Knox returns to Scotland
The firebrand comes home
Knox has been in exile for twelve years — in England under Edward VI, in Frankfurt and Geneva under the Catholic Mary Tudor. He has been preaching, writing, arguing, translating. His First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in 1558 against the female Catholic monarchs of England and Scotland, so offends Queen Elizabeth I of England when she takes the throne that she refuses to let him return through England.
He sails directly to Scotland.
Scotland in 1559 is a country in the middle of a religious revolution. The Protestant lords — the Lords of the Congregation — are in open conflict with the regent Mary of Guise, who is governing for her daughter Mary Queen of Scots. The Reformation is gaining ground rapidly.
Knox's arrival accelerates everything. He preaches in Perth and his sermon produces a riot — the congregation strips the local church of its images and destroys them. This pattern repeats across Scotland. Knox preaches. Churches are stripped. The Reformation proceeds with a thoroughness that even Calvin finds somewhat alarming.
Within two years the Scottish Parliament establishes Protestantism as the official religion of Scotland and Knox's Geneva-influenced polity — presbyterian governance, Reformed theology, plain worship — as its shape.
Knox is not a gentle reformer. He is a firebrand who believes he is living in apocalyptic times and acts accordingly.
He is not always wrong.
“A man with God is always in the majority.”
— John Knox, attributed, c. 16th century
“What then will we say about these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”
A man with God is always in the majority. Knox said it and lived it — from the galleys to the pulpit, always in the minority by any human accounting, always operating on the conviction that the arithmetic of heaven overrides the arithmetic of earth.
This is not triumphalism. Knox lost constantly by earthly measures — exiled, opposed, misunderstood, working in a country that resisted him. What he held was not a guarantee of earthly success but a confidence about ultimate alignment.
If God is for us, who can be against us? Paul asks the question and does not mean it rhetorically. He means it as the foundation of the courage that persists through opposition — the recognition that the opposition, however powerful, is outnumbered by the one who matters.
What opposition are you facing? And what would it mean to do the math the way Knox did it?