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’s Ninety-Five Theses was 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’.