The Republic of King Jesus - Professor Alec Ryrie

so good afternoon everybody and welcome to the first of this series of lectures on extreme Christianity which I'm going to be offering at Gresham College during this year let me begin before I turn to today's subject about why I think this topic is is a way that's worth in this way of framing the topic is one that's worth thinking about we are very familiar nowadays with thinking about religious extremism a phrase which in modern usage is nine times out of ten a code for Islamic extremism but it's not clear how helpful the notion of extremism really is when we're thinking about religion first not most religions of whatever kind make ultimate or totalizing claims of some sort it's in the in the nature of a religion to do that in some ways it's hard to see how you can seriously embrace any religion without being an extremist or at least an absolutist of some kind it's one thing to be an atheist or an agnostic but to be a moderate believer to profess a religious faith but not to let it affect your life too much that's a problematic stance and well it is in fact the stance that a great many people adopt now and have adopted throughout history the the more extreme believers can be forgiven for thinking that they're simply being consistent they're taking seriously what they profess to believe and its implications as the proverb goes extremism in the pursuit of Liberty is no vice nor by extension is extremism in the pursuit of true faith so when we describe people as religious extremists we should be aware that we are complimenting them but when we talk about religious extremism we're not usually actually talking simply about people who are passionately committed to their faith but about instead about people who've taken their faith in an unusual direction especially one that's violent or that socially or politically destabilizing in some way and people who attack or disrupt social and political norms tends to provoke a strong reaction up to an including state repression and popular violence so it's always been so it still is now leave aside for the question of whether for a moment the question of whether that reaction is justified in a particular case there's also a good question to be asked about whether or not it works disruptive religious extremists of this kind know that their views are countercultural and unpopular and they may well glory in or thrive on that fact their profits they're brave lonely heralds of the truth and being opposed only proves that they're right now that may sound like a Council of despair neither toleration nor suppression can actually do anything to stop disruptive extremism well my purpose in these lectures is to offer what I hope will be some more constructive examples I'm going to be looking at for historical case studies of disruptive extremism in the Christian world over the last few centuries movements which in their time ranged from the unnerving and ridiculous through to the genocide 'el and what I want to do with them in each case is to try to understand them from within not to justify them but to explain why people who were inherently no more stupid and wicked than we are might well have embraced them that's partly as a reminder that religious extremism in any age has its own logic and in its own terms makes sense but also unless platitudinous Lee I hope because each of these also shows an example of how a disruptive religious movement comes to an end sometimes as the result of external suppression at least in part but more often as its own internal dynamics progress to the point where a movement has burnt itself out or been trapped by its own in a logic in future lectures we'll be looking at the the Millerites the apocalyptic movement that convulsed the United States in the 1840s we'll be looking at the German Christian movement that affiliated itself or tried to affiliate itself with the Nazi regime in Germany and we'll be looking at the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa which created the concept of apartheid and then eventually walked away from it but today we're staying closer to home and going a bit further back looking at one of the the great explosive moments of religious and sectarian creativity in world history England in the 1640s and 1650s the era of the civil war and the Republic now I'm not going to talk you through the set of crises which that unexpected very unexpectedly took England from a long lifetime of settled political and religious stability which lasted between 1559 1640 through to a vicious Civil War beginning in 1642 there are political legal cultural issues of all sorts there are also fatal clashes of personality driving these events and whatever other deep forces were at work if King Charles the first had been less disastrously inadequate as a ruler the crisis would not and could not have unfolded as it did there is may be especially for our own times a certain urgent tragedy in the way that war crept over England our people who had grown used to peace and order and who didn't really think that the depth and bitterness of their political divisions posed any significant danger suddenly realized too late that a full-blown war was upon but the the crucial accelerant to this fire was deep religious antagonism the king favored a hierarchical ceremonial form of Protestantism a sort of precursor to modern Anglicanism although I'm uneasy applying that word to the period and he's foolish enough to attempt to enforce it not only on England where a vocal and militant portion of the population are bitterly opposed to that but also fatally on to Scotland where the same opposition extended to almost the whole of the political and religious establishment and famously this was the response to the first attempt to use the service book that he tried to enforce them those opponents of the Kings religious policy north and south of the border whom for want of a better word we might as well call the Puritans they represented a tradition of disgruntled Protestantism that had been convinced for