August 26, 2025 Show with Dr. Sean Morris on “John Knox: The Thundering Scot”

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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

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Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

00:23

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

00:31

Proverbs chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 26th day of August 2025.

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I'm delighted to have a first -time guest today to talk about a very important figure from church history.

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Our guest today is Dr. Sean Morris, Associate Pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is a congregation in the

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Presbyterian Church in America denomination, also known as the PCA. And Sean earned his

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Master of Theology from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, on Scottish theology and church history, and his

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Ph .D. from Puritan Reform Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, founded by my longtime dear friend,

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Dr. Joel Beeky. Today, we're going to address John Knox, the Thundering Scott, the man and his pastoral theology.

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It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.

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Sean Morris. Chris, it's a delight to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

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It's great to be with you on this platform. I don't know if you remember, I think we met briefly in the flesh a few years back at the

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Banner of Truth Minister's Conference there on the campus of Elizabethtown College.

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And so it's great to see you again, even if it is mediated through the Internet. Well, it's a delight to have you on the show finally.

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And tell our listeners something more about Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

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Certainly, Covenant PCA was founded here in the little community of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville in the 1950s.

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It was part of the old Southern Church, the old PCUS, and came into the

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PCA in its early days. And for those folks who may not be familiar with the story of Oak Ridge, it's a fascinating tale.

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Oak Ridge was a town, was a city, quite literally a secret city built by the federal government in the days of World War II as part of the

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Manhattan Project. And so as the atomic bombs were developed, a lot of that development happened here at what is now the

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory and were tested at Los Alamos and eventually used, as folks will know, in Japan to bring a sooner end to that war.

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And so Oak Ridge was a secret city built by the government for that project. And I think if I have my story straight, initially, it was meant to be destroyed after the war was over.

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But they built a town and they had brought in a population and there were people living here.

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There were schools, there were families. And they thought, you know, we have this world -class, state -of -the -art laboratory that's functioning here.

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Why get rid of it? And besides, the secret is out. People know that this facility exists. So let's just use it for purposes now in the post -war era.

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And so Oak Ridge has been here ever since. And there were Presbyterians, Bible -believing,

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Bible -loving Presbyterians that wanted a congregation here. And as things went south in the mainline church, eventually those folks realized, you know, we need to seek greener, more faithful pastors.

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And so they came into the PCA. And we've been, by the grace of God, going strong ever since. Hallelujah.

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Well, if anybody wants more details on this fine congregation,

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Covenant Presbyterian Church of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, you can go to their website, covprezpca.

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I'm sorry. I'm looking at your email address. Your website is covenant -pca .com.

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Covenant -pca .com, and God willing, we'll be repeating that later on in the program.

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And I've got to introduce you to a very dear friend of mine in Knoxville, since you're so close,

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Pastor Claude Ramsey of Reformata Baptist Church in Knoxville, which is a

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Reformed Baptist church. And you will absolutely love Claude if and when you meet him.

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Oh, I'd love to. Very humble, gracious, and just a wise brother in Christ, and also a very powerful preacher.

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And they call John Knox the Thundering Scott. I guess you could probably call

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Claude Ramsey the Thundering Redneck. But he's a great guy, and I'm sure that he would laugh at that comment and not be offended by it.

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Excellent. Well, we have a tradition here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Whenever we have a first -time guest, before we delve into our main topic at hand, we always have first -time guests give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign

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Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them. So, we would love to hear your story.

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Oh, I'd be delighted. Thanks. Well, I grew up in a church -going home, and I'm thankful for that.

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My parents, they brought me to church. We went to all kinds of variety of different churches, and it's one of those complicated things where not knowing exactly the spiritual state of family members, but nevertheless,

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I'm thankful that my parents saw fit to raise me in a church -going environment.

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And so, growing up, we attended a variety of different kinds of congregations. We were, oh, we went to Methodist churches, we went to Pentecostal churches, we went to Baptist churches, we went to Churches of Christ.

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We were all over the place. But I think that I was converted at age 11 through the ministry of just a

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Bible camp that a fourth -grade friend of mine invited me to tag along to.

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And it was one of those instances where there was no dramatic sort of emotional manipulation, there was no sort of altar call at the end of the week or anything like that.

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But I think that just as a result of being in that environment and listening to the preaching of the

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Word and sermons day in and day out in Bible studies and singing God's praises and hearing those sermons in our evening worship services throughout the week, that I came home a

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Christian. I knew that the death of Christ on the cross reflected God's love.

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I understood that conceptually. But coming home after that week, I finally understood that it was for me, a sinner, and that I could have salvation in and through trusting

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Christ as my own Lord. And so from there, from age 11, by God's grace, I just grew exponentially.

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I went to a local Christian bookshop and bought myself, at the recommendation of the shopkeeper, a good study

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Bible, and I devoured it. And as I grew in grace and as I grew as a

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Christian, I'll tie this into my own sense of call to ministry because it just goes so part and parcel with that.

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I think by age 13, I started to sense a call to the ministry. And in the most unlikely of places, it was my junior high metal shop teacher, a man by the name of Ken Ayers, who's now home with the

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Lord. Ken Ayers, his full -time job was a woodshop and metal shop teacher in the local public schools, but he also pastored this small little country church in the

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PCUSA. He did that bivocationally, and that congregation was conservative as far as that denomination goes, pretty conservative by PCUSA standards.

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And I got to know Ken, and he invited me and my family to come worship with him at that church sometime.

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And I discovered historic Presbyterianism by a man who still believed and taught the

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Bible and the truths of Scripture. And one day sitting in worship, it just dawned on me that as I was growing as a

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Christian, that I love to read about Christ, I love to talk about Christ, I love to tell others about Christ. And I was watching

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Pastor Ken, it just dawned on me, I could do this for a living. Now, of course, I'd put it in more sophisticated and biblical terms then, but to my 13 -year -old mind, it dawned on me,

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I could study and talk about and teach the Bible for a career. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

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And so I talked to Ken, I said, Ken, or Mr. Ayers, what do you have to do to be a pastor? He goes, well,

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Sean, traditionally, Presbyterians have valued a highly educated ministry.

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And so you'll want to get ready to go off to undergrad for four years, and then you want to go off to seminary for an additional three years beyond that.

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That's what you should be planning on doing. And so throughout high school, that was in the back of my mind, this is the game plan that I intend to pursue post high school years.

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And we were there at that little country church for a couple of years, but it was about an hour or so drive from our house.

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And so it became a little tedious for our family. But we, again, by the grace of God, were able to find another pretty conservative

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PCUSA congregation, at least by that denomination standards, closer to our home, about a 20 minute drive from our home.

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And that was the First Presbyterian Church of Ashtabula, Ohio. And the pastor's name there was

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Stephen Long, who's also since gone home to be with the Lord. And I told Stephen the same things I told

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Ken. And Stephen was the man who introduced me to Reformed theology. He gave me R .C.

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Sproul books and R .C. Sproul videos and taught me about the doctrines of grace. He mentored me, both these men did, took me under their wing, brought me to things like presbytery meetings, let me try my hand at leading

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Bible studies or assisting in worship services in appropriate capacities to test my giftings and inclinations as a young man who thought he might want to go into the ministry.

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And that sense of call just continued to get affirmed and confirmed. And so off I went to undergrad at Pastor Stephen's recommendation because his son had gone to Grove City College in nearby

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Western Pennsylvania. And he had such a wonderful experience there. So he commended that to me and he steered me in that direction.

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So off I went after high school to Grove City, and there I came into a theology faculty that was full of men that were

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PCA ministers and Reformed theologians. And at that point, it was game over for me.

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I had already been sensing that the PCUSA was not likely to be a good or happy home for me long term, given where that denomination was going.

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So within a couple of years, thanks to the mentoring of professors, including a music professor who was a

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PCA deacon of all things, I came into the PCA and I told the elders there the same thing, that I was sensing a call to ministry.

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They mentored me. They loved me. They shepherded me. They invested in me. They let me test out gifts and inclinations, leading

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Bible studies and things like that for the church teaching Sunday school. And they affirmed that inclination.

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And so they, post -undergrad, sent me off to seminary, both with their prayers and financial support and their commendation.

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And I met my wife, Sarah, at Grove City. We got married there. And shortly after we got married, we packed the car and off we went to Jackson, Mississippi, so that I could study at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson.

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And we had four wonderful years there studying. I had a wonderful internship at the First Presbyterian Church of Jackson.

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And then after that, took my first call in Roanoke, Virginia, at Westminster Presbyterian Church, PCA.

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And that's where I ministered for eight years or so before taking the call here where I am now.

