Bruce Gore: John Knox and the Scottish Reformation

In the last lecture, Bruce Gore explored the seeds of American republicanism in John Calvin’s theology. Calvin himself didn’t have much to say about how the state should be organized though. This lecture explores how Calvinism was brought to Scotland and how John Knox built on Calvin’s legacy.

I’m enjoying watching the series because I have always loved Early Modern history and intellectual history. I like learning about these twists and turns in the history of Calvinism from Geneva in Switzerland to Scotland and England to Ulster and from there to the Scots-Irish in the American backcountry. The story continues in the 17th and 18th centuries as the Enlightenment gains steam and added a new layer of cultural sediment over the Protestant cultural bedrock in the American colonies.

In particular, one of the things that fascinates me about this series is tracing the theological origins of the phrase “all men are created equal” and how it found its way into the Declaration of Independence. It started out as the imago Dei – the idea that humans are created in God’s image – and specifically in Calvinism in the insistence on the absolute sovereignty of God and total depravity. Calvin believed that all men were equal in the sense of being corrupted by sin and prone to evil. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, the old religious fervor subsided in Scotland and England and there was an attempt to prop this old idea up on a new secular, scientific and naturalistic basis with a new positive, Pelagian spin.

9 Comments

  1. The New Testament: A Jewish Creation to Destroy the White Race

    The Old Testament was designed to unite the jewish race and give them a binding creed. Its objective was to give the race a united solidarity such as none has ever achieved before or after, and to give them purpose, direction, and a program to conquer and plunder the rest of the world. Early in their history the jews realized an astounding fact of human nature. They discovered what an amazingly powerful weapon was religion, defensively and offensively, constructively and destructively.

    They have capitalized upon this discovery to the ultimate throughout their long and tortuous history.

    By skillful use and manipulation of religions, they have not only survived but prospered; they have built a solidarity of race no other people has accomplished; they have demolished all enemies (and all other peoples are their enemies) though these enemies might be a hundred times more powerful than themselves.

    This they have done through the fantastically skillful use of religion. It is high time that we, the White Race, too, grasp this powerful weapon into our own hands, for our own benefit.

    Whereas judaism was designed to unite the jews into a solid ramrod, christianity, on the other hand, also a jewish creation, was designed to do just the opposite to their enemies— divide, confuse and destroy them. The New Testament was also written by the jews— it supposedly revolves around the character of Jesus Christ, who is identified in the very first chapter of the New Testament (Matthew 1) as being a direct descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, through David and through Joseph and Mary, with great emphasis being placed upon him being a purebred jew. In Luke 2:21 it reads Christ was a circumcised jew.

    Christianity was designed not for the jews, but was designed to destroy the great White power of the times— in particular, the Romans, and in general, the White Race. It was designed not to unite and solidify, as the Old Testament had done for the jews, but designed to divide, confuse and destroy the White Race.
    http://www.renegadetribune.com/the-new-testament-a-jewish-creation-to-destroy-the-white-race/

  2. Scotland was a shithole even before the new immigrants. It feels very foreign to me. I do, however, admire the industrialists. I assume they all left ages ago.

    • You need to meet the man who brought Calvin to Geneva and is considered Calvin’s closest friend—William Farel a/k/a “the scourage of priests”.

      Farel would challenge any Cardinal, Bishop, or Priest to a debate, and then destroy their arguments and drive them from the city where they were located.

      The Catholics, on numerous occasions tried to kill Farel, and he survived every attack.

      Even today little of Farel has been translated into English, because his polemics against the Catholics was so incendiary as to embarras modern scholars.

  3. “a new secular, scientific and naturalistic basis with a new positive, Pelagian spin”:

    The Welsh monk Morwen (Pelagius) has been misrepresented, demonized by Roman Catholicism and by many Protestant groups. He preached against sin and the corruption of Rome, and Augustine’s heresy, and was the complete opposite of his antinomian caricature.

  4. “RJ Rushdoony rightly describes the heresy promoted during this conference as follows:

    The Enlightenment shifted the center of interest from God to man, and from the Church to the State … Man was now the measure of all things, and it was man’s will that needed to be done … Enlightenment humanism began with the ‘moral baggage’ of its context, Christendom, but, in practice, it steadily stripped off all morality in favor of self-enjoyment. At the same time, being at war with God, profanation became a prized pleasure … One of the quiet goals of the Enlightenment was the disestablishment of Churches and of Christianity… A first step in this process of disestablishment was to reduce Christianity to an option for man, a matter of choice, not of necessity. The realm of necessity was held to be the civil government. Freedom came to mean deliverance from the Church to the State, from supernatural mandates and laws to ‘natural’ and statist laws. The Reformation had said plainly that Biblical faith requires belief in God’s predestination, in God’s sovereign choice… This was reversed by the Enlightenment, and then by Arminianism. Sovereign choice was transferred to man. Man, it was held, has the option to choose God or reject Him, to declare God to be elect or non-elect.[1]”

    http://ironink.org/2022/08/pretoria-south-africa-conference-on-church-and-state-a-major-disappointment/

4 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. Bruce Gore: The First American Colonies – Occidental Dissent
  2. Bruce Gore: Three Waves of Calvinists – Occidental Dissent
  3. Bruce Gore: Precursors to The Great Awakening – Occidental Dissent
  4. Bruce Gore: George Whitefield and the Beginning of the Great Awakening – Occidental Dissent

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