Until the death of Henry VIII (28 January 1547), the services of the Church of England were in the Latin of the Breviary and the Missal. The beginning of service books in English begins with the reign of Edward VI (aged 9). A Reformed service book was prepared, under the authority of Edward Seymour,Footnote 2 the first Duke of Somerset, who acted as Protector during the infancy of Edward VI. By Act of Parliament in 1549 the First Prayer Book of Edward VI was to be used from Pentecost that year. This was a conservative and basically Catholic book, which contrasted with the Zwinglian style of the Dutch and the Strasbourg style of the French Stranger churches in Glastonbury and London, and the more continental-Reformed Anglicans under John Hooper.Footnote 3
After the fall of Somerset, the new Protector was John Dudley,Footnote 4 Earl of Warwick, who subsequently became Duke of Northumberland. He depended for support on the more Reformed group, and after much discussion of the eucharistic presence, by an Act of 6 April 1552, a revised book was ordered for use. This was the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. It showed extensive changes. Vestments were forbidden.Footnote 5 The word ‘table’, not ‘altar’ was used. The table stood in the body of the church. How one received the consecrated elements was an issue. In sermons on Jonah during Lent 1550 Hooper had argued that the Paschal Lamb was eaten standing, whereas Christ and his Apostles had used the Passover sacrament sitting,Footnote 6 indicating that they were at peace since the Messiah had come. Though kneeling was the traditional posture, discussion had reached the point when sitting (called ‘the Table Gesture’) was being considered. This was opposed by Thomas Cranmer, who added a rubric to the draft book that communion should be given ‘to the people in their hands kneling’ as a way of ensuring that the practice did not drift.
The First Book had been silent on this. It said that ‘touching, kneeling, crossing, holding up of hands. . . may be used or left, as every man's devotion serveth’ and Hooper would have preferred it to be left open. The matter was energised by a fervent sermon against kneeling preached by the chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland before the King and his court at Windsor in the autumn of 1552.Footnote 7 This was John Knox, hitherto at Newcastle and Berwick where he had known little liturgical restriction, who had been brought to London by the Duke.Footnote 8
The Second Prayer Book was by now in production and Cranmer wrote in the most direct terms to the Privy Council on 7 October 1552. He begged the councillors not to be moved ‘by these glorious and unquiet spirits’.Footnote 9 He questioned the cogency of Knox's argument for sitting: it is true that scripture does not expressly prescribe sitting, kneeling or standing, ‘but if we follow the plain words of Scripture, we shall rather receive it lying down on the ground as the custom of the world at that time [was] almost everywhere’.Footnote 10
Consequently, the rubric was left as it was, but a long note was added (known as the Black Rubric because it was too late in the process to print it in red). This defined the intention of the posture (it was not for adoration), and denied a real or essential presence, or change of substance). It was a victory for Cranmer.Footnote 11
Knox's objections were substantial and interesting. In a lengthy and convoluted letter to his congregation in Berwick,Footnote 12 Knox reminded them that ‘kneling at the Lord's Souper I have proved by doctrine to be no convenient gesture for a table’.Footnote 13 ‘Kneling appering to be joined with certain dangears no less in manteyning superstitioun than in using Christ's holye institutioun. . . I thought good amongst you to avoide’.Footnote 14
He wrote that ‘because I am but one, having in my contrair magistrates, commone order, and judgements of manye lerned, I am not minded for maintenance of that one thing to gainstand the magistrates, nor yet to break nor truble common order, thought meet to be kept for unitie and peace for a tyme’.Footnote 15 On being assured that, first:
kneling is not reteyned in the Lord's Souper for maintenance of anye superstitioun, much less that anye adoratioun to anye realle presence of Christ's bodye natural there conteaned, or joined with those elements of breade amd wynne,
And that, second,
commone order clame not kneeling in the Lord's Soupper as either necessarie or decent to Christis action, but onlye as a ceremonye thought goodely by man,Footnote 16
Knox agreed not to ‘gainstand godlie magistrates, nether brak commone order nor yit contend with my superiors or fellow preachers’.Footnote 17
Accordingly, he advised his congregation ‘seeing that my resystance shuld rather sturr the magistrates against you. . . the consail of all godliye, as also the testimonie of my owin conscience, is that less offence it is to beare this one thing. . . Than to provoke the magistrates to displeasour, seeing that in principals we all agree.’Footnote 18
This agreement to support the Black Rubric is about as reluctant as it could be.