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At Covenant Oak Ridge, where I labor alongside my wonderful man, wonderful colleague, my dear friend, and frankly, another man

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I consider a mentor, Dr. Nick Wilborn, who's the senior minister here. Yes, and he's actually agreed to be on the program in October.

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So we're looking forward to that. Wonderful. Yeah, we've got all kinds of church history here at Covenant.

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Nick is a scholar of Southern Presbyterianism. He did his PhD on John Girardeau. He taught for many years at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, still does teach for them adjunct.

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And so whether it's Scottish church history or Southern Presbyterian church history, from me or from him, we've got church history and historical theology coursing through our veins here at Covenant.

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It's a wonderful place to be. Well, I'm assuming this love affair that you began with Reformed Theology and discovering, no doubt, that much of the rich history of the

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Reformed faith can trace its roots back to Scotland. I'm sure that was one of the reasons you sought to be getting further education there in Glasgow, Scotland, and to learn more about the

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Scottish Reformation and your primary hero that we are discussing today,

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John Knox. Yeah, that's right. During undergrad, I, like so many other folks in the

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Reformed world, I knew who John Knox was. He was the leader of the Scottish Reformation. He's the so -called father of Scottish Presbyterianism.

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He'd been influenced by Calvin. But that's really all I knew about him. I didn't know a whole ton about Scottish Presbyterianism or the

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Scottish Reformation. And it was really through the influence of two of my pastors when

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I was in Jackson, as well as another friend of mine who was adjunct faculty at the seminary, that I found a love for Scottish theology.

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So when we were in Jackson, we were members at First Presbyterian. The first couple of years there,

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Ligon Duncan was our pastor. And if anyone knows Ligon, they know he loves Scottish history. He loves Scottish theology.

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And so he first whet my appetite for learning more about Scottish church history.

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And then when he went on to be the chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary, the next man who became our senior pastor at First Pres was

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David Strain. And David does hail from Glasgow, Scotland. So he's a Scotsman. And he absolutely ignited my love and interest in Scottish church history and Scottish theology just through tons of conversations and learning more about the

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Free Church of Scotland, which was the denomination that he hailed from. And learning how that denomination arose out of the

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Mother Church, the Church of Scotland. And I realized I want to learn more about this further. I want to study more about this.

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Another gentleman, a friend of mine, Dr. Duncan Rankin, he did his PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

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He's a lover of Scottish theology and church history. And so talking with Duncan and having him in some classes also further bolstered that interest in Scottish church history and theology.

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And so I was excited. And then it was only further exacerbated, if you like, when

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I was able to go on a short mission trip with our church in Jackson. We went to Scotland. I visited Scotland for the first time, and we did a week of evangelism and outreach in the city of Dundee at St.

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Peter's Free Church, where David Robertson was the minister at the time. But that, as your listeners might know, that's the historic church where Robert Murray McShane served.

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St. Peter's, what is now St. Peter's Free Church in Dundee. And so I fell in love with the land of Scotland, the land of our

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Presbyterian heritage. I wanted to learn more. And so David Strain, Pastor Strain and others had alerted me to the existence of this wonderful study program through what used to be called the

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Free Church College, the official training institution of the Free Church of Scotland. It's now called

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ETS or Edinburgh Theological Seminary. And they have this wonderful Master of Theology program where you can study with them, even from afar like I did.

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You can study from overseas, maybe fly over, travel over once or twice to be in the library and to do some research, but to have a distance program.

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And that's what I did in Scottish church history and theology. I thought to myself, I don't know at this,

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I didn't know at this point if I wanted to do further terminal degree studies, to do

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PhD studies. So I thought it might be wise, and others counseled me as well, it might be wise to try your hand at THM level studies and see how that suits you.

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And then if you enjoy it and it's successful, you might want to go on and do further studies. So I did.

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I did THM studies through ETS slash University of Glasgow. And in those days,

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I was discovering a love for psalm singing. The singing of psalms, which of course is part of it, just part of the warp and woof of the

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Scottish Reformation, the classic expression of the sung praises of God's people through psalm singing.

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And I just wanted to know more about the history of it. I wanted to know how it developed in the Church of Scotland and on into the

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Free Church of Scotland and how congressional singing developed over those years. And so that was the subject of my research for my

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THM studies was the development of psalmody and hymnody in the Church of Scotland, the mother church denomination, just from a vantage point of historical interest, how that development took place.

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And so from there, because I did enjoy it and it did go so well, other men in my life, mentors and pastors and others that I trusted, encouraged me to go further and do some

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PhD studies. And so I guess it was around 2019, 2020 or so when

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I had wrapped up the THM program, I was looking at PhD programs and I had a few different characters in mind.

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One man, one church history scholar highly suggested, he said, you're a man whose full -time vocation is pastoral ministry.

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And so having a concrete, distinct subject matter that's maybe not too amorphous will be very beneficial to you.

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Otherwise it might carry on forever. So he said, if you can pick up an historical figure who has an obvious beginning and end date, he has a birthday, he has a date of death, that's where his body of work ends, and you can study and analyze that, that could really suit you well to do those studies in tandem with your pastoral ministry.

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And so I talked to a few folks and said, who's out there in Scottish Reformation studies that needs further exploration?

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And in 2016 or so, Professor Jane Dawson of Edinburgh had published that magnificent biography, probably for Magnum Opus on John Knox.

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And so there was a fresh interest in Knoxian studies going on. And so it became clear to me that Knox might be a man worth pursuing.

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And if I could dovetail the studies nicely so that it really supplemented and strengthened and reinforced my own pastoral ministry, all the better.

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And so my doctoral advisor said, well, then you need to do the pastoral theology of John Knox because that really hasn't been covered yet.

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You're a pastor, you love pastoral theology. Let's examine this man in terms of his pastoral theology because lots of other facets of his life and ministry have been examined, but not this one.

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And so in looking at different programs, I thought, well, I want to stay in ministry. I want to keep on pastoring.

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I don't necessarily want to pause and go move somewhere for full -time studies. So there were only a few institutions that would allow for that.

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And one of them was Puritan Reformed in Grand Rapids where you can be a full -time minister and do studies part -time at a distance, just fly up there a couple times a year for week -long intensives, do other classes online via Zoom and continue your studies in a part -time capacity.

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And so I was very blessed. The generous people that operate

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PRTS, I was awarded a fully funded scholarship for which we thank God. And I did that course of study for about five years.

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And then that came to a terminus this past spring at our May graduation ceremony. Oh, praise

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God. Just out of curiosity, do you know one of my former pastors, John Miller?

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I don't, I'm sorry. Okay, I was just curious because he's likely a little older than you, but he had some of his education at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary and also

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Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylor, South Carolina.

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But I was just curious. I've known other people as well. I know other people who were educated at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

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Well, we're going to our first commercial break. And if you have a question about John Knox and about the

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Scottish Reformation in general, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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James White here of Alpha and Omega Ministries announcing that this September I'm heading out to Pennsylvania to speak at two events that my longtime friend

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Living Christ in Loisville. Then on Sunday, September 21st at 1 .30

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p .m. I'm speaking at Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle on the theme Can We Trust the

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I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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Oh, and make sure that you tell them you heard about them on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Welcome back.

30:03

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And if you just tuned in our guest today is

30:11

Dr. Sean Morris, associate pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is a congregation in the

30:21

Presbyterian Church in America. And today we are talking about John Knox, the

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Thundering Scott, the man and his pastoral theology.

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And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

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Give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence. So, tell us,

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Dr. Morris, why is it that you wanted to really highlight this great man of history,

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John Knox, among all of the other men of history that were giants of the

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Reformation? Why is it that he stands out to you as someone that needs to be addressed more thoroughly?

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I know that one reason is it must be because something that you mentioned before about your own knowledge initially being very thin in regard to John Knox, you knew that he was the father of Scottish Presbyterianism and not really a lot beyond that.

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And I think that is generally, if you were to quiz even

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Reformed Christians, that would be their answer, and they probably wouldn't have much else to say.

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And it's a shame because it seems that out of all of the Reformers, John Calvin and Martin Luther are the ones that are more frequently cited, discussed, and of course,

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I'm not lamenting that these men are holding significant places in the hearts and minds and pulpits of pastors all over the world, but it just seems that their legacies have far overshadowed

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Knox. But if you could tell us in your own words not only what compelled you to focus your studies on this man, but also about the man himself and just as I asked you earlier, something about his own upbringing and his coming to Christ and so on.

32:44

Certainly. I think in many ways, and like you just said,

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Chris, it's certainly not a shame. It's just a statement of fact. I think Knox is overshadowed by Calvin because Calvin is such an indomitable figure in terms of Reformation history, and rightly so.

