Scots Confession

“For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.”

— Romans 10:10

The Scots Confession is the first confessional standard of the Reformed Church of Scotland, written in 1560 by John Knox and his fellow reformers at the urgent request of the Scottish Parliament.¹ Its twenty-six chapters confess the Trinity, the fall, the person and work of Christ, election, the kirk and its marks, the sacraments, and the civil magistrate, closing with a prayer that “all nations” would “attain to Thy true knowledge.”² Its own emphasis, though, falls less on defining justifying faith than on the sovereignty of God in salvation and good works as faith’s necessary mark.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession never mentions the Scots Confession by name, but stands in the same doctrinal line on the points that mattered most to both documents. Matthew Barrett groups “the 1560 Scots Confession” with the Reformed confessions that preceded Westminster in teaching the same doctrine of human depravity, free will, and God’s effectual grace that the wider confessional family, the 2LBCF included, would go on to state at greater length, keying the point specifically to the Scots Confession’s own chapters on original sin, election, and faith worked by the Holy Spirit.³ Those chapters bear this out. Where the Scots Confession says fallen man is “enemies to God, slaves to Satan, and servants to sin” until “regenerated from above” by “the power of the Holy Ghost,”⁴ the 2LBCF likewise confesses that man, “being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.”⁵ And where the Scots Confession grounds salvation in the Father, who “of mere grace elected us in Christ Jesus His Son before the foundation of the world was laid,”⁶ the 2LBCF confesses that God “decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass.”⁷

Historical Development

Knox and his fellow reformers wrote the confession “somewhat hastily” at the Scottish Parliament’s request, and through Knox it “bears the impress of Calvin’s thought.”¹ Samuel Waldron finds the confession’s testimony to justification by faith alone “relatively brief,” judging that “Knox and his fellow-workers seem most concerned to emphasize the sovereignty of God in salvation and the necessity of good works as the indispensable mark of saving faith.”¹ The confession itself makes that point at length: no one but Christ “has given, gives, or will give in work that obedience to the Law which the Law requires,” so that even a believer’s own imperfect obedience is accepted only because “God the Father beholding us in the body of His Son Christ Jesus, accepts our imperfect obedience as it were perfect.”⁸

The confession’s standing as Scotland’s own doctrinal standard did not outlast the following century. The Westminster Assembly, convened by the English Long Parliament in 1643, produced a Confession of Faith and catechisms that “were immediately adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland” once the Assembly’s work concluded in 1649.⁹

Content

God, the fall, and Christ. The confession opens by confessing “one only God… one in substance and yet distinct in three persons,”¹⁰ and traces the fall of “our first father Adam,” who lost the “wisdom, lordship, justice, free will, and clear knowledge” God had given him.¹¹ It confesses Christ as “Immanuel, very God and very man, two perfect natures united and joined in one person,” explicitly naming and rejecting “the damnable and pestilent heresies of Arius, Marcion, Eutyches, Nestorius” for denying or confounding his two natures.¹²

The kirk and the sacraments. The confession names three marks by which the true kirk is known from “that horrible harlot, the kirk malignant”: “first, the true preaching of the Word of God… secondly, the right administration of the sacraments of Christ Jesus… last, ecclesiastical discipline, uprightly ministered.”¹³ On the Lord’s Supper, it rejects both a bare-sign memorialism and Roman transubstantiation, confessing instead that believers are joined to Christ “by operation of the Holy Ghost, who by true faith carries us above all things that are visible, carnal, and earthly.”¹⁴ Herman Bavinck reads the confession’s own doctrine of the Supper as one instance of Calvin’s own view that believers, by the Holy Spirit, “experience spiritual fellowship with the person of Christ,” a view Bavinck says “has been taken over in the various Reformed confessions,” the Scots Confession’s twenty-first article among them.¹⁵

The civil magistrate. The confession treats civil government as God’s “holy ordinance,” to the point of naming “whosoever goes about to take away or to confound the whole state of civil policies now long established” as men who “wickedly [fight] against God’s expressed will.”¹⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Samuel Eldon Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), chap. 4, “Sola Fide in the Reformation Confessions,” 108-11. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 26, “Finis.” ↩
Matthew Michael Barrett, “Monergism in the Calvinist Tradition,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 21-87. ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 3, “Of Original Sin.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 9, “Of Free Will,” para. 3. ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 8, “Election.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 3, “Of God’s Decree,” para. 1. ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 15, “The Perfection of the Law and Imperfection of Man.” ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 112-28. ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 1, “Of God.” ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 2, “Of the Creation of Man.” ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 6, “Of the Incarnation of Christ Jesus.” ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 18, “Of the Notes by Which the True Kirk is Discerned from the False.” ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 21, “Of the Sacraments.” ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩
The Scots Confession (Edinburgh, 1560), chap. 24, “Of the Civil Magistrate.” ↩