That Lollard saying is… wow. 
Very grinworthy.
Yes it’s hugely wonderful Jason - and has always tickled me. It is attributed to the Lollard Preacher John Ball who ministered to the ‘revolting’ peasants in the reign of Richard II (I allude to the old music hall joke here ;first man - ‘The Peasants are revolting’; second man - after inhaling deeply and with much distaste - ‘Yes, they sure are!’ )
John Ball and his merry band also seem to have held the dream vision poem ‘Piers Plowman’ in high esteem. Piers is an ordinary, humble Plowman who turns out to be the type of Christ; and it is said that the revolting peasants would mumble, ‘Piers is with us – Piers is on our side’. People are divided over whether Langland who wrote Piers Plowman - or at least started the literary tradition from which the three extant texts of Piers emerged - was a real social radical. But it seems he/they, was/were in the Universalist tradition. I posted the famous affirmation of the reconciliation of all in Christ from Piers Plowman at the Poems thread here just before Christmas (there are two versions of this - one relating to Purgatory as the means to reconciliation and one to God’s merciful Judgement as the means to this - I posted the latter on the thread here). At the time, I’d just started reading the All Shall Be Well’ anthology where someone states that in the High Middle Ages the only trace we have of a tradition of Universalism in the West comes from the writings of a few female mystics (I can’t remember who says this - but someone does say it). Again - I reckon we need to keep sharing information on our history as we slowly piece it together because Langland was certainly a hopeful Universalist and also a bloke.
By the way I have a photocopy of William Morris’ very beautiful engraving illustrating ‘When Adam delved and Eve span – who was then the gentleman?’ If you’d like a copy of this I’ll do one and give it to Drew when I see him who can then send it to you (the original photocopy I have is good a crisp one so there will not be much deterioration if I get it redone on a good machine).
All good wishes old matey
Dick
All the best
Dick
A brief note on Hill’s reference to Raleigh – and then I’ve done with the analysis of this passage from ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. Sir Walter Raleigh – he who allegedly threw his cloak over a puddle that Elizabeth might step over it unspotted, and brought back tobacco and the potatoes from the Americas to Europe – has been connected to an early school of scepticism – or perhaps even secret atheism, again allegedly, known as the ‘School of the Night, that was very small in number and had some followers in Elizabeth’s court. (We will soon meet Raleigh as a witness to the St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre of Protestants in France who later presided over the massacre of Catholics in Ireland)
So Hill is implying that the good men of Sherborne, Raleigh’s birth place and place of residence, denounced by the shoemaker may have been influenced by the free thinking Knight of the realm. Hill provides no evidence to substantiate this, and also this implicit judgement on the School of the Night appears deeply anachronistic to me. The School of Night met in secret and at night because their ideas were esoteric/dangerous. Also they may have valued ‘dark’ melancholy as an inspired state for philosophical reflection and contemplation. However, the most consistent explanation of the school places it not in the context of crypto atheism – but rather in the context of Christian Hermeticism. I am acquainted with this tradition through the fascinating writings of the cultural historian Frances Yates; but I am not too fascinated. The hermeticists operated in secret and the evidence about them is very fragmentary and has become a bit of a cult among internet nerds who love a good conspiracy theory.
Suffice to say that Christian Hermeticism was the radical and ‘funky’ wing of Christian Humanism – and all movements at the time of the Reformation had radical and ‘funky’ wings. However the hermeticists had little or no influence on the mainstream humanist tradition of Erasmus. The hermeticist tradition had its roots in the Neo-Platonic Academy in Florence founded by Ficino who, under Medici patronage, collected Neo-platonic texts, texts of Jewish mysticism (the Cabbala), alchemical texts, and texts purporting to be by the ancient Egyptian priest ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ who ,it was alleged, had initiated Moses into the mysteries of Egyptian religion (the Hermetic texts were actually written in Alexandria in the second century). Pico – the pupil of Ficino – sifted and synthesised these texts in an attempt to reconstruct the lost perennial wisdom that underpinned the ancient religions of men. Pico also got into hot water with the Inquisition for his enthusiasm for Origen – which he was made to recant. When he protested that while it may not be true that all will be saved, at least we can assert that Origen is not damned, he was made to recant again.
There was a famous Christian hermetcist who hung around the early court of Elizabeth as a bit of an outsider/insider, and later travelled to Europe and returned to England in disgrace. His name was Dr. John Dee. I think of him as being more like a version of C.S, Lewis’ strange friend Charles Williams than as anything more sinister. Dee was a polymath – a cartographer, mathematician and expert in navigation, and a cryptographer and court spy. Indeed, he was the original 007 because ‘7’ was his monograph, and ‘00’ indicated that as a spy and cryptographer he was the ‘eyes of the Queen’ (Fleming took over this monograph from Dee for James Bond). Dee became fascinated with the idea of rediscovering the language spoken by men before the Tower of Babel in an attempt to reunite humanity in peace. I think this project, which he pursued in Europe with his side kick Edward Kelly, drove him mad.
Anyway Raleigh’s School on Night, although it was founded after the halcyon days of Dr Dee, appears to have been likewise a Hermeticist enterprise – and it is completely anachronistic to term it ‘atheistic’ in my view.
Christian hermeticism is important to the history of Christian Universalism because its symbolism influenced the very difficult writings of the Lutheran Cobbler mystic Jackob Boheme; and his followers are one of the lineages of Christian Universalist tradition (his ideas are more readily accessible in the writings of William Law – the Anglican Universalist - who managed to take what was precious from Boheme and translate it out of its cryptic hermetic symbolism into language that is easy to comprehend).
All the best
Dick
Regarding a reckoning of the record of the Elizabethan Church as a persecuting church (and the Elizabethan State as a persecuting State) my sources are diverse. However, my two main reference sources for a final weighing of the evidence are Charitable Hatred’ by Alexandra Walsham’ and ‘Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558 – 1689’ by John Coffey. I think the former book is the finer one of the two. The latter, in its summing up of the Elizabethan record is needlessly harsh and judgemental in comparing ‘like with dislike’; in other words it compares the Elizabethan record with other countries with completely different circumstances and, in one case, from a later time; and it also only concentrates on the positive aspects of the records of these other countries, and neglects to look at the ways in which they had a far worse records than Elizabethan England for tolerance in other ways – and sometimes far, far worse.
To begin I would like to take some time in outlining some points of perspective made by Alexandra Walsham regarding the pressures upon an English monarch in these times to comply with a Magisterial policy of persecution (because she makes these points with a marvellous sense of empathic historical imagination). Yes the reach of Magisterial Protestant policy was often frustrated by the neighbourly love of communities that closed against it to protect their ‘heretics’. However, the best among the Christian Humanists who tried to attenuate ‘MP’ and eventually to subvert it from within, still had to operate within its frame of meaning (unlike the radicals who lived outside of it and therefore could simply reject it)
I’d like to quote some sizeable chunks to you from ‘Charitable Hatred’ because Walsham writes so well on these matters. The examples she gives range beyond Elizabeth’s reign to those of later times that we will look at in broad brush in part 2 of this thread. So read this to get an overview and treat it as a key resource like my initial summary of D.P. Walker’s ‘Decline of Hell’. I have included a/my commentary on Walsham’s text to outline the points at which I think Magisterial Protestantism is at variance with the true witness of the Christina faith.
Walsham writes that -
**Despite their fierce denunciation of the barbarous cruelty of (‘bloody’) Mary’s Catholicism and the legendary brutality of the Inquisition, Protestant did noy discard the persecuting heritage of the great Latin father Augustine. Augustine remained a revered source of authority for post-Reformation writers who sought to justify the enforcement of religious uniformity. They regarded coercion as a legitimate weapon in the quest to persuade the misguided to see the light of the Gospel: ‘as just wrath is no wrath, but a fervent diligence, so is right-wise smiting not smiting.’ The Church of England homily ‘on charity’ composed before 1547 also stressed the responsibility of Christian governors to take steps to discipline erring subjects, even ‘as every loving father correcteth his natural son when he doeth amiss’, and it is necessary to sever such ‘evil persons’ from society permanently. **
I think it is in the light of the above that we need to sift ‘Luke the non-universalist’s’ contention early on in this thread that –
*Cranmer in his first book of homilies which as Anglicans we are also obliged to refer to says:
"The other, as they be ready to believe God’s promises, so they should be as ready to believe the threatenings of God: as well they should believe the law, as the Gospel: as well that there is an hell & everlasting fire, as that there is an heaven, and everlasting joy’’*
Yes – as Anglicans we are obliged to refer to Homilies as part of our history – but the Homilies never had any greater binding force than being for ‘our edification and instruction’. And the original context of Cranmer’s Homily here is that of ‘charitable hatred’ as a reflection of ‘God’s just vengeance’. We can certainly learn from this – but we will all draw different lessons from it. (And most Anglican’s today see the Elizabethan Settlement as their real point of historical reference, and not Henry VIII requiring legitimation for his divorce /lust, or Cranmer’s less inclusive Protestantism).
Back to Walsham -
**The exile George Joye likewise reprimanded the ‘fond, foolish pity’ of sparing a murderer or an adulterer who ‘Hurteth the whole commonalty’ and it is clear from the abortive Edwardian revision of canon law, the ‘Reformatio Legum’, that this precept was regarded as applying to religious deviants as well as moral offenders. Arians, Anabaptists and other arrogant radicals and ‘fireballs’ who spread perverse and pestilential opinions were to be treated as ‘gangrenous members’: to show clemency to those who peddled false doctrine was a misplaced mercy that put others in terrible peril…As Bishop Thomas Bilson reminded readers in his ‘True difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion (1585). St Paul himself had been ‘compelled to Christianity by corporeal violence’ **
So here we have the old persecuting text metaphors of ‘pestilence’ and ‘gangrenous members’ – and this all has a deadening monotony to it. I note that Bishop Bilson is writing in the dark years of the build up to the war with Spain. However, his reading of Paul conversion is surely perverse. I take it that Bilson is implying here that because of Paul’s’ career as a persecutor the first Christians lead to his conversion , this somehow lends legitimacy to persecution; very twisted indeed!
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Punishments’, declared the late seventeenth century rector of Bath, Joseph Glanvill, were ‘instruments of real reformation’; the ‘soft and gentle remedies’ of statutory penalties, said the Northamptonshire minister Thomas Ashden in 1682, were applied in the hope that ‘a little smart might make the scales peel off from men’s eyes’.
We will meet the likes of Glanvill and Ashden in part 2. They were High Church Armenian Anglicans who wanted the Church to remain a persecuting monopoly – but they lost this case to the Latitudinarian Anglican’s who argued for a comprehensive and tolerant church and were finally backed by the Dutch King of England, William II in his Act of Toleration. Te more Conservative elements in the American Episcopalian Church today are decedents of the High Church Armenian faction in England.
