****Scottish police forces have been told not to accept a gift of free Bibles from the Gideons because the book “condemns homosexuality”. ****
What has happened to the land that gave us JOHN KNOX!
Soon to be released—new William Wallace biopic “Gayheart”.
Socialism.
The Scots were once known as the People of the Book--i. e. the Bible.
Unfortunately, the same thing that has happened to the lands that gave us John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Jonathan Edwards. You don't want to know what incredible wickedness happens today in First Congregational Church of Northhampton and First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, the two Massachusetts churches where Edwards once preached (hint: lesbianism is only part of the evil happening in Northhampton). As for the heritage of Kuyper, to ask to go to the “Old Church” in Amsterdam is a euphemism for wanting a prostitute since it is in that city's red light district. I understand that Calvin's church in Geneva is theologically almost as bad, though my information is outdated and I don't want to speak with authority.
When God removes his candlestick from a church, great indeed is the darkness in the land (cf. Rev. 2:6).
Of course, that's no cause for pessimism from those who profess Christ. “The church has existed from the beginning of the world and will be to the end, for Christ is an eternal King who cannot be without subjects. This holy church is preserved by God against the fury of the whole world, although for a while it may look very small and as extinct in the eyes of man. Thus during the perilous reign of Ahab, the Lord kept for Himself seven thousand persons who had not bowed their knees to Baal” (Belgic Confession, Article 27).
Scotland before the Reformation was a barely civilized wilderness virtually at the edge of Europe. It was poor, its people and even princes were largely uneducated, and the nation had only minimal relevance. Nobody familiar with the subsequent history of Scotland would make such statements about the role of Scotsmen a century or two after the Reformation, and there are reasons that some of the key leaders of the industrial revolution and the development of modern capitalism hailed from Scotland.
As a Protestant, it appears to me that God raised up virtually irrelevant countries like Scotland to shame and embarrass the great powers of the day, especially the Hapsburgs of Spain and what much later became Austria, but also the rulers of France and the various wealthy Italian city-states. I find it interesting that today, Anglicans from Nigeria and Presbyterians from Brazil and Korea are sending missionaries to re-evangelize the nations which not that many generations ago were sending out missionaries.
Who, a hundred years ago, could ever have expected that Presbyterianism and Anglicanism would be collapsing in Scotland and England while the centers of orthodoxy in both confessional traditions would be in nations which the British then considered hopelessly backward?
Christ is an eternal King who cannot be without subjects, but He certainly makes no promises that he won't replace wicked grandchildren of once-faithful subjects by raising up new subjects who possess the faith others merely profess.
Indeed. They and we desperately need another John Knox.
Scotland is very left wing. It reliably votes for the Labour Party and has its own left wing nationlist party (the Scottish National Party) and its own Maoist terrorist organization (the Scottish National Liberation Army).