Scots Confession

The Scottish Parliament that met in August 1560, with the regent Mary of Guise dead two months and Catholic establishment in Scotland effectively at an end, ordered six ministers, John Knox among them, to draw up a confession of the reformed faith. Knox's own account says they did it in four days. The speed shows in the text: it is direct, argued in the first person plural as we believe and we confess, and carries a polemical energy that the later and more measured confessions generally lack.

Its twenty-five chapters move from the nature of God and original sin through Christ, election, the church and the sacraments to civil authority, and chapter eighteen, on the notes by which the true kirk is discerned from the false, states a concern shaped directly by Scotland's recent break with Rome: true doctrine rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and ecclesiastical discipline uprightly ministered. Parliament ratified the confession within days of receiving it, and in the same short session abolished papal jurisdiction in Scotland and forbade the mass, so the document arrived as one part of a single legislative act of national religious change rather than as a standalone theological statement.

Knox and his colleagues wrote knowing the political window might close as fast as it had opened. The confession's urgency is that of a church establishing itself before the settlement could be reversed, and the fear was not idle: Mary, Queen of Scots returned from France the following year and heard mass in her own chapel over the Kirk's protest.

The Scots Confession governed the Church of Scotland for eighty seven years, until the General Assembly set it aside in 1647 in favour of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the fuller and more systematic document the Westminster Assembly in London had just produced. The change was not a repudiation. The Scots Confession's substance, a thoroughly Calvinist doctrine of election, grace and the church, was not in dispute; what Westminster offered was a more comprehensive and more precisely worded confession, suited to a church now negotiating its place within a three kingdoms settlement rather than fighting for survival against an established Catholic monarchy.

The older document did not disappear from Scottish confessional memory. It is still printed in the subordinate standards of several Presbyterian churches descended from the Scottish Reformation, cited for its historical witness even where Westminster carries the binding doctrinal weight.

Its most quoted passage is not a doctrinal proposition but a plea for correction. The authors asked that if any man should find in their confession an article or sentence contrary to God's holy word, he would inform them of it in writing, and they undertook to amend what they had written or to satisfy him from Scripture. That is a note of theological humility which stands out sharply against the more confidently systematic confessions that followed, including the one that replaced it, and it is the sentence Scottish churches most often reach for when they want to say what kind of document their first confession was.