The Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity revived our interest in Presbyterian history in the United States since 1729, but stopped short of formative roots in the old world. Recently my wife and I joined a presbytery- sponsored tour to visit some sources of our Reformed faith in Scotland and Ireland. We found significant historic challenges to the peace, unity and purity of the church, and also surprising foundations for hope.
“Purity” was a driving force in the turbulent events of the Scottish Reformation. Purity was the match used by John Knox and his colleagues to ignite the flames of church (and national) reform in Scotland–purity in the Word of God, in the sacrament, in the clergy, and in the leaders of the land. In his passion for religious purity, Knox sparked an emotional explosion among Scottish people early in St. Andrews in 1547, and again in Perth, Edinburgh, and beyond beginning in 1559. In these violent birth-years of the Presbyterian Church, purity-minded mobs attacked the churches and monastic houses to strip them bare of their images of “idolatry,” typically burning the churches to the ground, and often inflicting bodily harm or death to Catholics who resisted.
Museums and monuments to formative religious struggle marked our Presbyterian heritage across the lowlands and up into the Scottish hills, written in blood by passionate Presbyterians in the never-to-be-forgotten massacres like Glencoe and Culloden.
Across the sea in Northern Ireland civic leaders are even today still trying to stem the bloodshed initiated by Protestant “King Billy” (William of Orange) in 1590 and brutally entrenched in 1650’s by Oliver Cromwell, Presbyterian Plantation in Ulster (Belfast), which carried the newly approved Westminster Standards of 1649 like a military banner to subdue the “heathen anti-Christ” (indigenous Irish Catholics). In revisiting the Presbyterian Reformation throughout Scotland and Ireland, “purity”–taken alone– leaves far too many bloody boot prints in our history.
At the same time, our Presbyterian heritage yielded fascinating symbols of ancient accommodation of various alien elements that might seem dissonant, even theologically at odds with one another. At the simplest level, the names of their churches were (and are) intentionally synergistic. For example, the church where John Knox launched the Scottish Reformation and preached his most famous sermons from 1559 to 1572 carries the name, “St. Giles Cathedral Presbyterian Church.” In the Reformed theology of Knox and his friends, we find no room for saints and no place for cathedrals. Don’t tell the Scots, since the name now carries a double root of memory that unifies rather than divides their faith. It works for them.
Or again, the Greyfriers Church was first the home of a Franciscan order until it was sacked by an angry mob inspired by Knox’s preaching at the beginning of the Reformation. Today it is known as the “Greyfriers Presbyterian Church,” remembering its Franciscan roots, and then an historic memorial to the 1638 Presbyterian Covenanters who defined the Scottish nation and then were martyred for their faith, and now a contemporary Presbyterian congregation in central Edinburgh, reclaiming aspects of pre-Reformation liturgy.
Comfortable but theologically conflicting traditions also co-mingle in the Presbyterian Cathedral of Glasgow (Church of Scotland), where the relics (bones) of St. Mungo (6th century missionary) are preserved inside a beautiful altar located in the crypt just below the lofty nave where Presbyterians have gathered to celebrate Reformed worship for four and a half centuries (on and off, depending on the religio-politics of their time). They have embraced a larger “purity” by mixing their separate faith traditions.
The familiar Celtic cross offers our most universal expression of this historic harmony. As we approached the west coast of Scotland, we saw the Celtic cross more often, a common form but always with uniquely different shapes and artistic symbols, no two exactly the same–like letters in the book of Kells. According to many scholars, the circle that most often unifies the arms of the Celtic cross was “borrowed” from the former Celtic goddess of the light, fertility and the rising sun, who is commonly known to Christians as St. Bride or St. Bridget. Her sun-circle symbol is as firmly entrenched in the Celtic cross as the evergreen tree is enshrined in our traditions of Christmas. About 1500 years ago these two faith symbols became one Celtic- Christian Cross, celebrating unity by mutual understanding, not the conquest by dominance of one over the other.
At last we reached Iona, epicenter of spiritual vibrations and the ancient Celtic cultural capital that was most easily accessible from the Irish Sea. Its windswept coastline is marked by ancient Celtic crosses that recall the early missionary trips of St. Columba, whose bones once shared this sacred space with the graves of Irish, Scottish, and Viking kings. Celtic stories claim that Columba’s relics were moved to the relative safety of Dunkeld in central Scotland about 1200 years ago. But carved in Iona’s stones, we found the omnipresence of prehistoric circles, spirals, and unending lines of Celtic art. These timeless images of spiritual journeys are recorded in enduring art that reflects Iona’s broad margin binding physical earth with divine reality.
On Celtic crosses, the graceful lifelines never end, and caught within the spirals one often finds their re-affirmation of the Creator–in birds, fish, and other forms of life drawn from reality and fantasy. On Iona the Celtic crafts of weaving and poetry, of liturgy as singing-dance-and-prayer, live on, grounded in their affirmations of the earth, earth-creatures, peace, and spiritual renewal. The Celtic cross is ancient, it is contemporary, and its roots are far deeper in Presbyterian heritage than calls for partisan purity, both recent and reformed.
The sheep upon the hills and smell of salt sea on Iona put the bitter differences of the Reformation in a larger perspective. Beneath the bloody history that marked the moments when purity alone was paramount, we found healing symbols of “com-unity” and a larger meaning of “peace” in, with and under the pervasive Celtic art and culture. Celtic crosses speak of serenity stretching from antiquity that dulls the sharp edges of “purity,” and more softly lets us speak together in the love of God Eternal. Beyond the brutal clarity of John Knox’s Reformation, our Celtic heritage of unity-beyond-diversity defines the clearly inclusive foundation of our Presbyterian-Christian heritage.
If we use it well, this tradition will endure and prosper, and so will we.
CARL S. DUDLEY is emeritus faculty, Hartford (Conn.) Seminary and the Hartford Institute on Religion Research.