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And Knox is so similar to Calvin. Now, these men are not... He's not a carbon copy of Calvin. He does have some differences, but he's more or less in lockstep with Calvin.

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And so the emphases and the strands that we find in Knox perhaps don't strike people as terribly unique if they can find them in Calvin anyway.

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And so I think there's this thought of Knox as, well, he's the man who was influenced by Calvin in Geneva, and so he took

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Calvin's idea back with him to Scotland, exported it there, applied it to the Scottish scene, and there we have the

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Scottish Reformation. And there is some credence to that perhaps overly simplistic assessment.

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And so I thought, well, but surely there's more to the man than just he learned a lot from Calvin and then copied it.

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And indeed there is more to that man. I think in the

33:50

Church, and especially outside of the Church, if anyone has heard of Knox at all, they've probably heard of him with respect to his infamous political treatise.

34:02

The first blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Yes. In fact, that has been reprinted, and people are still selling it and reading it.

34:12

That's right. And with such a fiery title like that, it's bound to attract attention. I thought it was about the view.

34:19

That's why I grabbed it. That's right. There's probably some good applicatory connections to make there.

34:31

And so as I was looking into Knox and seeing what research, what studies had been done on him, there were various aspects of the man that had been covered.

34:42

He'd been analyzed along the lines of his work as a reformer, as a statesman, as an orator, as something of the prophetic dimension that he brought to his preaching, into his ministry in the

34:55

Reformation. There's even a PhD dissertation out there on him about how he's this surly, misogynistic woman -hater and so forth.

35:03

And again, I think if people have any impression, if they've even heard of Knox at all, and if they do have any impression of him, it might be something like that, which is unfortunate.

35:12

They know that title. It sounds fiery, and it sounds abrasive. And so they think, oh, well, he's just some backwards fella with these backwards views who was hateful towards the fairer sex in the time of the

35:25

Reformation, so who needs time with him? And as I was digging into it, I thought, no, there's more to this man than meets the eye.

35:32

There's more than I think has been fairly portrayed about him. And he was a complex figure. That's one of the reasons I love

35:37

Jane Dawson's biographical work so much, because I think she's eminently fair to the man in painting a rather sympathetic picture of him, but not committing hagiography and not simply whitewashing his flaws and foibles away.

35:52

But it also occurred to me that there is an in—so going back for just a second, so because he was a pastor, because he was a preacher, because he was a minister,

36:03

I thought, this is the lion's share of his work and attention and where his energies went. That warrants further analysis.

36:09

What was his pastoral theology all about? What did he spend the vast majority of his time doing? These other dimensions of his life have been analyzed, but that which perhaps was the soul of the man, that which was his heartbeat, his pastoral ministry, that really hasn't been given a detailed analysis.

36:26

In fact, my own doctoral advisor from PRTS, Stephen Myers, he was in correspondence with Jane Dawson, who is probably the world's leading living expert on Knox.

36:36

And she said the same thing. She goes, I'm so glad that someone is doing this, because there is further work on Knox that needs to be done on this aspect of his life and of his person, on his pastoral ministry.

36:47

So kudos to your student, she said, that he's doing this analysis on his pastoral theology.

36:53

It needs to be done. And it's just interesting that in spite of his reputation, probably the majority of it being slandered with misrepresentation and exaggeration, but a man who is viewed by many as the arch male chauvinist of history, his chief scholar and biographer is a woman.

37:33

Yes, it is quite something. And we can talk about that title and what he meant in context as we go on in the conversation.

37:42

And of course, as a novice scholar, I'm not interested in excusing away the flaws and foibles that Knox had.

37:49

He had them. We all have them. All of us sinners have flaws and foibles. But I am interested in getting a more accurate, fair depiction and representation of the man and understanding him on his own terms.

38:01

That was one of the big things they hammered home to us at Puritan as historical scholars is striving to understand historical figures in their own words and on their own terms, not simply on the terms that we would like to import back on them or not simply on the terms that are convenient for us to foist upon them.

38:20

And so that's so key, I think, to understanding Knox. And as I was reflecting on it a couple years ago, and I've been reflecting on it some more even recently, it occurred to me that there is something of a renewed interest in Knox amongst some folks in the

38:34

Reformed world. But I think that it's an imbalanced interest. And here's what

38:39

I mean by that. I see sometimes out there, this is just anecdotally, I don't have any hard numbers or anything, but I see sometimes out there, young men in particular, young red -blooded men who like what

38:50

Knox says. They like the things that he says about those dirty, wicked papists and the evils that they were promulgating and how he was opposed to that.

38:59

And they like what he said when he was calling out these wicked Roman Catholic female monarchs for what he viewed as an unnatural reign and rule and the wickedness that they were bringing to their kingdoms and opposing the

39:13

Protestant cause and frustrating the efforts of Reformation. They like Knox when he speaks boldly in those regards.

39:19

And so they say, we need a boldness like this in our day. And to some extent, I would agree. We do need boldness in our day.

39:25

These are precarious times that we live in, spiritually speaking, and we need some boldness.

39:31

We need gospel boldness in our day. That's true. But it occurred to me that that's an aspect or a dimension or a sliver of Knox that some of these fellows like to highlight and gravitate to and grab onto, but they often do it to the neglect of what

39:46

I think is the lion's share of this man's life and ministry. Yes, he said those bold things, and yes, he went toe -to -toe with Mary, Queen of Scots, and he had some epic showdowns, you might say.

39:56

But the vast majority of Knox's time and energies were spent in doing what? Preaching the word to God's people, shepherding to hurting souls, teaching on the doctrine of assurance to people who had troubled consciences, working on things like an educational scheme, an educational plan for the nation of Scotland's children so that they could be more literate.

40:18

Why? So that they could read the Bible. Why? So that they might come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He gave his time to restructuring universities so that there was an educated ministry that would be able to serve the

40:30

Church of Scotland in the coming years. He gave his energy to pounding out a confession of faith, the

40:37

Scots' Confession of 1560. He gave his energy to pounding out what is basically what you and I might call a book of church order, to give structure and governance to this fledgling young Protestant body, the

40:49

Church of Scotland. These are the things that occupied the lion's share of Knox's time.

40:55

In other words, doing the ordinary work of an ordinary gospel minister, preaching, teaching, counseling, visiting, administering the sacraments, nurturing the young, caring for widows and orphans, giving a better structure to the diaconate, things like this.

41:09

So while we don't want to ignore perhaps the more edgy or fiery things that Knox said, neither can they be abstracted or isolated from what

41:18

I think was the totality of his ministry. In many ways, as I argued, he was a vanilla reformer, a vanilla minister, a vanilla churchman, doing vanilla ordinary gospel churchman things.

41:29

And I think those aspects of Knox have been underappreciated. And so I hope in some small way to give a renewed emphasis and attention to those dimensions of Knox's life, which are often overlooked.

41:40

Now, there seems to be some discrepancy on when he was born.

41:45

Some sources cite him as being born in 1514, and some make it a broader question mark sometime between 1505 and 1515 or 1504 and 1550.

42:04

Do you have any more accurate idea of when he was born?

42:09

And tell us something about that upbringing, I'm assuming, since he was born prior to those famous hammer blows on the church door in Wittenberg by Martin Luther.

42:23

I'm assuming he was raised Roman Catholic, and perhaps you could just pick up from there. Certainly.

42:29

Yeah, that's right. There is some discrepancy. As you might imagine, records in those days were not always kept in the most precise manner, not like we have birth certificates today.

42:40

Oftentimes, we're reliant on baptismal records if they've survived to have an idea of when a child, when an individual might have been born, if there is some record of the baptism in the local

42:49

Roman Catholic parish in that town. And so there is some discrepancy based on various records.

42:55

It seems that the majority of the scholarly consensus tends to be 1514. We think circa 1514 was when

43:02

Knox was born. That's where Jane Dawson lands, again, giving the best approximation that we can. That's the date that I've worked with in my own studies is circa 1514, so a mere three years before Luther hammered the 95

43:18

Theses to the castle church door at Wittenberg. So Knox was a three -year -old boy growing up in the little village of Haddington in East Lothian, sort of near Edinburgh in eastern

43:31

Scotland. And so he was a three -year -old child. The fires of Reformation were beginning to be kindled.

43:39

Certainly he was raised in the ethos of the Roman church that was the church of Scotland in those days.

43:46

It was the Roman church that was the hierarchy. And in Scotland, it didn't have the urbane development that England did, even by medieval standards.

43:57

And so in many ways, the Roman church hierarchy and structure provided the administrative and civic structure to the life of the

44:05

Scottish nation. So not only did you go there for weddings and baptisms and burials, you also went there if you needed proper paperwork to be certified.

