To the best of my memory, no monograph has ever been devoted to 'The Theology (or Theologians) of the Scottish Reformation'. The name most likely to spring to mind as theological animator of the movement is that of John Knox, yet, among the several roles he played in it, historians have not cast him characteristically as a theologian. James S. McEwen’s selective account is judiciously entitled The Faith of John Knox, and even Richard G. Kyle, the author of The Mind of John Knox, which is the nearest we have to a comprehensive exposition of his thought, had to grant that 'as a theologian Knox developed no dramatically fresh interpretations, nor will he ever be accorded the status of a first-rate thinker of the Protestant Reformation'.

Such a verdict would not have worried Knox himself, as is clear from his introduction to the only sermon he ever committed to print, indeed the only exposition of any portion of scripture thus preserved from over two decades of ‘al my studye and travayle within the Scriptures of God’.