Church of Scotland

Church of Scotland, national church in Scotland, which accepted the Presbyterian faith during the 16th-century Reformation.

According to tradition, the first Christian church in Scotland was founded about 400 by St. Ninian. In the 6th century, Irish missionaries included St. Columba, who settled at Iona about 563. In 1192 the Scottish church was declared “a special daughter” of the Roman see, subject only to the pope. St. Andrews became an archiepiscopal see in 1472, followed by Glasgow in 1492.

The earliest Scottish reformers were under Lutheran influence but were subsequently influenced by the Swiss reformers. The Calvinistic tone of the Scottish Reformation was ascribable to John Knox, who became the leader of the Scottish Reformation. Knox’s admiration for John Calvin and for the Reformation that Calvin led in Geneva is evident in Knox’s Scots Confession, in the Book of Common Order (often known as Knox’s liturgy), and in the Book of Discipline, the last of which discussed a plan for a godly church and commonwealth. The Scottish reformers held a parliament in August 1560, which abolished the authority of the pope in Scotland, adopted the Scots Confession, and forbade the celebration of mass.

After the breach with Rome, it was uncertain for more than a century whether the church in Scotland would be episcopal or presbyterian in government. Charles I, who ruled Scotland and England, preferred the episcopal form, while the Scottish people insisted on the presbyterian form. The struggle was long and complicated, but, when William and Mary became the English monarchs in 1689, Presbyterianism was permanently established in Scotland by constitutional act.

New problems then developed. In the late 17th century a large group of essentially professional clergymen known as Moderates became influential in the church. They were opposed by the Evangelicals, who held firmly to the traditional Calvinism of the Westminster Confession.

When the British Parliament restored patronage in Scotland in 1712, the people lost the right to elect their pastors to the landowners, which brought the Church of Scotland under the control of the Moderate ministers.

Dissension between the Moderates and the Evangelicals, who had been strengthened by religious revivals and the Sunday school movement, increased from 1833 to 1843. Finally a large group, led by Thomas Chalmers, left the established church and formed, in 1843, a Free Church of Scotland. All but one of the Church of Scotland missionaries and most of its best scholars joined the Free Church.

Gradually, better leadership replaced the Moderate party in the Church of Scotland. Patronage was abolished in 1874, and closer relations with the Free Church developed. In 1921 the state severed its old relation with the Church of Scotland, leaving it the national church but not the established state church. After several years of negotiations, the two churches united in 1929 under the old name of the Church of Scotland.

Subsequently the church continued to be active in missionary work and to take an active part in the Protestant ecumenical movement. Moves to affiliate it with the Church of England were defeated in 1959 and 1971.