44:14

If you had a tax dispute, if you had a property dispute, you went to the local bishop or perhaps better, to one of his notaries, basically a church attorney or church lawyer.

44:24

And that's where you went to get papers notarized, documents signed off on, various disputes would be heard and sometimes adjudicated.

44:34

It's hard to over -describe how interwoven the Roman church was in the life of the

44:41

Scottish nation, not just ecclesiastically but also administratively and civically. We'll come back to this,

44:49

I'm sure, but one of Knox's first careers before he was probably converted, certainly before he became a

44:55

Protestant, was he was a papal notary. He was essentially a Roman Catholic notary public, and so he was ordained as a

45:02

Roman priest, but that's what he did all day was work with documents and give certifications and official seals to things and handle various town and city level not necessarily disputes, but just administrative civic duties is what he had to handle because he was well trained in those things.

45:22

But our data on Knox's early life is scant unfortunately, but circa 1514, born in Haddington, East Lothian, and at some point, his older brother,

45:37

William, being the older brother, he was the one that was going to inherit the family trade. His father was a merchant of some sort, and so he was going to inherit the family business, and so Knox needed to do something else.

45:48

Well, he never particularly had taken an interest in medicine, so going off to be a doctor might have been another lucrative vocational option.

45:56

His brother was going to get the family business, so there goes that lucrative vocational option. So what does a young man in medieval

46:02

Scotland do if he wants to do well for himself? Well, he goes into the ministry, and so that's what he did.

46:09

Likely, he was trained at St. Andrews, at the University of St. Andrews, as a priest, and in God's providence, even in those early years, the seeds of reform and reformation were likely being sown into his young and tender soul by a man named

46:25

John Major, sometimes John Mayer, M -A -I -R. John Major was on the faculty at the

46:32

University of St. Andrews, but he had spent some time on the European continent, I believe also serving at the

46:38

University of Paris for a time as well. And John Major, though he was outwardly part of the

46:44

Roman Church, he harbored a lot of reformed or at least Reformation sympathies, including he had certain dubious thoughts about the authority of the papacy and about the claims that the papacy could make.

47:00

John Major was a big fan of what's called conciliarism, or the power of church councils to bring consensus and bring order and to set doctrine, and not just the

47:08

Pope of Rome doing this. And so John Knox would have picked up on these ideas from his professor John Major.

47:13

And that probably went on as far as discussion and debate over that papal authority must have gone on a lot because a lot of people are shocked to discover that papal infallibility was not even made dogma by Rome until the 19th century.

47:33

That's right. That's right. And you know, like, not unlike modern university culture, universities and their student bodies are often known to be wanting to be edgy, to challenge the status quo, to have a bit of an anti -authoritarian bent to them.

47:48

Well, this was the case of medieval Scotland as well. Places like University of St. Andrews was where edgy ideas, maybe certain verboten ideas were discussed in the classroom and around the lecture halls of, you know,

48:01

Rome makes all these claims, but I'm not so sure about that. They say that this is how it is, but even good old the medieval

48:09

Dr. Thomas Aquinas doesn't quite put it that way. I'm not so sure about what they're saying down there in Rome.

48:14

I'm questioning these things. Now I know we can't say that publicly, but we can discuss that in the classroom. And so in the

48:20

University of St. Andrews, there's these conversations going on. There's these ideas being discussed.

48:25

And so these early seeds of Reformation, shall we say, sympathies were likely being planted in the heart and mind of John Knox in those early years as a university student.

48:38

But he went on and he graduated. He graduated from St.

48:43

Andrews. He was ordained as a priest, but again, he went into the more legal or administrative service in the

48:51

Roman church as a papal notary. He would have done some churchly duties, but primarily it was almost like a church attorney is how he served.

48:59

And he did. He had a good, he had a sharp mind, he had a logical mind, and that comes through, I think, in a variety of his treatises they wrote, as well as the rhetoric that he employed.

49:08

He had a sharp and logical mind about him. Probably the 1540s is when we start to see things really take a turn for Knox, and that was when

49:18

George Wishart came to Scottish soil. George Wishart, you might call him a proto -reformer.

49:24

I wouldn't say that he was reformed the way you and I understand the word reform. He's probably more Lutheran than anything else, but Wishart had been on the

49:32

European continent. He'd been introduced and influenced by Martin Luther's ideas, and Wishart comes back to Scotland, and he had to go back and forth between Scotland and England for a bit,

49:43

I think to Cambridge, because he started promoting and preaching these unpopular ideas, or at least unpopular in the eyes of the

49:50

Scottish Roman Catholic Church. He was preaching things like justification by faith. He was preaching things like salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

49:59

And this was upsetting some people, so he had to go back and forth for his own safety. But eventually, in the 1540s, he came back, and he basically was—there were these early proto -Protestant sympathizers in the nobility, earls and barons and so forth, that wanted

50:16

Wishart to come and teach on these ideas throughout the Scottish countryside. He couldn't get an audience in any official church building.

50:23

The Roman authorities, Roman church authorities, made sure of that. And so they took

50:29

Wishart on this preaching tour. Anywhere they could find an open field, if they could find a house, if they could find a barn in the back of someone's property where he could hold audience, he would.

50:41

And he traveled around preaching these Reformation ideas, these Protestant ideas.

50:47

And John Knox was captivated by it. Incidentally, John Knox ended up being what was essentially

50:52

Wishart's bodyguard. The men, the nobility, knew that Wishart was likely to be in danger.

50:58

They knew that if the Roman church could shut him up in any way or even kill him, they would try. And so they tapped

51:04

Knox to be his broadsword carrier. He would often walk in front of Wishart and the party that was with him as they were walking along, carrying this

51:13

Scottish broadsword and keeping watch when he was preaching for any unseemly business.

51:19

Do you know why he would be asked to perform such a task? Well, I think that Knox was just a young man who was able -bodied.

51:28

He was strong. He was single. He wasn't married. So in one sense, he would take the young men who had the least to lose and put them in these precarious situations.

51:36

But because he had an interest in these Protestant ideas, he was a fan, if you like. He was a disciple of Wishart.

51:42

He wanted to travel with him anyway. And so they said, why don't we make you the broadsword carrier?

51:47

We'll make you the bodyguard and offer protection for Wishart. And there might have been a little bit of savvy going on in there of in case we run into trouble with the

51:56

Roman church authorities, Knox, you're among their ranks. You might be able to grease the skids for us and maybe smooth things over if things go awry with those

52:06

Roman church authorities. And so he traveled along with Wishart for these several weeks.

52:12

And Knox doesn't get terribly specific about his own conversion.

52:19

But based on later accounts that we have in his writings, it seems evident that by the time he was done traveling with Wishart, not only was he converted to biblical

52:28

Christianity, but he was fully on board with Protestant sympathies. He had been persuaded that the way that the

52:35

Roman church was doing it was wrong. It was against what Scripture plainly taught. And what he was going to do about that was not yet settled in his mind.

52:44

Was he going to make a clean break with Rome? Was he going to try and work from the inside out? That wasn't entirely certain.

52:50

But what Wishart was preaching and teaching on, Knox was persuaded, was biblical, and was true.

52:56

And so he was on board with this new Protestant movement. Great. Well, we are going to our midway break right now.

53:02

And I'm really excited to hear the rest of this story. And I'm sure you are as well, those of you who are listening.

53:10

If you do have a question, we do have a couple of folks waiting for their questions to be asked and answered on the air.

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01:08:59

And before I return to my guest, Dr. Sean Morris, and our fascinating conversation on John Knox, I just have some important reminders.

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That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Dr. Sean Morris, and our conversation is on the legendary giant of church history,

01:12:11

John Knox, the Thundering Scott, chrisarenson at gmail .com,

01:12:16

chrisarenson at gmail .com. Before I take any listener questions, I still want you to take us through some further events and pivotal points in John Knox's life as he began to really make a name for himself as a true reformer of Christ's church.

01:12:46

Yeah, excuse me, I'd love to. I'll do this as succinctly as I can, but I'll highlight some of the major milestones of his pastoral ministry in the different areas where he served.

01:12:58

John Knox, we often associate John with Scotland, and rightly so, but he pastored in England, he pastored in Geneva, Switzerland, he pastored in Frankfurt, Germany.

01:13:11

He was back and forth to various places, and as was often the case during those days of the

01:13:18

Protestant Reformation, many of the European leaders had to go back and forth hither and thither due to persecution, due to political fallout for a variety of reasons, and that was true of Knox as well.

01:13:29

So, I'll give a little rundown of the development of his ministry. So, eventually, as your listeners might know,

01:13:37

George Wishart was apprehended by the Roman Catholic church authorities in Scotland, and he was summarily executed.