generations that England's Protestant Reformation was a poor brackish half stunted thing a half Reformation whose true spirit had been bound and shackled by lordly bishops and the Kings and Nobles whom they'd befuddled and these Puritans now feared that King Charles and his bishops weren't so much cramping the true church as actually throttling it and in particular they feared that unwittingly or maybe even deliberately the king was leading his subject back to the Roman Catholic Church to what they saw as Pope wish tyranny so when England slid into civil war in 1642 plenty of people on both sides understood themselves to be fighting a war of religion Royalists were fighting for the old Church and for good order against the fanatics parliamentarians were fighting for the true Reformation against crypto Papists now so far none of this is what I would class as extremism for most English parliamentarians and for most of the Scottish Covenanters who fought with them Reformation meant some form or other of Presbyterian Church an established Church embracing the entire nation self-governing independent or more or less independent of royal and state control committed to a clear and stern Calvinism stripped of Popish flummery and ceremony as they would see it and governed by committees elected from amongst its ministers rather than by lordly bishops systems like that were already partly established in Scotland in the Netherlands in portions of Switzerland and Germany and elsewhere so if this had happened it would certainly have taken English history in a new direction but in the context of the time it wouldn't have been particularly extremist the moment when it might have happened was late 1644 after a crushing victory by a Scots parliamentary army at the Battle of Marston Moor we don't have a good contemporary depiction of the battle itself we do have a depiction of the murder of Prince Rupert's famous dog that's the best we can do who was said by parliamentarians to be a devil so after this this crushing defeat of the royalist army when in effect the Royalists lose the north of England there's talk of a negotiated peace the deal that was on the table would have seen a chastened king accepting a sort of house-trained variant of Presbyterians but if Charles the first had been the kind of man who would have accepted terms like that then the war would never have begun by the winter of 1644 to five it's clear that Parliament is going to have to fight the war to the end although it is not yet clear what the end might be it is clear that they're going to have to fight a new kind of war up till now parliamentarians have generally been fighting off royalist attacks their armies are fragmented essentially regional now they have to go on the offensive to defeat the king in his heartland in the Midlands and in the west of England and that requires a new strategy and in Wales of course that requires a new strategy and so faithfully in January 1645 Parliament votes to consolidate its hotchpotch of forces into what it calls a new modeled army a professional national force which could fight at the war to the finish now in military terms this is very effective less than six months later on the 14th of June 1645 the new army crushes a veteran royalist force at the Battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire in September the army takes what is left of Bristol of royalist stronghold which had once been England's third city by early 1546 royalist resistance is virtually over but the Army's career I mean that partly in military terms in a series of further campaigns in England and Scotland and Ireland over the next decade and a half it was to prove itself an exceptionally formidable fighting force man for a man a match for any army in the world at the time but it also quickly became and remained until 1660 the primary source of political power in the British Isles the king wasn't actually defeated by Parliament he was defeated by the army but almost everything else that I'm gonna say today follows from that fact now when armies intervene in politics nowadays we tend to think of them as authoritarian and conservative forces but this army was created as its new modeled moniker indicated it was created to be God's army to be the people's army it's a meritocracy of true believers it imagines itself to be the true custodian of the godly cause much more so than the House of Commons which had been elected way back in 1640 dating from another world in 1647 one zealous London Puritan called the army our army the army that we had poured out to God so many prayers and tears for that we had largely contributed unto the people you know they've made voluntary donate - they were he says as our right hand the soldiers themselves had earned their moral authority by risking their lives and God had plainly bestowed that authority on them by rewarding them with an unbroken run of victories so this is a godly army but it's godliness for a particular kind the breakdown of religious authority since the beginning of a decade had given a vocal minority of English Protestants a taste for religious experiment even if they still in theory wanted a unified national church a proper Presbyterian settlement for example it took him Noack patience in the midst of a war to wait so that the whole country might be able to reach that point in lockstep especially when the New Jerusalem is is there for the taking and so a vanguard of advanced reformers find themselves wanting to enjoy true Christian purity here and now in 1641 even before the war the Puritan hero Henry Burton who'd had his ears cut off for his public opposition to Charles the first religious policy Burton is advocating a network of what he calls independence churches churches which aren't governed by bishops but nor are they governed by presbyteries they're governed by the law of Christ and by mutual consultation and advice effectively self-governing and some zealous souls were already starting to put that advice into practice these independent congregations were never numerically dominant but