In another document, addressed to the Privy Council and unsigned and undated, the author – almost certainly Knox – further elaborated his understanding of the Reformed communion.Footnote 19 ‘Kneling’ he wrote, ‘is no gesture meete at the Table’ because it obscures ‘the joyfull sygnyfications of that holie mysterie’.Footnote 20 ‘Kneling is the gesture most commonlye of supplyantes, of beggars, or suche men as. . . seketh help’.Footnote 21 ‘[I]n the Lorde's Supper. . . nether shoulde appere in us dolor, povertie, nor syne of any miserye’.Footnote 22 The writer continued that
In the propheticall churche, before that Messiah was planely revelat to the world, in that sacrament when every yeare was celebrated by the Israelites. . . There was one ceremonye notable, that hastilye they should eate the Lambe standyng, theyr loynes gyrded, with staves in their hands; the Holie Ghost signifying thereby their sodeyne departure from Egypt. . . Yet was not the ceremonye chaunged,. . . because the veray Joshua that was to leade the elect people of God. . . was not then come in fleshe. But at suche tyme as the Sonne of God began to be preached and revealed to the world. . . at that tyme. . . began the fygures of the law to evanysshe and to cease; for John began a new ceremonye of baptising. . . Which ceremonye Jesus Christ commanded his disciples to kepe and follow, gevying to charge to circumsyse any; in wytness that blodd shuld cease, by reason that the very perfect sacrifice was already come. . . And so, the former Sacrament gave place to the latter. . . For the nyght before he was to suffer. . . eatying the Passover with his disciples, he appereth to have dissolved and disannulled the ceremonye of standing before used at God's commandment. . . [T]he Passover thyat night was not eatyn standing according to the precept and commandment of the lawe, but sittynge, to wytness that [He] who is the end of the lawe. . . Was shortly to pass before his brethren to the kingdom wherunto they should be fully possessed by Him.Footnote 23
The writer summed up to the Privy Council, ‘Thus have we given unto your Honors, most honourable, our plane confession whye, in the Lord's Table, we cannot admit kneling.’Footnote 24 He requested them that ‘ye not bynd that thing under a law. . . Which also hath been the gestures of Idolatours. . . because such gestures, nothing comely for a Table, do obscure the joyfull sygnifications of such things’.Footnote 25
Despite all Knox's objections and efforts, the Second Prayer Book revised with the Black Rubric came into force on 1 November 1552. At least if one goes on the evidence of this material, for Knox repetition of the Last Supper had become the controlling narrative for making sense of what was happening at the Reformed celebration of Holy Communion. This is an interesting and not inconsiderable argument and it cast a long shadow. Unsurprisingly, if one argued from that perspective, one would be unsympathetic to the notion of ‘private’ communion or ‘private’ baptism.
Edward VI died on 6 July 1553.Footnote 26 The two heirs were Mary Queen of Scots and Mary Tudor. Mary Tudor, a Catholic, came to the throne. In 1554 she married Philip II of Spain. The Second Prayer Book of Edward VI was abolished in 1553.Footnote 27
The argument about the posture to be adopted in worship and, indeed, the nature of Reformed worship itself, had a prolonged second showing in Scotland a generation later. Awareness of how the argument was played in the rerun may be helpful in locating Knox's legacy at an earlier point on a complicated trajectory.
So we jump a generation.
In 1614 James VI, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, and since 1603 also King of England, ordered all ministers to celebrate communion at Easter. Most obeyed.
In 1615 he ordered them to celebrate communion at Easter every year, and St Andrews University to observe the major festivals of the Christian year.
King James then initiated a project for improving Knox's liturgy. John Spottiswoode, now archbishop of St Andrews, insisted that this must go to a General Assembly, and an Assembly at Aberdeen in 1616 recommended the preparation of a new liturgy; a book of canons; a confession of faith; a catechism; the examination of children by bishops on their visitations; and the celebration of Easter. Two draft liturgies were prepared in 1616 and 1617.
