Calvin Synod Herald, 1973 (73. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1973-03-01 / 3. szám
REFORMÁTUSOK LAPJA 3 WAS JOHN KNOX A PRESBYTERIAN? By Norman V. Hope Professor of Church History Princeton Theological Seminary THE year 1972 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of John Knox, the famous Scottish Reformer. Many persons consider him to be one of the two founding fathers of the Presbyterian Church — the other, of course, being John Calvin of Geneva. That Knox was an ardent and determined Protestant, with a strong Calvinistic bent, admits of no doubt. He was the clerical leader of the Reformation movement in Scotland; his eloquence did much to nerve and inspire the Protestant forces that succeeded in having Roman Catholicism officially abolished in Scotland in 1560. That same year Knox helped to draft the thoroughly Calvinistic Scots Confession, the doctrinal manifesto of the Reformed Church of Scotland. As the first Protestant minister of St. Giles Church in Edinburgh, Knox thundered against the celebration of the Roman Mass in the royal chapel of Queen Mary of Scotland at Holyrood. In his eyes, “one Mass was more fearful than if 10,000 armed enemies were landed in any part of the realm.” But is the view of Knox as a Presbyterian founder an apt assessment? The essence of Presbyterianism is the government of the church by a graded series of courts: kirk session, presbytery, synod, and general assembly. The key unit is the presbytery, for it alone has the authority to admit to and depose from the ministry of word and sacrament. The structure of the Church of Scotland in Knox’s day has been investigated by Professor Gordon Donaldson of Edinburgh University and other scholars. Their research shows that each congregation had its kirk session; the elders on the session were elected as lay officers on a yearly basis, not for life. At the national level there was a general assembly. This was a social and political rather than a specifically ecclesiastical body, for in addition to the church delegates, its membership included official representatives of the nobles and barons as well as of the burghs of the country. The actual day-to-day oversight of the congregations and ministers was carried on by a group of men known as “superintendents,” whose areas of jurisdiction corresponded roughly to the episcopal dioceses of the pre-Reformation church in Scotland. Dr. Donaldson writes in The Scottish Reformation that these superintendents, appointed by the state and commissioned by the general assembly, “performed most of the administrative, disciplinary, and judicial functions which in an Episcopal system pertain to the bishops and in a Presbyterian system to the presbytery.” Their duties included the examination and admission of ministers to pastoral charges. This system of church organization, Donaldson believes, “cannot be called Presbyterian, and if it must be explained at all in later terminology, it might best be described as Congregationalism tempered by episcopacy and Erastianism” (Erastianism means the supremacy of the state in ecclesiastical affairs). Thus there were no presbyteries in the Scottish church during the lifetime of Knox, and he never served under a presbyterian system of church government. It should not occasion surprise that Knox served happily and without protest in a church that was characterized by a combination of Congregationalism and episcopacy, for between 1549 and 1553 he had labored in the areas of Berwick and Newcastle as a clergyman of the Church of England. In point of fact, he was offered the important bishopric of Rochester in the Anglican church in 1552. And although he refused this offer of episcopal nomination, it was not because he did not regard episcopacy as a legitimate and permissible form of church government. Knox’s two sons, Nathaniel and Eleazer, were lifelong members of the Church of England. Indeed, Eleazer was ordained an Anglican clergyman and died as archdeacon of Colchester. The conclusion seems clear: Knox, although an ardent Protestant, was not strictly a Presbyterian and certainly was not one of the founders of the Presbyterian church as it subsequently developed in Scotland. HOW then did Presbyterianism become the officially established pattern of organization in the Church of Scotland? It happened years after Knox’s death; and its chief begetter was Andrew Melville (1545-1622). Melville spent much of his young manhood outside of Scotland — partly in France, where presbyteries were set up after the official organization of the French Protestant (Huguenot) church in 1559, and partly in Geneva, where Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, had moved from a grudging acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the episcopacy to out-and-out condemnation. After Melville returned to Scotland in 1574, he expounded the idea of the parity of ministers, with the corollary that since ministers were all equal, the church must be governed, not by superintendents or bishops, but by committees of ministers to be given the name of presbyteries. Melville argued this proposal with such persuasiveness that in the 1580s presbyteries began to be organized in Scotland and to replace superintendents as church administrators. In 1592, an act of the Scottish Parliament gave official standing to the new presbyterial system of church government. Since then, presbyteries have always been part of the organization of the Church of Scotland. Scottish Presbyterianism still had to fight against
