Reformation as rupture

The Cellarer cites the Pope’s comment that the Reformation was ‘a rupture with Scotland’s Catholic past’.

This is most certainly true. The Scottish Reformers were deeply concerned to new-model (to put it anachronistically) Scotland’s religious scene. There were social and political by-products of the religious reformation, of course, but the main thing is the theological or doctrinal development.

At the Reformation, the Scottish church returned to the inscripturated Word as a thoroughly sufficient authority on “all things necessary for the instruction of the kirk, and to make the man of God perfect”. In terms of ecclesiastical structure, the Scottish church became presbyterian rather than prelatical, and repudiated any role for any bishops, including the bishop of Rome. The Reformation in Scotland went back to the scriptural model of only two sacraments, and confessed that the grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments is not conferred by any power in the sacraments themselves. And the trajectory of Reformed thought was then continued down through the generations through the struggles of the Covenanting times, the increased clarity gained about the nature of the free offer of the gospel in the 18th century, the detailed exegetical work on the nature of the atonement in the 19th century by Smeaton, Martin, et al., and so on – but the breach with Rome was deliberate, conscientious, and thorough.

That’s not to say that no good thing has ever come from Rome, or that people in communion with Rome aren’t lovely people, or that we can’t learn from Rome, or agree on a whole lot of things, theological and not. But there is no denying that, as far as the Reformers were concerned, they were cutting ties with an institution which they regarded as unbiblical in its structure, its soteriology, and its practice.