The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Church of England Articles allowed Universalism in 1563

Hi Drew (and Hi Paul Corinthians - havent; heard from you for a couple of days and hope you are still following) –
I’m home from work now (early start, early finish) – I’m just going to chill out for the afternoon and then will get going with this thread again in the early evening.

Any feedback from you as to how the argument is developing at this point is appreciated. I hope I’ve made valid distinctions in assessing the evidence between what we can be certain about, what is probable, what is possible, and what is plain ridiculous when we are talking about this fascinating area of history (at least for us Christian Universalists). I hope I am beginning to make a reasonable case for thinking that arguments suggesting Matthew Parker may have been a Universalist are not ridiculous; rather they wobble somewhere between the possible and the probable (indeed I’m beginning to think that the idea that Elizabeth nursed Universalist sympathies may be possible, despite her career as a persecutor from 1575).

You’ll just have to trust me about sources – because I am giving you a general sketch rather than the real McCoy here. If you would particularly like to question me about my sources on specific points of interest, do ask and I will supply them.

Before assessing the changes to Cranmer’s 42 Articles in any detail (at last!!)I think that I/we now need to pause to reflect on why we cannot expect the evidence from this period to yield positive answers. It’s not only that the evidence is fragmentary; it’s also to do with the lack of personal disclosure expected of most public figures at this time even in their personal correspondence (and there are sound reasons for this – expedient self protection, and also the lack of a clear language of personal revelation at this time).

I think perhaps I should also say a little more about the ‘double truth’ doctrine of early Universalism – we may find this troubling, D.P. Walker certainly stands in harsh moral judgement on it; but I think he is being anachronistic and we are being anachronistic if we feel as he does. Also, on reflection, I certainly feel that Walker’s use of the words ‘esoteric’ and ‘intellectual’ in his passage on Origen quoted in my last post needs to be qualified.

With my dentist appointment tomorrow – which I had conveniently put to the back of my mind since I don’t like having teeth pulled!!! – I think it unlikely that I will have everything completed by the end of Friday. But I do hope to have the argument about the abrogation of the 42nd in its original Elizabethan context settled, as far as is humanly possible.

After this I want to continue the story – mainly looking at how the Athanasian Creed was used by the Tudor and early Stuart Anglican Church as a charter for persecution, and how (some) Anglicans eventually learnt that this was wrong at the same time that they questioned the authority of this creed (this links to the English Civil War and its aftermath, the development of Religious Toleration from the late seventeenth in England and its Anglican supporters and detractors, the changes to the prayer book made by the Episcopalians in 1801, and the prosecution for blasphemy of an Anglican hopeful Universalist clergyman in the mid- Victorian period using the Athanasian creed as a pretext (Farrar alludes to this prosecution in the sermon I have already quoted).

An important sub-theme here is the different arguments put forward by Anglicans and others during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The eighteenth century arguments against hell are based on reason – threats do not produce good behaviour, disproportionate punishment eventually breed hatred of a tyrant and rebellion rather than compliance. This is in keeping with the Age of Reason/Enlightenment and part of the rational/classical ethos.

In the nineteenth century the arguments against hell are based more on feeling and imagination – ‘How can a loving father do such things to his children? How can we live happy knowing that or nearest and dearest departed may be suffering eternal torment?’ Etc. This is in keeping with the ethos/emphasis of Romanticism.

At the end of the thread I’d like to sum arguments about whether an Anglican today -,of whatever shade or party, and whether ordained or lay - can in good conscience describe themselves as Universalist (given the 39 articles, The Athanasian Creed etc; to which, of course, I hope to give a resounding ‘yes!!!’)

I think I will deal with this part of the argument on unused thread on the ‘Athanasian Creed, the Damnatory clauses and EU’ Drew started for me at Ecclesiology. I will refer everyone to the very full discussion of the theological issues regarding the Creed that has already taken place for excellent background reading. But will confine myself to the history outlined above in the new thread.

The new thread should not be as complex as this one, of which it will be a continuation, and I hope to have it ‘nailed good and proper’ by the end of next week. That’ll give everyone, including me, a time to take a breather between thread topics.

I hope you are all still on board and appreciate your support.

All the best

Dick

Still very much on board, Dick, but have been too busy to respond. I’m not pinning my hopes on Parker and Elizabeth being universalists, but it is fascinating that your research is leaning towards that possibility.

Hi Drew –

I always know you are there!! A quick word about primary sources for Matthew Parker

First he left a substantial library to Corpus Christi College on his death in 1575 –

**The Parker Library is the rare books and manuscripts library for Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is known throughout the world due to its invaluable collection of over 600 manuscripts, particularly medieval texts, the core of which were bequeathed to the College by Archbishop Matthew Parker.

The Parker Library on the Web project is a joint venture run by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library and Stanford University Libraries in the United States of America.The main goal of the project is to digitise all of the medieval manuscripts in the Parker Library and to be the first project that seeks to make an entire library publicly accessible on the web. The project is funded by the Mellon Foundation.**

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Lib … ti_College

I note from the catalogue that his collection includes texts of both Erasmus and the Church Fathers, and plenty of texts concerning the History of the English Church – Venerable Bede, Alfred, Anglo Saxon Chronicle etc… I could do a proper scholarly trawl here, but I’m pretty content that this all accords with the picture that emerges from biographical information.

Second we have his correspondence from his time as Archbishop that was all published in the nineteenth century by The Parker Society, ‘For the Publication of the Works of the Fathers and Early Writers of the Reformed English Church’. This society was formed in 1840 and disbanded in 1855 when its work was completed. The current Church Society gives the opinion that –

The stimulus for the foundation of the (Parker) society was provided by the nineteenth-Century Tractarians. Some members of this movement, e.g., R.H. Froude in his Remains of 1838-9, spoke most disparagingly of the English Reformation: ‘Really I hate the Reformation and the Reformers more and more’. Keble could add in 1838, ‘Anything which separates the present Church from the Reformers I should hail as a great good’. Protestants within the Church of England therefore felt the urgent need to make available in an attractive and accessible form the works of the leaders of the English Reformation. To many it seemed that the Protestant foundations of the English Church were being challenged like never before. Thus the society represented a co-operation between traditional High Churchmen and evangelical churchmen, both of whom were committed to the Reformation teaching on justification by faith. Subscribers were also involved in the erection of the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford, although this was as much anti-Roman Catholic as anti-Tractarian. The society had about seven thousand subscribers who paid one pound each year from 1841 to 1855; thus for fifteen pounds the subscribers received fifty three volumes – the General Index and the Latin originals of the 1847 ‘Original Letters relative to the English Reformation’ being special subscriptions. Twenty-four editors were used and the task of arriving at the best text was far from easy. The choice of publications was controversial and some authors and works were unfortunate not to be included in PS volumes. While some of the volumes have been superseded by more recent critical editions, today this collection remains one of the most valuable sources for the study of the English Reformation.

