JOHN KNOX

In Judaism, there is an ancient but enduring tradition of disputation. It dates all the way back to the faith’s very beginning, to when Abraham argued with God that if so much as one righteous man could be found in the doomed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities should be spared. Later, Job protested to God that his misfortunes were undeserved, and that they were therefore at odds with any belief in the principle of divine justice. On the same issue, there have been rabbis who go so far as to put God on trial, so to speak, for permitting the outrageous sufferings of the Jewish people — this despite the loud assertions of several prophets that such sufferings were a due punishment for their sins. That assertion has tended, since the Holocaust, to ring a bit hollow.

On a more modest level than arguing with God, there have been many debates, not always rancorous, between rabbis, on points of doctrine. And it has always been considered legitimate for members of a congregation to disagree with their rabbi. And this is as it should be; for a rabbi, by definition, is a teacher, not an authority figure.

There is a parallel to that in the Gentile world. In Scotland, where education is revered by the poor, both for its own sake and as an escape-hatch from poverty, teachers are highly respected; and the term of address for a teacher, in Scots dialect, is Dominie. The term is also used as a form of address for a Presbyterian minister: it implies that he is as much a teacher as he is a figure of authority; in the former role, he can be legitimately argued with.

In Christianity, taking issue with God was deemed both sacrilegious and blasphemous. To do so was to be defined as an heretic; and within the Roman Catholic Church, the authorities punished heresy with at least excommunication, and quite often with execution. Even when heresy was not involved, the clergy, from the papal top down to the parish priest, were all authority figures, and lay obedience was compulsory. Disputation, in any ordinary sense, simply did not exist. The only semblance of it that did occur was as an exercise in formal logic, conducted in mediaeval theological colleges; but it was academic, dispassionate, and ritualized.

Within the Reformed Churches, ministers did not have, by virtue of their office, quite the same magisterial privileges. Some of the charismatic leaders commanded a compliant respect from the laity; and that verged on obedience when faced with a personality like Martin Luther’s, who was forceful, intolerant, and prone to ill temper. By and large, however, lay church-goers were free to disagree on points of doctrine or morals; and if their disagreement was either fundamental or personal, they could always go and worship elsewhere.

The only Reform equivalent of excommunication was disfellowship. In certain denominations, a contentious member might be called before a panel of the elders, chastised, and expelled from the congregation. This happened occasionally among the early Methodists, and still happens among the Mormons. Most of the time, though, some kind of accommodation is reached: the Anglicans, for example, are masters of compromise.

Within the Reform traditions, there has been, in some quarters, a moralistic rigidity that inflicts on souls a damaging wound of guilt. This is not uncommon in the Presbyterian Church, where a strong emphasis is frequently laid on Sin. In the same context, however, there is a sturdy streak of insubordination, a willingness to answer back under reproof. This is exemplified by a famous exchange in a country kirk in the Scottish Highlands.

The minister there, one Sabbath, was preaching ferociously on eternal punishment, addressing his flock as a bunch of miserable sinners. “Ye’ll a’ get what ye richly desairve”, he ranted. “Ye’ll gang to Hell wi’ weepin’ an’ wailin’ an’ gnashin’ o’ teeth!”

“Ay, but Dominie”, called out an elderly crofter from the rear pew, gumming his words, “I hae nae teeth”.

It was a riposte worthy of any self-confident Jew speaking up in Temple, or of any recalcitrant monk in a Benedictine Abbey, refusing an order from his Superior on grounds of conscience.

Normally, however, in a Roman Catholic monastery, male or female, monks and nuns observe a vow of obedience to their Superiors. In the Reformed Churches, by contrast, members of a congregation may feel an obligation to behave according to the precepts of their denomination, but fundamentally they are to be guided by their own consciences: they owe no obedience to some Moderator. In seventeenth-century Edinburgh, an Anglican Dean, supported by his Bishop, certainly commanded no submissiveness from lay people in the Little Kirk, when he tried to conduct a service according to his own Order of Worship: it caused a near riot; and in it the legendary Jenny Geddes threw a folding stool at his head, denouncing him in broad Lallans.