they're zealous they're high-profile and a bridle at Presbyterians who want to make them march to a slow orderly national tune the young poet John Milton is one of the most passionate early advocates for independancy he brackets bishops and presbyteries together as disciplinary enforcers of conscience some independents begin to talk about toleration not as a pragmatic solution but as a principal in 1644 Parliament tries to reimpose some order on a printing industry where the censorship had pretty much collapsed and Milton famously defends a Free Press as a matter of principle the Presbyterians have claimed that they were opposed to religious persecution unlike the the wicked Catholics they will never put anyone to death with their religious beliefs this is a there's a boast but Milton argues that it's almost as good to kill a man as kill a good book who kills a man kills a reasonable creature God's image but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself kills the image of God and Protestant that he was he lodges his complaint at the ultimate Court of Appeal conscience he claims the freedom to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties now the Presbyterians returned to this is that that sort of Liberty leads directly to heresy and to blasphemy in their view the independence are never merely orthodox Calvinists who simply want to run their own show they always concealed views which as one of the proponents of them said were higher flown more seraphic 'el now that's not true plenty of us but Previn dependents were were essentially orthodox including the most famous of all of them Oliver Cromwell but there were some for whom in dependency of this kind was a gateway drug there had been a radical sectarian underground in London even in the 1630s and now it begins to come out into the open and so even as a Presbyterian victory over Royalists cryptocat Catholicism is in that in its grasp even as the Wars coming to an end Presbyterianism is unraveling on its other flank and parliament while it's horrified by these novelties under the circumstances can't muster either the votes or the will for a serious crackdown they can't fight a war on two worst of all the primary vector for this new radical infection is the new model army itself it's not simply that the zealous types who volunteered for military service in the godly army were disproportionately independents the whole the essence of this independent movement was its denial of a fixed network of parish churches and the army which by definition is on the move is outside that network to begin with the Army's chaplains are under the Army's own discipline and its soldiers who are risking their lives in God's service have their own voices Richard Baxter who's the Worcestershire clergyman who's one of the most humane pastoral theologians of his age recalled how early in the war he and his fellow parliamentarians in the Midlands believed that the war was being fought in defense of our old principles only to save the parliaments and kingdom from papists and delinquents this is standard moderate parliamentarian position but shortly after the Battle of Naseby he happened to visit the Army's encampment and he recalled later among Cromwell soldiers I found a new face of things which I never dreamt of I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their intention to subvert both church and state in dependency and Anna baptistry were most prevalent and to know me anism and Arminianism these shocking radical doctrines are equally distributed something new was brewing in the Army's ranks the old principles were no longer to be had and so when the King finally surrendered in 1646 he faced a divided gaggle of victors there's now a sort of Presbyterian establishment that set itself up with rather lukewarm backing from parliament but it's struggling to make its long dreamt of settlements thick Presbyterian structures are set up but actually compelling parish church is to belong to them is all but impossible in fact every parish church whether they like it or not has become independent free to choose whether or not it's going to submit its a presbyterian discipline or whether it will stick to something like the old Church of England's rights from before the war which are now supposed to be illegal although that's not really enforced or perhaps they're going to explore Wilder Shores for ranged over against the Presbyterians is the army increasingly insistent but no political or religious settlement with the defeated King is valid unless they agree to it quite what it was that the Army once is not yet clear the leading officers it looks are willing to contemplate a political settlement which permits quite loss of religious toleration to which otherwise just about recognizably looks like pre-crisis England but from any of the rank and file that moment has passed and this is what leads us famously to the group whom we know as the Levellers who are justly famous now as the first political movement in recorded history calling for representative democracy in the modern sense of the word their ambitions are first articulated by a series of radical pamphlets in 1645 six but in 1647 they get taken up in earnest by the Army's rank-and-file and reinforced by london-based petitions which gather tens of thousands of signatures their demands include having Parliament's elected every two years by something not too far from universal male suffrage with guarantees of freedom of religion and of equality under the law there are even some and not many who talk about votes for women as to the king some of them openly call for a republic they certainly refused to cede any real power to the man who'd intended our bondage and brought a cruel war upon us it's of course the war which has made this sort of radicalism possible going back to 16th pretending that nothing had happened is not adequate the army level is central Manifesta declares that their wartime service have made plain at how high a rate we value our just freedom they've put their lives on the line they're not