See -

churchsociety.org/churchman/ … namond.pdf

The Church Society – a very Conservative body within the Church of England - is involved in a project to re-publish the volumes first published by the Parker Society to encourage the faithful today. They are keen, like the original Parker Society, to give the lie to the idea that the Elizabethan Settlement, of which I shall write very soon, was a compromise between the ‘extremes’ of Lutheranism/Zwingli-ism and not a compromise between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Calvinism. My view is that those that stress the former view (Conservative Protestants) are as much guilty of historical myth making as those who stress the latter view (Anglo-Catholics), The Elizabethan settlement in Parker’s Prayer Bok with its 38 Articles was deliberately vague, and it always meant different things to different people (as he was content to be ‘all things to all men’).

However, the unwitting testimony of the publication of Parker’s correspondence by Conservative Protestant Anglicans must be that there is nothing in this correspondence to disturb their view. I hope you agree with this – and on these grounds I take it as read that I do not need to trawl through his letters etc, for new evidence.

Likewise I take it as read that Dean Farrar would have researched Parker’s correspondence before writing his Eternal Hope sermons and that he was well aware the arguments and historical myths/conjectures of Conservative Protestant Anglican’s when he wrote -

To say that it (the 42nd article) was struck out because the Anabaptists were no longer prominent is simply an unsupported conjecture. The conjecture may be true, but even if so I look on the elimination of the Article as distinctly overruled by a watchful Providence; since it is the province of the Church to decide only in matters of faith, and no church has a right to legislate in those matters of opinion on which wise and holy men have, in all ages, been content to differ, seeing that we have no indisputable voice of Revelation to guide our conclusions respecting them.

(see my first post in this revived thread - a couple of days ago)

A lot more is known about Christianity in the Renaissance and the Reformation today than was known in Farrar’s day – of how messy and disparate and fascinating Christianity was then (as it is today). This has allowed me to make my own conjectures (but I hope these are stated with due modesty rather than as historical myths- or ‘truths’ that go beyond the evidence). In the end we have to focus on ‘the watchful providence’ of how the abrogation of the 42nd article worked itself out in our history –this is the truly important thing in my view.

What I will do now is briefly address the issues I highlighted in my last post, and then crack on with an analysis of the Elizabethan Settlement. I think I will also start and Appendix thread for the two Ecclesiology threads that are developing here – I have other very relevant and interesting bits and bobs that the committed may well want to read and comment on; but I do not want this material to interrupt the main narrative thread

All the best

Dick

Correction to the above - I meant to say that the Church Society’s Conservaitve view of the Elizabethan Settlement is that it was a compromise between Lutheranism/Zwingli-ism and Calvinism (a narrow range).

In my view the C of E today - which is the C of E that matters most - has progressed from the Elizabethan Church through Acts of Toleration and through learning from its history as a persecuting Church and repenting of this. Today the Anglican compromise - in all but the rite fo Adult Baptism - is actually more like a compromise between Catholicism and Anabaptism.

All the best

Dick

Two thoughts (which I may expand on in a supplementary thread)

First a word about Walker’s scruples over Origen’s doctrine of double truth

Second a word about private and public selves during the Reformation

Regarding Walker – his book ‘The Decline of Hell’, is a fine study. However he does sometimes seem harsh in his value judgements. I’m convinced that Origen did not see the final truth of Christian Universalism as a matter just for ‘intellectuals’. Obviously Origen was a gifted intellectual but the pursuit of theology was/is never simply a matter of intellectual pursuit in the Eastern tradition, Study must always be allied to participation in the liturgy of the Church, and a life of contemplative prayer and ascetic discipline. I’m sure that what Origen meant by his double truth doctrine is that some things cannot be disclosed to people new to the faith, and should be kept for people more mature in the faith – and this goes for both the learned and the ‘simple’. He was concerned that new believers might hastily draw the wrong conclusions (like ‘since we are all going to be saved we can just let it all hang out and do what we like’).He was no intellectual snob. As he said to the Pagan Neo-Platonist Celsus – who was certainly a snob; ‘You prepare fine food for the elite. We (Christians) cook for the masses’. We differ from Origen today because, in my view, we have a better understanding of what motivates people to live a good life – and this is rarely done by having them internalise a psychology of religious terror from bad or partial religious teaching.

On another thread AllanS has intriguingly suggested that perhaps C.S. Lewis came round to thinking of Hell in terms of ‘double truth’. Allan wrote that

**There’s a suggestive incident in Dawn Treader where the crew mutiny against Caspian. He quashes the revolt by saying only a select few (the elect?) would be chosen to continue the mystical voyage into the Utter East. All the rest would be left behind. Upon hearing this, all the crew but one begged to be chosen, and were reinstated.

I cannot help but wonder if Lewis thought the threats of being shut out etc in the Gospels were designed to have a similar effect.**
(If you are reading this Allan – Ta for the insight! It is far more relevant here than in the context I originally suggested)

Regarding private and public selves – if you look at the portrait of Erasmus by Holbein he seems to have an almost mask like composure (and the same is true of many portraits from the period of many public figures). The wearing of a public mask was vital for those in power or who moved in the circles of the powerful; for death or banishment through incurring disfavour was always a terrible risk. So people played there cards closely to their chests (and Universalists of the time would not have deliberately courted martyrdom over a matter of private opinion). We do get fleeting glimpses of private selves – in the intimacy of the miniature paintings and in the coded messages of poems and private devotions (but these are always open to a variety of interpretations). However, we will not gain a window into a person’s soul of this type and from this period by looking at their public correspondence– apart from a few unique individuals, of whom I believe Luther was one.

All the best

Dick

I am also still very fascinated by all you are posting here. I have been silent because

  1. Just reading along
  2. Intermittent Net issues

But this is really good stuff so do not worry. I haven’t lost interest in the slightest. :smiley:

Hi Dick, I’m still reading along too and just about keeping up. Fascinating stuff about the influence of Erasmus and the need for caution in putting forward views which may be deemed heretical in those days. :open_mouth:

Hi Paul and Drew -

Lovely to hear from both of my encouragers - and keep it up; you are vital for my motivation, adn I thank you warmly :smiley:

Paul - that’s a great quotation from ‘Abraham Lincoln’ you have as your motto (and the real Abraham Lincoln was a very fine and humble man who America should be proud of and revere above some of the more ‘certain of the destiny of America as the elect nation of God’ figures in its history - in my view).

Drew - yes you had to be very cautious. And ‘heresy’ was a slippery category in the fast moving falling outs about ever finer points of doctrine that was a feature of the Reformation (and this often went hand in hand with fast moving shifts in balance of power and alliances). And never mind hopeful Universalism, the idea of religious tolerance was itself often suspect as a damnable doctrine.