01:13:45

He was martyred on account of his supposedly heretical teachings according to the

01:13:52

Scottish Roman church. Influenced by that, though, after Wishart's execution, which

01:13:58

Wishart was executed, we think, in 1546, and then some months later in 1547,

01:14:06

Knox makes his way back to St. Andrews. So, Wishart is executed in St. Andrews, and you can go visit

01:14:14

St. Andrews to this day, and you can find marked out in these white stones in the cobblestone street outside some of the university buildings the spot where he was executed.

01:14:24

You can, likewise, with Patrick Hamilton, another earlier proto -reformer where he was burned at the stake there in St.

01:14:31

Andrews, you can see marked out PH and GW in those white stones on the cobblestone streets of St.

01:14:38

Andrews. So, after Wishart's execution, Knox disappeared, perhaps for his own safety, we're not sure.

01:14:44

But he falls away from the scene for some months, but eventually returns to St. Andrews because there is a band of Protestants there.

01:14:53

There's a struggling band of Protestants there, and he joins up with them in the

01:15:01

St. Andrews castle. Now, they take refuge in the castle because at some point they take matters into their own hands.

01:15:10

They're called the Castilians, this band of Protestants. And they kidnap the

01:15:17

Cardinal David Beaton who dwelt in the castle there at St.

01:15:23

Andrews, along with his many mistresses and other illegitimate children. And Cardinal Beaton was executed by these

01:15:29

Protestants. And so they take over the castle, and they take refuge in that castle because they know that retribution is coming.

01:15:36

And sure enough, it did. In those days, there was an alliance between the French and the

01:15:41

Scottish because both of those monarchs were Roman Catholic. So, Scottish Roman Catholic monarch calls upon the

01:15:47

French Roman Catholic monarch, send us some of your naval ships, and they do. They send up some French naval ships and galley ships up the seaside towards St.

01:15:56

Andrews to eventually take revenge on these Protestants for murdering Cardinal Beaton.

01:16:01

But before that happens, in the meantime, Knox is with these, he's with these band of Protestants because they need a man to be the tutor to their children.

01:16:15

And that's what Knox had been doing after his being a papal notary. We think that when Knox came to his

01:16:20

Protestant convictions, he quietly exited his more formal priestly duties and papal notary duties, and he's earned an income for himself by tutoring children of various noblemen.

01:16:32

He would tutor them in Latin, he would tutor them in history, grammar, all those kinds of things. And that's how he made a living for himself.

01:16:38

So, these Protestants, we think, summoned Knox to come tutor their children as their hold up there in the castle for safety.

01:16:44

And while he's instructing them in these things, particularly in the Bible, people overhear him and they think, this man knows what he's talking about.

01:16:52

This man knows some Bible. This man knows some theology. Maybe we should have him be our pastor, since we have a veritable congregation of Protestants here inside these castle walls.

01:17:02

We need a minister. We need a pastor. They tell him he's initially resistant to the idea, in fact, so resistant to the idea that when one of the men in that band summons him, calls upon him to take on the mantle of being the pastor, he flees the room in tears,

01:17:18

John Knox does. He's so overwhelmed by the enormous weight of such a call. But that call doesn't go away.

01:17:24

They keep pressing on him. Eventually, there's something of a dispute in one of the town churches at Holy Trinity Church in St.

01:17:32

Andrews and John Ruff, the man who summoned him, who was also on faculty there at the university, he's in a dispute with the local priest and one of the theologians about a variety of things.

01:17:46

And he has to play things a little, he has to be a little politically savvy. And so he thinks, wait a minute,

01:17:52

I can get Knox to go in debate with this guy, and at the same time I'll have him do it in front of the congregation at Holy Trinity in St.

01:18:01

Andrews because Knox has basically said, it's not enough for one man to call me. It's not enough for me to have a sense of call.

01:18:07

I need the approbation of God's people. I need the church of God to call me to be a pastor if I'm ever going to be a pastor.

01:18:13

And so John Ruff thinks, I can do a two -for -one here. I can get Knox to take down this aberrant theology in a formal debate.

01:18:20

It's almost like a preach -off, like a sermon preach -off. And I can get the church to see his gifts and affirm and confirm those gifts, and maybe that will finally make it click for Knox, and he'll accept the call to be a pastor when he hears the call of the church at this moment.

01:18:37

And that's exactly what happens. He goes into this church on a particular Sunday. He preaches from Daniel 7, and he gets this remarkable exegetical walk -down of how the various kingdoms seen in Daniel's vision were the subsequent empires, like the

01:18:51

Persian Empire and the Roman Empire, and eventually the harlotry of the Roman Catholic Church. And he really does a fine job of meeting the disputes and answering the disputes against the

01:19:06

Roman Catholic official there. And the church congregants, they basically cry out and say,

01:19:14

Knox, we would have you be a minister. We would have you be a preacher of the gospel. And at that point, Knox relents with his resistance, and he accepts the call, and he becomes essentially the pastor or the chaplain to that little band of Protestants that were taking refuge inside the castle at St.

01:19:31

Andrews. Well, some time goes by, and eventually those ships from France do arrive, and they bombard that castle, and they overtake them, and all of the

01:19:39

Protestants, more or less, are—certainly the men—are brought onto the ship and made to be galley slaves on those

01:19:46

French vessels. And so that's where Knox spent about the next couple of years, about the next 19 months as that castle fell to the

01:19:54

French. He's captured, he spent 19 months from the year 1547 onward as a galley slave on one of those ships.

01:20:02

But even there, he keeps ministering. Even there on that ship, he's working on a treatise on justification and explaining the doctrine of justification to his comrades on the ship.

01:20:12

There's this one moment, and I'll probably butcher the quote a little bit, but it's quintessential

01:20:17

Knox, where the French Catholic ship authorities are going around with this portrait of the

01:20:22

Virgin Mary, and they're thrusting it into the faces of the various passengers and slaves and forcing them to kiss the portrait and to pay homage to the

01:20:32

Virgin Mary. And when they get to Knox, somehow he grabs the portrait out of their hands, throws it out the ship window, and says to the officials, let our lady swim, for she is regal, powerful, and light enough.

01:20:45

She can do it. Well, we do have a listener question that I will read at this point before you go on any further.

01:20:57

Certainly. We have Burton in Farragut, Tennessee, and Burton says, what interaction, if any, did

01:21:08

John Knox have with the other Reformers, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and if he did have contact with them, was he close in any substantial way with any of them?

01:21:25

Yes, that's a great question. Not Luther or Zwingli. I believe

01:21:30

Zwingli would have already perished on the battlefield before Knox came into the ministry, and Luther, being a fair bit older than Calvin, he may have died already as well.

01:21:40

I'm not entirely certain. So he didn't have... Knox was certainly aware of Luther. He was certainly aware of his writings and his treatises.

01:21:46

He would have been familiar with them. A lot of the early influence of the Scottish Reformation came from Lutheran sources, certainly, like George Wishart.

01:21:55

And a man whose name escapes me at the moment, but it'll come to me in a few minutes.

01:22:01

One of Knox's associates said he helped distill this man's doctrinal instruction and included it in some of his own works as well.

01:22:11

So Knox certainly was familiar with Luther's teachings. But Calvin, yes. Knox was particularly close with Calvin.

01:22:17

He was particularly associated with Calvin. I'll speak to this more as we get on in Knox's ministry, but twice

01:22:26

Calvin influenced Knox, leaned on Knox, if you like, to pastor a couple of churches.

01:22:35

One in Frankfurt, Germany, and another in Geneva itself. Both of those churches were

01:22:42

Protestant congregations for English refugees, English Protestants who were in hiding for safety on the

01:22:50

European continent during the reign of Queen Mary, Bloody Mary. And so they had these refugee churches in these, if you will, sanctuary cities like Geneva and Frankfurt.

01:22:59

And so Calvin knew, here's these English Protestants who need a pastor. And so two times, Calvin says, John Knox, you go be their pastor.

01:23:06

And so Knox pastored briefly in Frankfurt. Those Protestants, there was a falling out.

01:23:11

We'll talk about that in a little bit. He came back to Geneva, and Calvin said, well, we still have work for you to do here.

01:23:17

There's still English refugees here in the city of Geneva that need a pastor, and so you can be their pastor as well.

01:23:24

Knox loved Geneva. He is said to have spoken of it in these exalted terms.

01:23:33

At one point in one of his letters, he said in Geneva was the most perfect school of Christ since the time of the apostles.

01:23:40

That's how highly he esteemed Calvin's ministry. That's how highly he esteemed the reform efforts that Calvin was making in that city.