simply willing to go home and there was also a broader sense that the past was gone and they were coverable they were in a new world and a new world needs new rules there are even some Royalists who are tempted by these sorts of ideas after all if what you're afraid of is the patear aney of parliament that that sense that what we're dealing with it wasn't simply entering into a new world but being at a critical moment a climatic moment indeed of human history of cosmic history is feeding into this if you look at the events of the Civil War and what's led up to it through certain Protestant eyes then you think well the Living God who acts providentially in history has renewed his gospel at the Reformation since then the Romish Antichrist has mustered all his forces in response and now this has come to a head in a series of catastrophic religious wars which have convulsed all of Europe and finally they've now come to the Gospels last outpost to England the world's Western most extreme and finally a terrible cost victories been won powers been providentially given to God's own army this is a hinge moment in the history of the world God is going to do something new and so the Levellers consistently oppose Presbyterian plans for what they call a compulsive mastership or aristocratic or government over the people what they want is a government which has no authority over religion at all because they said therein we cannot remit or exceed a tipple of what our consciences dictate to be the mind of God without wilful sin the conscience won't allow state authority to have any space explicitly this means refusing to let anybody fine orthodoxy for them now if you're a respectable Calvinist of any kind you think orthodoxy is policed by the scholarship of university trained ministers but what if the universities have become a self-serving guild which exclude inconvenient truths what uses book learning when the Spirit of God is abroad teaching people directly the radical army chaplain Jonathan chaplain John saltmarsh claimed that Presbyterians insisted that God must not speak till man give him leave saltmarsh instead appealed to the infinitely abounding Spirit of God which blows when and where it lists it could never have worked I'm even if impossibly they had managed to secure truly free elections they would have been routed there rather awkward argument that everybody should be allowed to vote apart from Catholics and Royalists shows that they know that but in any case the discussions are cut short because it doesn't do to leave a live King out of your calculations in December 16 47 Charles escaped from captivity gathered fresh supporters old Royalists were joined by some Presbyterians who'd concluded that the Army's radical ways were a more serious threat than the king and a second civil war ensued which lasted for most of 1648 although Charles himself is fairly quickly recaptured the new royalist coalition could have been formidable but it's disparate it's disorganized and the army does what it did best local revolts were put down one by one a Scottish royalist army the most substantial is taken unawares by a slightly smaller English force at Preston in Lancashire and beaten into a bloody surrender and now the army officers and men alike are unforgiving King Charles is a war criminal a man of blood who bears responsibility for his subjects deaths by restarting a war that he had already lost he has openly defied the verdict of God there's talk of force him to abdicate in favor of one of his sons but even now compromised was still not Charles the first style he tries to strike a deal with the parliamentary leadership but over the armies heads a crucial parliamentary vote on the 5th of December 1648 suggests that it might actually happen and the result is an open coup the army moves into Westminster 45 MPs are briefly imprisoned nearly 300 more are excluded leaving a hard core of only about 70 who was sympathetic to the Army's views eventually another 130 or so were allowed to trickle back to the body which would become known cruelly but fairly as the rump Parliament but by the time they come back this body has already carried out the task for which it was created it put its Sovereign Lord King Charles the first on trial for treason against himself and on the 30th of January 1649 in cut off his head now the King's death opens up three possible ways forward one is to conclude that with this exceptionally awful King gone normality of some kind can now resume that's what the Scots do they proclaim the dead king's son as king charles ii as soon as the news from london reaches the new king in continental exile is not all that keen and accepting the sort of fileted crown which presbyterian scotland is offering him but even royal beggars can't be choosers and so in 1650 he lands in Scotland to claim it relations with his Scottish subjects are not warm and nor is England's response to this the army under Oliver Cromwell's leadership invades defeating the Scots Royalists in a series of brutally effective battles the only successful English conquest of Scotland in history in 1651 Charles himself narrowly escapes to exile once again and so the first option a restored monarchy fails but not utterly it sleeps until the second one is run its course the second possible response is the one that's taken by the new regime in London and that's to reform what they see is the state's abuses while still maintaining a degree of continuity following the Kings execution they declare a republic but this isn't truly an extremist regime the fundamental structure of the English station of English law doesn't change the Republican leadership experiments with different governing structures over the following decade the the rump Parliament ineffective increasingly friendless is forcibly dissolved by the army in 1653 when it tries to make its own rule perpetual brief quixotic attempt is made to replace it with a nominated Parliament known derisively as bare-bones Parliament many of his members were drawn from the independent churches but when the radical