3 - Presbyterian Church Government

Summary

The differences between episcopal, presbyterian and congregational polities were often porous and blurred. Even the polity of Robert Baillie's Scottish Church – hailed both at home and abroad as ‘the best Reformed Kirk’ – cannot easily be cast in a presbyterian mould without overlooking its similarities with episcopal and congregational polities. Yet seventeenth-century Scots and centuries of subsequent historiography may lead one to conclude that a clear divide emerged between proponents of episcopacy and presbyterianism at the Reformation Parliament of 1560. Such a dichotomous framework more accurately reflects, however, a characteristically sectarian historiography of Scottish Church parties from the early seventeenth century onwards. ‘Presbyterian’ tendencies emerged amongst a group of Scottish ministers following the Jacobean Union of the Crowns in 1603, reacting to royal absenteeism, fear of incorporating union with England, royal forbearance of Catholics and repeated prorogations of the General Assembly. As it appeared that consensus over the Scottish Church's polity declined, contemporaries began to draft historical accounts that refashioned the post-Reformation Church as starkly divided between ‘presbyterian’ and ‘episcopalian’ factions. Composed during the reigns of James VI and I and his son, Charles I, David Calderwood's posthumously published True History of the Church of Scotland (1678) narrated the oppression endured and victories scored by presbyterian ministers against ‘anti-Christian’ bishops, whereas Archbishop John Spottiswoode of St Andrews provided an historical account of the lawfulness of episcopacy in his History of the church and state of Scotland that was completed before 1639, although not published until 1655.

The histories of Calderwood and Spottiswoode imposed retrospective coherence on the ecclesiological commitments of ministers within the post-Reformation Church, implying that such identities were becoming more clearly defined. Rhetorical coherence nevertheless continued to conceal conceptual ambiguities. Baillie's self-identification with a presbyterian polity, discussed in this chapter, remained largely a rhetorical construct deployed for polemical advantage in published pamphlets.