Religion and the Rise of Democracy

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY

‘The breadth of reading is admirable. . . . A valuable text.’ Diarmaid MacCulloch, University of Bristol Political democracy is a secular affair, but Graham Maddox argues that its foundations are religious. Democratic ideals – freedom, equality, community spirit, oppositional politics and justice – while nursed in the arms of Athens and Jerusalem, were first transmitted to the modern world by religious teachings. Graham Maddox’s analysis of the role of religion in the formation of democracy is wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and original. He begins with a consideration of the ancient tribes of Israel and carries his thesis through early Christianity to the Reformation before considering democracy in the modern world. While the older contemporary democracies drown out their origins with rationalist praise of capitalism, recent liberation movements, like the abolition of apartheid in South Africa and the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe, demonstrate the galvanizing impetus of prophetic religion as a force for democratic progress. Religion and the Rise of Democracy offers original and controversial arguments that will be of interest to political scientists, religious historians and theologians. Graham Maddox is Professor of Politics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of New England, Australia. He is the author of Australian Democracy in Theory and Practice (1985) and The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition (1989) as well as many articles and chapters on constitutionalism, republicanism and democracy.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY

Graham Maddox

London and New York

In Memoriam RJM duorum patris fratrisque

First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 1996 Graham Maddox All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0–415–02603–2 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-19312-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-19315-6 (Glassbook Format)

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

INTRODUCTION

1

1 ANCIENT ISRAEL: THE PROPHETIC CHALLENGE

21

2 EARLY CHRISTIANITY: A KINGDOM NOT OF THIS WORLD

46

3 THE TWO CITIES: SOJOURNERS IN THE WORLD

69

4 THE TWO KINGDOMS: REFORMATION SEPARATISM

92

5 CALVINISM AND DEMOCRACY: THE GROWTH OF OPPOSITIONAL POLITICS

121

6 PURITAN DEMOCRACY: THE RISE OF POPULAR CONSCIOUSNESS

144

7 MODERN DEMOCRACY: FROM TWO KINGDOMS TO DIALECTICAL POLITICS

170

CONCLUSION

200

Notes Select bibliography Index

220 283 291

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PREFACE

Whereas the religious influences upon emerging democratic communities were once taken for granted, the very process of secularization required for the preservation of religious liberties has in turn produced a climate in which the secular foundations are assumed to be the only ones important to modern democracy. This book attempts to reaffirm the essential nature of the religious background to democratic theory. In so doing, it may seem to discover prototype democracy in some surprising places, but all such examples, I believe, are sustainable. It does not purport to be a comprehensive history of religion and politics, but alights upon some ‘analytical moments’ in the history of the West that demonstrate the force of religious challenges to illegitimate power and illustrate the quality of religious fellowship in binding communities to a democratic purpose. Except where otherwise stated in the text, biblical quotations are from the Revised English Bible, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1989. In the few other cases where a translator is not acknowledged, the translations are my own. In producing a book of this scope one inevitably incurs many debts of gratitude. I have been greatly influenced by former teachers, especially the late Professors Leonard Schapiro and Walter Ullmann, and also Professor J. J. Nicholls and Dr John B. Morrall. I am grateful to those who encouraged this project, including Professor James W. Flanagan, Professor Bernard Crick, Rev. Dr Allan W. Loy, Professor Dorothy Emmet, Rev. Professor John A. Moses, Professor John Bishop and the late Professor Robert Berki. During the period of writing, the University of New England granted me two terms of leave, both spent at Clare Hall, Cambridge, a most hospitable home away from home. I thank the respective Presidents, and my sponsoring fellow, Dr Geoffrey Hawthorn. To other friends who made Cambridge an even more congenial place to be for my family and me – especially Jim Flanagan, Ann Johnston, Graham and Barbara Miles, Maggie Heywood, Dorothy Hurst, Kathleen Fowle, Chris McLeod and Mark Goldie – we are very grateful. Some patient friends and colleagues read parts of the manuscript and supplied helpful comments: Dr Minor M. Markle, Professor Dorothy A. Lee, Professor vii