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The Old Testament was a source of particular inspiration for Protestant theorists of intolerance. In setting forth the duties of episcopate, Edwin Sandys cited Ezekiel 3: 8 (‘if thou speakest not to warn the wicked from his wicked way, his soul I will require at thine hand) and it was a clerical commonplace that civil officials who allowed the sword to grow rusty in the scabbard would be held guilty as accomplices to the death of each and every heretic. To tolerate stubborn papists, urged a delegation of Irish bishops in November 1626, was to make one an accessory’ not just to ‘all their abominations of popery, but also… to the perdition of the seduced people which perish in the deluge of Catholick apostasy’. The Pentateuch provided an empathic mandate for taking draconian action against misbelievers: Deuteronomy 13: 6-11 insisted that no mercy could be shown to those who enticed their brethren to worship other gods and ordered that idolaters be ruthlessly stoned to death. These convictions acquired special resonance in the context of the renewed emphasis on Hebrew models of kingship that accompanied the spread and entrenchment of the Reformation and the growing belief that ancient Israel was the perfect pattern and prototype of the kind of godly nation which the Lord expected England to become. Just as biblical rulers like Josiah, Asa and Hezekiah had zealously purged their kingdoms of idolatry, so too were Tudor and Stuart sovereigns expected to endeavour to extirpate all traces of it from their realms, emulating Constantine, Justinian, Theodosius and other godly emperors of old.
Edwin Sandys was Archbishop of York during the dark and final decades of Elizabeth’s reign. My personal view of the Pentateuch code is the same as Richard Beck’s - as expressed on his blog; Jesus was following the inclusive Mercy Code of the great Prophets of the Jewish Testament which is openly critical of the harsh and exclusive Severe Code of Leviticus, Deuteronomy etc. Therefore I think that the severe emphasis of Magisterial Protestantism actually runs counter to the teachings of our Lord. And regarding Jesus’ attitude to ‘heretics’ we should be mindful of his parable of the Good Samaritan – Samaritans were the arch heretics of Judaism during New Testament tries because of their heterodox views about the Temple and the purity laws. It is no coincidence that Jesus chose the Samaritan as his model of neighbour love – the heretic Samaritan – unlike the Levite and the Pharisee – was not bound by the purity laws to have scruples about touching a body ‘left for dead’ that might actually be a corpse.
Back to Walsham -
Throughout this period, royal proclamations, the preambles of parliamentary statutes and other forms of official propaganda were saturated with solemn claims about the weighty spiritual responsibilities of the Christian prince. Henry VIII consciously fashioned himself in the image of Hebrew Kings like David and Solomon, not least on the illustrated title-page of the Great Bible and in his majestic performance, clad in the white of theological purity (what a poseur!), at the trial of the sacramentarian John Lambert in 1538, when he disputed with the defendant and offered him one last chance to repent before sentencing him to death on the stake. Propagation of the myth of the precocious young Protestant Edward VI as the reincarnation of Josiah was accompanied by much emphasis on his exemplary determination to remove all impediments to religious purity…while an edict of Elizabeth insisted that it was ‘a thing appertaining chiefly’ to Christian monarchs ‘to have a special care’ to train up people in the true religion and restrain those who sought to subvert it’. James I, who likewise modelled himself on Moses and Solomon, acknowledged that ‘our duty towards God requireth… that what intractable men do not perform upon admonition they must be compelled unto by Authority’; it was incumbent upon ‘a religious and wise King…[to] plant good seed with one hand’ and ‘to root out with the other as far as he can, the Cockle and Tares of Heresy that do ordinarily grow up among the Lord’s wheat’.
Regarding the above story about Henry VII note that a sacramentarian heretic was one who denied the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. (Cranmer at first burnt sacrementarians, until he changed his mind on this issue and refocused his persecuting zeal on the Anabaptists).
Regarding Henry’s behaviour when robed in ‘the white of theological purity’ – what a shocking poseur he was! It is difficult to think of a King of England more addicted to casual cruelty and lust, and more in love with his own power than Henry. Yet here he stands in judgement of another showing off his undoubted learning with vainglory in the cause of a Catholicism from which he was soon to become turncoat (sorry – I almost fell angry at reading this). I also note how modest Elizabeth’s declaration is in comparison to that of another shocking poseur of a monarch – James I.
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**The notion that early modern sovereigns were no less bound than their ancient forbears to uphold theological orthodoxy with the aid of physical might was integrally linked with the conviction that they had a divine commission to resurrect the severe sanctions against sin enshrined in the Mosaic law. Such assumptions were partly responsible for Henry VIII’s act of 1533 making sodomy (homosexuality) a felony. **
Regarding the issue of homosexuality and the Christian response, I know that this matter has been debated hotly here and Christians differ in good conscience over their interpretation of passages in Paul and on the weight they give to the code of the Pentateuch. One thing I would say is that whereas in the penitential manuals of the early and medieval Church homosexual activity is obviously considered a sin – although the penances for it in fasting and prayer vary from the quite lenient to the more severe – but it is not considered different in kind from other sins of the flesh or sins of un-charity. Homosexuality largely only became a capital crime in early modern Europe where homosexuals join heretics and witches as scapegoats for the birth pangs of the new era. I will always remember reading the account of the last outdoor hanging in England which took place in the mid-Victorian period (it was not a carnival occasion as had been the case in the eighteenth century – but it was carried out in the light of day in a prison yard). The person hanged had been convicted of sodomy. It was noteworthy that no one from his family had turned up to say goodbye or comfort him in his hour of trial.
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These notions permeated the body of legislation repressing drunkenness, swearing and Sabbath breaking placed on the statute book in the seventeenth century and they peaked with the Rump Parliament’s notorious Adultery Act of 1650, which imposed the death penalty on those who broke the holy bond of matrimony and inflicted a three month prison sentence on convicted fornicators). This high conception of regal office survived the republican experiment of the 1650’s and exerted influence for the rest of the century
Actually the death penalty for adultery although put on the statue books by the Rump Parliament during the Civil War (and ‘Rump’ was always meant to be a term of semi-abuse) was never carried out. The precedent that the Puritan Parliament had for his law was the law in Calvin’s Geneva where adulterers were executed without mercy. Calvin argued that in the story of the Woman taken in Adultery Jesus did not act in such a way as to suggest that stoning for adultery should be abrogated; rather he simply refused to make a decision on this point of law as he did in the dispute between the two brothers.
This is a very odd piece of exegesis as far as I am concerned – a piece of special pleading even in Calvin’s day with Calvin’s knowledge. I note that J. Duncan M. Derrett, Professor of Laws at the University of London, has shown in recent times in his ‘Law in the New Testament’ that Jesus was certainly giving a Rabbinical ruling in this case and that the writing in the sand of the appropriate Torah text summarising the ruling was completely in accord with Rabbinical practice. Derrett speculates, from sound first principles, that Jesus’ ruling was probably summarised with the text of Exodus xxiii. Ib – ‘place not they hand with the wicked (to be a false witness)’; which underscores the point that only the sinless can demand the life of a sinner. (This is certainly a vast improvement on the sentimental legend that Jesus wrote down all of the sins of the Accusers in the sand).
For Calvin, all of the Laws in the Leviticus’ penal code were binding for Christian magistrates. Hence disobedient children in Calvin’s Geneva were sometimes sentenced to death, taken to the scaffold, and with the halter already around their necks had their sentences commuted at the last minute on account of their tender age. I have it on the authority of Phillip Schaff – the Calvinist Christian Universalist who was still sympathetic to Calvin and anxious to do him justice by weighing the evidence for and against him scrupulously – that in Calvin’s Geneva a child was beheaded for striking a parent in a temper tantrum.
See www.edwardtbabinski.us/history/death_penalty.html.
Back to Walshman –
As Tony Claydon has shown, the notion that the Prince had a sacred duty to repress gross immorality and idolatry also lay at the heart of William III’s ‘godly revolution’. The canny political architect of the Act of Toleration still found it vital to project himself as a pious enemy and avenger of popery and vice, a providential instrument exalted to the throne to defend the true church and restore its original purity, a second ‘Hezekiah’. It is a mistake to dismiss this empowering rhetoric as ‘a conventional gift wrapping for a case whose substance was other principles’…
So it seems that even William III, the Dutch King of England, had to project himself as the ‘Scourge of the Lord’ to enact his programme of liberal reform ( it also helped that he had deposed a Catholic king - James II - and therefore could take the moral high ground even for liberal reforms with English Protestants.
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**Preachers invoked the same language to persuade monarchs and their advisers to grasp the nettle and deal out strict forms of discipline to religious deviants. Thus Cardinal Poke informed (Bloody) Mary: ‘God hath given the sceptre and sword into her Majesty’s hands for no other reason than that ribaldry and disobedience to the holy laws may be punished. In a letter to the Lord Protector written in 1550, Jean (John) Calvin admonished him not to flinch from executing seditious Anabaptists and obstinate Catholics as befitted the chosen deputy of the almighty, ‘seeing that they quarrel not only against the king, but also against God. **
Oh dear, so Calvin was already interfering in the affairs of England during the reign of the boy King Edward VI by corresponding with Edward’s Protector in his ‘minority’, Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset. And note the idolatrous identification of earthly power and heavenly power in Calvin’s sentiments.
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**Thomas Cranmer used similar arguments to urge Edward to sign the warrant condemning the Kentish (Anabaptists) heretic Joan Boucher, who had stubbornly refused to retract her belief that Christ had not taken the flesh of the Virgin Mary. Invoking the harsh precedent in Exodus decreeing that blasphemers be stoned to death, he reminded the young King that it was his obligation as the Lord’s lieutenant to stamp out heinous errors and impiety. **
Poor Joan Boucher – a woman of blameless life by all accounts and beloved of her neighbours. Her crime was to subscribe to the Christology of Melchior Hoffman. It seems that Cranmer’s request came as something of a shock to the boy king Edward – after all he had enacted the repeal of the Law for the Burning of Heretics. However, Cranmer had Boucher arraigned and executed by burning under the blasphemy laws for offences against Trinitarian/Incarnational orthodoxy as set out in the Athanasian Creed. Edward – who would have been educated in the lessons of English History as part of his training in the arts of Princely Statecraft - would have known well the fate of other boy kings who had come to power in their minority in recent British history – Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward V; all deposed and murdered - the first two because of their alleged ‘weakness’, the last because he was just a child.
