Justified True Belief

(●) The preacher who turned Scotland Protestant, and who told a reigning queen to her face that a king may be resisted. + Nothing in John Knox’s first thirty years suggests what the last twenty-five would be. He was a country priest in East Lothian, a notary who drew up deeds about grain and land for his neighbours, a tutor to the sons of small lairds. A laird is simply a Scottish landowner, and a small one held a farm or two and a name that counted for something in his own parish, which is to say that Knox spent his last years before the break teaching other men’s children in other men’s houses. Then a friend was burned alive, and Knox was never quiet again. Within a single generation he helped move an entire kingdom from one religion to another, and he did it mostly by preaching. Scotland in 1559 was officially Catholic and governed from France. By August 1560 its Parliament had abolished the pope’s authority and the Mass, and had adopted a statement of faith that Knox and five other men wrote in four days. Nothing quite like that had happened anywhere else in Europe, and no army of Knox’s own ever won a battle to make it happen. His dates are not certain, and the uncertainty starts at the beginning. Older writers put his birth around 1505, a figure that rests on a late and unsupported tradition and that the antiquary David Hay Fleming, one of those patient scholars who spend a lifetime checking received stories against the parchments behind them, traced in 1904 to an error in copying. The witnesses closest to Knox point later. Sir Peter Young, writing to Theodore Beza from Edinburgh in 1579, gives 1513, and Beza’s Icones of 1580 gives 1515. Modern historians, weighing those two against the earliest documents that name him, settle on about 1514. A date the sources leave open like that carries a "c." in front of it, short for "circa," meaning "about."

(●) c. 1514 AD: He was born near Haddington and spent his first three decades inside the church he would later help pull down. + Haddington is a market town about seventeen miles east of Edinburgh, and Knox was born there or just outside it, to a family of no rank at all. He said later that his forebears had served the Earls of Bothwell, and he seems to have studied at St Andrews, the oldest of the Scottish universities, under the theologian John Major. He was ordained a priest. He was also a notary apostolic, which means a clerk licensed by the pope to draw up legal documents and vouch that they are genuine, roughly what a solicitor does today. The earliest certain trace of him is in a Haddington record from December 1540, where "Schir John Knox" appears at the market cross on behalf of a neighbour. "Schir" was the ordinary courtesy title for a priest who had no university degree, and it is worth pausing on the picture: the future scourge of the Roman church standing in a Scottish square, doing a small errand for a farmer, in a priest’s gown. Three years later, in March 1543, he drew up a notarial instrument in his own hand and subscribed it, an instrument being one of those formal deeds a notary writes out and then certifies as genuine by signing at the foot of it. This one made over to James Ker of Samuelston, the same neighbour he had acted for three years before, the non-entry duties of a field called the Ley-acre, the dues that fell to the landlord while no heir had yet formally taken up the ground. That parchment turned up in the charter room at Tyninghame, among the Earl of Haddington’s papers, and it is the earliest sample of his handwriting anyone has found. The words he chose for himself in it are worth reading twice: John Knox, minister of the sacred altar in the diocese of St Andrews, notary by apostolic authority. He closed it with a motto, Testis per Christum fidelis, cui gloria, Amen, "a witness faithful through Christ, to whom be glory, Amen," and it was that flourish, along with the place and the names, that convinced his editor David Laing the hand was Knox’s own. By then he was living at Samuelston, tutoring the children of local landowners, and the old religion still had his formal loyalty. Something in him had already moved.