PREFACE

John Tonkin, Dr Majella Franzmann, Rev. Jim Douglass and Professors Crick and Flanagan. My good colleague, Professor Fred D’Agostino and, for the publishers, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, read the manuscript in its entirety, saving me from many errors, and I am deeply thankful for their generosity. For points of specific help I wish to thank Jenny Post, Dorothy Cordingley, David Hartley, Tim Battin, Tom Hillard, and Professors Alan Sandison and Greg Stanton. Some of the work for this book was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council, and it has been a very happy circumstance that has enabled me to work with the invaluable assistance of my colleague, Tod Moore. We have both been much assisted by the helpful staff of the Dixson Library. The manuscript proceeded through several drafts, and I have benefited greatly from the word-processing skills of Yve Richards, Janet Batchler, Cathy Coleman and, at greatest length, Cheryl Chant and Jonathan Maddox. The publishers have been very patient with me; I am grateful for the early encouragement of Nancy Marten and Claire L’Enfant, and for the courteous dealings of commissioning editor Heather McCallum and production editor Sarah Foulkes, together with their text editor, Jennifer Fellows. My companion and wife, Carol, continues to be my greatest source of friendly criticism, encouragement and sustenance. We are both immensely thankful for the love and support of the next generation: Elizabeth, Horst and Hannah, James and Lisa, Jonathan, and Susan. GM Armidale August 1995

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ATHENS AND JERUSALEM To say that the roots of modern democracy intertwine somewhere deep between Jerusalem and Athens is to invite a charge of heresy from both directions. The Christian Father Tertullian thrust the two cities worlds apart: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or the Academy with the Church?’1 What could Christian revelation learn from all the speculations of Greek philosophy? On the other hand, what help, asked the rationalist, could human institutions derive from intimations of another, divine, plane of existence? In all its essentials, democracy began with the Greeks; they bequeathed us a term, attached to a specific form of government, which in the twentieth century has caught the imaginations of the Western world in an irresistible grip. Most modern books on democracy acknowledge a semantic, and in some ways a historical, debt to ancient Athens. The 2500th anniversary of democracy – in 1992–3 – was celebrated in a widespread festival of seminars, radio broadcasts, books and articles.2 All are prepared to acknowledge the Athenians’ demonstration that a people (however narrowly that term may be construed) can govern itself. Their experiment was confined to two extraordinary centuries following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE. For most of the years between their time and ours democracy became a historical curiosity, observed only as one element of the so-called mixed constitution. The Roman republicans, for example, would admit to democratic aspects of their constitution allowing for tribal assemblies, tribunicial action and some popular voting, but under no circumstance would their senatorial oligarchy contemplate the people governing themselves. The coming of empire would plunge the democratic idea further into the recesses of the Western subconscious, whence it would be brought to light by the flickering candles of a few independent acolytes. 1