The context of martyrdom during the Reformation was also far more ambiguous than it was to the Christians in the first centuries of the Church. The early Christian martyrs knew that they were making a clear protest and witness against the brutality of Roman power, hoping to change hearts and minds thereby (at least this was the case of the less egocentric martyrs – I am more suspicious of some of the exhibitionist enthusiasts for martyrdom whose stories I have read). But in the reformation it was Christian killing Christian. The blood of martyrs was no longer the seed of the Church, but the seed of further sectarian violence.
Paul and Drew- I know both of you have a keen personal interest in the matters of which I am writing - and that’s wonderful motivation for me. Understand that I hurtle along at a fine old pace because I want to set down an overview; and also, because of my personal situation, I’m never sure when my time will be severely restricted again - so I’m making the most of this window of opportunity.

So take in the scope of my narrative - it will remain on site for you to ponder the details at leisure, and you can always, always get back to me with questions - I hope you know that I will try my best to give you an honest answer.

All the best friends

Dick

That’s enough background…

And so in 1558, Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England, hailed as the ‘New Deborah’ after the tragic reign of her Catholic half sister ‘Bloody Mary’. And Elizabeth’s reign was to last for more than forty years until her death as a frail old woman in 1603.

Again I must emphasise that her basic instinct was always for peace and tolerance. Mary had burned 300 Protestants at the stake in three terrible years. No one died under Elizabeth for their faith until 1575 – and she exacted no reprisals on the Marian persecutors. In addition she was initially a conciliator on the international stage. She had no real appetite for war and foreign adventures – unlike her father Henry VIII who it seems, at least in his prime, would wake up each spring with his blood up and full of heat for new battles. It was only new and threatening developments in the International situation that persuaded her to engage in war with the mighty Spanish Empire (with great success) and colonial repression in Ireland (with tragic consequences).

Elizabeth’s first big challenge on coming to the throne was to sort out the religious mess left by Mary (in an age when religion and politics were identical). As I wrote in an earlier post –

Elizabeth was in a difficult situation and was not fully confident of her position until late in her reign after the defeat o the Spanish Armada when she finally became ‘Gloriana Virginia,’ the Virgin Queen beloved by her people. At first she had to play different parties off against each other in order to survive, and also take care not to offend continental Princes of various religious sympathies so as to keep open the prospect of a marriage match and build defensive alliances on the basis of this guessing game. She also had to cope with religious pluralism and the need to prevent the sectarian violence that was all too common on the Continent.

I will add that her position was also difficult because of the slur attached to her name that she was illegitimate; the child of the Protestant whore Anne Boleyn who had supplanted the rightful Queen Katherine of Aragon and had eventually been tried and executed explicitly on charges of adultery and implicitly on charges of witchcraft. This slur was made good use of by supporters of Mary Queen of Scots later in Elizabeth’s reign.

The solution thrashed out by Elizabeth and her supporters and advisers in both the Lords and the Commons to the politico-religious quandary has become known as the Elizabethan Settlement. The Act of Settlement/Supremacy passed in 1558-9 made Elizabeth – rather than the Pope – the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This meant that she was empowered to appoint Archbishops and Bishops, and therefore had control of the reins of Church politics. However, regarding matters of Church doctrine it was agreed that while she should be consulted on these, she should not interfere unnecessarily in them (and most of the time she kept to her part of this bargain – she only influenced two of the 39 Articles explicitly, for example). The revision of the Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer with its 42 Articles by Archbishop Matthew Parker in Convocation with Bishops Cox and Gheast was the next stage of consolidation.

The ‘total package’ that was the Elizabethan Settlement rapidly came to be known as the Anglican ‘via media’ (‘middle way’). Richard Hooker was later to describe this in a ringing phrase as the ‘Golden Mediocrity’ (mediocre ‘in them days’ was used to describe the virtuous and moderate middle ground or ‘golden mean’, and had none of its modern idolatrous connotations of ‘second best’). By Elizabeth’s time the actual influence of Erasmus on doctrinal matters was on the wane – but Erasmus rhetoric of moderation still exerted a powerful influence on the formation of this ‘Golden Mediocrity’.

As I have suggested earlier, the various factions that existed in the Church of England then, and the slightly different factions that exist in the Church of England now, all have different interpretations of this ‘Golden Mean’ – is it set between Catholicism and Calvinism; between Lutheranism and Calvinism; between Calvinism and Radicalism etc…? My view, as you will have guessed, is that it was actually a piece of benign religious/political fudge to privilege the Peace of the realm over any factional understandings of Truth. It was indeed – ‘All things to all men’.

I note that in the early 1950’s a very influential theory – since discredited – was put forward by the historian Sir John Neale concerning the Settlement. He argued that Elizabeth’s real intention had been to preserve the old Catholic faith of England in everything excepting loyalty to the Pope and the restoration of Monastic lands – but she was pushed into a more radical reforming programme by a Puritan pressure group in Parliament known as ‘The Puritan Choir’. He noted hesitations in legislation in support of his thesis. However these hesitations are now almost unanimously put down to ‘government politicking round Catholic peers and bishops until a Lords majority could be constructed to pass the settlement’ (see ‘ The History Today Companion to British History’, p.282).

I go with the current consensus – Elizabeth wanted to avoid strife with English Catholics (while hoping that the old religion in its Roman form would die out in a generation). She needed to appease the powerful Calvinist lobby without bowing to them. And her own instincts, like Matthew Parker’s, were basically Lutheran softened by Christian Humanism. And this is the context for the shaping of the 39 Articles to which I will now turn (at last!!!) - obviously, with special attention to the abrogation of the 42nd Article of Cranmer’s Prayer Book.

A final word at this stage. Just to give you a seed thought about the subject that I will turn to after considering the Articles – that is, the Elizabethan church as a persecuting Church – I’d like to briefly introduce you to the character of John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist. I remember perusing Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments’ (commonly known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’) as a child in a public library. It filled me with terror – all of those grisly, seemingly sadomasochistic depictions of deaths most horrid in graphic illustrations. The book begins with the stories of the early Christian Martyrs; then fast forwards to the martyrs of pre-reformation Protestantism (the Waldensians on the Continent, and the Lollards in England); then forwards to the persecutions of the new Reformed Christians under the still Catholic Henry VIII (with Sir Thomas Moore as the arch-villain); and finally forwards to the martyrs during the reign of ‘Bloody Mary’. The book has often been used as a rallying point for the fears of Protestant fundamentalists – the message seeming to be that persecution was always and only an attribute of Romish Popery . Indeed when John Locke was writing his epistle on Religious Toleration at the end of the seventeenth century he had to employ the collaborative skills of the scholarship of his Dutch Armenian Christian Humanist friends to debunk this myth.

However, for his time Foxe was a radical. Almost alone among magisterial Protestants he bravely protested that the burning of heretics – and indeed the death penalty for heresy – was not a good idea. When a congregation of Anabaptists who had fled to England to escape persecution on the continent were discovered worshipping in secret and tried and condemned in 1575, it was Foxe who bravely pleaded for their lives. It was Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and its affect on the public imagination which meant that there was no public stomach for a large scale burning. And it was Foxe, who when two were finally burned at the stake, comforted them in their hour of trial. In addition to this, Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments’ was a very controversial book at the time. Elizabeth was none too keen on her half-sister Mary, also a Queen of England, being portrayed as a villainess, and Foxe also wanted to commemorate the twenty Anabaptists who had died under Mary, but this was censored. His inclusion of the Lollards in his martyrology was suspect, because like the Anabaptists the Lollards had disobeyed the ‘dread majesty’ of Christian Princes (albeit Catholic ones).