01:23:48

It might be a little bit anachronistic to put it in these terms, but I'll do it anyway. Calvin was something of Knox's mentor, and he loved his time in Geneva.

01:23:58

He was coming off of a hard and frustrating season of ministry in the Church of England, and so when he got to be in Geneva and sit under Calvin's tutelage, collaborate with Calvin, attend some of those worship services there, receive advice from Calvin, he found it to be a particularly refreshing season of ministry for him.

01:24:15

He might have been at his happiest when he was in Geneva, working in the same environs with Calvin.

01:24:24

And even after Knox left Geneva, he kept up a correspondence with Calvin and sought his advice on some different matters.

01:24:31

In some cases, he did not choose to take Calvin's advice and later regretted it, but in many cases, he took

01:24:36

Calvin's advice and ran with it. So, yes. We have Derek in Jamestown, New York, and Derek said, were there any significant differences in theology between John Knox and John Calvin?

01:24:55

Not terribly significant differences in theology, at least none that I've unearthed yet.

01:25:01

The one that sticks out in my mind most predominantly because I was writing about this a few months ago, is that Calvin has a tighter view of the marks, of the true marks of the

01:25:15

Church, whereas Knox falls along the more classic three distinctions of the true

01:25:22

Church. And what I mean is this, you might have heard this in various reformed lingo and reformed literature, but oftentimes it's said that what are the three marks that distinguish a true gospel

01:25:32

Church, a true Church of Christ? Well, it's where the Word is rightly preached, where the sacraments or the ordinances are rightly administered, and where church discipline is rightly practiced.

01:25:41

That's the view that Knox held to, that these are the three marks of the Church. Calvin held to a tighter view, where he emphasized the

01:25:48

Word rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered. He certainly believed in church discipline,

01:25:54

Calvin did, but he didn't articulate it quite so pointedly the way later reformers did and even the way

01:25:59

Knox did. So there's a slight discrepancy among them in that regard, but I wouldn't say that that's a major one.

01:26:05

But in most other ways, I'd say that the men were relatively in lockstep. One of the things that we'll talk about with Knox's Scottish ministry in Edinburgh and elsewhere in a few minutes is basically how

01:26:17

Knox took Calvin's structure, and he took his project as it was taking place in one particular city -state, namely

01:26:24

Geneva, and he exported that and he extrapolated that to an entire nation.

01:26:30

So Calvin had elders and Calvin had church structure and councils and an interaction with the magistrates at a city level, at a city scale in Geneva.

01:26:41

Knox took that same thing in seed form and extrapolated it to an entire nation in Scotland, where he had many congregations and many different elders serving in different cities and a nationwide system of education and discipline and connectionalism and so forth.

01:26:55

So that's not necessarily a disagreement, but just a furtherance or a development or a furthering of Calvin's idea in seed form

01:27:04

Knox brought to fuller blossom in Scotland, you might say. We have Bo in Colebrook, Connecticut, and Bo says,

01:27:14

I heard that John Calvin's confrontation of Mary Queen of Scots somewhat disturbed

01:27:24

John Calvin. Is that true? Knox's confrontations with Mary Queen of Scots, did that disturb

01:27:32

John Calvin? I don't know if his confrontations with Mary Queen of Scots necessarily perturbed

01:27:39

Calvin. I do know that Knox's publication of that treatise, the first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women,

01:27:50

Calvin strongly discouraged Knox from publishing it. Calvin shared

01:27:57

Knox's convictions more or less in those regards, but Calvin said, I understand what you're saying,

01:28:04

Knox, but in times extraordinary, God sometimes even uses female leaders and female rulers.

01:28:10

He cited, Calvin did the example of Deborah and Huldah as unusual providences of God in unusual and spiritually derelict times, and he advised

01:28:20

Knox not to publish it because the cause of Reformation was so tender, it was so fragile, it was so precarious in so many ways.

01:28:27

Calvin basically said, we need as many friends as we can in this regard, and if you publish this, we have some female sovereigns, female monarchs who are sympathetic to the

01:28:37

Protestant cause, and if you publish this, you're going to put them at odds with us, and who knows what that will do for the cause of Christ.

01:28:43

And indeed, when Knox published it, he very much had in mind, in view, I should say, these wicked

01:28:49

Roman Catholic female monarchs who were slaughtering his countrymen and slaughtering his fellow Protestants. So we can understand at some level the urgency and the fieriness behind Knox's words there when he looks at Queen Mary, Bloody Mary in England, killing these

01:29:04

Protestants, when he looks at Mary, Queen of Scots, and her mother, Mary de Guise, in Scotland, who are imprisoning his fellow

01:29:10

Protestants and bringing miseries upon his countrymen. He's incensed about it. He writes this fiery letter about it.

01:29:17

Well, given the rate and the timetable of publication in these days, by the time he wrote it and sent it off to publication,

01:29:25

Mary, Bloody Mary of England, was no longer around, and she had been replaced by Queen Elizabeth I, a

01:29:32

Protestant. And so by the time this fiery political treatise reaches the English shores, Bloody Mary's out of the picture.

01:29:38

It's Elizabeth I who's on the throne. And so Elizabeth I gets this letter and she reads this, this John Knox guy, he hates me.

01:29:45

He thinks that I'm an illegitimate ruler. He thinks I'm a rotten woman for being a female queen, a female monarch over England.

01:29:52

Well, forget this guy. And so it was just a... And Calvin in his own way, he foresaw that.

01:29:58

And so, unfortunately, because of that, whatever alliance or friendship or support

01:30:03

Knox might have had from the English throne, he blew it with Queen Elizabeth. In fact,

01:30:08

Knox later said that he came to regret publishing that letter in the manner or at least at the timeline that he did.

01:30:15

He said, in that first blast of the trumpet, I blew away all the friends that I had in England.

01:30:23

He comes to regret that later, wishing he would have heeded Calvin's advice to be more measured and more discreet and perhaps refrain from sending that thing off right away.

01:30:32

Now, did that in any way disrupt or damage his friendship with Calvin? I think that Calvin kept...

01:30:42

He regarded Knox in a rather circumspect way from there on. We have evidence in Calvin's letters, not to Knox, but to others, where Calvin admits, you know,

01:30:52

I tried to counsel this Knox guy. I gave him my advice, and he disregarded it, and I really wish he wouldn't have done that.

01:30:59

He seems a bit impetuous, but it is what it is, and he's left Geneva. He's back in Scotland now, and so we'll do what we can to support him.

01:31:07

But he can be a bit reckless at times. That's a rough paraphrase of what Calvin said about Knox in some of his other correspondence.

01:31:15

Well, I'd like you to just continue with the most important highlights of John Knox's life and legacy, and perhaps even especially about his pastoral theology.

01:31:25

And if we have time later on, we'll have some more listening questions. Certainly, certainly.

01:31:31

So 19 months, they're on the ship as galley slaves, and then somebody on the outside negotiates for their release, and the ships are brought to England at last, and the slaves, the

01:31:43

Protestant slaves, are set free. And somebody had made arrangements because at this point, Edward VI, young king boy

01:31:51

King Edward, is on the throne, and so England is sympathetic to Protestantism. It's a pro -Protestant place to be.

01:31:58

And so somebody on the outside, we think perhaps Richard Bannatyne, one of Knox's friends and associates and colleagues, had made arrangements for their release, and he goes into ministry,

01:32:11

Knox does, in the Church of England. He began Protestant ministry, as we think of Knox as the great

01:32:16

Scottish Presbyterian, the great Church of Scotland minister, but he began his Protestant ministry as a Church of England minister.

01:32:23

Really? And so he did, yes, and he was there during the time of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and the boy

01:32:28

King Edward VI, and he preached in Berwick, he preached in Newcastle, he even had an offering to preach in London, and he did minister in London for a time.

01:32:41

Berwick was a border town near the English -Scottish border, military garrison was there, a rough and tumble kind of area, a rough place to be, but Knox was a bit of a rough, tough guy, and so he gained the respect of a lot of the military soldiers who were there, and gained their respect with his plain, straightforward preaching and his presence there.

01:33:01

He did similar in Newcastle. It was during this time that Knox was arguing for certain reforms in the

01:33:09

Church of England that were not always well -received. This is where Knox, I think, at least honed or more pointedly expressed some of his liturgical convictions, particularly surrounding the

01:33:19

Lord's Supper. As you might imagine, there's lots of vestiges of medieval practice that were still going on in the

01:33:26

Church of England, and in particular, Knox was really bothered by the practice of kneeling at the

01:33:31

Lord's Supper, because for him, that communicated the leftovers of medieval theology, of adoring the host, the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ, and so we're kneeling before these elements because we believe

01:33:44

Christ is corporeally present there. He thought that's what kneeling communicated, and so it really bothered him.