(●) 1546 AD: He carried a two-handed sword as bodyguard to the preacher George Wishart, and was sent home the night Wishart was taken. + George Wishart was a Scottish preacher of the reformed faith, newly back from Cambridge and the Swiss cities, and he preached knowing that Cardinal David Beaton, the most powerful churchman in Scotland, wanted him dead. Friends armed themselves and walked with him. Knox was one of them, and he carried the great two-handed sword that went everywhere with Wishart, the sort of weapon a man needs both hands and a wide stance to swing. On a freezing January night at Haddington, Wishart finished preaching and said his goodbyes as though for good. Knox pressed to go with him. Knox recorded the answer himself: "Nay, return to your bairns, and God bless you. One is sufficient for one sacrifice." Wishart had the sword taken out of Knox’s hands, and Knox, as he admits, obeyed unwillingly and went home. Wishart was seized before midnight and burned at St Andrews on 1 March 1546. Not three months later, on 29 May, a band of lairds broke into the castle of St Andrews and killed Cardinal Beaton in his own chamber, crying out as they struck that they came to avenge Wishart. They then held the castle against the government. Knox had no part in the killing. He did defend it in print for the rest of his life, and that stayed on his own ledger.

(●) 1547 AD: A congregation called him to preach against his will, and within three months he was chained to a French galley. + In April 1547 Knox brought his three pupils into the castle of St Andrews for safety, and went on teaching them there. Others listened in. The men holding the castle decided this tutor should be their preacher, and when he refused, they arranged an ambush. During a sermon the minister John Rough turned to Knox in front of everybody and charged him, in the name of God and of the congregation, not to refuse the office. Then he asked the people whether this was their will, and they said it was. Knox was in his early thirties, a man who had spent his life in other people’s service. By his own account he "burst forth in most abundant tears, and withdrew himself to his chamber," and for days afterwards nobody saw him smile. His first sermon took as its text Daniel 7:24–25, on a king who would speak words against the Most High and think to change the times and the law, and he applied it to the papacy. It was not a cautious debut. In July the French fleet took the castle. The defenders were carried off to France, and Knox spent nineteen months chained to an oar. Mass was said aboard, and a painted image of the Virgin was brought round for the rowers to kiss. One of the Scots refused, and when it was forced into his hands he threw it into the river and said, "Let our Lady now save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to swim." Knox tells the story without naming the man, and his nineteenth-century editor David Laing took him to be Knox himself. What is certain is the other scene he does tell about himself. Lying desperately sick as the galleys passed between Dundee and St Andrews, he was asked whether he knew the coast. He said he did: he could see the steeple of the place where God had first opened his mouth to his glory, and he was persuaded he would not die until he preached there again.

(●) 1549 AD: Ten years of exile in England and on the Continent turned a Scottish preacher into a European one. + Released in early 1549, Knox went not home but to England. Scotland was no place for him yet, and England had a boy king, Edward VI, whose government was pushing the English church in a Protestant direction. So he preached at Berwick, the garrison town on the border, and then at Newcastle, and for a man who had been chained to a French oar less than three years earlier the rise was startlingly quick: in December 1551 the Privy Council, the small circle of advisers who governed in the young king’s name, made him one of six royal chaplains. The next year, in 1552, they offered him the bishopric of Rochester and he turned it down. What he did with the position he had was argue. He argued hard, and in public, against kneeling to receive communion, on the ground that ordinary people would take the posture for adoration of the bread. He did not get his way, but he was not brushed aside either. The result was the so-called Black Rubric, a paragraph inserted into the 1552 Prayer Book stating that kneeling implied no adoration. A rubric is a direction to the worshippers printed alongside the prayers rather than said as one of them, the sort of line that tells a congregation when to stand, and this is one of the few passages in the English liturgy that a Scotsman’s protest put there. Then the ground moved again. Edward died in July 1553 and his Catholic sister Mary came to the throne, which changed everything for a man who had been preaching Protestant sermons in England as one of the king’s own chaplains. Knox fled in January 1554, and the next five years were spent among the English refugees scattered across the Continent. Exile did not make those refugees agreeable to one another. At Frankfurt they quarrelled bitterly over how much of the English Prayer Book to keep, Knox led the party that wanted less of it, and when he lost the quarrel he left, in March 1555, for Geneva. In the middle of all this he went home. He spent the winter of 1555 in Scotland preaching in private houses, in ordinary rooms with the door shut and somebody’s table for a pulpit, and he married an Englishwoman, Marjorie Bowes, before returning to Geneva in 1556 as a pastor to the English congregation there. Geneva, under John Calvin, was the closest thing the Reformation had to a working model, and Knox loved it without reserve. In 1558 he also published anonymously the book that would follow him to the grave, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, arguing that female rule is against nature and against God. "Regiment" here simply means rule or government, not a body of soldiers. He aimed it at Mary Tudor in England and Mary of Guise, the French regent governing Scotland. A regent is someone who rules on behalf of a monarch who is absent or too young, and Scotland’s queen, Mary Stuart, was then a girl in France. Within months Mary Tudor was dead and the Protestant Elizabeth was queen of England, and the blast that was meant for Knox’s enemies had landed squarely on the ally he most needed. Elizabeth never forgave him.