All the best

Dick

I’ll do another post on other significant changes to the Prayer Book; but I’ll not keep you waiting any longer. Let us now consider the Abrogation of the 42nd article in context.
Cranmer’s 42nd Article stated that:

All men shall not be saved at length. They also are worthy of condemnation who endeavour at this time to restore the dangerous opinion that all men, be they never so ungodly, shall at length be saved, when they have suffered pain for their sins a certain time appointed by God’s justice.

The accepted view, which Farrar alludes with a degree of scepticism in ‘Eternal Hope’ (but remains agnostic on), is that this Article seems to be entirely consonant with the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg (1530), one of the documents on which Cranmer’s Articles of 1552 are based. The Confession states in Article 27—‘Of Christ’s Return to Judgment’ – that:

Also they (the Lutherans) teach that, in the consummation of the world (at the last day), Christ shall appear to judge, and shall raise up all the dead, and shall give unto the godly and elect eternal life and everlasting joys; but ungodly men and the devils shall he condemn unto endless torments. They condemn the Anabaptists who think that to condemned men and the devils shall be an end of torments.

The Article from the Augsburg Confession explicitly condemns the Anabaptists – it predates the Munster debacle by three years – but the Anabaptists were already associated, rightly or wrongly, with the Peasant Risings which had been put down ruthlessly by Lutheran Princes egged on by the explosive rhetoric of Martin Luther himself.

Cranmer’s Article, does not explicitly mention the Anabaptists but, the argument goes, it is placed in a sequence of other Articles – also deleted by Parker – which address the fears of Magisterial Protestants about Anabaptists and imply a fear of the repetition of the Munster debacle. These articles condemn the false teaching of –

Millennialism/Chiliasm – the utopian idea that men can set up the Kingdom of God here on earth (the condemnation is a clear swipe at the Messianic kingdom of Munster)

Soul sleep – the idea that the human soul is mortal, dies with the body, and that both await the general Resurrection on the Day of Judgement. Again this idea was anathema to Magisterial Protestants (although Luther had some sympathy with it). First because it might take away some of the deterrent effect of the imagined terrors of Hell by persuading people to think – in superstition- that the wait between death and Judgement could be a very long one, so a period of blessed oblivion could be anticipated before the torment begins. Second – and with this Luther would not have sympathised – it could become part and parcel of an annihilationist doctrine (the wicked are not raised from the dead, only the righteous are).

Perfectionism and Antinomianism – the idea that God’s elect are free from sin in this life and therefore can ‘let it all hang out’; again a condemnation that suggest the Munster debacle. Some of the stories that came out of Munster - of John of Leydon disporting himself with his concubines – are probably fictitious in my view. But the cruel imposition of polygamy by Leydon did give rise to the more lurid stories of unrestrained promiscuity and it is these that Cranmer addressed with his condemnation of antinomian perfectionism. (I note that these ideas – that the elect can do no wrong - have also been current in extreme/distorted manifestations of Calvinism throughout history, by the way).

As the accepted argument continues, Parker and friends felt that the danger of Munster had passed and the Church needed to address more pressing concerns (all conjecture since we have no minutes for the Convocation and no documents of personal reflection on the Convocation’s deliberations from its members). However we do note that articles condemning Anabpatists concerning their position on taking oaths, bearing arms , and on teaching that all goods be held in common were retained (and other articles on the relationship between Church and State all implicitly condemn the Anabaptists). We also note that it was actually the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed that were used as a pretext for continued persecution of Anabaptists eventually (for the teaching of at least some Anabaptist about the Incarnation was deemed heretical as I shall describe in a later post).

I’m sure the explanation about the receding threat /memory of the Munster debacle is a perfectly good explanation for the deleting of the Articles covering Soul Sleep, Chiliasm, and Perfectionism/Antinomianism. However – I may not be a Prince among experts – but I do have a wee problem with this as an explanation for the abrogation of the 42nd article. You see this article condemns Origen’s teaching that all will eventually be saved. As far as I know the Anabaptists at this time were annihilationist; and this teaching was implicitly condemned in Crammers article on Soul Sleep. (It is until the seventeenth century that Anabaptist sects appear – for example, the Dunkers, with explicitly Universalist teachings). I note that, quite properly, article 27 of the Augsburg Confession against the Anabaptists does not condemn Universal Salvation; rather it condemns the doctrine that the torments of men and devils shall have an end – which sounds very much like annihilationism to me. Curious eh?

All the best

Dick

Regarding other changes to the Prayer Book made by Parker in convocation with his brother bishops (and under Elizabeth’s watchful eye)…

First, I list some of the few changes made to the liturgy…

The very last rubric in the Communion service (called the “Black Rubric”) was dropped. This had sought to assure that kneeling during Communion did not in any way imply worship of the elements of the Bread and Wine. Its supression gave leeway to Catholics loyal to the Queen who privately understood communion in terms of transubstantiation and adoration of the Host as the ‘Corpus Christi’ (which is what the rubric implicitly cnodemned). The Thirty Nine Articles speak out against this very understanding of Communion – transubstantiation is not to be taught by Anglican clergy as sound doctrine. But put the two together and the implied message is that while the Catholic understanding of the ‘Mass’ it is not to be taught , each person is allowed to follow their own understanding of Communion in the secrecy of their heart

The prayers/curses against the Pope were dropped from the Litany to conciliate Catholic opinion (and at this time Elizabeth had not, as yet, been excommunicated from the Catholic Church and, I dare say, was not keen on this happening either)

A rubric was added to Morning Prayer prescribing the use of traditional vestments. This went against the Reformed view of vestments commended to Cranmer by Martin Bucer. It is consonant with Elizabeth’s ‘Lutheran’ instincts and was later use by her as a powerful weapon to assert her authority over the Calvinists.

Second a list of other changes to Cranmer’s Articles which are of note to us

Article 20

A preamble was added to Article 20 on the authority of the church, ‘asserting the authority of the Church to decree rites and ceremonies (one of two alterations thought to be made at the explicit request of Elizabeth). This preamble reasserts the Queen’s authority to impose vestments etc, on Calvinist clergy at her will. I’m sure Elizabeth had no sense that the wearing of vestments and the sacrificial understanding of communion are necessary to salvation. For her the vestments issue was simply a sticking point to assert her authority over.

Article 17

However, Article 17 on Predestination did give some leeway to the Calvinists. Cranmer’s version, asserts the election of the saved to salvation, but does not assert the election of the reprobate to damnation .Indeed Cranmer’s article gives a deliberate rebuke to the Reformed view of Predestination when it asserts that the elect cannot know Assurance of their salvation in this life (which became the Calvinist view in the generation after Calvin’s death). Parker and friends kept the Article as Cranmer wrote it – but deleted the rebuke about Assurance. So here was a wonderful piece of fudge that everyone could agree on – at least partially – and no one needed to disagree on. Pure genius!