In 1617 James visited Holyrood bringing William LaudFootnote 28 with him. His proposals had become Five Articles: kneeling at communion; the celebration of the Christian year; provision for private communion; provision for private baptism; confirmation by a bishop. An Assembly at St Andrews in November 1617 effectively rejected them, but they were accepted by a ‘National Assembly’ which met at Perth in 1618.Footnote 29 Approval was also given for the preparation of a liturgy. It was an error on James’ part and a misreading of the situation. The greatest hostility came from the requirement to kneel at communion, which affected the laity and focused opposition to changes in the liturgy.
The Articles were, in fact, widely disregarded. A new draft liturgy was prepared in 1618 which, unlike the earlier drafts, was based on the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote 30 In fact it was a reasonable compromise, which could have been accepted. But the storm over the Five Articles made it impossible, and it never appeared. Parliament ratified the Articles in 1621, as part of a bargain from James that he would make no more innovations. James died on 27 March 1625 and the Articles remained on the statute book until the Confession of Faith Ratification Act of 1690.
For the second-generation discussion, I turn to John Forbes,Footnote 31 and begin with some biographical context.
John Forbes was born on 2 May 1593, the second son of Patrick Forbes, the bishop of Aberdeen. His uncle was John Forbes of Alford, moderator of an illegal General Assembly at Aberdeen in 1605, who was tried and banished, and subsequently became the minister of Delft. Another uncle was Danzig Willie (William Forbes of Menie), a trader in memel pine, who in 1610 bought the half-built Craigievar Castle from the Mortimer family and completed it in 1626. Patrick and John were cousins of Andrew Melville,Footnote 32 and Patrick had been his pupil. Both brothers were imbued with his teaching.
Young John was ordained in the Netherlands in 1619 and in 1620 (aged 27) was appointed Professor of Divinity at King's College, Aberdeen, where he became the leader of a distinctive group called the Aberdeen Doctors. He defended the Episcopal side in the controversy after the Articles of Perth in 1618. He published a volume titled the Irenicon Footnote 33 in defence of them in 1629. When the National Covenant was produced (1638), Forbes disagreed and produced A peaceable warning to the subjects in Scotland Footnote 34 (1638) which was promptly replied to by David Calderwood.Footnote 35 In November 1638 the Glasgow Assembly sat, and episcopacy was formally abolished in Scotland. Aberdeen repudiated the Assembly's decree, and the Covenanting army was sent to the city. In March 1639, just before the city surrendered, the Aberdeen Doctors dispersed: three went to England, Forbes went to his estate at Corse.
In the summer of 1640 Forbes was summoned to appear before the Assembly at Aberdeen, one of the charges being the line he had taken in his Irenicon. The case was remitted to the Presbytery of Edinburgh. He was told to present himself on pain of deposition. He feared he might make concessions against his conscience, and wrote to the Presbytery, refusing to sign the Covenant, and agreeing to accept their sentence. He was deprived of his Professorship at King's College and his house in Aberdeen on 20 April 1641.
In August 1643 the Solemn League and Covenant was agreed by the General Assembly, and everyone was required to subscribe to it. Forbes left the country (5 April 1644), and went to Amsterdam. Here he produced his Instructiones Historico-Theologicae.Footnote 36 In July 1646 he returned to Scotland, to his estate at Corse, and died 29 April 1648. The Presbytery of Aberdeen was sufficiently malicious to refuse permission for him to be buried beside his wife and father at St Machar's Cathedral. He was buried at Leochel, near Corse, where there is no gravestone.
What was Forbes’ perspective in these disputes? In 1619 there was an anonymous examination of The Perth Assembly, probably by David Calderwood. In 1637 George GillespieFootnote 37 anonymously published his Dispute against the English-Popish Ceremonies. Forbes knew both of these. After the Covenant had been signed, the Covenanters sent the theologians Andrew Cant of Pitsligo, David Dickson of Irvine and Alexander Henderson of Leuchars to convince the City of Aberdeen to accept it. There followed several exchanges of pamphlets, and reference is made below to the last replyFootnote 38 from the Aberdeen Doctors.