(●) 1559 AD: He came home in May, and within fifteen months Parliament had abolished the Mass. + Knox landed at Leith and reached Edinburgh on 2 May 1559, into a country already close to breaking. On 11 May he preached at Perth against idolatry, meaning the worship of images and of anything made by human hands in the place of God. After the sermon a priest defiantly began to say Mass and opened the ornamented cupboard above the high altar. A boy shouted that this was intolerable; the priest hit him; the boy threw a stone, missed the priest, and broke an image. Knox says the crowd finished the job before half the town knew it had started, most of them being at dinner. Then they went on to sack the friaries, and Knox, who approved of the images coming down, is dry about who did it: not the gentlemen, not the earnest believers, but "the rascal multitude." What followed was a war fought with sermons, treaties and other people’s soldiers. The Protestant nobles, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation, took up arms against the French garrison. Knox went to Berwick to ask England for help, and Elizabeth, who detested him, sent a fleet and an army anyway because she detested French troops in Scotland more. Mary of Guise died in Edinburgh Castle in June 1560, and the French and English forces both withdrew. The Parliament that met on 1 August 1560 had no legal authority to sit, since the absent queen had not called it. It sat anyway. It ordered the Protestant ministers to set down in plain heads, meaning short numbered headings a layman could follow, the doctrine they wanted established, and within four days they brought back the Scots Confession, which Parliament ratified on 17 August without changing a sentence. Papal jurisdiction was abolished, and saying Mass was made a crime. Four days of writing, and a kingdom changed its religion on the strength of it. Knox was one of six authors, all of them named John.

(●) 1561 AD: Mary Queen of Scots came home to rule a Protestant kingdom, and Knox argued with her five times and stood trial for treason. + Mary Stuart landed in August 1561, eighteen years old, widowed, Catholic, and legally sovereign over a country whose Parliament had just outlawed her religion. She sent for Knox almost at once. He wrote up the conversations himself, in his own history, which means we hear them through his ears; but the give and take is too awkward for him to have invented, and he does not spare himself. She asked whether subjects might resist their princes. He answered that they might, if the prince exceeded his bounds, and offered her an analogy from family life: if a father goes mad and tries to kill his children, and the children take the sword from him and tie his hands and shut him up until the fit passes, no one thinks they have wronged him. Mary sat silent for what he reckoned was a quarter of an hour. Her face changed. At last she said that she saw her subjects would obey him and not her. He was not always the harder of the two. At a later meeting, with the queen in tears in front of him, he told her that he had never delighted in the weeping of any of God’s creatures, "yea, I can scarcely well abide the tears of my own boys whom my own hands correct." In 1563 the queen had him tried for treason before her own Privy Council, for sending out a circular letter summoning Protestants to Edinburgh. The lords voted unanimously that they could find no offence. The queen was brought back in and they were made to vote again, and they acquitted him again. His private life ran alongside all of it, and it is easy to forget that the man doing the shouting went home afterwards to a house with children in it. Marjorie died at the end of 1560, a few months after Parliament ratified the Confession, and left him two small sons to raise. In March 1564 he married Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, who was about seventeen to his roughly fifty, and the court found it very funny. She bore him three daughters, and it was she who nursed him at the end.

