The Scots Confession

Edinburgh · commissioned August 1, 1560, written in four days, ratified by Parliament on August 17 · the founding confession of the Church of Scotland.

Six men, all of them named John, were given the task of saying what a nation believed. They took four days. Parliament heard it read twice, and the bishops of the old church — who were present and entitled to object — said almost nothing at all.

No other Reformation confession was produced so fast, and few have worn so well. It is not a work of cool systematic precision; the Westminster Confession would supply that eighty-seven years later. It is a confession written by preachers who had been hunted, exiled, and in one case chained to a French galley bench, at the moment their country was handed back to them. It reads like men who could hardly believe what God had done.

The Road to August 1560

Scotland in 1560 had just come through a year that its own participants regarded as providential to the point of embarrassment.

Mary of Guise, the queen regent, governed with French troops at her back and was determined to crush the Protestant lords. They appealed to England. In March 1560 an English force arrived and broke the French position. France prepared to send four thousand five hundred more soldiers; a storm drove the fleet back. Trouble at home prevented a second attempt. And in June, Mary of Guise died in her sleep.

By the Treaty of Edinburgh both foreign armies withdrew. Mary Stuart, the young queen, was in France and uninterested in returning. The Scottish lords called a Parliament, and it took up religion first.

On August 1, 1560, that Parliament asked six ministers to set down a summary of doctrine. Within the same month it would also abolish papal jurisdiction in Scotland and forbid the celebration of the Mass. A nation changed its religion by statute in a matter of weeks.

The Six Johns

John Knox, minister of St. Giles' in Edinburgh. John Winram, subprior of St. Andrews. John Spottiswoode, later superintendent of Lothian. John Willock, later superintendent of Glasgow and the West. John Douglas, rector of St. Andrews. John Row, minister of Perth.

The coincidence of names has given the document its affectionate nickname, but the more interesting thing about the six is how differently they had arrived. Winram and Douglas came out of the old church's own universities and cloisters. Willock had been a Dominican friar, then chaplain to the family of Lady Jane Grey, then a fugitive in Emden. Knox had been a bodyguard, a galley slave, and a royal chaplain in England. They had not spent the previous decade in one another's company. They had spent it under pressure, in different places, reaching the same conclusions from the same Scriptures.

John Row afterward insisted that they had not copied anyone. They took their pattern, he said, from no kirk in the world, not even from Geneva, but laid God's Word before them and reformed according to it. That claim can be overstated — the six knew the existing Reformed confessions well, and it shows — but as a statement of intent it is exactly right, and it explains the confession's distinctive voice.

John Knox

Knox was the dominant figure among the six, and the confession bears his fingerprints more than anyone's. He came to the task better prepared than is usually recognized. While in exile he had already had a hand in confessional writing at Frankfurt and at Geneva; the brief Confession of the English Congregation at Geneva of 1558, in four articles, was probably his work, and its first and fourth articles bear a family resemblance to the corresponding chapters here.

The road to that competence had been brutal. He served as a bodyguard to George Wishart, carrying a two-handed sword before him, until Wishart was burned at St. Andrews in 1546. He was called to preach in the besieged castle there in 1547 — a call so unexpected and so terrifying that he burst into tears and fled to his room. When the castle fell he was taken by the French and spent nineteen months chained to a galley oar. He served under Edward VI in England, refused a bishopric, and fled again when Mary Tudor took the throne. In Geneva he sat under Calvin and called the city the most perfect school of Christ since the days of the apostles.

He came home in 1559 to a country at war, and served as preacher to the Protestant troops. His own account of what that cost him is worth setting beside the confession he helped write the following year:

One day of troubles since my last arrival in Scotland has pierced my heart more than all the torments of the galleys in nineteen months; because that torment, for the most part, touched the body, but this one pierces the soul and feelings. John Knox

He pastored St. Giles' until his death in 1572 and was buried in its churchyard. The Regent Morton is said to have stood at the grave and remarked that here lay one who never feared nor flattered any flesh.

Read the full biographical sketch of John Knox, with his timeline, his writings, and his place among the five major reformers.

Four Days

The speed is the detail everyone remembers, and it is usually told as though it were a miracle of composition. It was not. It was the fruit of a quarter century of argument, preaching, imprisonment, and exile. These men were not deciding what they believed in August 1560; they were writing down what they had already been prepared to die for. Patrick Hamilton had burned in 1528, Wishart in 1546. The four days were the last four days of a much longer process.