In the background, what was at stake was the genre or style of Reformed worship. The primary theological arguments were over whether or not one should kneel at communion and whether or not baptism and communion may in emergencies be administered in private. Underlying these questions were the issues: Do the sacraments add anything to the preached Word? Where does authority lie in matters where scripture is silent? Does one have liberty, or is one to be compelled? How exactly do you understand a sacrament? Does a sacrament (to use the language of Robert BruceFootnote 39) convey what it promises? We see emerging two distinct (and still unresolved) lines in the Scottish church: the Calvinist line and the more rationalist Melvillian/Westminster line.
On kneeling, Calderwood's basic claim was that this would be in breach of the Second Commandment. He said that Papists kneel because of transubstantiation, Lutherans kneel because of consubstantiation and Christ's real presence, and a third sort kneel ‘for reverence of the elements an inferior kinde of worship due (as they thinke) to consecrate creatures: this also is Idolatry’.Footnote 40 It is objected: are not holy things to be reverenced? Yes, but not worshipped: ‘veneration is one thing, adoration is an other’.Footnote 41
Calderwood allowed that God told his people to bow towards the Ark and the Temple wherein the Ark was.Footnote 42 He allows that ‘where God is present after an extraordinary maner’ as with the burning bush, adoration may be directed towards the place of his extraordinary presence. But he asserts: ‘The sacramentall elements have neither the like presence, the like promise, nor the like commandment’.Footnote 43
It is objected that we may pray as we receive, and so we may kneel as we receive. He answers that this insinuates that kneeling is the proper and only commendable gesture of prayer. Moses and Samuel stood before the Lord; the publican at Luke 18:11 stood to pray.Footnote 44
On the administration of the sacraments in private places,Footnote 45 Calderwood began by referring to the First Book of Discipline, §9, that baptism was to be administered on the ordinary days of preaching. He continued: ‘Not that it is unlawfull to baptise whensoever the Word is preached’, but the restriction was intended to remove a gross error, namely the belief that children will be damned if they die without baptism, and to ensure that the people hold the administration of the sacraments in greater reverence.Footnote 46 Sacraments were not to be used ‘in private corners, as charms or sorceries’.Footnote 47
Calderwood noted that the Assembly of October 1581 (in Edinburgh) ordered that sacraments should not be administered in private houses, under pain of deposition.
Yet the Perth Assembly allowed baptism in private houses when necessity required, and communion in private houses to the sick and infirm.
Calderwood responded: ‘A sacrament is a publick action, to be performed publickly, by publick ministers: neither can any necessity or sufficient cause be alledged, wherefore any sacred and publick action, should passe in private.’Footnote 48 One cannot fail to note Calderwood's rhetoric and the repetition of the word ‘public’.
Calderwood continued, ‘The sacraments were appointed not onely to be signs and seals of invisible graces, but also to be testimonies before the world of our piety and thankfulness towards God, and badges of our profession.’Footnote 49
All other actions which concerned the whole Kirk, were done with consent, and in presence of the Kirke as elections, ordinations and excommunications. . . By the same reason ought the sacraments to be ministered with consent, and in presence of the Kirk, seeing they are works of publick nature, and publick fruit belonging to all. . .Footnote 50
He adds that circumcision was a permanent and secret sign, but visible and able to be checked. Baptism is invisible, and so should be done in face of the congregation, so that it may be known who has been baptised.
He continues: ‘When the opinion of the necessity of private baptism prevailed, then followed many absurdities, the defence of baptism by women, baptism by a pagane, baptisme with puddly water, and disputation whether the mother should be baptised for the safety of the infant in the mother's belly, that is, whether they should be renati antequam nati, get the sacrament of the second birth before they get the first birth’.Footnote 51
In his sacramental sermons two decades before the Articles of Perth, Robert Bruce spoke of there being two agents in the sacraments, and two mouths. Christ is the true minister, not the visible minister we see in St Giles’. But what we now see emerging with Calderwood is much greater anxiety about the status of the human minister. The sacrament is becoming much more a human act; there is a shift to what we do. This led to its own type of presbyterian sacerdotalism and authoritarianism. And Forbes was able to pick this up.