INTRODUCTION

As an isolated and remote historical experiment, then, could the Athenian democracy bequeath us any more than an evocative name and, to the modern mind, a largely unrealizable ideal? More sympathetic observers testify to a set of institutions which, however impossible they might now be to replicate, were bathed in ideals of universal validity. For all their bickering, the people who fashioned those institutions grounded them upon equality, freedom and justice. Their commitment was dignified by a respect for one another as persons, and an investment in each other’s welfare. The ethos they cultivated is as evident in their architecture, plays, poems and histories, in the speeches of their politicians, as in the nature of the institutions. It could not fail to shine through even the speculations of philosophers overtly hostile to democracy who believed themselves obliged, perhaps by the ethos itself, to give respectful weight to the views of their adversaries. If Athens inspires some genuflexion amongst the moderns, Jerusalem scarcely attracts a nod. The few who set out to revive an all but lost example can point out certain institutional resemblances between democratic Athens and the period of the tribal federation of Israel (and that is, strictly, before Jerusalem was annexed to Israel).3 Both established political communities, run by all the adult males, in repudiation of tyranny. In both traditions the enlivening myth was the repulse of oriental despotic monarchies – Egypt and the Canaanite city-states in the case of Israel, Persia in the case of Athens. Towards the end of the seventh century BCE both moved to enact complex legal codes. Despite their imperfections in practice, both upheld the ideal of equality, and both accorded a special dignity to the poor. Yet there were significant differences between them. To think of Athens is to remember a remarkable political system and all the philosophical and artistic energy seething within it. For us, the religious ceremonies that constituted meetings of the Athenian assembly and the religious fervour that called out festivals into theatre or marketplace seem incidental to the celebration of civic life; but to think of Jerusalem is to begin with the religion. It is not just that the ‘history’ of Israel comes to us in the form of religious books. The religion of Israel induced a radical change in human understanding. From the surge of new thinking about God flowed everything else – including political, material and intellectual culture. In ancient Jewish religion God assumed a novel role: the liberator of slaves. Religion was prised away from nature; breaking through the rhythm of the seasons, it spurned magical incantation and shunned propitiation, the routines of paganism. The Israelite God placed himself at the head of his chosen people as their personal leader on a march through history. Whereas nature religion had entombed people in their slavery and tightened their subjection to the forces of nature and to the king representing those forces, Judaism unlocked human personality, nurturing it in a personal relationship with the godhead. While through and through a religious experience, this relationship was irrefutably political because it was irresistibly liberating. Pagan religion was an apparatus of political subordination. Juda2

INTRODUCTION

ism tacked a light political structure on to the ark of religion. Israelite political life was but a consequence of the all-important religious fact – the relationship between God and people. Between tribal, or ‘pre-state’, Israel and democratic Athens there were resemblances in institutions and attitudes of a ‘democratic’ nature, although the term can only be applied accurately to Athens.4 There was also a great difference: we approach Athenian democracy through its political organization; we approach ancient Jewish liberation through its religion. Despite the resemblances, and despite the impact of both experiences on Western culture, in practical terms we now find them all but discarded by contemporary democratic theory. The gulf between ancient and modern democracy is greater and more significant than the physical impossibility of reproducing the Athenian assembly in most modern settings. The differences are neither fully explained by the systematic efforts of some moderns – the American Founders, for example – to vilify Athenian democracy, nor removed by the romantic attempts of some nineteenth-century British – George Grote or John Stuart Mill, for example – to assimilate all that was admirable in Athenian democracy to British political life.5 The major difference in kind between the Athenian and the modern democratic state is that the modern is a secular state in a way that the Greek was not. Since the religious element was integral to both Jerusalem and Athens, one might reasonably expect the modern democrat to repudiate both traditions. This would seem to be the secular route of modern ‘liberal democracy’, certainly under the urging of Benjamin Constant.6 For other reasons, Marxists would take a similar course. At least thirty years of democratic writing have generally neglected the religious contributions of the Athens and Jerusalem traditions. Some recent discussions insist that the modern state has only become modern by becoming secular – that is, by breaking entirely with religious traditions.7 What this approach largely overlooks is that the secularization of the modern state was an inevitable and integral outcome of the Jerusalem tradition. It was essential to the Calvinist Reformation that the realms of spiritual and temporal affairs be resolutely and rigidly separated so that both might more properly be understood and dealt with. The most obvious political statements of this process came in the writings of Hobbes, Locke and Roger Williams, but in a sense it reached back to the beginnings of the Jewish tradition, where liberation from slavestates pronounced once and for all that the rule of God had nothing to do with physical oppression: the Israelite God taught people not to join together what should be kept separate.8 The Western religious tradition was founded on separation. Secularization was the necessary response of prophetic religion to the rise of the all-powerful temporal regime.