The case of Henry VI would have been especially instructive to Edward. Henry was a saintly, gentle and pious King and a patron of learning. His kingdom was ‘not enough of this world’ to make him a canny ruler. It is related that once he was riding out of London with his royal entourage when he saw the quatered/dismembered remains of a traitor impaled on spears and spikes at the outskirts of the City. He did not know what to make of this and told his lieutenants that he ‘would have no Christian man treated in this way in my realm’. His edict was ignored and he was eventually deposed by his brutal and feuding ‘brother’ Barons in the terrible Wars of the Roses which the Tudors put a stop to by imposing their equally brutal centralised authority on England – but this at least ensured the peace in a brutal age.
When all is said and done, it still makes me shudder to think of Cranmer pressurising a boy to sign a warrant for death by burning.
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In 1572 Elizabeth was exhorted by her bishops to set aside ‘foolish pitie’ and consent to the execution of her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots and in a sermon preached later that decade Edwin Sandys insisted that the magistrate must not recoil from shedding the blood of idolaters since the Almighty had commanded that false prophets should be judicially executed. If kings and queens shirked this unsavoury task, they stood in danger of being convicted of soul murder at the Last Judgement, not to mention running the risk of having their crowns knocked from their heads. The fate of the Old Testament ruler Saul, who had been dispossessed of his kingdom for negligently sparing wicked Agag, was held up as a stark example of how the Lord dealt with monarchs who were lax and lukewarm in upholding His cause…
Yes Elizabeth only agreed to the execution of her sister Queen Mary of Scots with great reluctance – even when it was crystal clear that Mary was plotting against her. Also, I note that when Sir Anthony Babington and his fellow Catholic conspirators who had plotted to kill Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne of England were hanged drawn and quartered (as a first instalment of their damnation and to delight the London crowds) word reached Elizabeth’s ears of the excessive cruelty of these executions and she said they had to stop; and they did stop because she had the authority to have her commands heeded. So I see all this as evidence that Elizabeth was no lover of cruelty and vengeance. However, I note what Walsham says about rulers running the risks of ‘having their crowns knocked from their heads’ at this time. Yes it would appear that ‘weakness’ or public and unequivocal affirmation of a ‘tender hearted’ belief such a Universalism could spell death for a Monarch, or an Archbishop for that matter.
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**The heavy burden and mantle of religious persecution and coercion did not, however, fall solely upon anointed monarchs. It extended down the social ladder to lesser magistrates as well. They too were God’s agents of wrath, as laid down in Romans 13. As the Ipswich preacher Samuel Ward declared in a sermon of 1618, they too had a duty to work in tandem with the ministry as a terror to evil doers, to be ‘guardians and tutors’ to those over whom they exercised jurisdiction – to exhibit what Richard Sibbes called ‘holy violence in the performance of their duties’, which included ‘restraining the false believers who lived in their midst’. These convictions reached a high point in the Puritan Revolution, acquiring particular urgency in the context of the widespread belief that the age was witnessing the final phase in a vast cosmic struggle against Antichrist and the devil, and that persecution of the ungodly would hasten the advent of the long awaited millennium. **
The Magisterial Protestant used Romans 13 to justify complicity with all manner of evils. I think Jacques Ellul puts the counter-exegesis of this passage very well, in a way that all Christians with a Social Gospel can agree with, at least in part -
Ellul agrees that the verses do come from Paul, but must be properly contextualized both within the epistle and within Paul’s other writings. The discussion prior to Romans 13 concerns loving and being at peace with others, both friend and enemy. The last verse of chapter twelve (Rm 12:21), “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” leads into the discussion of political power, which is an evil that must be endured. Paul is far from advocating revolution or violent resistance, counselling submission instead. If we owe taxes, we pay them, nothing more. We recognize that these exousia, or powers are ultimately subject to God alone, but we know, too, that as Christians we have been called to struggle against these exousia (Eph 6:12). While these powers are already defeated by Christ, for the time being we experience and admit their necessity, but never their legitimacy.
(from ‘ Violence, Anarchy and Scripture: Jacques Ellul and René Girard’ by Matthew Pattillo from
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture Vol 11, Spring 2004)
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More generally, it was believed that every man was bound to act as his brother’s keeper, sternly to rebuke his faults and forcibly to prevent him from falling into the abyss of damnation. In the course of a vehement polemical attack upon the Family of Love published in 1579, John Knewstub insisted that ordinary Christians had a responsibility ‘to be the chief doers in the death and executions of heretics, even if they were their own friends and relatives.
We’ve met our old friend/foe John Knewstub before. I note that a close associate of the Calvinist ‘Family of Love Negative Fan Club’ was the unfortunate John Stubbes. Stubbes wrote a scurrilous tract in hostility to Elizabeth’s proposed French marriage. Whether by Elizabeth’s command or the command of her Privy Council without her full consent, he was sentenced to have his hand cut off for writing these slanders. This, as far as I can see, is the one example of the Elizabethan powers reacting with excessive violence towards a Calvinist. However, if Stubbes had written in this way against Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, he would have been sentenced to death by hanging, drawing and quartering without scruple or hesitation.
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Underlying all of the statements quoted above lay the assumption that failure to implement justice against religious and moral deviants was a recipe for divine retribution if not complete destruction. As a speaker in the House of Commons declared in 1601, God would not allow such sins to go unpunished ‘neither in the offenders themselves, nor in us that tolerate the same, but will lay his heavy wrath and indignation upon this land’. Intolerance of one’s confessional enemies, no less than heinous sinners, was necessary to appease the rage the Almighty and deflect devastating temporal judgements. It was taken for granted that to condone wicked doctrine and worship was to expose the nation at large to the threat of annihilation. The Edwardian bishop of Gloucester John Hooper used the episode of Jonah being thrown overboard to demonstrate that unless sinners were sharply disciplined the entire community would suffer…
How odd that the Book of Jonah should be used to legitimate persecution. Jonah is one of the truly Universalist texts in the
Jewish Testament in the precise sense that it reveals God’s love for the Gentiles as well as for his Chosen People. And the Gentiles in question are the people of Nineveh, the oppressors of God’s Chosen. Jonah is thrown overboard because he is trying to escape his vocation to warn the people of Nineveh. As we all know in the end he does warn them – expecting them to not heed him and reap their destruction. However, they repent and Jonah is none too happy about this – and Jonah’s displeasure is displeasing to our God of mercy.
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Countries that turned a blind eye to error and heresy could also be punished more indirectly and subtly, in the form o sedition and anarchy, which would dissolve the internal sinews of society and in turn provoke the righteous anger of God. Thus William Laud warned in a sermon preached at Whitehall in 1652 that ‘great and multiplied sin’ would lead a nation to ‘inwardly melt’ and Roger L’Estrange wrote in his tract ‘Toleration Discussed’ (1663) that religious uniformity was ‘the cement of both Christian and Civil societies: take that away, and the parts drop from the body’…
And with Laud and L’Estrange we again meet the High Church Armenian Anglican tradition to be discussed in part 2. Suffice to say for the moment that as Magisterial Protestants their ‘charitable hatred’ was primarily directed at another group of Magisterial Protestants whose vision they did not share – that is the Calvinists.
(All passages quoted are from ‘Charitable Hatred’ by Alexandra Walsham, Manchester University Press 2006. They are taken from Chapter 2 on ‘Fraternal Correction and Holy Violence’ in the section on ‘The Theology of Religious Intolerance’, pages 40-47)
Hope you are still following this?
All the best
Dick
I certainly am.
I am also considering assembling everything here and making it into a PDF style book when you are all done.
That’s a lovely idea Paul. In principle I’ve no objections and would relish the opportunity to have a collaborator/editor in this task. I guess the only thing we have to think about is copy write issues - I’m not bothered about my own copy write but about the parts of my posts where I have quoted extensively from others; but there may be ways round this (like asking permission). So yeah - let’s think around the idea. I wonder what Drew and Jason think about this – since they have also contributed a lot?
All the best old chum
Dick 
So I’ll begin the final reckoning with Elizabeth’s record as a persecuting monarch.
First I think we always need to remember that from 1558 until 1575 – nearly seventeen years – no one died for their faith in England, and that is a remarkable record for the times. Perhaps this does mark a honeymoon period for a hope that was later tested too sorely by events. Perhaps it is equivalent in some ways to the hopeful dawn of Lutheranism when in the 1520’s Luther argued that magistrates should under no circumstances compel religious conformity or fight religious deviance with the sword. Luther was reacting against the autocratic control of the Catholic Church and was hopeful that the rediscovered Gospel would soon spread like wildfire and convert the hearts of human beings to the Protestant faith. Events soon proved him wrong – with the peasant uprisings etc – and he modified his views to justify the suppression of Anabaptists and other false brethren. With Elizabeth the hopeful dawn – based this time on pragmatism grounded in the principles of Erasmus’ Humanism - lasted far longer than with Luther. There is nothing incompatible here with the contention that Elizabeth may have been sympathetic to Universalism – and it may be relevant that the persecuting in England did not begin until the year of Matthew Parker’s death.
Second, I think that we need to consider that even if Elizabeth did have Universalist sympathies, it does not necessarily follow that her sympathies were universal. She was limited by her role in society and her historical circumstances as we all are. She was still an aristocrat and a magisterial ruler in a brutal age – if a moderate one. Under the Tudors the death penalty was in force for a large number of felonies and prisons were horrible insanitary places to be incarcerated in. Henry VIII had multiplied the number of offences that carried the death penalty in order to consolidate his autocratic and centralised control. Elizabeth softened Henry’s code somewhat, especially by abrogating the hideous punishment Henry had introduced onto the statute books for poisoners.
She would have seen no crime in people being sentenced to death to secure the peace of the realm – indeed she would have seen this as a necessary evil. (Indeed, the full reform of England’s ‘bloody penal code’ did not come until the nineteenth century – largely because of the pioneering work of non-conformists like the Quakers who had recent experience of suffering under the penal code and in prisons that had enlarged their imaginations to encompass the plight of the condemned, a cause later taken up by the Evangelicals along with the Quaker concern to abolish slavery). Also she would have had no problems with the death reserved for traitors (although she is recorded to have stopped the excesses of the hanging, drawing and quartering of the Babbington plotters). However, unlike her father she is not on record as having relished arbitrary cruelty to keep her subjects in a state of terror. Henry is recorded to have relished staging executions in which just as the axe was about to fall he would pardon the condemned – which meant that court executions often took on a carnival air in the expectation that a pardon would be issued. But sometimes – he just let the axe fall to everyone’s horror. With this arbitrary cruelty he was behaving very much in the image of the God conjured in the imaginations of Magisterial Protestants. Elizabeth did not behave in this way.