In his Irenicon, Forbes set himself to answer a series of problems posed by the Reverend Alexander Lunan, minister of Kintore (formerly of Monymusk). The first question was to do with kneeling: ‘To offer religious adoration before a creature. . . appears to be idolatry. . . Therefore, to kneel before bread etc is idolatry.’Footnote 52
Forbes was concerned with permissibility, not compulsion, and had little difficulty in disposing of the charge of idolatry. (1) To offer religious adoration in front of a mere created thing is not necessarily to make the created thing the object of religious adoration.Footnote 53 He cited the altar in the Old Testament; the Ark of the Covenant; the Temple. The candidate at ordination remains on his knees: it did not follow that he worshipped the man who ordained him, or his hands.Footnote 54 (2) He took this further: the bread is not set before us so that it may in and for itself Footnote 55 be adored. During the whole activity, before the bread is brought, and after it has been consumed, one keeps a posture of humble adoration. This kneeling is never directed towards the bread: it is directed towards God.Footnote 56 Similarly, a candidate being presented with the Bible at ordination adores neither the minister nor the Bible. He looks to God, ‘whom he knows to be present in a special way’.Footnote 57 At Communion, Forbes says, ‘Our King gives Himself spiritually to us’.Footnote 58 ‘He now in a wonderful manner draws nearer with that most precious gift’.Footnote 59 Forbes was holding onto Robert Bruce's recovered understanding of the transparent nature of a sacrament. We look not at, but through it. Our attention is on God. If a person ‘accepts a goblet or some little present from the King's hand, [he] does so on bended knee’.Footnote 60 This betokens no homage to the goblet. That is offered to the King alone.
Forbes neatly turned the tables. What was wrong with these arguments, he said, was that they assumed that a sitting, standing or kneeling posture cannot be adopted without the posture being offered to the sacrament. But in fact, we eat and drink the bread and cup of the Lord. Footnote 61 So, if we stand, kneel or sit, it is before Him. But, Forbes argued, our brethren claim that a sitting posture is necessary and instituted by God for the reception of the Supper. In that case, they must allow that sitting has a sacred and religious significance.Footnote 62 Then all their own arguments about idolatry will apply to them: they are sitting before mere created things. This argument is a reductio. Forbes’ point was that the idolatry arguments only apply if you lose the transparency of the sacrament, and that is precisely what his opponents seemed to be doing.
Calderwood and Forbes were saying quite different things. To Calderwood, the sacrament is also a ‘badge of our profession’; a ‘testimony of our piety’. To Forbes, ‘this. . . is no thankless or stupid commemoration, but indissolubly and intrinsically Eucharistic. . . this action is precatory’.Footnote 63 This is the point of the words: Lift up your hearts. ‘No one. . . properly partakes of the Lord's Supper unless. . . he adores our Lord,. . . and so the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity’.Footnote 64 What was at stake was the genre of Reformed worship.
I turn now to Forbes’ arguments for the permissibility of private administration of the sacraments.Footnote 65
The Aberdeen Doctors asked whether the wish their people had for baptism and communion in time of sickness was through the superstitious idea that sacraments are ultimately necessary for salvation, because ‘God hath tyed his grace to them’.Footnote 66 The Doctors denied that they taught, or their people thought, that baptism is so necessary for salvation that God will not save without it. When baptism cannot be obtained, the prayers of the parents and of the church are accepted by God. So here Forbes distances himself from any crude ex opere operatum view.
So, the sacrament was not a charm or talisman. But we have the command of Christ in Matthew 28:19. ‘If Parents and Pastors are tyed by this Commandment, then Parents ought to seek baptism to their dying children’.Footnote 67 Forbes quoted King James of blessed memory at the Hampton Court Conference. A ‘Scotish minister’ asked the King: If he thought baptism so necessary, that if it be omitted, the child should be damned? No, said the King; but if you being called to baptise the child, though privatlie, should refuse to come, I think you should be damned. Footnote 68 The point of the anecdote was that to refuse to baptise privately when it was not possible to do so publicly would be in flagrant breach of Christ's command.