3

INTRODUCTION

THE AUGUSTINIAN MOMENT Behind the demand for secularization stands the central notion of the two cities. We might, in the fashion of our times, have called this whole study the ‘Augustinian moment’: the moment of discovery that all human institutions in the sæculum – in the secular realm – are imperfect attempts at creating order and must all be subjected to perpetual revision. The ‘City of God’, about which glorious things were spoken in the Old Testament, was elaborated by the Psalms, the prophets and the Christian ‘kingdom of God’; but behind it also hovers the mirage of Plato’s kallipolis, the perfect order which can only be perceived in the heavenly realm. Whereas Plato could only hope that one day ‘philosophers’ might take power and impose a perfect order on earth, Augustine the realist saw that the city of the earth would always be mediate, partial and imperfect, and always the target of radical criticism from the perfect order; so the City of God cast its harsh light upon the city of the earth through the lens of the third ‘person’ of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, focusing upon the affairs of humans and awakening in those who would see a constant alertness to renewal and reform.9 The Reformation, postulating two ‘kingdoms’, insisted upon the total difference between the spiritual order and the temporal or secular world of physical beings and objects. The thoroughness with which the Reformation tide of secularization drenched the modern world, however, in time almost leached away from democratic memory all hint of the two-cities doctrine which first insisted upon the tentative and probationary nature of all government. The decisive departure from more authoritarian forms of rule was the realization – under pressure from the two-realms teaching – that no government was good enough to rule human affairs without limits in time and competence. Constitutionalism, an essential ingredient of modern democracy, is equally an essential outcome of the separations enforced by the two-realms doctrine. When most modern democrats insist upon constitutional controls, checks and balances, the integration of opposition into orderly political processes, and the separation of state and society, they are implicitly building into modern institutions cautions about human affairs conveyed by the Jerusalem tradition. Even the most secular version of modern democracy claims as its ‘moral distinctiveness’ from ancient or direct democracy its implicit distrust, and its radical chastening, of human power systems.10 There are two sides to the chastening of human power. Constitutionalists like the American Founders were ever alert to the possible abuse of state power. They often seemed less aware of other forms of oppression by some humans over others: for example, the accumulation of vast economic resources under, but often beyond the reach of, the law; the exertion of power over women and children in that private bastion of the liberal democrat, the ‘castle’ of the man’s home; or even the frankly criminal use of power in defiance of the law. As Bernard Bosanquet long 4

INTRODUCTION

ago recognized, there needs to be a measure of public power to hinder the private hindrances of people’s freedoms.11 Prophetic religion taught the injustice of a ‘justice’ which ranks and orders people, assigning some to subordination, disadvantage and legalized oppression. Radical criticism would teach the democratic polity not only to keep state power under control, but also to examine the social and economic layering of society in which many were allowed or even forced by the system to suffer. Under the capitalist dispensation reform languishes as the unspoken and often forgotten constituent of democracy. The ancient Athenians, while labouring under a static conception of ‘the good’, knew something of the need for reform through a system run by and for the poor. Their notion of isonomia – equal apportionment under the law – could recognize the need to use the law to redress social and economic imbalance: the law was the vehicle of state power against social and economic injustice.12 The moral demand of democracy is volatile and dangerous. Stability is under threat where righteous scrutiny reveals a ‘justice’ that is unjust, and where an ordered society is seen to be deranged under the prophetic vision. The ‘incalculable inspirations of grace’, in Lindsay’s term, themselves require control: that, indeed, was Hobbes’s preoccupation. How do we know that the new claims of justice against a settled order will not themselves turn out to be unjust? They will always appear unjust to those who legally benefit from the existing order. How, indeed, can power be discharged for the purposes of justice and yet be controlled? These are delicate questions, yet, as John Dunn has argued, capitalist economic analysis has had no trouble in insisting upon the need ‘to reinvent economic agency all the time’ even against the inertia of monopoly, the extraction of unearned rents and the protection of ‘comforting routines’. This inertia, recognized in the political sphere, is the enemy of democratic notions of justice, and yet the liberal order has managed to resist most attempts at social and political reconstruction. The political vision is more dim, but there remains ‘the permanent need to reinvent political and social agency throughout the world in which we now live’.13 If we were able to peel back the layers of secularization we would discover that the pressure for reform exerted by the two-realms doctrine implied this need to reconstruct a more equal and cooperative sense of community. In religious terms this means individuals conscious of their intimate relationship to God, their infinite, and therefore equal, worth in God’s sight, and the dialectical and communal nature of their discovery of the truth. In a secular world we may postulate a realm of ethical conscience which likewise roots out those defects that create the need for reform and activates the mechanisms of state power. In the 1990s champions of liberal democracy happily announce its universal triumph. The victory march has long been under way. After the Second World 5

