Eric Anderson

Full of sound and fury

Jane Dawson’s biography of John Knox suggests that the strident leader of the Scottish Reformation may have had a sensitive side after all, says Eric Anderson

John Knox (Photo: Getty) 
issue 02 May 2015

John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy, and cease not to make trouble and disquietness’.
Yet this awkward cuss, son of a merchant in Haddington and initially a young Roman Catholic priest, became a pillar of the Reformation in Europe and the inspiration for Presbyterianism in Scotland. The recent Scottish political television debates remind us also that his strident tone is still fashionable in Scotland. The black and white judgments proclaimed rather than discussed, and the winning of arguments by out-shouting opponents, are exactly in the style of Knox.

He knew precisely what reforms were needed in the church. It was only necessary to follow the word of God: ‘add nothing to it; diminish nothing from it.’ The Bible did not prescribe vestments, the worship of saints, or sacraments other than baptism and communion. Such accretions were ‘idolatrie’.

The trouble was that almost everywhere the idolatrous Roman Catholic church (‘the synagogue of Satan’) was overwhelmingly powerful.

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