(●) 1572 AD: He died in Edinburgh asking his wife to read him the chapter where he had first cast anchor. + A stroke in October 1570 left him able to preach only with help, and the civil war that followed Mary’s deposition drove him out of Edinburgh to St Andrews in 1571. When the fighting paused the Edinburgh congregation sent word to St Andrews begging to have his preaching back among them, and he came in August 1572, too weak to climb into the pulpit unaided. His servant Richard Bannatyne wrote down the last days. Knox had his wife read him 1 Corinthians 15, on the resurrection, and asked her, "Is not that a comfortable chapter?" A little later he said, "Now, for the last, I commend my soul, spirit, and body unto thy hands, O Lord," pointing at his three fingers as he named them. About five in the afternoon he told her: "Go read where I cast my first anchor." She read John 17, the prayer of Jesus for his disciples on the night he was betrayed. Asked at the very end to give some sign that he could still hear the promises being spoken over him, he lifted a hand, and died. It was Monday, 24 November 1572. He was buried on the Wednesday in the churchyard of St Giles. The Earl of Morton, who had been chosen regent the same day Knox died, gave the verdict over the grave that Scotland has repeated ever since. The earliest record of it is James Melville’s diary, which keeps it short, that he neither feared nor flattered any flesh; the fuller sentence, "Here lieth a man who, in his life, never feared the face of man," comes from David Calderwood’s history of the kirk, the Scots word for the church, written a good sixty years after the funeral. Neither man stood at the graveside with a pen, so the words are best treated as a well-attested tradition rather than as a transcript.

What He Taught

(T1) Worship belongs to God, so only God may say what it is, and what he has not commanded the church may not invent. + Think of a man who is given the keys to a friend’s house while the friend is abroad, with a short list of things to do: water the plants, take in the post, keep the heating on. He would be within his rights to do exactly those things. He would not be within his rights to knock through a wall, however handsome the new room, and however sincerely he meant it as a gift. The house is not his. That was Knox’s instinct about worship, and it is the argument later writers would call the regulative principle: that in the church’s public worship, what God has positively commanded is permitted, and the rest is not ours to add. He found it in Moses, where God says, "Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it" (Deuteronomy 12:32), and in Christ’s quotation of Isaiah against the Pharisees, "in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men" (Matthew 15:9). The sharp end of this was the Mass. Catholic teaching holds that in the Mass the sacrifice of Christ is made present and offered again on the altar, and that the bread and wine become his body and blood. Knox argued in 1550 that a sacrifice repeated is a sacrifice implied to be insufficient, that the honour paid to the consecrated bread was therefore honour paid to a creature, and that this made the Mass not a defective worship but idolatry. It is the harshest verdict he ever pronounced and it drove almost everything else he did. The same principle cuts the other way, and this is the part that is easy to miss in a man with his reputation. If Scripture alone can bind a conscience, then nothing Knox himself wrote could bind one either. The confession he helped draft says so outright, and invites correction from anyone who can show an article of it contrary to Scripture. Christians have differed ever since about how tightly the principle should be drawn, and whether it governs only the elements of worship or also its manner and its music. What almost no one disputes is the instinct beneath it: that the church is a guest in God’s house.

(Q) "If any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugnant to God’s holy word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity’s sake, to admonish us of the same in writing; and we, of our honour and fidelity, do promise unto him satisfaction from the mouth of God, that is, from his holy Scriptures, or else reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss." + Source: The Scots Confession, preface (1560), as printed in Laing, Works of John Knox, vol. II, p. 94; spelling modernised. The offer stands in the preface of the document Parliament adopted, written by Knox and five colleagues in four days. A church that had just made its own worship the law of the land opened its statement of faith by promising to change any line of it that could be proved wrong from Scripture (T1).