01:33:50

Because the Thirty -Nine Articles are clearly opposed to the adoration of the elements. That's right, and Archbishop Cranmer was more of a politician.

01:34:01

He was actually quite sympathetic to Knox's convictions, but Cranmer said, basically, we can't have complete overhaul right away.

01:34:10

We need to do things slowly and steadily to keep the peace, and if we do too much too soon, it could really blow up in our faces.

01:34:18

I understand where you're coming from, Knox, but we can't overhaul it and mandate it right now. But Knox was always something of a purist, and that didn't stop him from backing down.

01:34:26

He kept insisting on sitting to receive the Lord's Supper, to receive the elements.

01:34:32

Don't you dare kneel at these things. That's what he did in his churches, and it caused a ruckus with some of the higher church hierarchy and authorities in the northern parts of England.

01:34:42

So eventually, he gets moved down to London to be a courtier, to be an advisor, a royal chaplain to the king, young boy

01:34:49

King Edward VI. And there, he's really able to make a good influence for the cause of reformation in the

01:34:55

Church of England. Boy, King Edward was— Knox had his ear, and that's why you have something that's called the

01:35:02

Black Rubric, which later gets appended into the Book of Common Prayer in the Church of England, where the

01:35:09

Black Rubric is part of one of Knox's creations, where they analyze these different practices and find whether or not, yes, the

01:35:17

Church of England currently practices them, but do they square up with what the Bible actually teaches or not?

01:35:22

And so this rubric was inserted later to say yes to this and no to that, yes to this and no to that, yes to preaching and to only two sacraments, the baptism of the

01:35:34

Lord's Supper, but no to kneeling and things like that. So it wasn't added into the official Book of Common Prayer.

01:35:40

But as a compromise, this Black Rubric was added as an appendix in the back of the Book of Common Prayer for some time, and that was largely due to the influence of John Knox and the fact that he had

01:35:50

King Edward's ear in that regard. Did any of the modern publications of the

01:35:57

Book of Common Prayer retain Knox's appendix, or have they long been removed?

01:36:05

It's long been removed. You can occasionally find an edition of it that includes it just as an artifact of historical interest, but in terms of official publications, it's long been removed.

01:36:15

I'm not sure how many editions or iterations of the BCP kept that rubric in.

01:36:20

It wasn't terribly long, especially after the death of Edward VI, because then

01:36:26

Bloody Mary came to the throne, and it was Roman Catholic again. And a lot of the Protestant advances went out the window for a time during Bloody Mary's reign, unfortunately.

01:36:38

Was that when Cranmer was executed? Yes, that's right. Yeah, I'm not sure the precise dates on there, but sometime in that time frame, that's right,

01:36:46

Chris. So unfortunately, with the death of young King Edward, that's when Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, came to the throne, and Knox had to flee for his own safety, and as many

01:36:58

Protestants did, she came to power, and Roman Catholicism was on the ascend and then, again, they fled to the

01:37:06

European continent. But yeah, that is an interesting thing, that he knew himself well enough in that he was offered the role of a bishop in London and in Newcastle, at least in Newcastle.

01:37:19

He turned it down. He was offered a prominent pulpit in a London church there in the city, and he turned it down,

01:37:26

I think, because he knew himself. He knew himself to be a purist. He knew himself to be insistent on taking the

01:37:33

English Reformation further than it was willing to go at this point. He wanted it to be more reformed and more biblical than it presently was, and he knew that he, in good conscience, couldn't abide by certain things, and he was going to keep on insisting on those things, and he knew that if he was a bishop in Newcastle, or if he was the pastor of this prominent church in London, it would not go well for him.

01:37:53

And so he politely declined those things, and he remained a chaplain to the king as long as he could.

01:37:58

And so Edward died, Mary comes to the throne, he flees England, and he goes to— he flees

01:38:06

England upon the accession of Mary Tudor, and he goes to Geneva for a little bit, because that's something of a sanctuary city.

01:38:12

Calvin is doing his reforms in Geneva. Many Protestants are taking refuge there, so he shows up, and that's when

01:38:18

Calvin says, you know, John Knox, we've got a lot of English Protestants taking refuge in Frankfurt.

01:38:24

They need a pastor. Why don't you go over there? So Knox does, and that's where he serves perhaps the briefest stint ever in his pastoral ministry—five months.

01:38:35

So, pastors listening to this show, if you think you've had a rough season of ministry, if you've had a tough congregation, if you've lasted longer than five months, then you're doing well, at least by John Knox's standards.

01:38:46

He gets there, and already when he gets there, there's tension. There's rumblings afoot, and he doesn't last.

01:38:54

They give him the boot five months later. Tom Horner Does that have anything to do with the predominance of Lutheran theology in the

01:39:00

Reformation there? David Well, maybe in a roundabout way, but what you have in Frankfurt is what's sometimes called the first skirmish of the battle of the regulative versus normative principle of worship.

01:39:14

That's basically what we have there. Now, of course, they wouldn't have put it in those terms. That's how we would describe it, but that really is what's going on.

01:39:20

You have two camps of people in this church in Frankfurt. They're all English, but one party says, we want to be as Reformed and biblical as possible.

01:39:30

These folks have been influenced by Calvin in Geneva, and they said, we want to get back to New Testament apostolic practices as much as we can, be as simple and biblical as possible, and worship

01:39:38

God accordingly. But then you have the other party, and again, they weren't nefarious. People are people.

01:39:44

We understand that. You have this other party that said, you know, this is what we're used to. We're Englishmen.

01:39:49

We worship this way in the Protestant Church of England. We like the Book of Common Prayer. There are people who bled and died to give us these things.

01:39:57

Are we going to dishonor them by negating everything they stood for and saying that they were wrong and they were less than faithful? I don't know that I'm comfortable with that.

01:40:04

Surely, we don't have to dispense of all the things in the Book of Common Prayer. Surely, we can retain some of these things.

01:40:09

Is it really that awful? That's where you had this tension of, we want to respect their memory.

01:40:16

We want to honor them. Of course, they sacrificed greatly. Of course, we thank God for our leaders. But ultimately, we have to worship

01:40:23

God in the way that He desires, not the way that we desire. And you had this party saying, we're these exiles from England.

01:40:30

We're far from home. If we can stay here as refugees in Frankfurt, this will give us a sense of home, a sense of the familiar.

01:40:37

It's comforting to us. Do we have to jettison all of it? And so there's this tension. The folks that said regulative principle versus the folks that said normative principle.

01:40:46

The folks that said let's worship only as the Bible commands versus the folks that said, well, the Bible doesn't forbid this explicitly, so is it really that awful?

01:40:54

Can we not retain these things? As you might imagine, John Knox fell on the side of the more regulative principle, the more

01:40:59

Genevan style of worship, where he wanted to keep it as simple and biblical as possible.

01:41:04

Only what Scripture commanded or was, by good and necessary consequence, set forth.

01:41:10

And that created tension. And the difference is, just for our listeners who are unfamiliar with those titles, the regulative principles, they would take silences in the

01:41:23

Scripture as prohibitions to include them in worship, whereas the normative principle would take silences as liberty in many cases, not in all cases.

01:41:33

But am I in the roundabout area of hitting the mark there?

01:41:39

Yeah, that's right, Chris. That which is not expressly forbidden is permitted.

01:41:44

That's a succinct way you might say is the normative principle. Certainly that which is commanded we have to do.

01:41:51

So preaching and singing and baptism in the Lord's Supper, those are commanded. We've got to do those things.

01:41:56

But other things that aren't expressly forbidden, like perhaps kneeling at the altar, perhaps dressing in certain ways, perhaps things like that, they're not forbidden, so they're okay.

01:42:08

Whereas the regulative principle camp would say, well, unless Scripture gives us an explicit command, then we don't really have the warrant to introduce that to worship.

01:42:19

We need a positive prescriptive example or deduction from Scripture in order to include this in the service of worship toward God.

01:42:28

We don't have the right to be creative or introduce things, which might be good things in and of themselves, but if they're not found to have a biblical warrant, then we don't really have the right to introduce that into the public worship of God.

01:42:40

Yeah, that's right. Well, we have to go to our final commercial break, and once again, if you'd like to join us on the air with a question, we will see if we have time for any of your questions toward the end of the show.

01:42:53

I would suggest that you send them immediately because we are running out of time.

01:42:58

So that's chrisarmson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

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01:50:00

And we are now back with Dr. Sean Morris and our phenomenal conversation on John Knox.

01:50:08

I already know that we will likely have to have him back on for a part two of this discussion.