Third we need to remember that Elizabeth reigned for a long forty five years which saw many changes and periods of huge religious/political anxiety. Before Christmas, I read an article by a secular journalist who writes for the liberal Guardian newspaper in England – which has some journalists from the militant secularist camp (although this is not true of all Guardian journalists). This journalist propagated a myth that ‘what we need to realise is that for all the good press that Elizabeth gets, she actually killed almost the same number of people for their faith in her reign as her sister ‘bloody’ Mary had done. Sure, Mary killed three hundred Protestants in three years. However, Elizabeth carried out no reprisals for this and during the forty five years of her reign only six people died for the faith – two Anabaptists and four Arians(the number rises to seven if we include one Arian who died in prison before being executed). 189 Catholics were executed after Elizabeth’s excommunication by the Pope at the close of the 1570s – but, as we shall see, although this is a terrible toll none were executed because of their beliefs, rather they were executed as traitors plotting the overthrow and death of Elizabeth and at least a sizeable minority of these were doing just that; although innocents also suffered. Six independent Separatists were also hanged in the 1590’s for sedition – but this was in the final years of Elizabeth’s rule when hard men had risen to prominence in her Privy Council and in the Church, hardened by the experience of war and paranoia.
I’m really glad this stage of the research/argument is almost at a close – and I look forward to part 2 in which real persecution unto death is a marginal theme. It is horrible thinking on all of these gruesome accounts of the deaths of brave women and men (and I’m sparing you the details given in my sources). However, I think this is necessary if we are to think on these if we are to understand Elizabeth’s religious tolerance properly. Also, given the concerns of this site I think it is necessary that we unmask the persecuting zeal that underpinned the hard tradition of ECT in western Christianity – just to stop anyone getting ‘romantic ‘about this tradition. The awfulness of cruelty n this period, in my view, goes a long way to explain the fragmented and often secret story of Christian Universalism in the west – and I think Universalism was probably actually always more extensive than the essays in the ‘All Shall be Well’ anthology suggest.
I want to do this reckoning now, one persecuted party at a time; and I will begin with the Anabaptists – for it is their persecution under Elizabeth that is least easy to explain away in terms of historical circumstances (although I think it can still be explained - but not condoned)
Two Anabaptists – Jan Pieters and Hendrick Terworort - were judicially murdered in London at Smithfield by burning at the stake in 1575; this much we can be certain of. From the reign of Henry VIII to the reign of James I (Elizabeth’s successor) a number of Anabaptists were burnt in England. Edward VI burnt two, Elizabeth burnt two, as did James I. Mary may have burnt as many as twenty and Henry burnt a number although I am unsure of the precise figure.
We have already seen how the Muster debacle instilled panic, fear and loathing in Catholic Autocrats and Magisterial Protestants throughout Europe. We have also seen that Cramner’s 42 Articles addressed both Anabaptist practices of non-cooperation with the magistrates – on taking oaths, bearing arms etc – and Anabaptist beliefs: Article 40 spoke against soul sleep, Article 41 spoke against the millenarians with the associated doctrines of perfectionism and antinomianism, Article 42 spoke against the doctrine of Universal salvation; in addition the article affirming the historic creeds implicitly condemned ‘Melchiorite’ Christology. (I note that not all Anabaptists held the doctrines condemned in Articles 40 and 41; and Article 42 - to be consistent, -should have condemned annihilationist teaching as the Augsburg Confession had done, because annihilationist teaching was the real eschatology of most real Anabaptists at this time). Again we have noted that although the 39 Articles drawn up in convocation by Matthew Parker did not abrogate those articles condemning Anabaptist practices of non-cooperation with the magistrates, and certainly did not amend the Article affirming historic Creeds, they did abrogate Articles 40 and 41 that explicitly condemned Anabaptist beliefs, and Article 42 that actually only explicitly condemns Origen’s eschatology although the traditional view is that it was meant to condemn Anabaptist eschatology. The same traditional view for these changes is that the memory of the Muster debacle had receded and the hour of panic had passed. I think that the idea that ‘the hour of panic’ over Muster ‘had passed’ provides some plausible explanation for the abrogation of Articles 40 -42 from Cranmer’s prayer book – but not a complete explanation.
So why were the Anabaptists singled out for such hatred, that lead to tow being burnt at the stake – especially if the panic over Munster had indeed passed? Let us look a bit more into the context of this tragic event in 1575.
We have investigated the history of the Family of Love in Elizabethan England. They were an Anabaptist sect, but as Marsh’s study suggests, compelling evidence that has recently come to light suggests that they were actually protected by the Elizabethan state, despite the machinations of hot-headed Calvinists against them. However, we have also noted that they the Family were basically non-confrontational and complied with the magistrates and with the outward observance of the rites and beliefs of the Anglican Church. They were also, despite being inspired by the writings of the Dutch Spiritual Anabaptist Hendrik Niclaes, all English and mostly respected members of their communities and thus protected by neighbour love.
A brief excursion is in order here. ‘Who is my neighbour’. To find an example of someone who actually practiced neighbor love towards outsiders at this time in history we have to look to a rare and wonderful Catholic missionary (who we Christian Universalists’ should remember with affection); namely the Dominican friar, Bartolome de las Casas who died in 1566.
*…He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed “Protector of the Indians.” His extensive writings, the most famous A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies and focus particularly on the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the Indigenous peoples.
…Bartolomé de las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the violent colonial abuse of indigenous peoples, especially by trying to convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization. And although he failed to save the indigenous peoples of the Western Indies, his efforts resulted in several improvements in the legal status of the natives, and in an increased colonial focus on the ethics of colonialism. De las Casas is often seen as one of the first advocates for universal Human Rights*
See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C … _las_Casas
However de las Casas was a rare soul – and certainly Protestant Europe at this time was consumed with its own infighting and not yet able to identify imaginatively with the wider human family –even where there were only small differences of language and custom… Indeed it is only today as a ‘global village’ that we are really being forced finally to all make the imaginative shifts of inclusive moral identification for which de las Cass was the foremost trail blazer.
(Warning: this paragraph is a bit unpleasant so you may skip it. Social historians have pointed out that when towns and city in Europe during this period held their appalling ‘punishment days’ where executions were carried out by inches over a number of days to the delight of the onlookers, the people who suffered were never ‘natives’ - they were always strangers from other parts :‘love the stranger and the sojourner within your gates because you too were strangers in the Land of Egypt!’. Fortunately ‘punishment days’ were not a native tradition in Tudor England despite other barbarities. Torture was outlawed in English common law –except in cases of treason where it was used ostensibly as a tool to extract information rather than as a common integral part of the process of punishment as was often the case in Continental Europe. However, the sheer banality of evil is in evidence in force in Elizabethan bureaucratic accounts of who was paid for what in executions)
Neighbor love towards complete outsiders was rare in pre modern Europe – although neighbor love within communities often flourished in the face of adversity. And England is an Island nation that was and is sometimes welcoming to refugees from persecution but where people often, at least until very recently, have lacked the experience and therefore imagination to accommodate real diversity. Both victims of the persecution of Anabaptists under Elizabeth were foreign refugees. Although the unfortunate and brave maid of Kent, Joan Boucher, who perished for her Melchiorite Anbaptists beliefs under Cranmer was English – an interesting and scholarly article by Meic Pearse, ‘Fear of “Anabaptists” in Sixteenth-Century England’ (originally published in Anabaptism Today, Issue 3, June 1993) points out that despite the Calvinist inspired scares about the Anabaptist ‘fifth column’ in Elizabethan England, it seems that any native tradition of English Anabaptism had been wiped out during the persecutions of ‘Bloody’ Mary.
Meic Pearse argues that -
*It is not at all easy to prove how much actual Anabaptism, in the full-blown continental sense, influenced English radicals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A majority of those who fell into the hands of the authorities for Anabaptism were foreigners, often Dutch. Most of the few native-born English who were consciously committed Anabaptists pass as shadows across the historian’s field of vision…
…If one is to speak meaningfully of “English Anabaptism” in the sixteenth century, one must produce evidence of actual congregations of English people who practiced believer’s baptism and separation from the world, and who believed in the separation of church and state in religious toleration. Alas, no English groups can be shown to meet these criteria. Robert Cooche, an isolated and eccentric courtier of the 1540s to 1570s, held Anabaptist views, but he was a singer in the royal chapel! An English carpenter whose name has come down to us only as “S. B.” was imprisoned in 1575 for his Anabaptist views. Yet he was a hanger-on of a Dutch group in London, and even he referred to the Anabaptists as “they” rather than “we"! These are the most conclusive examples of indigenous Anabaptism that we have!*
It is interesting to note the example of Robert Cooche, the Anabaptist singer at the Royal Chapel. IT seems that neighbour love protected him at Elizabeth’s court because although an outsider in his beliefs he was an insider in being an Englishman.
In 1568 and 1574, searches within the Dutch immigrant community had uncovered the presence of Anabaptists, who were then banished from the country. On Easter Sunday 1575, the government discovered another Anabaptist meeting in a private home, and arrested 25 people. Five recanted, and fourteen women and a young boy were banished (though the boy was also flogged). The five remaining men were sentenced to be burned for heresy.
They were accused of Melchiorite Christological beliefs and for saying that infants should not be baptised, and that Christians should not serve magistrates , bear arms or take oaths.
John Foxe – who I mentioned in an earlier post - was appalled at the prospect of the burnings and campaigned vigorously for these to be cancelled. When it became clear that the government was insistent on carrying out punishment -
*Foxe argued that as an alternative the ‘heretics’ should be branded, imprisoned or perhaps sent to the gallows. Foxe secured a reprieve of one month. Eventually two of the men were released, and one died in gaol, but the remaining two were burnt at Smithfield on 22 July as Elizabeth declared that since she had already executed men for treason, for ‘now sparing these blasphemers, the world would condemn her, as being more in earnest in asserting her own safety that God’s honour According to Foxe these blasphemers went to their deaths expressing firmly their beliefs in the Trinity’ – but Foxe had been trying to get them to do this since his involvement in the affair. *
(see ‘Persecution and Toleration’, Coffey p.100)
I note that Fox’s appeal for clemency was given some consideration and a reprieve of sorts did happen – there would have been no hesitation in dispatching the Anabaptists without scruple elsewhere in Europe at this time. I also note that Elizabeth found it necessary to declare what all Magisterial Protestants would have looked upon as being obvious and not really worth stating. Perhaps there was real heart searching going on behind the scene.
These tragic Anabaptists were foreigners/strangers. They were found worshipping in a form that was associated with sedition and treachery in the minds of the authorities. There were also big pressures to make a scapegoats of them.