(T2) A believer’s assurance rests on God’s choice of him, not on his performance for God. + Knox’s longest book is about predestination, and it is worth being clear what he was after, because the word now arrives trailing arguments he was not having. Predestination, in this tradition, is the teaching that God from eternity chose those he would save, and that their salvation therefore begins in his decision rather than in theirs. Knox published his defence of it in 1560, answering an anabaptist writer point by point across four hundred pages. The anabaptists were the radical wing of the Reformation, best known for holding that baptism belongs only to believers old enough to answer for themselves rather than to infants, and they got their name from their opponents: it means "rebaptisers." He did not treat it as a puzzle about the mechanics of the divine will. He treated it as pastoral care, which tells you where he had been. He had rowed a French galley for nineteen months. He had watched Wishart burn and had preached to congregations that might be scattered by soldiers before the year was out. To people living like that, the question "am I really saved?" is not academic, and he thought the only answer that holds in a storm is one that does not depend on the believer’s own steadiness. If my standing with God rests on the warmth of my faith this morning, it is as changeable as I am. If it rests on God’s eternal purpose in Christ, it is not. Christians have disagreed about this doctrine since long before Knox and still do, and the disagreement runs through every part of the church rather than between its denominations. Those who hold that God’s choice waits on a freely given human response make their case from the same Scriptures, and a fair account of Knox says plainly that he was taking one side of a live family argument. What he shares with the whole church is the floor underneath it: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9).

(Q) "Then only is our salvation in assurance, when we find the cause of the same in the bosom and counsel of God." + Source: John Knox, On Predestination, in Answer to the Cavillations by an Anabaptist (1560), as printed in Laing, Works of John Knox, vol. V, p. 26; spelling modernised. Knox has just argued that a believer’s election, which is the old word for God’s choosing of him, rests not in himself but in the eternal and unchanging good pleasure of God, and rests so firmly that the raging storms of the world, the assaults of Satan and the wavering and weakness of our own flesh cannot overthrow it. The ground of assurance has to be somewhere those three cannot reach (T2).

(T3) A ruler holds power on conditions, and a ruler who makes war on God may be resisted by force. + This was the most dangerous thing Knox said, and he knew it. Sixteenth-century Europe mostly held that a subject facing a wicked king had two honourable options: obey, or suffer. Scripture seemed to settle it. "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God" (Romans 13:1). Knox never denied that text. He argued that it establishes the office rather than licensing whatever the officeholder does, and that the same Bible shows the limit in practice. Daniel prayed against the king’s express command. The three young men told Nebuchadnezzar to his face that they would not worship his gods. The apostles, ordered to stop preaching, answered, "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). None of those men was an anarchist, and none of them obeyed. From there Knox took one more step, and it is the step that made him notorious. In his Appellation of 1558 he argued that the duty of putting down idolatry does not belong to kings alone but to the nobility, and indeed to every man according to his power; and in front of Mary he pressed it with the analogy of the mad father, restrained by his own children for his good and theirs. Notice what the analogy does and does not concede. The father is still the father. The children are not entitled to a new father, or to no father, and when the frenzy passes they untie his hands. Knox is arguing for a limit on power, not for the abolition of it. He is also arguing in his own interest, and an honest reader should say so. The man insisting that rulers may be resisted had been condemned to death in his absence by one government and burned in effigy, which is to say that a likeness of him went to the fire because the man himself was out of reach, and he needed the argument to be true. That it was self-serving does not make it false, and English constitutional practice would concede something very like it when Parliament put James II off the throne in 1688.

(Q) "If their princes exceed their bounds, Madam, and do against that wherefore they should be obeyed, it is no doubt but they may be resisted, even by power." + Source: John Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland, Book IV, as printed in Laing, Works of John Knox, vol. II, p. 282; spelling modernised. Knox’s answer in his first interview with Mary Queen of Scots, August 1561, when she asked him whether subjects who have the power may resist their princes. The analogy of the father in a frenzy follows immediately after (T3).