The Covenanters replied that the command applied to ‘Baptism in publick’: ‘no precepte requireth Baptism, but when it can be had orderly’.Footnote 69 Forbes replied that they cannot show from scripture where God ‘hath tyed this solemnity [i.e. requirement] to Baptism’.Footnote 70 He turned the argument round: ‘We beseech you, therefore Brethren, to take heed, that ye prescribe not to men's consciences, Rites of Necessity, without clear warrant from Gods word’.Footnote 71 What we see here is that there was an underlying dispute about the boundaries of adiaphora – the areas that are appropriately held to be indifferent. Despite their claims, the Covenanters were not being strictly biblical either, but had devised rules of their own. Preservation of the flexibility created by adiaphora was very important.
Forbes claimed to have behind him the practice of the early church. He cited Philip's baptism of the Eunuch (Acts 8) and Ananias’ baptism of Saul in a private house (Acts 9). To the objection that the necessity of the primitive church excused the lack of a congregation, he replied: ‘the same necessity is found in the cases whereof we speak: for as unpossible it is for a dying infant, who about mid-night is at the last gaspe, to enjoy the presence of a congregation’.Footnote 72 Forbes’ argument was impressive for its pastoral compassion.
The Covenanters maintained that the congregation has an interest, and ought to be present at baptism, no less than at excommunication, when a rotten member is cut off.Footnote 73 Forbes replied that excommunication is only inflicted for public offences, therefore it must be public. It is not the same with baptism.
Forbes argued similarly for the permissibility of giving communion to the dying. ‘Pastors who are the Stewards of God's House, ought not to deny to his Children, so hungering and thirsting in this conflict, that heavenly refreshment’.Footnote 74 There was an obvious implied rebuke of pastors who were not stewards, but acted as masters. He cited Calvin: ‘Many and weightie reasons move me to think that the Communion should not be denyed to sick persons’.Footnote 75
Finally he responded to the charge that private administration, in emergencies, brings the sacraments into contempt. In modern terms, the charge is that private administration domesticates the sacrament. On the contrary, Forbes replied, our practice shows how we reverence the command of God and how highly we esteem God's ordinances. It was the Covenanters who brought the sacraments into contempt, as they led people to think the sacraments do not have in them the ‘necessity and efficacy’ which scripture and the consent of Christians have affirmed.Footnote 76
Let us now stand back from the detail of the disputes. A long sweep of this kind allows us to see that, though fierce in their time, entrenched arguments about kneeling were misplaced. Though feared initially, the introduction of idolatry was not a serious risk. Though not realised initially, much more problematic was the risk that over-prescription of the gesture of reception distracted from and ultimately undermined the transparency and signifying power of the sacrament.
Knox needed to separate (a) the issue of the mode of the eucharistic presence; (b) the issue of who is worthy to receive; and (c) the mechanics of how and by whom the sacrament was to be administered. Issue (b) ran a long-term risk of subverting what were originally seen as ‘sacraments of the gospel’ and turning them into ‘badges of our profession’. This was a movement we see in the Scottish tradition from ‘evangelical’ to ‘legal’ sacraments and the outcome was the ‘fenced table’of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Issue (c) raises the issue of adiaphora: of what is and what is not properly to be left indifferent or at least not over-prescribed. It is important to use water and to baptise in the tri-fold name of God. But for sacramental efficacy, it is indifferent whether you use wheaten bread or oatcakes, white or red wine, a male or a female presider. And today gay or straight. Matters of this kind are simply a distraction and concentration upon them diminishes the transparency of the sacramental action.
A generation after Knox, the argument about posture could no longer be portrayed as having the continuation of the Reformation at stake. It was an intra-Protestant argument about the chosen style of piety and the acceptable range of the adiaphora. I believe it always was, but Knox, of course, could not have been expected to realise that.
Knox's formal arguments about sitting were demolished first by Thomas Cranmer and then by John Forbes. By the time of Forbes, and with the benefit of distance, we begin to see how modelling the Eucharist on the Last Supper understood as a Passover prescribes too much. The sacraments have more settings and greater flexibility than this permits and privacy does not necessarily render them inauthentic.
Knox's achievements, however, are enormous. He bequeathed to us a style of piety – table fellowship – which is a worthy legacy and has become characteristic of the Reformed churches, of Scotland at its best and of the Scottish diaspora. By reason of its very restraint, it has become an instrument of hospitality in the World Church and not least for this we thank him.