In 1572 thousands of Calvinist Huguenots had been massacred in France on St Bartholomew’s Eve and for several days after. This event had shocked the heart of Protestant England and had lent some authority to the conspiracy theories of the English Calvinists, who were already anxious at losing their grip on the course and pace of Reform. By 1575 England was probably already engaged in covert operation to help the Lutherans and Calvinists in Holland – who would surely have not taking kindly to tolerance of the Anabaptists in England - against the Spanish occupation there – something which would lead to open war with Spain in the following decade. And in 1575 English Catholicism was resurgent in confidence with the first Jesuits arriving in secret from the English Jesuit College in Rome; this College was not yet calling for the assassination of Elizabeth but was still making threatening noises about restoring Roman Catholicism here. All of this crystallised the context for the need for a scapegoat – which the discovery of the Anabaptist congregation surely provided. This is a terrible tale – but I am not sure that we can assume Elizabeth’s full collaboration and complicity in it; and I do not necessarily think that it can discount our theory that she may have harboured Universalist sympathies.
This is the most complex story of them all, and I will try to be briefer with the others. It’s getting difficult now and I hope this is still making sense to some.
All the best
Dick
Still following. What a gruesome, fascinating story. Great work, Dick, and I’m in agreement with Paul’s idea, so long as copyright infringement can be avoided.
Hi Drew old chum 
-
A thought on Calvin
(I refer to Calvin’s letter to Edward Seymour, Lord Protector of England, referred to in a previous post)
**In a letter to the Lord Protector written in 1550, Jean (John) Calvin admonished him not to flinch from executing seditious Anabaptists and obstinate Catholics as befitted the chosen deputy of the almighty, ‘seeing that they quarrel not only against the king, but also against God. **
I note that Martin Bucer was in England from 1549 until his untimely death in 1551. Perhaps Calvin’s letter was an attempt to undermine Bucer’s influence in England – since Bucer had a deserved reputation for moderation in matters of ‘Charitable Hatred’. We’d need to see the original letter and know more about the context but it is an intriguing hypothesis to test out – and one that I would never have formulated if you had not first made me aware of Bucer’s reputation for moderation.
There is a very good and well sourced article on Calvin at Wikipedia. See
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin
This tells us that
Calvin’s ‘first theological work, the Psychopannychia, attempted to refute the doctrine of soul sleep as promulgated by the Anabaptists. Calvin probably wrote it during the period following Cop’s speech (Nicholas Cop’s speech to the faculty members of College Royal in Paris which fired the young Calvin with reforming zeal took place on 1 November 1533) However, it was not published until 1542 in Strasbourg.
And so this is why Schaff refers to the 40th Article in Cranmer’s Prayer Book – against ‘soul sleep’ – as being ‘against psychopannychia – aha! I also note that Calvin dedicated his work on the General Epistles to the boy King Edward VI - curious.
I think I’ll put some stuff on the Supplementary thread about Calvin – cut and pasted together from other posts I’ve made here.
A note on my sloppy scholarship.
In the last post I got something rather wrong, indeed very wrong. I said or at least implied that Elizabeth was first excommunicated by Rome at the end of the 1570’s, In fact this took place after her suppression of the serious Catholic uprising in the North of England at the end of the 1560’s (see post after next). Just a slip – and I will keep making the odd one and correcting as I go – I hope. But it does mean that very inflammatory rhetoric against Elizabeth was already circulating from the English Jesuit College in Rome by 1575 – hence the great anxiety about the safety of the realm in this year, because it was the year that the first Jesuits entered Britain.
I think this shows that we should be cautious about rushing into PDF format too hastily. I’m pretty confident that I’m mostly very much on the right track here – but would like to get an independent academic to look over the scope of the argument at some point to advise on any slips (I have one in mind). It’s impossible not to make slips when the range is so wide. And this research is still at an informal discussion stage.
All the best
Dick
On the Elizabethan persecution of the Arian Christians.
The Arians believed that the Son of God did not always exist but was created by and subordinate to God the Father. The English Arian Unitarians during our period of study were strong on the authority of the Bible – and many were preoccupied with arcane matters such as the meaning ofBiblical Prophecy as unlocked from an understanding of the measurements of the New Jerusalem in Revelations.
Eventually the Arian tradition in English Unitarianism became the minority one. The majority tradition out of which the Unitarian denominations for the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed was the Socinian one. The ideas of Socinianism have their root in the Italian Anabaptist movement of the 1540s, taken up by the Humanist scholars Lelio Sozzini and his nephew Faustus Sozzini, The Socinians were more rationalist and rooted in Humanist scholarship of the Biblical texts than the Arians, and more liberal in their views both of scripture and of social policy.
Four Arians (not Socinians) were judicially murdered by being burned to death during Elizabeth’s reign between 1579 and 1589. They were:
Matthew Hamont –said to have denied the deity, atonement and resurrection of Christ and to have condemned the New Testament as a fable.
John Lewes and Peter Cole – said to have shared many of Hamont’s ideas.
Francis Kett said to have taught that Christ had returned to Jerusalem and was gathering the True Church, and that in order to be saved men had to be baptised as adults and visit the Holy City before they died.
(see Coffey pages 100 – 101)
I note that although all of these men were probably Arians– or just a bit muddled maybe - we should take the wilder accusations brought against them with suspicion because we are dealing with ‘Persecution Texts’ with the court records here.
I also note that the burnings took place between 1579 and 1589, the time of the most intense fear of foreigners during Elizabeth’s rule – due to the Dutch War, and the Catholic plots and the Spanish Armada. All of the judicial murders took place in the City of Norwich – ‘then the second largest city in England with a population of around 12,000 and home to a substantial Dutch community where various continental ‘heresies’ circulated’ (see Coffey page 101). Matthew Hamont the first victim of the persecution was of Dutch origins, and John Lewes and Peter Cole were tarred with the same xenophobic brush through association with his ideas. Francis Kett – a deeply devout man – may have just been an isolated eccentric who expressed Arian ideas along with apocalyptic fantasies without any influence from Hamont, but again he would have been seen as guilty by association for expressing Arian beliefs. In a sense what happened here was actually a ‘race hate’ crime, in modern terms – and race hate crimes are still with us today. All of these men were quickly dispatched and burnt in ditches, whereas the Anabaptist deaths in more cosmopolitan London were subject to a process of appeal and mitigation.
And I note that this tragic and terrible episode was not part of a nationwide hunting down and persecution of Arians. It all happened in Norwich under the auspices of Edmund Freke - the Bishop of Norwich - and Edmund Scambler his successor, both aggressive hunters of heresy. Elizabethan Bishops had a measure of autonomy and some were more moderate, more merciful and less willing to persecute than others. That the Bishops in Norwich were both extremist of ‘Charitable Hatred’ was the last component needed to facilitate this scapegoating.
All of this makes me reflect that– weak and limited human beings that we are – even if we were able to see through the glass darkly and formulate unquestionably sound doctrine, any enforcement of this doctrine would still be mixed up with our baser impulses and this would besmirch the sound doctrine and make it unsound As Derret speculates in ‘Law and the New Testament’ from a profound knowledge of rabbinical law and custom, and ancient legal practice in the Near East - Jesus’ ruling written in the sand for the case of the woman taken in adultery may well have been the text of Exodus xxiii. Ib – ‘place not they hand with the wicked (to be a false witness). Which is no to suggest in this context that we should not stand in and for the truth that is revealed to us – but we fight with words and not with sword flames, and we should fight nib a knowledge of our own fallibility.
A final reflection – Karl Barth is on record as having said that we have much to learn from our heretics; because the part of doctrine that they overemphasise is the part that orthodox Christian’s may be underemphasizing. The case of the Elizabethan Arians is telling because the orthodox Magisterial Christina’s were certainly underemphasizing the humanity of Christ – at least in practical terms; and doctrine without practice is a dead letter.
And I don’t think that any of the above can be used to strongly suggest that Elisabeth did not have Universalist sympathies
All the best
Dick
Before I look at the deaths of the Catholic martyrs under Elizabeth I’d like to strike a note of balance. I’m a Protestant, so I am more aware of the stories of the Protestant martyrs and of how these have often been used/misrepresented as a rallying point for chauvinism and even sectarian violence. It’s harder for me to assess the Catholic martyrologies with any objectivity because they are outside of my intimate knowledge. I apologise for this – we are all limited creatures.
I know the names of some of those who died under Elizabeth – Margaret Clitherow, Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell – to name but a few; but as yet I do not know their storied in any detail apart from being sure that many were completely innocent of treason. However I do know the story of poor Father Garnet, the Jesuit priest during the reign of James I. He was simply unlucky enough to have heard the confessions of the Gunpowder Plotters – without condoning their intentions - and therefore was implicated and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered with the other plotters who were unlucky enough not to be shot dead resisting arrest. On the scaffold, Father Garnet conducted himself with such composure and meekness of spirit that even the London mob who had turned out to see him die were moved to pity. He was hanged and about to be cut down while still alive for the real and damnable torture to begin. But the mob crowded round the hangman and prevented this. EH was obviously an innocent man, and a heroic man. There is even some consolation in the behaviour of the London mob – it suggests that sometimes, in the most depraved manifestations of human behaviour the image of God can still shine forth in people’s hearts, no matter how dimly and fleetingly.
In the whole history of Christian violence the name of another Catholic – this time a German priest in the seventeenth century, should be remembered with gratitude by Christian Universalist and all Christians of good faith. He was Father Friedrich Spee, I mentioned him in my second post on this thread but did not go into any detail because I was unsure how strong the stomachs of people on here would be to look at these issues four squarely 9I’m proud of you all!). I quote now from S, Mark Heim’s ‘Saved from Sacrifice’ to relate Spee’s instructive and very inspiring story:
**Perhaps the most influential single work in ending the witch trials was written by Father Friedrich von Spee, a professor of theology at Wurzburg. He lived at ground zero in an affected region where the devastations of war and plague created the classic conditions of sacrificial crisis for the ravaged communities. He had served as a confessor to a number of those about to be executed, and he quickly became convinced that he was seeing a process in which those in charge of the trials were manufacturing false witness by torture. He did not cease to believe in the possibility of witchcraft, but he insisted that the greater imperative was to avoid becoming the crucifiers of the innocent…
In his book on the witch trials, Spee identifies clearly the sacrificial dynamic he sees at work: ‘Should some plague infect cattle…, should a doctor not know the cause of a new disease…, then some sort of shallowness, superstition, or ignorance immediately leads us to turn to thoughts of sorcery and conclude witches are the cause. Then we exclaim that we hold the source of evil in our hands’. Among the chief inciters of persecution are lawyers, who do so for gain (‘Woe to you lawyers’), and crowds of jealous and malicious people who, he says, ‘Everywhere avenge their feuds through defamation’.
If the woman has a bad reputation this proves her guilt. If she has a good reputation, it does the same, for witches notoriously put up this appearance. ‘If there are any people who ever wanted to do her harm, they now have a wonderful opportunity to hurt her. They can allege whatever they want, they will easily find things. So they shout from all sides that she is incriminated. Since she die whether she confesses or not, I would like to know, may God love me, how can she escape, no matter how innocent she may be.’ Either the trials must be stopped, or the judges ‘must in the end burn their own families, themselves and everyone else’.