That was in 1637. There was not yet peaceful co-existence between the Anglican and the Presbyterian folds in Scotland. Earlier, in Knox’s day, the battle had been between Reform and Rome, and it involved more violence than the mere throwing of a stool: would-be reformers often had to flee for their lives. Over time, Knox prevailed, but not by a matching authoritarianism: rather, he won the day by virtue of his preaching, which was eloquent, fiery, and convincing. He had a great talent for it; but it was not something that came easily to him, for his natural temperament was quiet and scholarly. Duty, however, drove him into the pulpit, and his preaching roused a people and founded a Church.

In so doing, Knox was the occasion of much religious dispute. Within his own circle, he had neither rivals nor opponents. But his attacks on the established Churches, Anglican or Roman, were ferocious, whether directed at them as institutions or at their prelates, and despite their ferocity were grounded in reasoning, not in emotion. Mostly he trained his fire on divines, considering the theologically unschooled to be beneath his notice — in relation to the laity, in fact, he was kindly, approachable, and gentle: the powerful, though, in Church or State, were fair game; he never suffered pretentious fools gladly.

In keeping with his intellectual bent, Knox did not confine his religious arguments to spontaneous preaching or his political arguments to overt or covert manoeuvring: he relied often on the printed word, publishing his views on burning issues of the day, especially those that pertained to the organizing of a Reformed Church in Scotland and to its survival in the face of Catholic oppression. His writings, on all topics, were lucid and persuasive. Two of them, of practical intent, were of lasting usefulness: a carefully worded confession of faith; and a liturgy. One other text, a political one, became notorious in its time and, ever since, has remained famous, if not much read, because of its catchy title, “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”.

Readers today, if they are not well versed in church history or in etymology, may not know of Knox’s pamphlet as a purely political diatribe, and may not know that the word, “regiment” does not refer to a military unit, but to a regime, usually monarchical, of government. They think of the phrase a “monstrous regiment of women” as rooted in male chauvinism; and if they dislike the feminist movement, they sometimes use the phrase to vilify its apostles.

In fact, though, the phrase was not an attack on women in general, for Knox was twice a happily married man, but on women in positions of official power. The pamphlet was published in 1560, two years after Elisabeth I became Queen of England. She was mortally offended by it, and banished him from the realm.

To modern sensibilities, the text is, indeed, offensive. There have been several enlightened prime ministers or presidents, in recent years, who have served their countries with distinction: women like Corazon Aquino, Benazir Bhutto, Gro Brundtland, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Mair. One cannot perhaps count Sirimavo Bandaranaike or Margaret Thatcher among them. But contemporary politicians, on the whole, have a more wholesome record than many of their male counterparts.

Knox’s views, of course, have to be measured in the context of their period and culture. He was raised Roman Catholic, and he inherited a stance that excluded women from the priesthood; a stance inherited, in turn, from Judaism. The prejudice persists into the present century, both in Roman Catholicism and in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism: only in Reform churches and Reform synagogues are there women clergy.

In his progressive thinking, Knox did not go so far as to advocate the ordination of women — for Presbyterians, that would come later. This was perhaps his one point of agreement with the Roman Catholic Church. Otherwise, its practices and doctrines were anathema to him. And he was not alone in that. He spent time in Geneva, where John Calvin was very much a kindred spirit. They shared a dislike of anything that smacked of superstition, such as the veneration of relics. They inveighed against the doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserted that the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass literally became the body and blood of Christ. They loathed idolatry, and expelled statues from their places of worship; and in the same vein of austerity, they denounced any indulgence in elaborate rituals, ornate decor, or complicated music. They detested the corrupt practice of simony, by which ecclesiastical salesmen, for profit, sold preferment to ambitious clerics, and sold to layfolk priced reductions of sentence to Purgatory. Nor was that the only kind of corruption afflicting the Roman Catholic Church in their day, for avarice, lust, and greed were rampant among the senior ordained, and popes even had armies to reinforce their worldly power. However, perhaps their most striking difference, and bone of contention, was in the matter of language, as it touched on both liturgy and scripture: it was important to them that worship be conducted in the mother tongue of the congregation; but it was especially important, in their view, that the Bible be available in the vernacular. They insisted that all believers had a right and a duty to base their faith on a Biblical foundation; and that would only be feasible if the faithful could read the Bible for themselves and draw their own conclusions, rather than having to be guided by prelates alone — indeed, this very contention threatened to undermine one of the mainstays of Roman authority.