wing of that assembly threatened to take control it's closed down to Oliver Cromwell himself who's been the effective ruler of the country for some time now openly takes charge as Lord Protector and the five years of his protector ship nearly five years bring a degree of stability Cromwell is even pressed to become King which he and the Army leadership refused but when he dies in 1658 he's even though he's not King he's succeeded as protected by his son Richard Cromwell but during the following two years 1658 to 60 the Republican regime unravels amidst rising panic about sectarianism the army which doesn't trust young Richard Cromwell deposes him in the spring of 1659 and there's a bewildering succession of attempted governing structures which come and go over the following few months until eventually one of the most powerful of the generals accepts the growing clamor for what by then started to look like the only viable option restoring the monarchy charles ii returns in 1660 pledging forgiveness and moderation promises which he didn't violate quite as thoroughly as some had feared he would so in the end the second option fails absolutely there's nothing like putting extremists in power to expose them for what they really are Republican government turned out to be simply old England in new dress there are even traces of that in the religious policy which on the face of it that is the one genuinely radical thing about this this government Cromwell is profoundly persuaded by the arguments in favor of religious tolerance famously momentously he ends England's centuries-old exclusion of Jews from the country almost as momentum emerges Lee extends toleration to the Baptist's who go from being a a marginal sectarian movement in pre-war England to a church tens of thousands strong by 1660 and tens of millions strong worldwide today adult baptism had long been a symbol of extremism for establishment Protestants because it meant abandoning the notion of an all-inclusive National Church but once that notion of a National Church is in ruins anyway well why not but Rama's tolerance is not limitless he excludes any religion which is politically subversive or dangerous that includes the levelness who are suppressed by force after the Kings execution but it also means Catholics or indeed the the much to Bishop II practices of the pre-war Church of England Bishop's mean tyranny and all the Republican regimes also maintain the underpinning structure of a National Church nobody's now compelled to attend their parish church but most people do the government vets ministerial appointments and expels known Royalists and above all tithes continue to be legally required this is a key betrayal for the radicals tithes are the makeshift local taxes which support local parish churches and from which very often landowners took a considerable cut radicals of all kinds railed against them but tithes as a symbol of continued social order became a totemic issue for the establishment it becomes something on which neither side is willing to compromise it's when bare bones is part considers a motion abolishing tithes in 1653 that's the trigger for Cromwell to step in and abolish the assembly it's a step too far because the route that they were beginning to take had it impossible was the third option the third way of remaking England in the wake of the King's death not the same old England dressed up but the Levellers vision taken up and transformed the first fruits of a world remade under Christ in 1647 the army chaplain John saltmarsh who I quoted before argued that a new age was dawning the age of the Holy Spirit Christians he said should no more stay in the old Church stuck as it was in its old ways than Christ's original disciples should have stayed in his tomb on Easter morning after he'd risen from the dead that's the easy part but once you've decided that you should leave the old church is behind you in a new age of the Spirit where should you go the most straightforwardly revolutionary ambition was for a so-called fifth monarchy in Biblical prophecy the first four monarchies of human empires and the fifth would be Christ's Kingdom on earth in the turmoil of 1640s it is not foolish to think that the time has finally come immediately after the Kings execution a fifth monarchist petition calls on the army to encourage the godly to form themselves into families churches and corporations until they thus multiplied exceedingly the idea is that a self-governing godly Republic will if effectively sort of wriggle free from its cocoon and the husk of worldly government and law around it will simply wither away in the mean time those who are in power should prepare for the emergence of this new kingdom by of course abolishing tides but also by imposing ferocious legislation against immorality of all sorts redistributing land radically to the poor simplifying the law there are those who argue that no law should be allowed to have more than 26 words in it and purging the university's levelers had wanted the rule of the people but the fifth monarchists illiterate this is a little different they want the rule of the godly those of the godly who are actually in power regard these idealists with a certain pattern izing tolerance in return v monarchists revile their republican rulers as illegitimate they dream about foreign adventures there's talk of the New Model Army crossing the channel to tear down the the rotten edifice of papacy and march in gospel victory all the way to Rome and to Constantinople at home they talk fruitlessly about armed insurrection and the regime I think sensibly never seems to have regarded them as very dangerous there were some who took more direct action in May 1649 Jared when Stanley lays claim to the Levellers inheritance for his group the so-called diggers they occupy a plot of land which has been shown to win Stanley in a dream and they propose to work it together holding all property and all produce in common this is not as it's often taken to be an anticipation of communism when Stanley's commune is a prophetic