• The wooly Lutheran influenced believers could agree with it, as could the Humanist pre-Armenian ‘freewillers’. Yes the elect are predestined to salvation but somehow the damned are dammed through their own free choice.

• The Calvinists and Reformed Christians could agree with it. Yes the elect are predestined to salvation – quite so; and although the Article does not state that the reprobate ear also elected to damnation (double predestination), it does not deny this. In addition although the Article does not affirm the Calvinist doctrine of Assurance, it issues no rebuke to those that do. Any moderate, non-sectarian Calvinist could buy into this. The Article is not Reformed, but it is partially Reformed and moving in the right direction.

• The secret Universalist Christians - if they existed - could agree with it. Yes we are all elected to salvation by the inescapable love of God who wills the final Restitution of All in Christ – and whose will cannot ultimately be frustrated.

Article 22

Article 22 against the doctrine of Purgatory – as Farrar notes in Eternal Hope – condemns the ‘Romish’ doctrine of Purgatory; but this leaves the door open for other understanding of Purgatory, at least in theory.

Article 29
Article 29 – ‘On the wicked that eat not the Body of Christ’ was omitted at first from the 39 Articles, and again it is thought this was done at Elizabeth’s explicit request (hence the 39 Articles were originally the 38 Articles). This Article argues that a wicked person receiving Holy Communion can derive no benefits from it, for their wickedness means that although they eat the Bread at Communion this does not become the body of Christ. I’ve always found controversy over Sacraments baffling – but as far as I understand it – (and stay with me on this because I think it leads to an important point)

• The Catholic view is that at Communion the whole substance of the Bread and the Wine are converted into the whole substance of the Body and Blood of Christ and only the appearances remain the same. So in the Catholic view the wicked do indeed eat the Body of Christ at Communion but do so to their condemnation.

• The Lutheran view is that the substance of the Bread and Wine co-exists with the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in Communion. So as with the Catholic view, the Lutheran view is that the wicked do indeed eat of the Body of Christ at communion but do so to their condemnation.

• The Receptionist view, which became the mainstream Anglican view, is that the Bread and the Wine only become the Body and Blood of Christ to those who receive it in faith. So in this view the wicked do not eat the Body of Christ at communion – they are condemned for not coming to Communion in good faith.

• The Calvinist view is that Communion is a memorial meal and the Bread remains Bread –although the Spirit of Christ is present to the Elect at Communion. So again in this view the wicked do not eat the Body of Christ at Communion, and the wicked are condemned anyway by being among the reprobate.

So the two groups of people that Elizabeth was careful not to offend here were the Lutherans abroad, and the Lutheran influenced Anglicans, and the Catholics. She was trying to keep her loyal Catholic subjects on board and, **according to the authoritative entry on the 39 Articles in ‘The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church’, she was also keen not to offend the Lutherans ‘probably in a move to facilitate good diplomatic relations with the Lutheran Princes of Germany’. Is this not curious? Surely if the 42nd article of Cranmer’s prayer book was simply a reworking of the 27th Article of the Augsburg confession she would have been equally cautious about that its abrogation might cause a stumbling block to her wooing of the Lutherans (I hope it’s now clear why I’ve laboured this obscure point!). **

Anyway in 1571 Article 29 was restored bringing the total to 39. Obviously by this point Elizabeth was past caring about delicate sensibilities over sacramental theology.

That’s quite enough on the 39 Articles. Are you still with me?

All good wishes

Dick

Still with you and am very impressed with all the info you have posted. Very appreciative and thankful. :smiley:

Thanks Paul: you are keeping my spirits up – bless you :smiley:

So where are we now? Well I hope I’ve been able to suggest to you – as fairly and truthfully as possible -that while there may not be necessary grounds for thinking that Matthew Parker was a secret Universalist – and that his Queen was at least a sympathiser – there are certainly sufficient grounds for thinking this might have been the case.

Likewise with the abrogation of the 42nd Article: there may not be necessary grounds for thinking that the abrogation was done to allow belief in Universal Salvation as a private option – but again, there are certainly sufficient grounds for thinking this.

Are we all agreed here? All for one and one for all? :wink:

I must turn now to a more depressing topic. Seven people were burnt at the stake during Elizabeth’s reign – two Anabaptists and five Arian Unitarians. At one point paranoia about two ‘sects’ that were actually very small in England – namely the Family of Love and the Anabaptists - became epidemic And, very tragically, roughly two hundred and ninety Catholics were also killed – most by beheading, but some by hanging, drawing and quartering and Elizabeth’s reign saw some appalling massacres of Irish Catholics carried out by Sir Walter Raleigh. That’s a pretty stark picture and hard to reconcile with the idea that the Queen was a Universalist sympathiser. But the picture is more complex than my brief sketch suggests – far more complex in fact. And I’d like to spend a little time with you looking at it in more detail (unless you tell me to stop!).

It is hard to ‘read’ Elizabeth. The sources for her reign are – as would be expected of this period –fragmentary and inconclusive. And so much about Elizabeth was about public persona; she gave few clues away about her private self (and, to give her credit, this seems to have made her respectful of the private selves and private beliefs of her fellow human beings). Her public persona was carefully crafted. It is commonplace to observe that Catholic England, before the time of Elizabeth, had been known as ‘Mary’s Isle’ because of the depth of devotion to the Virgin Mary shown there. Old habits die hard, even when the new religion of Protestantism had come to ascendancy. So Elizabeth, in reinventing her public persona as ‘The Virgin Queen’, not only gave justification for her disinclination to marry, but also – whether consciously or not – filled the vacuum left by the suppression of the cult of the ‘Virgin Mother of God’ (this idea was popularised fairly recently by the International hit film about Elizabeth starring Kate Blanchett).

The pageantry and etiquette at court, the allegoric symbolism of court masques, and of court poetry, and of paintings and engravings on the Royal and Imperial themes all underpinned this new cult; as did the carefully staged ‘processions’ of the Queen from town to town in England receiving the loving devotion o f her ‘dear’ people.

If the ‘Elizabeth the cult’ is a block to our access to Elizabeth’s private thoughts, another factor makes it even more difficult to sift evidence about her with over confidence – namely that Elizabeth had some very powerful and influential advisers. She may have been a mighty Christian ‘Prince’ in her own way (she is referred to as ‘Prince’ as often as she is referred to as ‘Queen’ in sources from the time). However she was never a tyrant with absolute power. Elizabethan England was not a representative democracy; but Elizabeth still had to answer to her Parliament and heed the advice of her Privy Council – composed of men like Robert Cecil Lord Burgleigh, and Francis Walsingham who, it seems, could force Elizabeth’s hand to act and speak against her better and her worst instincts when considerations of statecraft/real-politick demanded this.

We need to bear these things in mind when considering Elizabeth’s record as a persecuting Prince/Queen, and the Elizabethan Church’s as a persecuting Church– and we always need to look at the political context of the different types and phases of Elizabethan persecution.