(T4) A reformed nation owes every parish a schoolmaster and every poor household its bread. + Having won the argument about doctrine, Knox and his colleagues had to answer a practical question: what do you actually do with a country’s churches once you have taken them off the pope? Their answer was the First Book of Discipline, drawn up in 1560, and it is the most attractive thing he ever put his name to. If every Christian is to test what is preached against Scripture, every Christian has to be able to read. So the Book asks for a schoolmaster in every parish, a college in every town of any size teaching logic, rhetoric and the ancient languages, and bursaries for clever boys whose families cannot pay. It goes further than an offer. Rich men are not to let their sons idle away their youth, and no father, "of what estate or condition that ever he be," is to keep a child from schooling at his own whim. The second ask was money for the poor, and the Book is careful about it. It distinguishes the sturdy beggar who has made a trade of begging, who should be made to work, from the widow, the orphan, the aged and the injured, who "neither can nor may travail for their sustentation," and it says flatly that it is fearful and horrible that people God has so earnestly commended to our care should be universally despised. All of this was to be paid for out of the old church’s lands and revenues. That last point killed it. The nobles who had subscribed the Book in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, the building that served the town as council house and courtroom, in January 1561 were in many cases already sitting on those revenues, and they had not fought a war to hand them over. The Book was never ratified. When the queen’s secretary, William Maitland of Lethington, scoffed that many had subscribed it the way infants are baptised, on somebody else’s faith, Knox answered that the scoff was neither true nor apt: the Book had been read aloud and debated for days, and no man had signed what he did not understand. Then, when it was plain the thing was lost, he said: let God require the lack which this poor commonwealth shall have of the things therein contained, from the hands of such as stop the same. The parish school he asked for was ordered by the Privy Council in 1616, and Parliament did not settle how to pay for it until 1696.

(Q) "Of necessity therefore we judge it, that every several church have a schoolmaster appointed, such a one as is able, at least, to teach grammar and the Latin tongue, if the town be of any reputation." + Source: The First Book of Discipline, fifth head (1560), as printed in Laing, Works of John Knox, vol. II, pp. 209–210; spelling modernised. Knox was one of six authors. The clause goes on to provide for country districts too, where the reader or the minister is to take charge of the children if no schoolmaster can be had (T4).

(Q) "Go read where I cast my first anchor." + Source: Richard Bannatyne’s account of Knox’s last illness, as printed in Laing, Works of John Knox, vol. VI, p. 643; spelling modernised. Knox said it to his wife at about five in the afternoon on 24 November 1572, a few hours before he died, and she read him John 17. The chapter is the prayer of Jesus on the night before his death, for the disciples in front of him and for everyone who would believe through their word. A man who had spent twenty-five years arguing about the church went out listening to Christ pray for it.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church he helped build outlived him, and its confession, its worship and its government travelled far beyond Scotland. + Knox did not leave behind a system named after himself. He left three documents and a habit of mind, and they did the work. - The Scots Confession. Adopted in 1560, it remained the confession of the Church of Scotland for eighty-seven years, until the Westminster Confession replaced it in 1647. The Westminster Assembly that produced its successor was an English gathering, summoned during the English civil wars, to which Scotland sent commissioners; the standards it wrote are now used by Presbyterian churches on every continent. - The Book of Common Order. The service book Knox compiled for the English congregation at Geneva was adopted by the Scottish church in 1564 and shaped its worship for some eighty years. It is a liturgy, not the free-form service Knox is often imagined to have introduced: set prayers for baptism, the Lord’s Supper, marriage, the visitation of the sick and burial, printed and used. - Church government by ministers and elders. The 1560 settlement was a halfway house, with officers called superintendents overseeing large districts, a role that looked uncomfortably like a bishop by another name. The full presbyterian pattern, in which ministers and elected lay elders govern together through a ladder of courts with no bishop at all, was worked out after Knox’s death by Andrew Melville in the Second Book of Discipline of 1578. Melville built on Knox’s foundation and went past it, and the honest statement is that Knox began the thing that Melville finished. The schooling clause outlived him too, though slowly. The Privy Council ordered a school in every parish in 1616, Parliament ratified that order in 1633 and passed an act for founding schools in 1646, and the Act for Settling of Schools in 1696 made the arrangement stick by laying the schoolmaster’s salary on the local landowners. By the eighteenth century Scotland’s literacy was widely remarked upon by visitors. Knox did not achieve that. He asked for it first, in print, in 1560, and Scotland kept the request on the books until it could afford it.