act it presages he says a new heaven and a new earth in which none shall lay claim to any creature and say this is mine and that is yours this is my work that is yours there shall be no buying or selling their fares no markets but the whole earth shall be a common Treasury for every man for the earth is the Lord's everyone shall work in love one with and for now this experiment is forcibly broken up within a few months and when Stanley eventually returns to a life of genteel respectability but other subversives are pushing in different directions in the summer 1649 a preacher of I think we have to say questionable mental stability named avi Isaac Cobb produces a book which claims that soared leveling or digging a leveling the approach is taken by the Levellers and the diggers are shadows of most terrible yet great and glorious good things to come behold behold behold I the eternal God the Lord of Hosts Who am that mighty leveler and coming to level the hills with the valleys and to lay the mountains low cop had his sights set on what he calls the play ee holiness of the Presbyterians and also of the independence people whose religion he says is no more than horrid hypocrisy Envy malice evil surmising an engine for moral self-satisfaction well-heeled believers using their own self awarded godliness to lift themselves up in their own minds above the poor whom they ought to love but in fact despise cop urges Christians to love not only the poor but thieves mongers and other notorious sinners he theatrically abandons both his own dignity and any pretensions to morality he ran through London's streets as he tells us charging at the coaches of the Welsh wealthy gnashing with my teeth with a huge loud voice proclaiming of the day of the Lord he prostrated himself before rogues beggars cripples kissing their feet he sat down and ate and drank around on the ground with gypsies and clipped and hugged and kissed them putting my hand in their bosoms loving the she gypsies dearly comments like that and especially his notorious claim that he would love my neighbor's wife as myself are what make him notorious but his supposed sexual libertinism is a side issue the cops point was that a true Christian as he said must lose all his righteousness every bit of his holiness every crumb of his religion only then can he reach the point where he knows no evil religion holiness righteousness over him become words so contaminated by hypocrisy that he wants to be rid of them cop is associated with a group of so-called ranters around him a sudden moral panic ballooned in 1649 fifty this panic is mostly about sex former ranters did claim to have taught for example that till you can lie with all women as one woman and not judge its sin you can do nothing but sin but that a priori and publicity around this I think rather misses the point the ranch's assaults on traditional moral norms was driven by their understanding of God they call God the being the fullness the great emotion reason the immensity they seem to have taught a kind of pantheism holding that all things are part of God including themselves and hence the the libertinism if they are God and they're fully aware that they are God then how can they possibly do wrong but also hence the radical egalitarianism everyone is a part of that so how can social barriers have any meaning they don't like talk of resurrection or judgement instead they talk about the dead returning to that infinite bulk and bigness so-called God as a drop into the ocean now this quixotic short-lived probably tiny movement masses less in its own right that's a clue to the wider Milio which people at the time call the world of seekers seekers are in no sense a sect they're a mood a restless conviction that established forms of Christianity were inadequate and needed to be abandoned there are some seekers who wait for the new age of the Spirit to reveal itself and others who set out to create it let me look at one of these people with you this is Mary spring it the kind of zealous Puritan for whom the early 1640s should have been filled with opportunity but instead when she saw the independence and even the Baptist's godly Reformation she says I saw death there instead she told us I changed my ways often this is from her autobiography written some years later and ran from one notion to another not finding satisfaction or assurance that I should obtain what my soul desired and she eventually abandoned the formal religious duties in which she'd once been screwed although most of my time in the day was spent either in reading scriptures or in praying and liked the the ranters during these years she developed a deep suspicion of outward religion she actively sought out the people of no religion as she puts it because they at least are not hypocrites she even began to explore worldly pleasures not sexual libertinism but carding dancing and jovial eating's and drinking's for a former Puritan that's quite bad enough she becomes convinced as she puts it that there had been nothing manifest in in the world since the Apostles days that was true religion that while there may be true religion it's it's completely inaccessible and she resolved in my heart I would be without a religion until the Lord manifestly taught me one now resolving to be without a religion might sound like atheism and that accusation was often made against people like this but in fact she's trying to be what the 20th century would what the Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have called a religion less Christian gouging out hypocrisy and formalism even if at the end there was nothing left that's what living on the cusp of the age of the Spirit meant we can appreciate that people like a BA zacapa Mary spring yet were extremists by the standard of their times or indeed almost any time but that doesn't mean that they were crazy yes they are fundamentally challenging the political religious legal social economic and gender structures of their time but the golden thread tying all of this together is an almost mundane Protestant religiosity