All the best

Dick

Yep, still with you Dick, and loving it. Interesting speculations about the editing of the Articles. It is frustrating that no minutes of the Convocation have survived. Not even personal reflections or jornal entries by the participants. What a shame. Still, there seem to be plenty of hints and clues for you to do your excellent detective work with.

Well thanks for that old chum :smiley: – it is indeed a real encouragement to me. I also detect our Jason’s benign and tolerant presence hovering in the background somewhere, and I am so grateful that he mainly ,with other input, have already done such a marvellous job in expounding the pros and cons of the Athanasian Creed on a separate thread – it’s gonna make our job so much easier in the second part of this story.

Those who are reading this, whoever you are, I’d like to thank you for your patience thus far. Since Drew and Paul have given me the thumbs up I feel happy to proceed with this thread as planned. The next bit about persecution in the Elizabethan Church is important – it’s not just an afterthought now that I’ve considered the question about the motivation behind the abrogation of Cranmer’s 42nd article as best I can for the moment. A It’s really important for a fair assessment of the limits of Elizabeth’s tolerance – which I believe, despite the evidence I gave in the last post (given without any context) was actually very wide. It is also an important bridge to the next part of our story which concerns the history of the influence of the Athanasian Creed in the Anglican Church after the time of Elizabeth. However, I do intend to end my contribution to this first thread on an upbeat note by cutting and pasting posts I’ve already made about Richard Hooker’s seeming ‘hopeful universalism’ elsewhere on the site to here with some small additions (the additions will be marked in bold so that those of you who have read the original posts already can speed read the bits you are already familiar with),
I’d like to say something at this point about the relevance of history to us today. History never ever repeats itself in exactly the same way – but we can often discern some general trends in the human story (like the lesson that brutal treatment of the vanquished by the victor – no matter how just the victor’s cause - is nearly always a recipe for future violence). I strongly believe that however strange and violent the Elizabethan religious world may seem to us it also yields important lessons to us of general trends.

Very soon we will consider the case of the treatment of Catholics under Elizabeth. The initial attempts at limited toleration of Catholics within the Elizabethan Settlement were well intentioned. However, as the political situation worsened with internal and external strife in dangerous times some Catholics became involved in treason, although it seems that most remained fiercely loyal to their Protestant Queen. Many were quite unfairly persecuted, and some put to death, who were completely innocent as extremist Protestant voices whipped up fury against picturing all Catholics as a monolith in which extremists and loyalist became one beast. I’m not the first to point out the parallel between the situation of loyal Elizabethan Catholics and the parallel between loyal and moderate Muslims in the United States, Britain and Europe since 9/11. And we should continue to mind the lessons of history here in my view

There is another parallel trend that occurs to me very strongly at the moment. Just last week the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey has been speaking about the persecution of Christians in Britain and how Christians should now be prepared to fight and die for their British Christian heritage and traditions as Africa Christians are prepared to die for their faith today. I don’t wish to be unkind to George Carey – I actually know someone who was a member of his staff for a time and testifies to him and his wife being enormously kind and humane people. In addition I was always very uncomfortable when public school educated wits in the Church of England used to mock him as ‘a bit of a thicko’. However, I do take issue with his words last week.

Just from thinking about the historical issues for this thread I would conclude that the question of our ‘Christian traditions and heritage’ in the UK and elsewhere in the world is not a simple matter; rather it is a matter of competing stories which we need discernment to interpret and to sift the wheat from the chaff. Also I take issue with George’s contention that Christians are actually persecuted in the UK (although they most certainly are in other parts of the world). What he really means is that Conservative Christians have sometimes been discriminated against in the UK by insensitive and ill informed secularist. These cases have been rare and most of them have been resolved quickly and without acrimony. Yes there is a continuing row about Civil partnerships for Gay people and how recognition of these in the law has sometimes presented Conservative Christians with a choice to act against their consciences or give up their jobs (i.e. if they happen to have a job as a Registrar of births, marriages, and deaths). I think these cases could and should be dealt with more sensitively and the matter should be constantly under review – it is a terrible thing to force people’s consciences -but none of this amounts to persecution. Indeed the paper in the UK that shouts most loudly about this persecution of Christians in the UK with angry headlines has a very poor record in painting Christians concerned with social justice issues etc., in the worst possible way, and was none too supportive of Desmond Tutu in his righteous and loving struggle against Apartheid.

Speaking of Desmond Tutu I also take issue with George concerning his romantic statement about African Christians’ being prepared to die for their faith. Indeed, in a sense this is true – and I’m sure Desmond Tutu would certainly have died for love if circumstances had made this unavoidable. However, what worries me about George’s statement is that in some parts of Africa we have a parallel situation developing to that of pre-modern Europe in the time of religious wars and persecutions; where the blood of martyrs fuelled the cycle of retribution. I think we can see the following parallels between Reformation Europe and certain parts of North and Central Africa today –

We have intra religious strife between competing Christian denominations – made worse in Africa by inter religious strife with Islam
We have plague (Aids in the African context)
We have hunger and scarcity
We have the beginnings of an urban middle class who are losing touch with and sympathy for the poor as disparity in wealth and poverty rises
We have the social upheaval of urbanisation with people being displaced from their traditional village communities
We have the replacement of traditional religion with more rational monotheistic faith but with traditional beliefs persisting in debased and corrupted forms while the new order is being born
We have the beginning of centralised state and law – but older forms of social organisation and justice persisting in a fragmented and debased form

And I am sure there are other parallels too. But all of this is a perfect context for religious violence and scape-goating violence, as it was in the days of the Reformation.

We may marvel at the courage and dignity of our African brothers and sisters – but we also have to understand their situation without romanticism and do what we can to help them and pray for them.

I give a plug to my favourite charity here:

www.steppingstonesnigeria.org/

Stepping Stones Nigeria is a wonderful example of how we can be aware of the complexities of African Christianity and the potentially tragic consequences of some of its manifestations (but not all by any means); and we can help if we so choose (given that many of us will already be up to our eyes in charitable commitment).

All the best

Dick

Before looking at how first the Anabaptist and Unitarians were persecuted using a blasphemy law underpinned by the Athanasian creed, and second how the Catholics became scapegoats (two relatively simple storied). I now want to look at the stranger and more curious case of The Family of Love – I mentioned them earlier in the thread without knowing too much about them. I said then that I’d ask an old friend for some assistance. I haven’t been able to ask him – I haven’t seen him - but I have since read the standard and up to date work on the Family: ‘The Family of Love in English Society 1550 – 1630 by Christopher W,. Marsh – and a very interesting read it is too. And it is sufficient for my purposes.

There is a case for arguing that the ‘Family’ were a Universalist sect inspired by a mix of Christian Humanism and Spiritual Anabaptism. At the very least we can say that their religion had all of the nascent characteristics of the first proper Universalist sects that flourished in England in the following century. Yet I can detect a note of exclusivism in their teachings which seems foreign to Universalism proper – but they were a secret and exclusive society in a time not yet ripe for public expressions of Universalism as we understand it today. And they were a small sect, probably numbering no more than two hundred throughout our period.