Spee calls forth the examples of Daniel and Susana to demonstrate that Christ‘s law requires a special concern to avoid the shedding of innocent blood. He devotes a special appendix to the Christian martyrs under Nero, who were crucified like Christ, falsely accuse as the cause of a terrible fire that had devastated Rome. Some of those innocent Christians too had named other innocents under pain of torture. This did not make them lesser martyrs, nor break their likeness to Jesus, Spee take his argument to the point of identifying the witches with Christian martyrs and their deaths with that of Christ himself, with the unequivocal moral that what is happening to them is wrong and must be resisted…Spee is not an obscure and ineffectual voice, but one that (along with others) finally prevailed against the persecutions at the time they burned most fiercely. To read his work is to grasp only more vividly the horrors of this Christian violence, and to see what elements within the Christian tradition were crucial to overcoming it. We should not lose touch with either.**
(S.Mark Heim. ‘Saved from Sacrifice’. Pages 186 – 187)
All the best
Dick
Great stuff, Dick. Good to learn about Spee and also the mercy of the London mob preventing the torture of the priest.
Thanks Drew - it’s great to know that ‘the light shines in the darkness’ -and sometimes in very dark places indeed. I’m cracking on and finally beginning to make real progress.
On the Elizabethan persecution of the Catholics
I come now to the persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth. I’ve read some Catholic websites on this which paint Elizabeth in very dark and bloody colours. I do not want to in any way justify the deaths of Catholics that happened in her reign – or the deaths of Protestants that happened in Continental Europe under Catholic Princes at the same time. My purpose is very different. I simply want to weigh the evidence, as I see it, to ascertain whether the persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth can be seen as stemming from her hatred of Catholic believers and her certainty of their damnation (which would tell against our case that she may have had Universalist sympathies; or whether, alternatively, it can be seen as stemming from fear for the political security of her realm and undertaken with reluctance (which would not tell against our case with the same force).
Elizabeth came to the throne after the Catholic persecutions of her sister Mary had ravaged the country – this had won sympathy for the Protestant cause especially in London and the south of England. I’m not totally without sympathy for ‘Bloody’ Mary; her mother Spanish Catholic mother – Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain - had been cast off callously by Henry VIII. Mary saw herself as a loyal daughter of the Catholic Church in reintroducing Catholicism to England and in her terrible acts of ‘Charitable Hatred’. She married her cousin Phillip II of Spain when past childbearing years. He was cold to her, preferring her younger and more vital sister Elizabeth – and he had hopes of a love match with Elizabeth after Mary death until they became sworn enemies. Mary also thought that God had favoured her with a child when her belly became swollen – like Sarah, Abraham’s wife – but the child turned out to be a tumour in her womb that killed her. Mary’s reintroduction of Catholics had much popular support. In the time of Edward VI – the boy King who preceded her -Protestantism had been very much the concern of an intellectual elite with only small pockets of support in the country. Indeed Londoners had initially welcomed Mary with open arms and thereby sealed the death warrant for poor young Lady Jane Grey – the seventeen year old who ruled for nine days who was the Reformers puppet/choice of Queen).
As I have repeated often, Elizabeth carried out no Protestant reprisals for the Marian persecutions – and a merciful judgement on Elizabeth is that she saved England from the terrible sectarian blood-letting that engulfed Franc during her reign and , indeed she ultimately saved England form the equivalent of the Thirty Years War between the Catholic and Protestant Powers that ravaged Europe in the seventeenth century, beside which the English Civil War , when it came, was a mere skirmish. As part of the Elizabethan Settlement the ‘black rubric’ against the adoration of the Host at communion was removed from Cranmer’s prayer book as were the curses against the Bishop of Rome. Everybody had to attend the Church of England– whatever their inner convictions (and Matthew Parker had made due allowance for inner convictions of Catholics with the changes outlined above to the Prayer Book along with others mentioned in an earlier post on the 39 Articles). Anyone refusing to attend Church was fined a shilling – a tidy sum in those days but, given the times, not the act of a tyrant and this applied to Puritans with scruples as well as to Catholics. Catholic clergy who refused to take the oath of supremacy to Elizabeth lost their office (surely to do with politics rather than faith?). Attendance at mass was to be punished by a fine of 100 marks, but the saying of mass, or arranging for it to be said, carried the death penalty, although Elizabeth ensured that this was never implemented before 1577 as she disliked such extremism. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, so long as Catholics behaved themselves, were loyal to her, and attended church now and then, they were free to believe what they wished. Elizabeth tried to accommodate Catholic beliefs in her religious settlement so that they could go to church without feeling guilty or disloyal to their faith, and often turned a blind eye to Catholics who had secret services in their home. There was no attempt to ruthlessly seek out Catholics, and no desire to put ordinary men and women to death simply for their faith (some of this paragraph may be cut and pasted from somewhere – I have it in my notes but have difficulty in tracing if it is my own work; but it accords with my own view).
So what went wrong? There was always strong support for the old Catholic faith in the North of England – as Henry VIII had found out when he was subjected to the peaceful but ,for him , alarming ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ which marched towards London from the North to petition the King. Indeed, ‘Bloody’ Mary always had her strongest support from the Catholic Lords of the North. In 1569 the Catholic lords of the North rose against Elizabeth but were quickly defeated because there was no support for their insurrection in the South, Unlike Henry VIII whose response to the Pilgrimages of Grace had been murder and massacre, all captured rebels of the Northern Rising were given proper trials. Seven hundred were sentenced to death – but many of these had their sentences commuted.
The tragedy began for Catholics who were loyal to their Protestant Queen when Pope Pius V in 1570 issued a Papal bull against Elizabeth – reissued in 1588, the year of the Armada - ‘Regnans in Excelsis’. This declared that Elizabeth was not a rightful queen, that she was the illegitimate, that all English Catholics were absolved of any obligations to her and should strive to depose her, and formally excommunicated her. ‘Ayatollah’ Pius seems to have had little concern for English Catholics and was criticised as such by Catholics loyal to the Queen. Even Phillip of Spain thought the bull to be unjust (but then he still had his hopes up at the time!).
At his point the first ‘recusancy ‘laws were implemented. The word ‘Recusant’ derives from the Latin word ‘recusare’ meaning to refuse to attend the services of the Church of England. The 1570 Recusant Act fined Catholics twelve shillings for non attendance of church. The harsher recusancy laws of 1581 made it treason to withdraw English subjects from allegiance to the Queen or her Church, and fines for recusancy were increased to twenty pounds - a phenomenal amount to the Elizabethans, considering that the annual income of a knight would only be about fifty pounds. The 1590 Act - the first statutes in which the term ‘Popish Recusants’ were used - decreed imprisonment for non payment of fines. The harshness of the Acts increased as the situation worsened between England and the Catholic Powers. Sadly, these harsh and unjust laws applied to English Roman Catholic who refused to attend services of the Church of England and thereby committed a statutory offence from about 1570 to 1791– apart from a brief relaxation of the laws under Oliver Cromwell and under the deposed Catholic King James II.
The next act in the tragedy for English Catholics was the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve in France in 1572. Over several days, French Huguenots (moderate French Calvinist Protestants) were butchered by Catholic mobs all over France. The death toll was terrible – but estimates are difficult to assess since they range from between 6,000 and 60,000. Both Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Phillip Sydney – who later both did terrible things in Catholic Ireland – witnessed the massacre; also, Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, the fiercely anti-Catholic Sir Francis Walsingham – soon to become Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’ - barely escaped with his life. Similar atrocities elsewhere in France resulted in thousands of deaths, and caused panic in England with fears of a Catholic invasion. It is difficult to know how much the catholic Royal Family of France colluded with initial massacre - but certainly they were keen to repair an alliance with England because both were common enemies of the mighty empire of Catholic Spain; and in the end the alliance was repaired.
One thing we can say in favour of Elizabeth’s record is that Protestant mobs never attacked Catholics - or heretics for that matter - at random in the streets of England; all scapegoating violence was done through the laws of the state which, in a brutal age, arguably kept it within bounds.
(Brief excursus - sadly attacks on Catholics by Protestant mobs was to be a feature of later English history – for example under Charles II the Protestant fantasist Titus Oates stirred up a frenzy of suspicion which lead to just this phenomenon (he claimed to have discovered a Catholic plot to kill the king but was later shown to be lying. His lies also lead indirectly lead to the death of the last Catholic martyr in England – the gentle, saintly and brave Oliver Plunkett, Catholic Bishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. Oliver Plunkett was brought to England and tried in front of court without representation for the defence. Found guilty of treason, he was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July 1681).
A further act in the tragedy for English Catholics was the infiltration of the Jesuits into England. The Jesuits (‘Society of Jesus’) today are mainly a socially progressive order commuted to liberal education (and often in trouble with Rome – especially under the conservative Pope John Paul II who was rightly harsh on Communism but sometime somewhat neglectful of being harsh on Fascism on South and Central America). However it was not ever thus. In our period of study they were the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation. Because of the persecution in England, Catholic priests in England were trained abroad at the ‘English College in Rome, the English College in Douai, the English College at Valladolid in Spain, and at the English College in Seville. Given that Douai was located in the Spanish Netherlands, part of the dominions of Elizabethan England’s greatest enemy, and Valladolid and Seville in Spain itself, they became associated in the public eye with political as well as religious subversion’. (again I think I may have cut and pasted this into my notes but it accords with everything else I have read)
The entrance of Jesuits into the country was prohibited by law in 1585, although they first arrived in 1575; but still they came in the hope of converting the English population to Catholicism. It was they who bore the brunt of persecution. Many of them were executed for treason. William Cecil devised questions to be asked of English Jesuits and Priests, and the question over who they would support if the Pope invaded the country - Pope or Queen, was their down fall every time. This question became known as it is still known today, “The bloody question”, as there was really only one answer that a true Catholic could give.
The Elizabethan government genuinely believed that Catholics, particularly the Jesuits, posed a serious threat to the Queen’s life and reign, and the literature produced by the leaders of the “English Mission” (an active campaign to restore Catholicism in the land and depose Elizabeth) such as William Allen and Robert Persons, seemed to confirm their suspicions’ (cut and pasted notes again perhaps). (Me again) the Jesuits practiced equivocation, not necessarily to conceal themselves from persecution in Nicodemian fashion; sometimes they did this to conceal their collaboration in terrorist plots. However, I am sure many were probably innocent and just became tarred with the same brush as the others. According to my sources, as many as 150 of the 189 Catholics executed in England under Elizabeth were Jesuit priests – and all of these, Jesuit or not, were executed for treason, not for their beliefs.