Martin Luther would have had no hesitation in calling these people fanatics which wasn't a compliment coming from him but he also had a lot in common with them like him these people had had a profound experience of God's immediate grace they knew that their consciences stood naked and shameless before God Luther's insistence that true faith could overcome sin isn't very different from cops intent an intention to forswear righteousness and religion so that he could no no evil even the extravagant mood has something comparable in it like Luther these radicals read their Bibles to make sense of their experiences and they won't allow any human authority to overrule them in interpreting the difference is that Luther defies the church using Scripture but these seekers like some of the early radicals in Luther's own time defy learning theology with an appeal to an authority that no one can refute direct revelation from God but while respectable English people are profoundly alarmed by the ranters and disturbed weather seekers in retrospect the clearest feature of these groups is their instability they couldn't have lasted their howls of Rage or cries of anguish and groups like that exhaust themselves very quickly the primary long-term inheritors of this moment of sectarian convulsion would be the one group who proved able to take those radical impulses and stabilize them into a permanent functioning community able to build an extremism whose feet are firmly planted on the ground this is the group that marries spring yet like many other ruthless radicals eventually made her home the Quakers the Quakers origins remain obscure they sprang up almost unnoticed in the north of England and are already formidable when they begin to attract serious attention they've got plenty of origin myths mostly based around the story of their only leader George Fox but Fox is only one of many rather than forming around one prophet Quakerism coalesced from a series of radical separatist groups who recognized the same spirit in one another many seekers seem to have felt this is what Mary Springer felt when they first encountered Quakers and they were meeting something that they already knew and it was on the tips of their tongues because Quakerism score doctrine is that the truth the inner light is already within each of us they scorned University theologians who as George Fox put it merely had the written Bible while Quakers had the living word like cop and others who looked to the Levellers the Quakers also taught a doctrine of absolute human equality they accepted no titles no ministry they thundered against the self awarded privileges and self-important learning of the clergy they not only one large numbers of women converts but they had prominent women leaders and preachers from a standing start in the early sixteen 50s they numbered many tens of thousands by the end of the decade outstripping every other sect in England most of them many times over it was exhilarating for them and terrifying for their neighbors because what marks the Quakers out from their predecessors is their severe and exemplary exemplary morality and also their level-headed energy a bee is a cop roars out against the rich in the street the Quakers face them in earnest standing up in their churches to disrupt their corrupt services other sects denounced tithes it's the Quakers who conduct the first serious campaigns of non-payment they stubbornly refused to acknowledge any social distinctions a Shropshire Quaker Elizabeth Andrews waited at table for Lord Newport but refused to curtsey to before his guests we have won reports of him teasingly offer and offering her twenty pounds if she'd agreed to curtsey here before him and she replied that even if he offered her his entire estate I dare not do it for all honor belongs to God he took that in good human not everybody would but that sort of disregard for human hierarchy won them considerable moral authority and considerable hatred like other sects before them the Quakers had their ecstasy's shaking trembling roaring foaming at the mouth hence the nickname that soon became a badge of pride but unlike the other sect their zeal was more pointed and purposeful for example they're not the first sect to sometimes practice nudism in the belief that now that they're freed from original sin they should shed the clothes which with with which Adam had covered his shame in the Garden of Eden but Quaker nudity has got a polemical edge to it this is a depiction of it as you might gather in England's chilly northwest Quakers are preaching stark-naked in the marketplace promising that God is going to strip the people bare of their hypocritical religion exposed their shame to the world one Quaker walked naked through Oxford in 1654 as a sign that Cromwell would soon be stripped both of his authority and of his seeming covering of religion other Quakers displayed the same zeal in other ways their itinerant preachers ate up the miles no one is too grand for them to confront in 1656 a Quaker named Mary how gill made her way fully clothed into oliver cromwell's rooms at Whitehall palace and handed him a letter denouncing him as a stinking dung Hill in the sight of God Cromwell rather characteristically patiently hears her out by then another Quaker an unmarried serving maid named Mary Fisher had made her way to Barbados and from then to there to New England she becomes one of the first Quakers in the new world in New England she's accused of witchcraft and shipped home but undaunted she and five others back in England hatched a new scheme they briefly considered going to minister in Jerusalem but instead set off to preach to the two great antichrists of the Protestant imagination the Pope and the Turkish sultan the party who reach Rome are imprisoned but in 1658 after many adventures Mary Fisher comes face to face with Sultan Mehmed the fourth encamped with his army at Adrianople and she wrote he was very noble unto me he and all that were about him received the words of truth without contradiction there is a royal seed amongst