However the ‘Family’ were well integrated into society – because of their non-confrontational and non-proselytising ethos, and because they guarded their beliefs with ‘Nicodemean’ dissembling – although these beliefs were often well known to others as were their affiliations. Members of the Family were employed in Elizabeth’s Yeomen of the Guard – who accompanied her on her great Processions through England, and, more intimately, guarded her bedchamber at night. Elizabeth tolerated them and it was only in the late 1570’s/ early 1580’s that the Calvinists kicked up such a fuss about them that they were investigated by the higher Church authorities – usually, it seems, with great mildness and comparative absence of intimidation. Eventually Elizabeth’s Privy Council forced an investigation into the religious affiliations of her Yeomen who, for a time, were sent out on the equivalent of extended leave from duty. However, the scare passed quickly and no serious consequences ensued for any members of the Family.

Before I look at the strange and curious history of The Family I first need to say something about an influential interpretation of who they were and their significance in history given by the atheist Marxist historian Christopher Hill. (Stay with me on this – it is relevant)

Christopher Hill was one of the greatest historians of the English Civil War (or ‘Revolution’ as he would have termed it) in a couple of generations. He had magnificent command of a huge range of sources. When I was young, I saw him speak twice –first on The ‘Diggers and the English Revolution ( at Middlesex Polytechnic (where I studied) and second on the Quakers and the English Revolution (at St Martin’s Lane Meeting House in London). The old boy was spell binding both times. I have noted that his take on Universalism in his book ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ comes with warm commendation from Louise Hickman in the ‘All Shall Be Well’ anthology. In this he gives his view of The Family of Love and many other issues. However, today I have real problems with Hill’s methodology.

Hill was rather doctrinaire in his Marxism. His use of Marxist theory when applied to the Elizabethan period suggests the following way of understanding the evidence is the correct one (I’ll give a crude version of the model to clarify things for you, but I assure you there is plenty/enough truth in what I am about to say).

The Marxist theoretical model has it that society is composed of different groups/classes that stand in a conflict relationship to each other. These groups do not share common interests and the conflict between them is what moves the historical process forwards. In this view religion in Elizabethan England was actually political ideology pure and simple; and each of the conflicting groups in society had a slightly different take on religion.

The Aristocracy – the Queen, the Lords and the Lords Bishops etc – wanted to retain power and hold on to the privileges they had which came from their status as landowners in the previous feudal stage of society. So their religious/political ideology was of a ‘conservative’ nature to justify their retaining hold on power; they made much of theological arguments about the God given, natural order of society – God given and natural as it is, always has been, and always will be – so they wanted to stress continuity with the past/tradition.

The new Middle Classes – merchants, small landowners, people in the professions etc – were the ‘new kids on the block’. They were frustrated with the aristocracy’s hold on power and wanted to overthrow them. They were chiefly represented by the Calvinists. Their religious ideology was based on literacy, thrift, and rampant individualism (hence their stress on individual rather than corporate salvation). At this moment in history they were the good guys – fighting for individual freedom and liberty from the oppression of the Aristocracy, developing commerce, science, technology and industry. However fast forward a few centuries when they have achieved their goal and ushered in Industrial Capitalism and they become the bad guys that need to be liquidated.

Then there were the Common People. Some were land workers who still largely bought into the feudal idea/lie of their obligations to the aristocracy – unless misery and starvation caused them to rebel. However, there was a burgeoning artisan class in the towns and (small) cities that formed the vanguard of what was to become the working class and were properly conscious of their own class interests. The Family of Love in this understanding were s a sort of underground resistance religious movement of the Common People, numbered in their thousands (rather than hundreds) who were Universalists and took the idea of ‘freedom from the law/Freedom in the Gospel’ as a licence for free love. Christopher Hill lauded Universalism, not because he believed it to be true – he was an atheist as I’ve stated above - but because he saw it as an example of the Common People throwing off the shackles of the oppressive ideology of their rulers. For him, belief in Universal salvation was part of the process of the Common People realising that religion is actually ‘false consciousness – a reality distorting ideology based on fictional supernatural sanctions. Therefore we can expect to find plenty of examples of popular religion actually being a vehicle for religious scepticism.’

Obviously I find this view, even in its non-caricature form, unsatisfactory (Hill was actually a bit more subtle than I’ve explained)

I think we need to be pragmatic about how we view groups/classes. Yes society does divide into groups that are unequal in power and wealth, but these groups are not always in conflict – there can be common interests between groups and indeed conflict within groups more bitter than conflict between groups. And if we impose the Marxist model on our evidence unthinkingly we can often be in danger of falsifying the same evidence – and Christopher Marsh’s study of the family reveals that the evidence in no way fits Christopher Hill’s Marxist theory.

Finally, of course I do not believe that religion can be reduced to politics. Religion is about our relationship with God - who transcends history and politics, and is the judge of both. However religion can often become confused with the political order – and it often did big time during the Reformation. I think that the Prophets of Israel were well aware of this general tendency in their critique of Priestly religion.

That’s enough Marxism. I hope it’s all clear and you will see the relevance in my next post.

All the best

Dick

I/we note that:

Erasmus wrote, in his Enchiridon that, ‘the torments of hell…are nothing but the perpetual anxiety of mind that accompanies habitual sin (and later qualified this statement under pressure so as to give it a non-Universalist ‘spin’).

The Family of Love taught that there is nothing to the pains of hell other than the torments of an unquiet conscience.
In the Parliament of 1584 – 8, just after the crisis period for the Family of love -1580 – 82 - had peaked and passed,

Elizabeth seemingly spoke against the teaching that there is ‘no Hell but a torment of conscience’ in Parliament, therefore seemingly condemning the teachings of the Family.

What are we to make of this? Well I cannot unpack the significance at a stroke – but be patient and things will become clear.

Christopher Marsh’s intriguing and exhaustive study of the primary sources on the Family reaches a number of conclusions that overturn the ideas of Christopher Hill (it’s a shame they are both named Christopher!!!).

There is no evidence to suggest that the Family of Love ever constituted a radical underground in Elizabethan society.

Their numbers were in the hundreds rather than the thousands – perhaps as few as two hundred. They were drawn mainly from the gentry rather than from the artisan class (the gentry were composed of families who had been freed from serfdom by their feudal lords during the Middle Ages, and were small land owners of modest wealth who often represented the common people in the House of Commons).

There is no evidence that the Family were involved in antinomian practices. They were accused of these by their Calvinist detractors in the early 1580’s but there is no evidence that the accusations were grounded in fact.

Members of the Family outwardly and peacefully conformed to the Anglican faith. ‘Recruitment’ was done with great care and in secret. They practised Nicodemean dissembling to cover up their true beliefs. They were non-confrontational and often highly respected members of their local communities with some holding public office as Justices of the Peace.
Despite their Nicodemean dissembling, the Family were well known about by the Queen and others but left alone because of their peaceable conformity.

