Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007)
Article: Religious Dissent And “Godly Discipline” At St. Andrews In 1560 And 1574
Author: Kirk R. MacGregor

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WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007) p. 39

Religious Dissent And “Godly Discipline” At St. Andrews In 1560 And 1574

Kirk R. MacGregor

Kirk R. MacGregor teaches Christian History and Thought at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa

St. Andrews during the Reformation era was a lively burgh with substantial maritime trade and a population between twenty-five hundred and three thousand people. It constituted the seat of both a university bearing its name and the metropolitan see of Scotland, which latter position gave the city jurisdiction over a number of outlying villages. The great transformation of St. Andrews from the hub of Scotland’s Catholic primate to her foremost Reformed community happened very quickly as the citizens literally awoke on Sunday June 11, 1559, in a town full of Catholic churches and went to bed that night with a Protestant burgh and a Reformed parish church. A defiant John Knox began “Reformation Day” by preaching on Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11:15–19) in the parish church of Holy Trinity, and there followed the forcible removal of all the “idols” and images from the burgh’s cathedral churches and the destruction of the two houses of friars, the Dominicans and Observant Franciscans.1 Directed by Knox, the Scottish Parliament of 1560 proceeded with the work of reformation by formally breaking national ties to the Roman Church. It ended the rule of the Pope, outlawed the Mass and Catholic baptism, repealed all statutes against heretics, and forbade “idolatrie and superstition in the Kirk of God,” especially transubstantiation, salvation by works, pilgrimages, and prayers to saints, with death as the prescribed penalty for third-time offenders.2 When the Scots Confession was drawn up by the “Six Johns” in 1560, Knox ensured that it recognized “ecclesiastical discipline, uprightly ministered as God’s word prescribes” as one of the three “notes, signs, and assured tokens” whereby the true church might be “known from that horrible harlot,” the church of Rome.3 Following the example of Calvin, Knox insisted that church discipline was to be administered by a special tribunal or morals court called the Kirk Session, the

WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007) p. 40

Scottish equivalent of the Genevan consistory, made up of all the salaried pastors of the city and twelve elected lay elders.

Religious dissent was the foremost disciplinary concern of the St. Andrews Kirk Session in the years 1560 and 1574, comprising seventy-five of its 106 total combined cases (71 percent).

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