I note that the English Jesuit College in Douai was located in the Spanish Netherlands – this was also always a possible bridgehead for a Catholic invasion of England – indeed in 15888 a Spanish army under the Duke of Parma was gathered there to be ferried across by the Spanish Armada. SO there were sound political reasons for England to aid the Dutch in collaboration with the French – as well as ones of religious conviction. Indeed at one point was offered the sovereignty of the United Dutch Provinces and declined. However, she latter agreed to turn the United Provinces into a protectorate of England (the Treaty of Nonsuch, 1585), and sent the Earl of Leicester as governor-general. This was unsuccessful and in 1588, the year of the Armada, the provinces became a republic. It was Elizabeth’s aid to the Dutch that was the first cause of conflict with Spain, along with piracy towards Spanish ships by the English sea dogs. However there was a problem closer to home that finally forced Phillip of Spain’s hand in his plan to invade England.
The Catholic Mary Queen of Scots – half French, half Scot and Elizabeth’s cousin -had fled from Scotland to England 1568 after a rebellion by both her Catholic and Protestant Lords against her because of scandal and misrule (she had married the man who was the murderer of her former husband for starters). Mary was first treated as Elizabeth’s guest. However, she soon became the focus of Catholic discontent with Elizabeth and plots were hatched, sometimes with Jesuit support, to kill Elizabeth, put Mary on the throe and restore the Catholic faith to apostate England.
In December 1583, Elizabeth I wrote to the French Ambassador:-“There are more than two hundred men of all ages who, at the instigation of the Jesuits, conspire to kill me.” She had good cause to think this. There were six serious Catholic attempts on Elizabeth’s life between 1571 and 1586. The final one in 1586 was the Anthony Babbington plot to unseat her. Mary Queen of Scots had been implicitly implicated in previous attempts, but this time the evidence against her was apparently incontrovertible. Elizabeth did not want to execute her cousin and sister Queen but in the end her ministers and bishops forced her hand and Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay on the seventh of February 1587. Elizabeth is recorded to have hated every minute of this and recoiled from the act. Mary – who was no saint – committed herself to the hands of the God of mercy before she died; and when the axe fell her wig came off revealing that the woman, once renowned for her auburn beauty , had gone grey with worry and grief. Also a story relates that her pet dog ran underneath her skirts and mourned for his dead mistress – in the end he had to be taken away by Mary’s Ladies in Waiting.
Again we note that when the Babbington plotters were hanged drawn and quartered and Elizabeth heard of the unspeakable cruelty with which this was being done she demanded that the butchery cease.
Well, we all know that Mary’s excecution was the last straw for Phillip of Spain. He assembled his great fleet – his Armada - but this was blown off course by the North winds in the Channel and was wrecked off the coasts of Scotland. This was interpreted as a sign of God’s providence in England and Elizabeth became secure as Queen , possibly for the first time in her reign. However, this security had been bought at a price of bitter experience and, I dare say, a hardening of hearts.
In Ireland the population were Catholic, although Calvinist Scots had already begun to the settle in the North. So Ireland was a predominantly Catholic nation, and one that the English had tried to subdue since the time of Henry VIII without complete success. This was also a place which Spain could use to open up a second front against the English (and, indeed in which Spanish troops had already landed). So it was always going to be a flash point for an outpouring of Protestant violence.
In 1580 there was a serious rebellion/fight for freedom in Ireland and Walter Raleigh and another captain, Macworth, led a force into the town Smerwick there. No mercy was shown to the population. In an hour six hundred were put to the sword. Catholic Europe judged the rape of Smerwick to be as much a tragedy as the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre in France. This was the first recorded English colonial atrocity.
It is ironic that Raleigh had actually witnessed the Bartholomew’s Eve massacres – and had obviously drawn precisely the wrong lesson from this. The Irish lived close across the sea to England – just close enough to accentuate a sense of their difference and otherness in the eyes of the English. Yes of course they were Catholics and perhaps some were in cahoots with the enemies of England, They were of the same religion as those that massacred Protestants abroad. They looked similar in some ways to the English, but spoke a different language and many would have appeared primitive and tribal to the early modern English. It is at such times that love is most needed to transcend barriers of fear and difference – but the opposite was shown here. Raleigh was never punished for his role in Smerwick – this was a colonial war conducted like all colonial wars at the time (and many in this day and age). The tragedy has echoed down the ages. Oliver Cromwell – in many ways a great man and most tender of the liberties of his English People – also went to Ireland bringing massacre –seeing himself as the avenging scourge of God, like a Joshua against the papist pagans. These tragedies have been a key historical source of the troubles in the North of Ireland that are only just resolving themselves today.
I still think that none of this means that Elizabeth was not/could not have been a Universalist sympathiser however. But it is a harrowing and terrible tale.
Al the best
Dick
A note on the persecution of the Jews under Elizabeth
There were not a lot of Jews in England during Elizabeth’s reign for they had all been expelled a couple of hundred years before by Edward I. And I’m glad they were not here in any numbers then with all of the inflammatory anti-Semitic rhetoric coming out of Luther and, I have only just learnt, out of Calvin too (I have also just learnt that Calvin said of witches, ‘Burn them and show no mercy’ – which is not helping me in my efforts to understand him; Luther always had something of the uneducated and superstitious Peasant about him, but Calvin had a fine Humanist education – albeit he majored in Law).
However, according to the cultural historian Dame Frances Yates there was a flowering of philo-Semitism at Elizabeth’s court amongst the ‘funky’ wing of the Christina Humanists influenced by Pico and Dr John Dee. You see the ‘funky’ Humanists were fascinated by Jewish Cabbalistic mysticism. The original impetus for this had been stimulated by a novel initiative to evangelise the Jews. The Continental Christian Cabbalists argued that the letters of the Jewish tetragrammaton – YHVH – the unpronounceable name of God written in Hebrew consonants that do not sound together because they lack a vowel – represent, in turn, each of the four elements of ancient (and early modern) science; Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Since these elements were assumed to be the building blocks of creation, the Christian Cabbalists further argued that ‘Jesus’ is the same name as YHVH but with a medial ‘S’ vowel inserted – representing the fifth element o f Ether/Spirit so that the name can be said. And they used this as an argument that the Incarnation is prophesied and confirmed in Hebrew scripture and lore. Curious – and she was a serious and respected historian, but I know little of the sources she cites and so cannot judge.
Anyway – the collaboration of Christian and Jewish scholars on Cabbalistic enterprises seems to have produced mutual respect. Yates suggests that the fringe Christian Neo-Platonists and Cabbalists at Elizabeth’s court actually managed to suggest a return of the Jews to England to her, and she was sympathetic to this idea for some time.
There was one notable Jew in England during Elizabeth’s reign. He was the Portuguese marrano Jew Doctor Rodrigo Lopez, physician to the Queen, and high in her favour. In 1593 he was accused of attempting to poison her. Elizabeth was reluctant to sign his death warrant - evidence again of her lack of cruelty and caution in persecution – but she was persuaded to at last by her ministers. Lopez was executed in 1594 and his dying words were that he loved the Queen as he loved Jesus Christ. But the crowd screamed back - ‘He is a Jew’.
This is a terrible story without any consolation ofr us. At this time Christopher Marlowe wrote his hugely anti-Semitic play ‘The Jew of Malta’ about the Jew Barabbas who relishes poisoning wells and killing Christian children – like the medieval and Renaissance persecution text stereotype. However, Shakespeare writing a few years after Marlowe gives us a different view of the Jew in his portrait of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. Yes, Shylock is an anti-hero, but he is not the monster of Marlowe’s imagination, Shylock’s speech – ‘If you cut us do we not bleed?’ was groundbreaking in subverting Christian anti-Semitism, and Shakespeare is suffused with the concerns and imagery of Christina Humanism.
All the best
Dick
Coming near to the end of this dark chapter I’d like to share a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay with you. I know nothing about her – I think she was an American poet writing in the twentieth century. I don’t know whether she was a bohemian or a puritan or even a Christina or a non-believer. But I think she spoke true when she wrote the following word that I once heard set to music and have always remembered -
I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.
Elizabethan Persecution of Calvinists and Independents – part 1
I come now at last to my final consideration of persecution under Elizabeth – and I am so very glad to be nearing the end of this dark chapter. I need to look at the case of the Calvinists and the Independents – again bear in mind that the real issue here is whether Elizabeth’s treatment of these two groups necessarily means that she could not possibly have harboured Universalist sympathies – which is different from the issue of whether, with hindsight, we think she was particularly just or even wise in her treatment of them (but it is hard to separate these two issues in any appraisal – I grant that).
I have to reveal my hand and say that I obviously have some prejudices against Calvinism so bear this in mind (but I will try to be fair and not go beyond the evidence as I know it and see it). Please forgive me for labouring the point – but I will anyway:
I find little to like or even empathise with in John Calvin, although I have an open mind and I hope it will change with greater understanding of the man. I’m never going to fall at his feet prostrated, but I do want to understand him more because Calvinism has not just been a stagnant pond in human history and it has had a profound influence, particularly on American culture (and at least some of the influence has been for the good). I admit that I may be influenced by ‘little Englander’ chauvinism in my current appreciations of this influence – because the influence of Calvinism is not strong on British culture today and so it is not a part of me that I am need to reconcile with; any generous view of Calvinism I hope to attain will be purely a matter of empathy on my part.
The sheer sectarianism of sectarian Calvinism, in my view, breaks down bonds of human solidarity and neighbour love (unless other factors come into play). The idea that the visible and godly elect constitute a race set part to dictates of the reprobate the terms of God’s sovereignty strikes me as idolatrous – and the project of making God sovereign often becomes confused with making Calvinism and Calvinist’s sovereign (I think this was always the danger in Elizabeth’s time). Indeed, my theory is that the true riches of Calvinism are best facilitated in a plural environment where Calvinists can bring their witness to the wider Church that God is really transcendent of history, and the of history and must not be identified with any particular arrangements or ruling clique within history.
I think that Calvinist sectarianism – the Calvinist antithesis – has lead to much evil; I’m thinking of Apartheid in South Africa, the American Puritan’s cull of the Native Americans, and the troubles in Northern Ireland. Calvinism does not have a monopoly on wickedness in the Christian tradition but where it has become wicked and persecuting this has been as a result of its sectarianism (and the great persecutors have often been humble men of modest person habits – but lacking in love)
I find the emphasis on irrefutable logic of sectarian Calvinism disturbing. Logic should be used to clarify but there is more to life and to faith than logic, especially legalistic logic. Jesus taught in parables and sings and said ‘Woe to you lawyers’. Indeed I find the emphasis on logic in Calvinism deeply contradictory because it often leads to paradox (see below). Life is often paradoxical – this is fine as long as we do not delude ourselves otherwise.