INTRODUCTION

War ‘no doctrines [were] advanced as antidemocratic’ amid the ‘basic agreement’ that democracy was ‘the highest form of political or social organization’.14 As Giovanni Sartori observed, ‘officially’ democracy had ‘no enemies left’.15 Now, following the collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, there is no gainsaying the ‘universal acclaim that democracy enjoys at this historical moment’.16 Yet there is a Eurocentric flavour to the praise of capitalist democracy. Where apparently capitalist economies are under full collapse, and the direst poverty is the condition of most people, it strains credulity to speak of the triumph of capitalism. Most people in the former Soviet Union have yet to sample the economic advantages of an introduced capitalism; how long can the failures of former communist economies be blamed for a legacy of commodity shortages, exiguous wages and uncontrollable inflation? In the ‘Third World’ there are many prepared to blame the capitalist order for the abrading poverty of the great majority of the population. The one institution that embraced the entire South American continent, largely ignoring state boundaries, the Catholic church, gave birth to a vocal minority within its own ranks that criticized capitalism as the anti-Christian source of all miseries. We shall encounter liberation theology at the end of this book, but we may note here that, whatever modifications its exponents may have made to their theology in the face of sustained criticism, they have maintained to this day their belief in the iniquity of the capitalist system and their conviction that it is ‘the greatest evil, the rotten root, the tree that produces those fruits we all know: poverty, hunger, sickness . . . and the death of the majority’.17 An ideology which claims that there is no alternative to the liberal-democratic regimes forgets too easily that the institutions of representative government are fashioned to accommodate change. This original function remains, even though the capitalist ideology aims to control the system in order to consolidate existing power structures. The emergence of modern democratic government is part of the romantic story.18 What could be more ‘romantic’ than the Pilgrim migrations, or the Levellers’ Agreement of the People, or the Declaration of the Rights of Man, or the fantastic demands of working people for the right to form government? The modern types of democracy, no less than the ancient, were born in change, rebellion, even revolution, against all odds. Embedded in their structures are the elements of progress. The institutions of democracy are more radical than bourgeois rationalizations or elitist theories allow. When we ask what is modern democracy, we should be sensible about recognizing common usage. We may welcome, with John Dunn, the modest achievements of modern states called ‘representative democracies’: ‘moderate government, a system of rule which minimizes the direct risks which governmental power poses to . . . subjects’; ‘a modest measure of governmental responsibility to the governed’; and making the modern state and the modern capitalist economy ‘safe’ for each other.19 We are now also compelled to recognize, again with Dunn, 6

INTRODUCTION

that democracy takes shape under an ‘incessant and turbulent encounter’ between accepted state forms and an energizing idea.20 There are many elements in the blending of institution, procedure and ethos that go to make up the democratic state. Apart from recollections of Athens, they would include the legacy of the feudal order, remnants of Roman law, and memories of historical acts of liberation.21 While never forgetting the central place of Athens, this book is mainly concerned with the liberating and democratizing aspects of the Western religious tradition. Although interpretations of that tradition (or misinterpretations) have had their negative – at times devastating – impact, the core of that tradition repudiates oppression and liberates the human spirit.

DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION It is not possible entirely to separate out religious influences from other tributaries to the democratic stream. Feudal contracts, for example, though forged for practical reasons, were surrounded by religious sanction, while feudal rulers lived in close, if sometimes uneasy, relationship with the church. The reception of Roman law in central Europe could hardly be unaffected by knowledge of canon law. Even secular rebellions could be motivated by self-confident ideas of human independence religious in origin. It is possible, however, to discern aspects of the religious tradition that have a direct relevance to democratic thought, and an intimate historical connection with the emergence of democratic government. The religious influence may not be the only source, but its impact is sufficient to warrant special treatment here. Its aspects include: individualism; freedom; equality; community; covenant and contract; limited government; political opposition; reform and reconstruction; the force of outside direction; secularization and the constitutionalism of the two kingdoms.

Individualism Scarcely any idea could have had more impact on the modern West – Catholic and secular as well as Protestant – than the Reformation doctrine of ‘the priesthood of all believers’. In its religious aspect it linked each faithful person in a direct relationship with God, bypassing church and government and all the world’s dealings and all the forces of nature. Religious doctrine not only empowered individual people, but also laid a heavy responsibility upon them to interpret the scriptures for themselves, to listen to the voice of God themselves, and to render an account of their own actions as a consequence. A similar responsibility, learnt from religious experience, towards the running of the secular community propelled many into public life. Since they often acknowledged no other qualifications than a calling, 7

INTRODUCTION

the politically active could emerge from any walk of life, opening up public affairs to democratic influences.

Freedom Those who learnt to read scripture for themselves discovered, in a passage explicitly contrasting freedom and slavery, that the truth would make them free (John 8.31– 6). Augustine taught that grace enlarged the will of those who had freely chosen to believe with a dynamism that asserted individual freedom against all earthly powers.22 Students of scripture, seeking their own path to the truth, worked in Milton’s ‘mansion-house of liberty’.23 Under the guidance of scripture one of the Levellers long anticipated Mill in demanding freedom of expression: ‘better many errors of some kind suffered than one useful truth be obstructed or destroyed’.24 Above all, freedom of worship, as both Roger Williams and John Locke taught in the seventeenth century, was the paradigm of all freedoms. Forced worship was less than useless; so also the worthlessness of forced ‘consent’ was a lesson to be learnt in the secular as in the religious world.

Equality The religious tradition held that each individual person was infinitely precious in the sight of God. If infinitely, equally precious. Christians had learnt in scripture of a kingdom in which the humble and meek were exalted and those who wished to be first were put last. The song of Mary celebrated how God had ‘routed the proud and all their schemes’, had ‘brought down monarchs from their thrones, and raised on high the lowly’ (Luke 1.51–2). There was comfort in these words for the populist and the revolutionary, but the consuming pacifism of the gospels surely renders these teachings a dramatized negation of rank and station, a proclamation of equality. In particular the Western religious tradition rejects economic inequality. This is expressed through ‘God’s preference for the poor’.25 In Judaism, protection for the poor is set down as law in Deuteronomy. The same explicit anger against poverty as expressed by the prophets emerges in the gospels and in the Epistle of James, and is a recurrent theme throughout the Christian tradition to the present, especially when it encounters the political order.