them which in time God will raise it appears that the Ottoman Sultan was unused to Christians telling him that God's inner light was within him but for everybody who was converted or impressed or indeed amused by the Quakers many more were horrified their exponential growth their willful disregard for social norms made them by far the most frightening of the radical sex during 1659 that year of chaos fears of Quakerism Christian there are mob attacks there are rumors of Quaker plots to burn cities one preacher in July of that year openly wondered whether God would suffer the faithful to be everywhere massacred ante Quaker panic helped steer that year's political helter skelter towards a restoration of the monarchy Presbyterians even some independents were beginning to fear the Quakers and sect and sectarians more than they feared potpourri once the monarchy was restored in 1660 Quakers and quickly transformed itself into not the most for the least frightening of sense stable its social egalitarianism contained peaceful to a fault indeed more likely to cause trouble by its pacifism than anything else that leap from terrifying extremists to harmless eccentrics in just a few years might seem hard for us to imagine in our own day although it's not unlike the road that say communists have traveled in the lifetime of many of us here the great question is did the Quakers cease to be terrifying because they were persecuted into quietness after 1660 because they certainly were persecuted even if only a a handful were actually put to death a great many more suffered Grievous imprisonment loss of property civil rights other systemic harassment that certainly pushed them to become more organized and to police themselves more rigorously but it also made them formulate their beliefs more clearly and stick to them more rigidly which in this case meant moving to a radical peacefulness but in other cases might not have done more to the point maybe social rejection combined with a generational changing of the gaurd to alter the sex mood the one truly terrifying and intolerable feature of the early Quakers was that they were winning converts by the basket load and this alarmed every other religious group within a couple of decades that's drying up they're raising their children in the faith but they're not bringing in outsiders so much anymore and so then they're able to take their place as part of what's now a religious kaleidoscope in England a jumble of sects stuff with one another but not fundamentally threatening one another's identity after he was restored I like this picture charles ii because he's normally shown as jolie figure I think having a sense of the man's thoroughness here is useful after he's restored tells the second restores the Church of England's old legal framework largely unchanged as if his kingdom had simply come round after a 20-year convulsion in 1662 about a quarter of England's parish ministers over two thousand men are once again ejected for failing to conform to this restored church but the attempt to turn the clock back fails in 1689 his successor but one admitted that England would never again be united in religion not even as imperfectly as it had been before the Civil War and that's the result of the age of extremism during the years of war and revolution the result that nobody had expected the extremists aren't suppressed or expelled the head of the snake is not cut off the country is not purged of intolerable but nor do the extremists take over even when their sympathizers came close to positions of power they're fatally compromised by pragmatism instead by a mixture of external pressure the logic of their own beliefs and the human impossibility of keeping fires of zeal ablaze indefinitely they settled down and became normalized slowly faithfully they learn to live with the world around them and rather more slowly but eventually the world learned to live with them [Applause] you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 64,181

Keywords: gresham college, gresham, lecture, free lecture, gresham lecture, public lecture, free public lecture, free education, education, college, Barnard's Inn Hall, Extreme Christianity, Professor Alec Ryrie, alec ryrie, history of religion, history, religion, faith, politics, Millerites, united states, 1840, German Christian movement, nazism, England, 1640s, 1650s, civil war, republic, King Charles I, anglicanism, Protestantism, Scotland, reformation, Roman Catholic Church, Presbyterian church

Id: mK5-UaRSSSs

Length: 55min 33sec (3333 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 19 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ragica]

This is the first lecture in a 4 part series called "Extreme Christianity". But the next three parts are yet to come. See: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/series/extreme-christianity/

Original description:

The English Civil Wars of 1642-8 began as the last of Europes wars of religion and ended as the first modern revolution.

Parliamentarians had been fighting for the chance to finish Englands Reformation, but the experience of war convinced some of them that their mere reshaping of the establishment was not enough. To be true to their religious vision, something more searching and profound was needed. This restless spirit manifested itself in various sects and fellowships, united by a loathing of complacency and hypocrisy, which both supported and helped to undermine the republican experiment.

[u/alllie]

That was very interesting. They were almost at a modern democratic republic. But they couldn't quite push it over that final hump.

Hope you post his next lectures.

[u/ToughAsGrapes]

Thank you for posting this OP, I've always been fascinated by the transformative power of war. Its the ability not just to change who rules the state but the way a society conceptualises itself.

When a nation is destroyed in its absolute that's the time when you can truly imagine utopia, I think that's why the counties that often do best in gender equality are often post conflict societies.