In the early 1580s the Calvinists began to publish works against the Family demanding their prosecution as heretics. This coincided with a period of panic in Calvinist quarters. Their hopes of further Reform of the Church of England were on the wane as Elizabeth began appointing Bishops and senior clergy who were not sympathetic or even accommodating to their cause. It also seemed that Elizabeth was allowing herself to be wooed by a French Catholic Prince, the Duke of Anjou (although she was probably just playing at one of her diplomatic games). They badly needed a scapegoat for their anxieties.

The pattern of persecution of Family members- and of others- varied considerably in England (although it never amounted to much with the Family because of their gentle outward conformity). The idea that is was a good thing to persecute dissenters was commonsense– i a hundred years later or so this view had been reversed (a remarkable shift in the history of human sentiments) but it was still the common sense view during Elizabeth’s reign. However, the will to persecute varied from place to place.

• Some communities were too religiously lukewarm to bother with persecution.
• Some communities, in which the orthodox and the dissenters lived and worked closely together, had little stomach for persecution because of shared neighbourliness.
• A strong Calvinist presence helped stir up persecuting zeal – or ‘charitable hatred’ as it was then termed. Elizabeth did not ‘make windows into men’s souls’ but, as the old saw has it, ‘Calvin’s Geneva was a City of Glass’ in which the committees of Elders kept a close watch on people’s behaviour and were anxious to police the thoughts of their hearts. So the Calvinist need to investigate people’s thoughts and behaviour always fuelled persecution.
• Any conflict already present in a community – due to recent plagues of humans or cattle, or land disputes, or family feuding – also helped fuel persecution.

Christopher Marsh (not Christopher Hill) writes that -

**‘…it can also be suggested, tentatively at first, that criticism of the Family was to a certain extent something rather like displaced criticism of Elizabeth herself. There were, arguably, significant points of contact between the Queen and her Familist guardsmen. Elizabeth’s attitude to religious conformity was, for example, very similar to that of the Family. She and they both held that, from a magisterial point of view, an individual subject’s loyalty, obedience and outward conformity ought not count for more that his or her profound acceptance of authorised theology.

Elizabeth I is often associated with a reluctance to make windows into the souls of men, though the words were not originally hers (as I have stated in previous post, that the aphorism comes from her courtier Sir Francis Bacon). The Familists argued in self defence that persecution of one person by another for any case touching conscience was ‘not Christian like’. They urged that matters which only God could judge should not be dealt with by mere mortals, and they lamented the ‘stretching and strayning’ currently being applied to force the consciences of ordinary people. The puritans who wrote and preached against the Family of Love despised this attitude, and expended much energy and ink in countering it.**

(Marsh - The Family p.118)

So what did Elizabeth have to say In the Parliament of 1584 – 85 – just after the crisis period for the Family of Love had peaked and passed? Yes she did seemingly speak against the teaching that ‘there is no Hell but a torment of conscience’, and therefore seemingly condemned the teachings of the Family. For this, of course, she earned Christopher Hill’s implicit Marxist condemnation as an aristocratic tyrant.

But whoa – hold the horses here; I’ve checked Hill’s source - J.E. Neale’s ‘Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1584 - 1601’ (p. 70) and something very different seems to be going on. Hansard did not exist at this time – Hansard being the record of all speeches in Parliament made verbatim by a clerk – and Elizabeth’s speeches were jotted down from memory by her MPs if they seemed particularly memorable; so Neale’s sources are not 100% certain – but the context of Elizabeth’s remembered words suggest that she meant something rather different than condemning the teachings of the Family. Neale tells us that she is reported as saying the following , obviously in a very great huff –

**‘Again’ – and now her diatribe once more embraced the Puritans – ‘you suffer many ministers to preach what they list and to minister the sacrament according to their own fancies, some way one, some another, to the breach of unity: yea, and some of them so curious in searching matters above their capacity as they preach they wot (know) not what – that there is no hell but a torment of conscience.’ **

It would be wrong to completely identify the Calvinists with the Puritans – but the Calvinist made up the major portion of Puritanism at this date, certainly in Parliament. Elizabeth appears to be speaking here against both the Calvinist subversion of Royal Decrees on Holy Communion, and against the Calvinists tradition of holding ‘Prophesyings’ – un-programmed, inter-active sermons whose content had not been vetted by her Bishops (and Christopher Hill would also have seen this as evidence of the Queen’s aristocratic tyranny). However, there was no prospect at this date of a Calvinist going soft on the doctrine of Hell – this was the Calvinist’s charge against the Family of Love (along with antinomianism). I feel that Elizabeth must surely have had an ironic, bitingly sarcastic intent in her words to the ‘Puritans’ here.

In my next and final post on the Family – before moving on to the Anabaptists and Catholics – I would like to say something in more detail about their beliefs and the influence of the Humanist and Anabaptist Spiritual traditions on these.

Thanks for sticking with me.

All the best

Dick

Hi All -

Let me know if I’m still holding you (it’s Saturday, and a time for a welcome break from the ‘Abrogation of the 42nd’ – and even I am going out tonight, although I’ve been living a semi-monastic life of late!!! :laughing: ).

I think that the Family of Love are interesting to us not because they had any influence on Elizabeth or Matthew Parker - I don’t believe this for a moment - but because they show that Elizabeth tolerated people of Universalist or near Universalist beliefs very close to her, and only wobbled in her tolerance when her Privy Council demanded an investigation into them (due to agitation from the Calvinists). Also, I’ve found the story of the Family interesting in terms of being finally persuaded by it to see the evidence without Christopher Hill spectacles guiding my vision. Before Christmas I was ready to give up the quest here when I read Hill talking about Elizabeth’s address to Parliament about Hell ; but I was astonished when I realised the real context of her remark and that Hill could have missed the irony that looks me right in the face when I read it - I wonder if you agree?.

Obviously Elizabeth was motivated by power in wanting to limit the Calvinist ‘Prophesyings’ - and the Prophesyings gave a generation of people experience in a sort of democratic process which helped empower them to agitate for change in the next century; and that has to be good and wonderful. However, I am not a Calvinist, nor am I a Marxist; therefore I don’t need to think that Elizabeth was only a control freak in this matter; some of her motivation was to protect people from ‘charitable hatred’.

Certainly any sorties of harsh punishments of branding, flogging and mutilation being meted out to Calvinists in her reign are groundless. These were to happen in the following century at the initiative of the Stuart Kings who lacked the moderate wisdom of Elizabeth and her Council

All the best

Dick

Absolutely!

Again, if you notice I am silent for a time, please do not think I have lost interest. I just am not always on a stable internet connection and take as much time as I can, when I can. Plus I have a 3yr old I have to fight with as well… :frowning:

So please, post all you feel like and I will be following along as I am able. :smiley:

Right with you Dick and that was a great discovery about Elizabeth’s speech. I agree with your interpretation of what she meant, the ironic tone. Just goes to show it is worthwhile checking references and not just relying on the author to do so. Good work, Sherlock:)