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INTRODUCTION

Community To eliminate obstructive inequalities and to harmonize believers into a unity, the early Christian church practised the collection and distribution of goods according to needs. There was more to their fellowship than an economic arrangement. However sharply the Reformation etched the outlines of individual personality, the path to salvation was communal. Augustine’s City of God was a community of equals united in their unqualified love of God, and in their free compliance with the injunction to love neighbour as self. From the first emancipation of the Israelites to the present work for the liberation of peasants in Peru or Chile, the Jewish and Christian religions inspire a love turned first upon God but radiating back through the whole fellowship. Love is both a matter of personal piety and the constituent of a wide communion of souls seeking, through mutual assistance and corporate study and worship, a path through this world to their final salvation in Zion. Where necessary, it also implies political action. Incorporation into a community engendered the highest form of individualism. The expectation of redemption was so certain as to allow the individual to leave self behind. Communal worship and mutual service meant a transcendence of the self in search of the higher purpose of the community. It also led to a speculative, even reckless, investment in the welfare of others. John Winthrop exhorted his congregation to ‘delight’ in each other. A political association – even the best imaginable democracy – could never go so far. Yet the congregation had much to teach the political community, and did so directly through the Puritan migration to New England, and the Cromwellian interregnum in Britain. Our story encompasses the establishment of civil institutions in the colonies that grew out of primary democratic experience when the church congregation, having attended to ecclesiastical matters, became the town community for work-a-day affairs. In both secular and religious aspects they had learnt from a long religious heritage that a communal business meeting is a practical device for finding out something that might not otherwise have been known, or for formulating some policy alternative that might otherwise have been neglected. Their heritage included the medieval conciliarists, the Anabaptist congregation, the Levellers’ conventicle. In all these the people discovered truth through discussion. As modern democracies came of age, it would often be church communities that would instruct the political movements of ordinary people – Chartists, trade-unionists in their chapters or ‘chapels’, labour electoral leagues, and a host of welfare organizations formed to bring aid to the needy or to exert pressure on governments to attend to neglected services.

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INTRODUCTION

Covenant and contract If the formation of their community was a socio-historical event, the ancient Jews were convinced that the tie was religious. The covenant God made with his people bound them not only to himself but also to one another. Whether it was first borrowed from a pagan vassal-treaty or not, the idea was uniquely fashioned in the Mosaic covenant. With God as one party, the covenant limited the extent of human agency in the government of a community – a powerful idea in the pre-dawn of modern democracy. It was taken up by Calvinists everywhere: in France and Switzerland, Britain and the New England colonies. Modern democrats also knew of the political contract through Plato and the Roman Epicureans. They had experience of royal charters and the business contract, but the Mosaic covenant was supremely suggestive to the towering contractarians. Hobbes, no less, saw the repudiation of the direct rule of God, and the establishment of the Jewish monarchy, as the second Fall and the beginning of the age of human perversity. As the moderns noted, it was with the covenant between God and people in the background that the prophet-priest Samuel insisted that any monarchy over Israel should be conditional upon the king himself upholding God’s ultimate rule over and care for his people. In frequent reference to this example the modern political contract emerged – in Hobbes as a response to human excesses in the sæculum, and in Locke as a guarantee that governments should hold office only as long as their rule was legitimated by the consent of the people.

Limited government Locke’s covenant, and subsequently Rousseau’s different version, were one avenue for insisting upon the control of government. But the religious tradition fostered a parallel ideology holding that all government must be kept under surveillance. We saw the force of Augustine’s contention that all human agency is, by reason of the Fall, defective. The age of ‘Israel without kings’, or pre-state Israel, had with a consuming ferocity scorned the idea of human dynasties. The leader of the exodus and the covenant, the rule of ‘judges’, and the admonition of the prophets – all messengers of God without dynastic pretension – built up a withering case against monarchic rule. The kingship of God made royal power ultimately irrelevant. Not that pre-state Jewish and Christian traditions held human organization – even coercive government – to be unnecessary, but they could not be called the work of God; and even if, in the end, all power emanates from God, no particular form of rule, and no particular ruler, could claim God’s sanction. The ruler is functionally placed in jeopardy of the worst of all sins – pride. Demonstrably

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INTRODUCTION

entering public consciousness through religion, the idea that governments must be held suspect is central to modern democratic thought.26