As a Christian Universalist I think that sectarian Calvinists are just plain wrong in their thinking about salvation – and they will always think me/ most of us on this site reprobate. I find the circular argument that if people disagree with you it is because they are reprobate deeply illogical ((paradoxically – because Calvinists pride themselves on their logic). I will always been in an antithetical relationships with sectarian Calvinists regarding our differing views (using the Calvinists term ‘antithesis’ advisedly here). However I agree with Tom Talbott that the Armenian and Calvinist positions on salvation are both properly accommodated in a right balance/synthesis within Christian Universalism – whereas for the sectarian Calvinist, Universalism is merely damnable heresy.
I do not believe in the ‘total depravity’ of human beings – even when this is explained as meaning that all parts of our humanity have been affected/weakened by the fall (which was Calvin’s understanding I believe). I’d agree with the weakened bit, but Calvinism asserts that because of this we come into the world as ‘creatures of God’s wrath’ (and this means that when they say ‘depravity. they mean ‘depravity’ and not ‘weakness’). I’m with George Fox of the Quakers on this who took to task the Calvinist preachers of his day for ‘roaring up for sin’.
The whole idea of double predestination goes against my Christian Humanists instincts too. It reminds me somewhat of the anti-humanist deterministic brand of Marxist where individuals are seen as mere ‘actors’ in history. As the anti-humanist brand of Marxism justifies their crimes against people today in terms of the temporal goal of history – the classless society - which, when it is achieved we will see that all was worthwhile – the sectarian Calvinists justify the crimes of their god in terms of the eschatological goal of history when god will be sovereign and all human suffering – including the eternal conscious torment of most of humanity– will be vindicated. I note how illogical the idea of predestination is too – Calvinists fulminate against pantheism but if everything is predestined then there is only God willing things to happen – human beings cease to have individual agency – and surely this is a form of pantheism.
I think the record of sectarian Calvinism on helping people with mental health issues is appalling – sectarian Calvinists revivals have always been accompanied by spates of suicide and psychosomatic illness amongst the less self confident who find it hard to believe they are ‘of the elect’ (andthe leaders of sectarian Calvinism have often pressed home the ponig that the depressed and otherwise mentally disturbed are thus because this is a sign of their reprobation). This contradicts my view of Jesus as the Christ who came with healing for humanity.
I find Calvinist confessional history – as exemplified in the writings of Francis Schaeffer – to fly in the efface of all evidence.
I am alarmed by the political history of sectarian Calvinism; and while I will defend the right of sectarian Calvinists to have their voice heard in the public sphere and to make their case and have their influence, I will always want to defend the institutions of law within a free society that prevent their likes from taking over and imposing a some form of theocratic governance on people who think an believe otherwise than them. The problem with Calvinists ‘Christian manifestos’ – from Elizabeth’s time in England to present day America – is that while the leaders of sectarian Calvinism may espouse moderation and action within the law, the very sectarianism of their manifestos soon incited/incites others to violence.
So I guess I am prejudiced against sectarian Calvinism 
– but I will try my best to do Elizabethan Calvinist s justice in my next post.
All the best
Dick
Hey there Sobornost, just wanted to let you know I have been following along diligently. However I am going to be away from the internet for the next month as I am going to be out of state taking care of family. They live out in the middle of nowhere practically and have no internet.
Just wanted you to know my lack of response in the near future is not due to lack of interest.
May you be blessed.
How lovely to hear from you Paul - and you have a great break, a necessary fast from the Internet, adn don’t let the three year old beat you up too much .
Now I’m getting nearer the end of my postings I’m feeling far less needy so I don’t require constant encouragement. Indeed I will consider myself very blessed when I’ve got this finished (have been working on how best to bring things to a close over this weekend actually). It will all still be here when you come back shoudl you want to take a furhter peep -
So may you adn your family be blessed too old chum
Dick
Hi Drew,
I’m still on the case here and will be finished on this thread by Sunday. The delay is caused by me having some good community work put my way and having discovered some very interesting stuff about Elizabeth and the witch hunts. It seems that because her mother had been accused of witchcraft she had a very enlightened view of the conduct of trials in England (for example, torture was never used, no one was executed for a first ‘offence’, convictions were few, and no one was ever burn)t. That’s a very fine record for the time (although I was wrong to suggest earlier that it was James I alone who introduced the witch hunts to England – that would have been too remarkable). I’ll do a brief post on this after I’ve finished my stuff on Elizabethan Calvinism – which I’m working away diligently at in an effort to get proper balance.
Tonight I’d like to do another post on the general subject of persecution – because this has been raised in some personal correspondence with members of this site and I assume that many will have been troubled by a romantic and nihilistic cult of martyrdom that does the rounds in fundamentalist literature (and for Western Christians who are not missionaries the martyrdom fantasy is basically a piece of titillating paranoia that breed s unnecessary distrust of our neighbours and our institutions in our hearts, imho).
As I said in an earlier post, William Law the eighteenth century Anglican Universalist, wrote that ‘Martyrdom has had its fools’. He said many wise and penetrating things and on a related matter opined that religion can actually make people worse than they are in their natural state if they are persuaded to ‘turn to God without having first tuned from Self’ – the thought repays close contemplation.
Sir Thomas Moore is an early example of the complexities of martyrdom. Moore, as a sincere Catholic, came into conflict with Henry VIII over Henry’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon and consequent declaration of himself as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England (because the Pope refused to grant the divorce, unswayed by Henry’s specious argument that since Katherine had first been betrothed to his dead brother Arthur she could not be the legitimate wife of the King). I’m sure many will know the play/film about this ‘A Man for All Seasons’ –which contains some truth, but not the unvarnished truth. Moore was also a fierce persecutor of the first Reformation Protestants in England and the animus of his attacks and intention to hunt down Tyndale – one of the earliest translators of the Bible into English, seems tellingly unattractive. Moore, ten hugely intelligent Christian Humanist, had a very practical and down to earth wife – Dame Alice. He was by all accounts very fond of her. However, she was no ‘looker’ and he would often comment to guests at his house, while she was present, that Dame Alice’s ugliness proved that he was not driven to marriage purely by the lusts of the flesh; so marring to Sir Thomas must have been smoothing o f a martyrdom for poor Dame Alice. When Moore was imprisoned in the Tower of London awaiting execution for treason she went to see him and said -
What the good year, Master More. I marvel that you have been always hitherto taken for so wise a man will now so play the fool to be here in this close, filthy prison and be content this to be shut up among mice and rats
She then went on to tell him about the spring beauties of their garden in Chelsea - at this date in the countryside outside of London’s walls –contrasting this paradise to his hovel in the Tower of London. And Sir Thomas replied –
I** pray thee good mistress Alice, tell me one thing, is not this house as nigh heaven as my own?**
And Dame Alice had the final word with **‘Tilly valle! Tilly-valle’ **which means, ‘Stuff and nonsense! Stuff and nonsense!’ in Tudor English.
Thomas More went to his death no longer the clean shaven and well barbered man in the robes of state, but an emaciated holy man with long and matted hair and beard. He joked with his executioner about being glad of the opportunity for a good haircut, and embraced him with forgiveness saying that they would one day ‘make jocund together at the heavenly banquet.
So much for Sir Thomas and God rest his soul. Alexandra Walsham writes in Charitable Hatred -
Late medieval writers had sometimes presented martyrdom as a counsel of perfection an warned against the temerity of seeking it without proper vocation. The Familist Hendrick Niclaes struck a similar note of caution in the advice he issued to ‘two daughters of Warwick’ in a manuscript epistle in the 1550’s. Some members of the Family even claimed that men ‘ought not to suffer their bodies to be executed because they are temples of the holy ghost’. Privately, the danger of crossing the line between passively embracing and presumptuously courting death on the scaffold or at the stake continued to trouble early modern religious minorities. So too, especially in the early, highly fluid stages of the English Reformation, did uncertainty about whether particular points of doctrine were sufficiently import at to necessitate making the ultimate sacrifice. This Hugh Latimer warned James Bainham in 1532: ‘Let no vain-glory overcome you in a matter that men deserve not to die for; for therin you shall neither please God, do good to yourself, nor your neighbour: and better it were for you to submit yourself to the ordinances of men than so rashly to finish your life without good ground. (But Latimer himself was martyred when he had no alternative)
Wise advice – but as the Reformation and Counter Reformation gathered pace the rhetoric of martyrdom intensified with the rhetoric of persecution; and the two went hand in glove. The apparent lessons of Matthew 10; 32-3 and Luke 12: 8-9 stoked up the violence. As Luke’s Gospel reports Jesus as saying:
**And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels and God; and whoever denies me… **(well, you all know the rest!)
The whole point of this saying, in my view is that God pronounces his judgment on the world in Christ when Christ is crucified (and this saying is a prophecy of the Passion as far as I am concerned). How we respond to Christ crucified is the judgment on us. And it was Peter who denied Christ three times - and this was a bitter judgment that he brought on himself. But God, in Christ, forgave Peter and built his Church on Peter - and Peter is Everyman, and represents every one of us. (I have always considered it richly and mischievously ironic of Jesus to have renamed Cephas, ‘Peter’, his rock – and I’m not alone in this despite Catholic claims to derive Papal authority from this. Dan I note that this is the same Peter who Jesus also rebuked with ‘Get thee behind me Satan’).
As 1 Corinthians 13 suggests - if we are called on to die in this life for faith, we must be sure to die for Love and for no other reason; not because dying for any other reason will bring damnation upon us as a punishment from God , but because dying for any other reason normally makes the martyr’s death a focus for cycles of revenge and retribution back here on earth (which defeats the whole point of dying in the first place).
The New Testament tradition of martyrdom is not at all macho. Jesus sweats blood in anticipation of his Passion. Jesus avoids death at first, as he passes through the crowd of Pharisees intent on stoning him in the Temple unharmed. AS for Peter- well the fact that he, as a key figure in the early Church. consented to having himself portrayed in Church tradition that became the Gospels in such an un-heroic light speaks volumes to me, and for me is a key witness to the authenticity of the Gospels. Paul at first did everything to avoid unnecessary martyrdom and the incident in Acts in which he is unceremoniously lowered in a basket to his escape over the city walls is again touchingly un-heroic and un-macho. In the early Church I find the details of Origen avoiding martyrdom despite his youthful desire for it because his Mum hid his clothes once again consonant with the authentic Christian un-heroic tradition which is the foundation for any true bravery (is the sort of detail you’d try to suppress unless you had a proper sense of humility, and I don’t think the story comes from Origen’s enemies but rather from his supporters). To be truly brave is to be brave when you are feeling at your most un-brave but do the brave thing anyway - if necessary.
I note that it was Tertullian who wrote that ‘The blood of martyrs’ is the seed of the Church’ – but he would have said that, wouldn’t he?
All the best
Dick