That authority was formally rejected in many places during the sixteenth century: in Germany, by Martin Luther; in Switzerland, by John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli; also in France, by John Calvin; in England, by Thomas Cranmer; and in Scotland, by John Knox. The Presbyterian Church, which he founded, put down deep roots, and it has continued to flourish ever since, both there and, through emigration, in other parts of the world. Its strengths have lain in a tradition of sound theological scholarship, in wide familiarity with the vernacular Bible, and in freedom of conscience as a right and an obligation. If it has weaknesses, they have lain elsewhere: in a deliberate plainness of worship that fails to lift the heart on the high strains of great music; in a homiletic emphasis on Sin as a persistent flaw in human nature; and in the consequent burden of guilt inculcated in the individual soul. The latter hardnesses have been much softened in modern times, and Presbyterianism has been generally successful, like other branches of Christendom, in shepherding the faithful along the road to God.

Nothing is perfect. No denomination is immune to hypocrisy within its walls. Notoriously, the archetypal figure of hypocrisy in Scots Presbyterianism was limned in the acerbic poem “Holy Willie’s Prayer”, by Robert Burns — who was himself no saint. Based on an actual Elder o’ the kirk, a William Fisher of Mauchline, it portrays a self-righteous condemner of any sinners given to drink, to swearing, to card-playing; but at the same time, much given to lechery himself, he makes little of his own sinning, because of his rigid belief in himself as one of the Elect, predestined for grace regardless of anything he does. It was a belief held by many Calvinists, which others have usually found indefensible, arrogant and self-exculpatory. But even the vast majority of Presbyterians, then or since, who did not share that belief, still were affected by other aspects of the stern Calvinistic moralizing: it was not directed only, or even mainly, at booze, oaths, and cards; it laid an extra and censorious emphasis on Sex, as a temptation to either adultery or fornication. In this, the kirk was no different from other churches, which have long been skewed by the Pauline oppression of the sexual self as intrinsically sinful. There is, of course, no reason for advocates of moral behaviour to look lightly on sexual misconduct. But arguably such advocacy should not make a special fetish of sexual reproof, while paying less heed to other wickednesses. In the present day in the West, for example, there is a widespread indulgence in a kind of sexual freedom which the monogamous find offensive; but that offence pales in comparison with the major besetting sin of the West, the widespread culture of greed.

Nothing suggests that John Knox, in his private life, was either licentious or greedy. He may have steered Presbyterianism into a Hibernian version of Calvinist strictness. But he left his followers an admirable legacy of reasoned argument, accessible scripture, and unpretentious worship. In his own singular but devoted way, he was a good shepherd and a loving disciple.

Knox was born c. 1514 in East Lothian, Scotland, probably into a farming family. Educated first at a local grammar-school, he went on to university, probably at St Andrew’s, and studied for the Roman Catholic priesthood, being ordained not later than 1540. In three years he was being promoted within the Church, but this was at odds with his growing conviction that a Protestant Reformation was the will of God. He quickly became leader of the reform movement in Scotland, but was not able to exercise that leadership uninterruptedly. Political turmoil within Scotland and in relation to England, France, and Spain constrained his activities and forced him more than once into exile. While abroad, he became minister of the Genera congregation of English exiles, with a firmly Puritan bent; and publication of the Geneva Bible in 1550, for example, accorded with the importance he attached to the role that vernacular scripture should play in the life of the laity. On his return to Scotland, he laboured mightily to secure a Protestant future in his native land. This he succeeded in doing, despite vehement government efforts to suppress that cause. He was ably supported by loyal followers, but the chief credit for success belongs to him, for his unyielding vision and his huge capacity for hard work. The Presbyterian Church was his enduring legacy. He died in 1572, in Edinburgh.