The Religion of Early Scottish Protestants

Abstract

In Scotland as elsewhere, Protestant reform began as a clerical revolt within the Established Church. Without exception, the earliest leaders of reform in Scotland were disenchanted ecclesiastics, men whose backgrounds were essentially academic and clerical, men who possessed sufficient technical training and expertise to appreciate, before the sloganizing began, the significance (if not all the implications) of Luther’s academic revolt in 1517, and the relevance of his challenging ideas on salvation and his attack on the ‘treasury of merit’: not even the saints, he believed, had sufficient merit to save themselves. Luther, after all, was an Augustinian friar, priest, university teacher (as, for that matter, were Wyclif and Hus), and doctor of theology before his break with Rome. His thinking merited scrutiny, appraisal, and debate, even if only for refutation; and if nothing else, scholastic methodology had fostered theological speculation and critical discussion within an accepted framework of debate. Besides, Erasmus’s initial reaction to Luther’sNinety-Five Theseswas conciliatory: he considered Luther’s beliefs would be approved by all men, apart from a few points on purgatory; and he was later to observe, in 1519, that Luther’s detractors were intent on ‘condemning passages in the writings of Luther which are deemed orthodox when they occur in the writings of Augustine and Bernard’.

Renaissance and reformation revisited

“…24 A similar progression, albeit under a different confessional sign, from catholic reform through Erasmian evangelism to Lutheran adherence, stamped the career of that internationally renowned scholar and humanist, George Buchanan. 25 In a festschrift in honour of James Cameron it is entirely appropriate that so many contributors should highlight what linked rather than what separated sixteenthcentury Christian reformers, for they thereby reflect his own scholarly concerns over four decades. What receives less attention, however, is the question of the persistence of catholic beliefs and practices within nominally protestant territories.…”

“…the rejection of purgatory, and of tithing], to inchoate Protestant doctrine', though why he should regard the blend as curious, since it is no more than what one would expect, is unclear. 33 Even Patrick Hamilton, archbishop of St Andrews and the last catholic primate of Scotland, seems, in not opposing the catechism of 1552, to have accepted, tacitly at least, justification by faith alone, even though Tridentine orthodoxy had anathematized the doctrine five years previously. 34 To the confusion which the split between evangelical and reformed protestantism had already created was added the fact that Calvinism, even after the second Helvetic confession of 1566, could continue to draw some of its inspiration from Zurich, in the person of Rudolf Gwalther, Heinrich Bullinger's son-in-law, as well as from Geneva.…”