“Who Do We Think We Are?”

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“Who Do We Think We Are?”

Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court [1]

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“ . . . fire and hail, snow and mist,

stormy wind fulfilling his word!”

Psalm 148:8 ESV

Martin Luther King’s assassination was the top of the news when a young man arrived at John Knox Church.  Decades later he is witnessing a political phenomenon who both baffles and annoys the media and the politicians.  Some are saying Donald Trump’s braggadocio is unstoppable, leaving challengers in humiliation and helplessness.  By contrast, in 2015, the currently-celebrated, self-identified radical Marxist, Angela Davis, a prominent figure in America’s 1960s and 70s social/political upheaval, reflected on the civil rights marches of the 1960s.  She insisted that “the women did the work and the men got the credit,” and that in the “movement” as it exists today, there is no place for male Martin Luther King types! [2]

Who would have believed that America’s mainline Protestant denominations would become the centers of social transformation such as we are witnessing today?

Indeed, “if the salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored?  It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. [3]

Meanwhile, the man who insists he can fix everything declares himself a Presbyterian!

History records the leadership of an original Presbyterian, “The Thundering Scot,” John Knox (ca.1505-1572) who took the Reformation teachings of John Calvin to his native Scotland in a tumultuous age.

After his early university education John Knox was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He became attracted to the faithful witness of George Wishart and stood by him with sword in hand as Wishart preached.  Following Wishart’s martyrdom and the subsequent murder of Cardinal Beaton, Knox joined a group of Protestants at St. Andrews, where, in 1547, he, along with others, was captured by French Roman Catholics.  Imprisoned as a galley slave in the smelly hole of a French ship for nineteen months, he was constantly pestered to pray to an image of the virgin Mary.  Upon his release he assisted Anglican Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, formulating the Forty-two Articles of the Creed for the Protestant Reformation in England.  Following the rise of “bloody Mary” (Mary Tudor), Knox visited Geneva.  Highly impacted, he returned for a short visit to Scotland urging Mary of Lorraine to lend her support for the gospel.  When Mary realized Knox was serious, she burned him in effigy after discovering he had already returned to Geneva.  John Knox regarded Calvin’s Geneva as “the greatest school of Christ since the days of the apostles” and served as organizing pastor of an English-speaking congregation at Geneva. [4]

Upon request, in 1559, Knox returned to Scotland.  He confronted the idolatrous and adulterous Mary Queen of Scots.  Knox’s preaching had immediate iconoclastic response from his countrymen.  Soon the state-sponsored Roman Catholic Mass was outlawed and Scotland became a Protestant nation.

John Knox’s direct descendant John Witherspoon (1723-1794) would play a major role in the American Revolution as a member of the Continental Congress and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.  The Continental Congress for a time met at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) where Witherspoon served as President from 1768 until his death in 1794. It is supposed that Englishman Horace Walpole had Witherspoon in mind when he stated that “Cousin America has eloped with a Presbyterian parson!” [5]

In his famous sermon of May 17, 1776 entitled “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men,” Witherspoon commented on how well the Americans had already fared with the veteran British soldiers having been “turned into confusion,” and proceeded to warn the colonists: “If we brag and act tough we will be just like Goliath, and we all remember what happened to him.  It is God who must get the praise; God is ‘the supreme disposer of all events.’” [6]  Witherspoon’s proven godly wisdom, being rooted in Holy Scripture, is ageless.

Christian statesmanship of the kind demonstrated by John Witherspoon should become the new order of the day.

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End Notes

[1]. Amber Philips, “John Roberts’s full-throated gay marriage dissent: Constitution ‘had nothing to do with it’” Washington Post, June 26, 2015

[2]. “Angela Davis to speak at College of Wooster,”  Wooster Daily Record, January 30, 2015; http://www.biography.com/people/angela-davis-9267589

[3]. Matt. 5:13

[4]. B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, p. 216, 226; Paul Carlson, Our Presbyterian Heritage, pp. 33-39

[5]. L. Gordon Tait, The Piety of John Witherspoon ix

[6]. Tait,, p. 157

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Sources

Carlson, Paul. 1973. Our Presbyterian Heritage. Elgin, Il: David C. Cook Publishing Co.

Kuiper, B. K. 1951. The Church in History. Revised by the NUCS Committee on Church History. Grand Rapids: The National Union of Christian Schools, William B. Eerdmans Publishing company

Latourette, Kenneth Scott. 1953. A History of Christianity. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers

Mosse, George L. 1953. The Reformation. Third Edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston

Shelley, Bruce L. 1982. Church History in Plain Language. Waco, Texas: Word books Publisher

Tait, L. Gordon. 2001. The Piety of John Witherspoon: Pew, Pulpit, and Public Forum. Louisville, Kentucky: Geneva Press

Walker, Williston. 1952. A History of the Christian Church. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

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About the Writer

David Clark Brand is a retired pastor and educator with missionary experience

in Korea and Arizona. He and his wife reside in Ohio. They have four grown children

and seven grandchildren. With a B.A. in the Liberal Arts, an M. Div., and a Th.M. in

Church History, Dave continues to enjoy study and writing. One of his books, a

contextual study of the life and thought of Jonathan Edwards, was published by the

American Academy of Religion via Scholars Press in Atlanta