Ian Bradley describes how the UK’s only ‘City of Reformation’ will be marking Reformation Day on October 31.

St Andrews

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ST Andrews has been designated as the only ‘City of the Reformation’ in the United Kingdom by the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe in connection with this year’s commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the event generally taken to mark the start of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther’s action in nailing up 95 theses attacking some of the practices and doctrines of the late Medieval Catholic church, especially the sale of indulgences, on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, a University town in Eastern Germany.

This means that the ‘Auld Grey Toon’ on the edge of Fife and the shore of the North Sea will have a leading role in both the Scottish and British commemoration of the Reformation, with special services, lectures, an exhibition and a concert being held in October.

St Andrews is one of 96 towns in 16 countries designated as ‘cities of the Reformation’, the majority of which are in Germany. It has been chosen because of its claim to be the birthplace of the Scottish Reformation, with four early Reformers having been put to death for their beliefs in the town, including the first Scottish Protestant martyr, 24-year-old Patrick Hamilton, in 1527 and the last, 88-yearold Walter Milne, in 1558. They are commemorated in the stark Martyrs’ Monument erected in 1843 on the Scores, overlooking the sea, and refurbished in 2013. John Knox served as preacher to the Protestant nobles who occupied the former bishops’ palace in the Castle and was captured by the French who forced him to be a galley slave. He subsequently preached a famously fiery sermon in Holy Trinity Parish Church on June 4 1559 which apparently provoked his congregation to storm the Cathedral and strip it of its statues and ornaments.

This year’s commemorative events got off to a rousing start with a packed seminar on April 27 on the theme of ‘Singing the Reformation’ which I led with the Rev Dr Douglas Galbraith, well known as a former precentor at the General Assembly and editor of the Church of Scotland Yearbook. We listened to recordings of songs and hymns written by Luther and managed to get the assembled company to sing some of the ‘Good and Godly Ballads’ written by the Wedderburn brothers of Dundee and some early metrical psalms from Thomas Wode’s Psalter produced in St Andrews.

St Andrews University’s Reformation Studies Institute is presenting open lectures on successive Tuesday afternoons through October. On October 10 Professor Andrew Pettegree will lecture on Luther and the Media, on October 17 Professor Mark Elliott will speak about ‘The Theologies of the Reformation’ and on October 24 Dr Bridget Heal will present on ‘Luther and the Arts’. On Monday October 30 I shall give my inaugural professorial lecture on ‘The Strange Death of Protestant Britain?’. The venue for all these lectures will be School III in the University’s main quadrangle behind the Chapel off North Street and they will start at 5.30pm.

BBC Radio 4’s service of Sunday worship will be broadcast live from St Andrews University Chapel at 8.10am on Sunday October 22 and will focus especially on the Scottish Reformation. The musical input will come from St Salvator’s Chapel Choir which in its own contribution to commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation has recently in collaboration with the Kellie Consort recorded a CD that traces the development of Lutheran music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Composers include Bruhns, Buxtehude, Kotter, Praetorius, Scheidemann and Schütz. The CD is being launched with a recital in the Chapel on Sunday October 8 at 8pm.

An exhibition on St Andrews’ involvement in the Reformation is being hosted by the Museum of the University of St Andrews (MUSA) on the Scores. It includes the dramatic and moving painting entitled ‘Wishart’s Last Exaltation’ by Sir William Orchardson which shows George Wishart blessing communion elements set out on a table in a room in the castle on the morning of his martyrdom in 1536. This is believed to have been the first ever Reformed celebration of the sacrament in Scotland. Also on display are illustrated Bibles and Reformation pamphlets from the University’s Special Collections.

The culmination of the commemorative events in St Andrews will be an ecumenical service on Reformation Day itself, Tuesday October 31, at 5.30pm in the town’s Holy Trinity Parish Church, with participation from local churches and the University. The sermon will be delivered by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

I have had the fascinating task and privilege of drawing up the liturgy for this service together with colleagues in the St Andrews clergy fraternal from the Roman Catholic, Baptist and Scottish Episcopal churches.

We took as our starting point the service held in Lund in Sweden on October 31 last year and attended by the Pope and leading representatives of the Lutheran World Federation. It was this ecumenical service which began the year-long commemoration of the start of the Reformation in Europe and it is appropriate that similarly ecumenical acts of worship, both in St Andrews and at Westminster Abbey in London, will mark its culmination here in the United Kingdom. Luther’s great hymn Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is Our God) will be sung in German and in English, as will that other great German Lutheran hymn, Nun Danket Alle Gott (Now Thank We all Our God). It is fitting that the five hundredth anniversary of the start of the Reformation is being commemorated in worship and hymn singing as much as through academic lectures and exhibitions. Luther was himself a passionate musician, hymn writer and composer, one of whose most lasting contributions to the Christian church was to establish worship in the language of the people and put hymn singing at the heart of it. Even if our own Scottish Presbyterian tradition of metrical psalmody owes more to that other great founding father of the Reformation, John Calvin, we are the heirs of Luther in this as in much else.

“The struggle for a more just and caring world has been going on for a long time, sometimes with victories, sometimes with set-backs. Confronted as we are today with a flood of secularism, we are called to enter into the struggle, to be a dynamic Christian minority.

Semper Reformanda!

Ian Bradley is Principal of St Mary’s College and Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at St Andrews University.Further information on the St Andrews events can be found on http://2017.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk