in the U.S.A. in 1967. As Barth has suggested, "The confession of a church, if it was once a good confession, cannot lose its message just because it has lost its significance as a standard of the church," and the strong word of grace of the gospel continues to be the significant message of the Scots Confession for all time.

Knox and his colleagues fared less well in their attempt to re-structure the church and her institutions. A Book of Discipline was drawn up, which included a Reformed polity, but its recommendations for the use of ecclesiastical properties and endowments for eductional and charitable purposes were never legally approved. Nevertheless, a democratic form of government was now installed, beginning with the kirk session, and the three medieval universities were renewed and a fourth, Edinburgh, founded. The far-reaching vision of Knox is nowhere more evident than in the scheme for the renewal of the whole church, her government, her schools, and her ministry of mercy. McEwen in his Croall Lectures, The Faith of John Knox, claims that Knox's aim was to restore a eucharistic church, one sacramental as well as evangelical. Perhaps this is the clue to the breadth of his application of the Christian faith to the needs of his nation.

Evangelical and eucharistic may also be the best description of Knox's personal faith. Percy comments that "at the end of the fifteenth century the future of Christian civilization depended mainly on the answer to one question: could popular mysticism be absorbed into the life and worship of the church?" The Reformation, beginning with Luther, was unusually successful in gathering up these impulses and in channeling them into the life of the church. It was more than a reform; it was a renascence, a new birth of spiritual experience and fervor.

To be sure, little is known of Knox's personal faith. We do not have his sermons to enlighten us. Moreover, he was a reticent man who, like Calvin, refused to unpack his spiritual bag in public, a good reason for suspecting that it was well-filled. His confidence was in Jesus Christ and His word of grace, and not in his spiritual prowess. But there is a clue to his faith, and it is found in the words directed to his wife when be was on his deathbed: "Go read where I cast my first anchor." This must have been a well known request, and she read from the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of St. John, the High Priestly Prayer, the moving language of Jesus' self-consecration and intercession for his disciples and his church. Here he had first cast anchor, in a personal relation to the living Christ.

V

Is not this the experience people are seeking today, the new life in Christ? We are aware of the reaction that is taking place

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in the church and in society. Miss Iris Murdoch calls it a "stripping down of the scene." Metaphysics and theological systems are being rejected along with institutions and their programs. Credibility has become the problem everywhere. But Miss Murdoch adds that "it has also perhaps made possible a kind of healing agnosticism, a natural mysticism, a new humility which favors clarity and plain speech and the expression of obvious and unpretentious truths: truths that are often unconnected and unhallowed by system." The church today, as in the sixteenth century, is called to re-create itself by returning to the deep and obvious and ordinary things of human existence to which the gospel of Jesus Christ is addressed. John Knox understood this, and he was able to lead such a movement from the pulpit. He was a Reformed preacher, only this and nothing more, and his genius lay in the abiding dimension where first he cast anchor.