Statue of Martin Luther in Dresden

Scotland and Luther

Tuesday January 10 2017

As the year marking the 500th anniversary of the Reformation begins, the Very Rev Dr Ian Bradley reflects on its impact in Scotland.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the event generally taken to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther’s action in nailing up 95 theses attacking some of the practices and doctrines of the late Medieval Catholic church on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

Scotland, and the Church of Scotland in particular, ultimately drew more in terms of theology, doctrines and forms of church government and polity from the other great founding father of the European Reformation, Jean Calvin, than it did from the more conservative figure of Luther.

However, the influence of Luther was also important here, especially in the early years of the spread of Protestant ideas from the continent. Luther’s critique of Medieval Catholicism and his strong assertion of the doctrine of justification by personal faith alone, without recourse to works, the accumulation of merit or the activities of the church, first came into Scotland in the form of literature which circulated particularly in the east coast burghs.

The first agent of Lutheranism to appear in Scotland seems to have been a Frenchman, Monsieur de la Tour, who arrived in 1523 to work for the Duke of Albany and suffered martyrdom when he subsequently returned to France.

An Act of Parliament in 1525 banned the importation of any literature by or about ‘that heretic Luther’ into Scotland but this did not stop several eminent Scots taking up and promulgating his main ideas. The most prominent of them was undoubtedly Patrick Hamilton (right, painting by John Scougal (1645-1730)), who was probably born near Glasgow around 1504 became a priest in 1526. His open support for the teachings of Luther, notably the idea of justification by faith alone, brought him into direct conflict with James Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews. In 1528 Hamilton was summoned before Beaton on charges of heresy, found guilty and slowly burnt to death at the stake on February 29.

The courage of Hamilton in facing his agonising death as the first Protestant martyr in Scotland had a considerable effect on promoting Lutheranism here. It made particular inroads in St Leonard’s College at St Andrews where both students and staff became outspoken critics of ecclesiastical corruption. Scotland’s second Protestant martyr, Henry Forrest, a Benedictine friar from Linlithgow and graduate of St Leonard’s College who had become Dean of the Abbey on the Isle of May, was burned to death near St Andrews Cathedral in 1533 for possessing a New Testament in English and affirming that Hamilton, whose death he had witnessed, was no heretic but a preacher of God’s truth.

Other early Scottish Protestants who were much influenced by Patrick Hamilton included Alexander Seton, a Dominican prior and confessor to James V, who fled to England after denouncing the failings of the Catholic bishops and the immoralities of the king, and Alexander Alesius, another graduate of St Leonard’s College, who implored James V to reform the Scottish church and sponsor a vernacular version of the Bible. John Gau and Henry Balnaves, both graduates of St Salvator’s College in St Andrews, were also enthusiastic propagandists for Luther’s ideas on justification by faith. Walter Milne, a former priest at Lunan in Angus who was burned to death at the age of 82 in St Andrews in 1558 for holding the mass as idolatrous and supporting clerical marriage and private preaching, was another figure strongly influenced by Luther’s teaching. He was the last Protestant martyr in Scotland, dying just two years before the Scottish Parliament repudiated the Pope’s authority and Roman Catholicism’s status as the country’s established faith, so initiating the Scottish Reformation.

The Church of Scotland established in 1560 was very much a Reformed kirk modelled on the principles that Calvin had put into practice in Geneva, as was the case with the Protestant churches of France and the Netherlands. Across Europe, Protestant churches shared a new emphasis of worshipping in the vernacular, the language of the people, rather than in Latin as through the Middle Ages.

Congregational hymn singing was an important aspect of this new approach Although the first significant Scottish collection of material for this purpose, in fact, owed more to Lutheran than Calvinist principles. James and John Wedderburn’s Ane Compendious Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs (also known as The Gude and Godlie Ballads), owed more to Lutheran than Calvinist principles, the subsequent history of Scottish psalmody and hymnody was to be very different in influence and orientation. Calvin’s insistence that the only material that could be properly sung in churches were the Psalms of David, put into metrical form and sung to dedicated tunes which would never be heard in the street or the public house, became normative and dictated what congregations sang for almost 300 years.

It was not just in worship that Scotland followed the Calvinist rather than the Lutheran strand of Protestantism. In his excellent book The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2006), Alec Ryrie writes that ‘Scottish Protestantism began as a broadly Lutheran movement during the reign of James V but had unmistakably become a Reformed (or ‘Calvinist’) one by 1560’. He points out that there was nothing automatic or inevitable about this and attributes much importance to the Scots’ preference for Calvin’s teaching about the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist as an essentially spiritual presence in the mind of the believer over Luther’s more objective and Catholic-inclined Eucharistic theology.

It is, of course, a moot point as to how far and in what respects the Church of Scotland still consciously sees itself as Calvinist. Maybe in some respects the modern Church of Scotland is leaning more towards its early Lutheran roots and even acknowledging its medieval Catholic origins in a greater concern with liturgy, spirituality and the mystical and experiential side of Christianity as against the rational, intellectual and disputatious. Yet it remains very clearly a church in the Reformed tradition, allied to other churches in Europe and beyond which share a Calvinist pedigree, and characterised, perhaps not always quite as fervently or enthusiastically as some would wish, by its motto ‘Semper Reformanda’ and the symbol of the ever burning bush which is never quite consumed by fire.

Perhaps the 500th anniversary of the Reformation will trigger conversations across the Kirk as to the nature and value of our Reformed heritage, the value and relevance of the theological insights and innovations made by Luther, Calvin and the early Scottish Reformers, and the positive legacy of Protestantism and what we can still affirm in it and build on.

A programme of events marking the Reformation anniversary will culminate with an ecumenical service on October 31. See the complete programme here.

The Very Rev Dr Ian Bradley is Principal of St Mary’s College, St Andrews and Reader in Church History and Practical Theology at the University of St Andrews.

A longer version of this article appeared in January's Life and Work. Subscribe here.