01:50:15

But if you could, pick up where you left off, Sean, and mention as many of the highlights of this giant of history's life and legacy that you have time to speak about before we run out of time today.

01:50:29

Certainly. And I'm over here smiling. Your listeners can't see it, but you mentioned that biography of the late

01:50:35

Dr. John MacArthur, and I'm sitting here drinking a can of Fresca right now, just thinking of him fondly. Also, not that he is nearly the hero that John MacArthur was, but also the favorite beverage of Lyndon Johnson, President of the

01:50:50

United States. He actually had a Fresca machine built into the White House when he was there.

01:50:57

Fantastic. Now, I'll briefly get us towards the end of Knox's ministry. So, there's the

01:51:04

Regulative Principal Party, Knox, and then there's the Normative Principal Party led by a man named

01:51:09

Richard Cox from the Church of England. Knox versus Cox, it was called. Well, the Cox Party prevailed.

01:51:15

John Knox left after five months. He goes back to Geneva, and there's that English refugee congregation there.

01:51:20

And so John Calvin says, Knox, minister to these brethren here in Geneva. So he does. He pastors them.

01:51:26

But meanwhile, he receives word from his countrymen back in Scotland that they need some guidance.

01:51:32

And so what he does is during this time from about 1554 to 1559, he's back and forth between Geneva and Scotland.

01:51:39

He goes back to visit what we call the Privy Kirks, the private little house churches, almost, of these proto -Protestants in Scotland because they need some guidance and pastoral counsel.

01:51:50

And so he goes there. He travels to these various villages and houses. He preaches to them. He gives them counsel. He gives them advice about what to do in the meantime because the

01:51:59

Roman Catholic Church is still in power in those days, so they can't meet publicly for biblical Protestant worship services.

01:52:05

So he tells them to make do the best they can, to read the Bible as families, to pray together, to sing together.

01:52:13

Obviously, they don't have ordained ministers to preach or do baptism of the Lord's Supper. But he says, you can get by in the meantime on these means of grace.

01:52:23

Please write to me if you need further counsel or advice when I'm away from you. And he had been in Scotland for some months.

01:52:29

And again, I think this highlights the churchman that Knox was. Eventually, he gets a letter from the congregation back in Geneva, where they're very kindly saying, basically,

01:52:39

Knox, we called you to be our pastor. We miss our pastor. We need our pastor. Please come back to us. And so he heeds that call.

01:52:46

He hearkens to the call of the church. He leaves Scotland, where he loves to be. He goes back to Geneva, and he shepherds the people there at that refugee church in Geneva.

01:52:55

And that's the time when he describes Geneva as that most perfect school of Christ since the time of the apostles.

01:53:01

That's when he publishes the first blast of the trumpet. It's during that time. But in 1559, there's something of a political crisis going on in Scotland.

01:53:10

And so he gets letters from those Scottish Protestants, where they say, please come back to your homeland. We think the time is ripe for reform.

01:53:18

Would you please come back and lead the cause of reformation in Scotland? And so, again, he heeds that call of the church.

01:53:24

He goes back to Scotland. And this is where it comes into play how he had earlier offended Queen Elizabeth I with his publication.

01:53:32

Had he been able to, he would have gone from Geneva to Dieppe, France, and take a short little ship across the

01:53:38

English Channel, get to England, and travel through England to go north into Scotland. But because he had so offended

01:53:43

Queen Elizabeth, she did not give him the papers to pass through her realm when he wanted to travel.

01:53:48

So he had to go the long way home from Dieppe, France, back to the coastland of Scotland.

01:53:54

But eventually he gets there in 1559. And in 1559, he is called to be the—he does a little bit of work in St.

01:54:04

Andrews in helping some of the earlier efforts of reform. And what you have happening at this time is a tension.

01:54:10

You've got Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. She's an ardent Roman Catholic. But many of the nobility that are under her—the earls, the barons, the dukes, and so forth—many of them are

01:54:18

Protestant in their sympathies. And so there's tension there. A lot of the members of the Scottish Parliament, the earlier form of the

01:54:24

Scottish Parliament, are Protestant in their sympathies. So that's why they think the time is right to put the pressure on the queen to make

01:54:30

Scotland a Protestant nation, whether she likes it or not. That's why they summon Knox back. So there he is.

01:54:36

He does some work in St. Andrews. And then eventually he's called to be the pastor of the High Kirk in Scotland's capital city,

01:54:43

St. Giles Kirk in Edinburgh. And he becomes the pastor there. And it's during this time that he has those famous engagements, those audiences with the queen where he is known in some cases to even make the queen cry.

01:54:58

The queen is known to say that she fears the prayers of John Knox more than a thousand armies or something along those lines.

01:55:04

So bold he is. In reading those discourses with Knox and the queen, he's often very respectful.

01:55:11

In fact, he's always respectful. He's very deferential to her and to the office that she holds.

01:55:16

But he's bold. He tells her the truth. He tells her that the truth of the gospel, how she needs to repent and flee to Christ and stop with these popish masses and stop with these dalliances that she has, including taking certain adulterous lovers that she was known to take.

01:55:30

He was very clear and bold in his confronting of her, all the while being respectful and deferential to his monarch.

01:55:39

While the pastor in Edinburgh, he does the things that any pastor would do. He preaches multiple times a week.

01:55:45

He visits the parishioners. He comforts the sick in the morning. He writes letters of assurance. He has particularly tender relationships, remarkably, with a number of women in the congregation.

01:55:54

Perfectly wholesome relationships, but I think that puts the lie to the impression that's out there that he was some sort of surly, misogynistic woman hater.

01:56:03

We have all kinds of letters that he's writing to older particular saints, female saints in the faith, where he's giving them assurance to trust in Christ, where they have doubts of their salvation.

01:56:15

He tells them to look to Christ and to find assurance and find comfort there. There's these remarkably tender correspondences.

01:56:24

He's busy with these things. Perhaps one of the more remarkable things that he's involved in is when the parliament summons the churchmen and says, now's the time.

01:56:33

We're breaking with the Roman Catholic Church. We are going to formally make a Protestant church for the nation of Scotland, for our kingdom.

01:56:40

Draft up the founding documents, Knox. He and five other men, all named

01:56:45

John, the so -called famous Six Johns, they hammer out what is called the Scott's Confession of Faith of 1560, and they do it in four days' time.

01:56:55

It's a remarkable document. Of course, you can tell that it was hammered out in a hurry. It's a little rough in some parts.

01:57:01

It doesn't have the smoothness and the sophisticated nature of later confessions like Westminster. Nevertheless, it's a fine, theological confession.

01:57:09

They hammer that out. They hammer out what's called the Book of Discipline, what you and I might think of as a modern book of church order.

01:57:15

It gives structure to the National Church of Scotland. Later, they provide what's called the Book of Common Order, which is a more

01:57:22

Presbyterian version of the Book of Common Prayer. That is, it doesn't give direct orders and direct liturgical orders for every

01:57:34

Lord's Day service the way the Book of Common Prayer does with prescribed words and verbiage and litanies and so forth.

01:57:40

But the Book of Common Order gives the basic shape of what public Lord's Day worship should look like.

01:57:46

The basic elements are there in place, and so churches can use that. Big churches, little churches, city churches, rural churches, they can use that to give shape to their services as they begin to have ordained ministers.

01:57:59

And so in 1560, through the providence of God and some political cooperation, even though Mary is on the throne, she is weak politically in some sense, and the

01:58:10

Scottish Parliament, or what's called the Convention of Estates in those days, they make the Church of Scotland to be the established religion, the formal religion of the

01:58:19

Kingdom of Scotland and its Protestants. John Knox is one of the leading ministers. It doesn't look quite the way the later iteration of a more fully blossomed

01:58:27

Presbyterian church would look under men like Andrew Melville, but the early seeds of it are there.

01:58:32

You might think of it as a proto -Presbyterian form. It's there in its seed form, and Knox labors for a number of years there in St.

01:58:41

Giles until eventually, growing old and ill, he dies in 1572. He died on November 24, 1572, and he had preached just days before, and he was buried in the churchyard, which now has been paved over, and so his grave is thought to be beneath car park spot number 23 in the car park next to St.

01:59:00

Giles. Amazing. And I am insulted, highly insulted, that you said he was old when he died because he was 58, which is five years younger than me.

01:59:11

Well, no insult was intended, but the poor man was quite infirm, unfortunately, and so he may have only been 58.

01:59:20

He might have felt 88, I suppose, given his ailments. Well, I want to make sure our listeners have your website, covenant -pca .com

01:59:27

covenant -pca .com I want you to come back. Perhaps we can even do a broader examination of the

01:59:35

Scottish Reformation, and I want to thank everybody who listened. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater