ABSTRACT
During the decades that followed the Scottish Reformation, a spectrum of ideas about Satan developed around the Reformed emphases on the sovereignty of God, double predestination and total human depravity. In educated circles across the country, demonic belief shifted, anxiety about the Devil intensified amid apocalyptic expectation, and perceived struggles with Satan and sin pervaded psyches. For many Scottish men and women, including those outside the clergy, beliefs about the Devil and the nature of his involvement in their lives became clarified and sharpened through the lens of a Protestant theology that was at once prescriptive and practical, communal and personal. This chapter provides a theological framework for examining this evolving role of Satan in early modern Scotland. It begins with an analysis of the demonological ideas articulated by early Continental reformers and then traces the expression and development of these ideas by the first generation of the Reformed Scottish clergy.3 These discussions about Satan comprised a core component of the Reformation process. In the century that followed, discourses about the Devil in print, from the pulpit, in personal writings, in the courtrooms and on the streets would make manifest to Scots of all sorts Reformed ideas about sin, salvation and the human condition.