(†) His case that a king may be resisted became a working tradition in Reformed political thought. + In 1558 the argument of the Appellation was an outrage. Calvin himself was embarrassed by the company Knox kept on this question, and the English government would not give Knox a safe-conduct through its territory. Within a generation it was a Scottish commonplace, and within a century it had been set out at book length for an English Parliament. George Buchanan, the humanist scholar who tutored James VI, published De Jure Regni apud Scotos ("On the Law of Kingship among the Scots") in 1579, arguing that kings hold office by a contract with the people and may be called to account. James spent much of his adult life trying to suppress it, which is its own kind of compliment. In 1644 the Scottish minister Samuel Rutherford published Lex, Rex ("The Law and the Prince"), the fullest statement of the case: that the law is king rather than the king law, that royal power is held in trust, and that a trust may be forfeited. Rutherford is arguing Knox’s point with a lawyer’s apparatus. Christians have never agreed on where the line falls, and the New Testament’s plain instruction to honour the emperor (Romans 13:1–7; 1 Peter 2:13–17) was written under Nero, which should keep anyone from treating resistance as easy or obvious. What the Reformed tradition after Knox contributed was not a licence to rebel but a distinction: between the office, which God established, and the man, who may forfeit his claim on obedience by commanding what God forbids. That distinction is why the tradition produced constitutional lawyers rather than assassins.

(†) Where he fell short: the trumpet blast against women, and the sword he was too ready to bless. + Knox’s faults are not subtle, and they are on the record in his own hand. - The First Blast. Its opening sentence declares that to promote a woman to bear rule over any realm, nation or city "is repugnant to nature, contumely to God," and the subversion of good order, equity and justice. "Contumely" means insult. The reasons he gives are worse than the thesis: he argues that a woman ruling is like the blind leading the seeing, or the sick nursing the healthy, and that women are by nature foolish and unfit to counsel. Knox later told Elizabeth he would not press the book against her personally, which is not the same as withdrawing it, and he never withdrew it. He was warned before publication that it would rebound, and it did: it cost the Scottish Protestants the confidence of the one monarch in Europe most likely to help them. - The blessing on the assassins. When Knox came to write up the murder of Cardinal Beaton in his History, he printed a note in the margin calling the killers’ deed and words "the godly fact." Laing, editing him three centuries later and sympathetic to him, noted that Knox "must certainly be held responsible for this marginal note, which has given rise to so much abuse," and could defend it only by saying it praised the manner of the killing rather than the killing itself. Whatever Beaton had done, a man stabbed in his own room crying that he is a priest is not an execution, and Knox’s tone throughout the passage is closer to satisfaction than to grief. - Idolaters and the death penalty. In the Appellation he reasons from Deuteronomy 13, where a city that turns to other gods falls to the sword, that the punishment of idolatry belongs not to kings only but to the whole people. He faces the obvious objection, that the apostles met pagan idolatry with a call to repentance and demanded no such punishment, and he answers it by drawing a line between the ignorant heathen and those who have known the truth and fallen away. It is a serious argument and it is still the wrong one. The church is not Israel under Moses, it holds no land by conquest and carries no sword of its own, and its Lord told Peter to put his away. Scottish Christians have said all of this about him for a long time, and it does not require a modern vantage point: his own contemporaries told him the First Blast was a mistake before he printed it. What is worth adding is that these are the same trait at three different pressures. Knox had an unusual gift for seeing one thing clearly, saying it without hedging, and holding to it when it cost him. That gift kept him at the oar for nineteen months and standing in front of an angry queen in his late forties. It also left him with almost no capacity to notice when he had gone too far.