The result was presented to Parliament and read aloud twice, with care. The Protestant ministers braced for a fight from the Catholic bishops sitting in the chamber. The strongest objection offered was that they would believe as their fathers had believed. When the vote came, the Three Estates ratified it with only a handful of dissenting voices.

The Twenty-Five Chapters

Two features stand out against the later Reformed confessions. First, the shape is narrative rather than topical: chapters four through eleven follow the story of redemption from the promise given to Adam through the Kirk under the law to the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. It is closer to a creed recited than a system outlined.

Second, the treatment of the Lord's Supper in chapters twenty-one and twenty-two is emphatically Calvinist rather than memorialist. The faithful, rightly using the Table, so eat the body and drink the blood of Christ that He remains in them and they in Him — a real feeding, by the Holy Spirit, on the Christ who is in heaven. Anyone who has read the account of the Colloquy of Marburg will recognize what has happened here: this is the mature Reformed answer that Zwingli had not yet been able to give.

The Marks of the True Kirk

Chapter eighteen is the most influential thing in the document, and the reason it matters far beyond Scotland. How does anyone know which assembly is the true church? Not by antiquity, said the six Johns, nor by succession of bishops, nor by numbers, nor by the approval of men. The notes of the true Kirk are three:

Chapter nineteen then places Scripture above the church rather than under it, and chapter twenty draws the conclusion that general councils have erred and may err, and that their decrees bind only so far as they are grounded in the written Word. This is sola Scriptura applied directly to the question of authority, and it is the seedbed of Presbyterian church government.

“Admonish Us in Writing”

The preface contains the single most remarkable sentence in any Reformation confession. Having laid out what they believe, the six Johns invite the world to correct them:

If any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugning to God's holy Word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity's sake, to admonish us of the same in writing; and we, of our honour and fidelity, do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth of God (that is, from His holy Scriptures), or else reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss. Scots Confession1560, preface

Consider what that offer costs. These are men who had just won, whose confession was about to become the law of the land, and who could have written it as a wall. Instead they wrote it as a question put to Scripture, and staked their honor on either answering an objection from the Bible or changing what they had said.

That is not weakness about doctrine. It is the strongest possible statement of where authority actually lies. A confession that submits itself to correction by Scripture is confessing something about Scripture in the very act.

Historic Significance

It founded a national church. The Scots Confession was the first subordinate standard of the reformed Church of Scotland and remained its confession for eighty-seven years. Together with the First Book of Discipline — written by the same six men, and approved along with the Confession by the first General Assembly in December 1560 — it gave Scotland a reformed doctrine, a reformed polity, poor relief, and a plan for a school beside every parish church. At a time when only about half the townspeople of Scotland could write their own names, that last provision changed the country as profoundly as anything in the Confession itself.

It came early in the Reformed family. It is sometimes said to be one of the first Protestant confessions in Europe; that overstates it, since Augsburg (1530), the First Helvetic (1536), and the French Confession (1559) all precede it. What is true, and more useful, is that it precedes the Belgic Confession (1561), the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), and the Second Helvetic (1566). Among the great Reformed confessions it is an elder, not a latecomer, and it was written before the tradition had settled into a house style.

It shaped Presbyterianism wherever it went. The doctrine of the Kirk in chapters sixteen through twenty traveled with Scottish Presbyterians to Ulster, to the American colonies, and across the empire. The Confession's insistence that Scripture judges councils, and that discipline is a mark of the church rather than an optional extra, is in the bloodstream of every Presbyterian body in the world.

It held a nation together under pressure. Edward Irving, who read it aloud to his congregation twice a year, called it the pillar of the Reformation Church of Scotland, and judged that these twenty-five articles had not merely united the kingdom against the papacy in 1560 but rallied the people through a century of trouble afterward.¹ That is a large claim, and the history of the covenanting years does a good deal to support it.

Afterlife: 1567 to 1647

Parliament's ratification in 1560 was never given royal assent; Mary Stuart returned the following year and would not confirm it. Official recognition had to wait until her abdication, when Parliament ratified the Confession afresh in 1567. Ministers were required to subscribe it by 1572. In 1580 the King's Confession was added as an anti-papal supplement, and it would be taken up again in the National Covenant of 1638.

In 1647 the General Assembly adopted the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Scots Confession quietly gave way to it. It was never actually repealed. And there is something fitting in the manner of its retirement: a confession whose preface begged to be corrected from Scripture was replaced by a fuller statement of the same faith, which is precisely what its authors said they wanted.

Creeds and Confessions