The Scottish Parliament Passes the Golden Act, Establishing Presbyterian Church Government

Thirty two years after the Scottish Reformation established Presbyterianism in Scotland in 1560, already recorded here, and forty six years before the Covenanters signed the National Covenant at Greyfriars Kirk in 1638, also recorded here, the Parliament of Scotland gave the young Presbyterian kirk the legal foundation later generations called its magna carta. Meeting in Edinburgh, the parliament of King James VI passed on 5 June 1592 the act formally titled an act for abolishing of the acts contrary the true religion, which reversed the so called Black Acts of 1584 that had subordinated the church's courts to royal bishops, and instead recognized general assemblies, synods, presbyteries and kirk sessions as the church's lawful government. Scottish churchmen came to call it the Golden Act, and for a generation it seemed to settle for good the argument, running since John Knox's death in 1572, over whether Scotland's reformed church would be governed by bishops answerable to the crown or by ministers and elders answerable to each other through presbyteries. The settlement did not hold unchallenged. James VI, who came to believe presbytery incompatible with monarchy, spent the following decades reintroducing bishops by degrees, and by his death in 1625 the kirk again had a full episcopal hierarchy, a reversal the Covenanters fought to undo when they signed their own covenant at Greyfriars Kirk. But the Golden Act's recognition of the General Assembly as the church's supreme court became the constitutional reference point every later Presbyterian settlement, in Scotland and in the churches Scottish emigration and mission planted worldwide, has measured itself against.