Political opposition If many ancient Jews devoted to God’s rule would execrate kingship before it was established, they would surely oppose it once it came into being. The scriptures unveil the irrepressible source of political opposition which is an essential ingredient of modern democracy and the chief institutional differentia between the ancient and modern forms. If all governments are defective in some respects, and if all are to be subject to surveillance, it follows that an institution to carry out the scrutiny should be incorporated into the mechanisms of democratic rule. There were no such mechanisms under the Jewish monarchy, yet the Old Testament prophets afford an almost perfect paradigm of opposition. Armed with nothing but the word, and hoping for no personal reward or access to power, they rebuked kings and held nations to account for their evil-doing. They inspired ‘monarchomachs’ throughout the ages, from Knox, Buchanan and Rutherford to the Huguenots and Cromwell. The prophets are an especially compelling source for modern democracy because of their uncontained fury, and their unmasked pain, at the institutional oppression of the weak – ‘the widow and the fatherless’, the cheated, the poor, the dispossessed, the accused, the enslaved. All around they saw institutional negation of the exodus, which they never ceased to retell as the foundational myth of a liberated people. Prophetic outrage – God’s outrage – continued to run through the Christian gospel, through the martyrs, through medieval mendicant orders, to the forerunners of the Reformation and especially to the so-called ‘radical Reformation’. New ‘reformations’, such as the Wesleyan revival, continued to be movements of and for the poor, and led, repeatedly, to criticism of governments.

Reform and reconstruction The ‘Augustinian moment’ set up a constant pressure of criticism of all things, including government, in the temporal order. The Catholic world of the Middle Ages placed the responsibility for charitable work upon the church and its lay orders. The Reformation, however, as a consequence of its separation of spiritual and temporal realms, shifted responsibility for the physical well-being of people upon the secular authorities, to whom the messengers of the spiritual realm sent words of admonition. Particularly under the Calvinist world-view, the elect took on the prophetic duty of seeking out injustices and instructing the secular order to address and remedy them – to ‘search out matters to the very bottom’.27 11

INTRODUCTION

Calvinist congregations, meeting as town assemblies, provided the nearest modern equivalent to the Athenian democracy. This meant wearing their secular hats to attend to civic responsibilities. Under the representative system, responsibility to guide discussion fell largely to organized political parties, to which Burke gave theoretical justification. His idea of opposition as a constructive measure was a kind of emergency remedy when things went wrong. Yet opposition was to grow into a continuous and permanent institution under the Westminster ‘model’, where it became a secularized version of perpetual criticism exerted by the City of God. As a secular instrument, opposition would not always be the agent of reform. Against a reforming government it could be the tool of conservatism or reaction. If the spiritual realm was monist in its intellectual commitment, the secular order in its very nature was pluralist; it was the condition of secularization that diverse political views should have equal access to the claims of morality.28 In any case, as human institutions, both government and opposition could go awry. The existence of public agencies in tension, pitted by the system in recurrent competition, opened representative government to democratic influences and fashioned the mechanisms of reform.

The force of outside direction For the democrat whose will has been fortified in the spiritual domain the need to pursue justice through political means comes as a divine imperative. It may be difficult for the spiritually directed person to distinguish between acting autonomously as a responsible citizen and surrendering the will.29 Many of the great democratic innovations have come as a response to such directives, but the liberalism of liberal democracy rejects the basis of such action as essentially not human, and therefore as not edifying to autonomous and self-respecting human beings. Shirley Robin Letwin, for example, dismissed John Locke from the ranks of the liberals because of his religious ‘fundamentalism’: for in Locke civil law ‘merely provides aid for obeying divine law with greater assurance’.30 There is a danger here of thinking that direction from the spiritual realm (or from the word of God) has a one-to-one correspondence between each civil action and a specific instruction. The Calvinist position held God to be so far above the human order that it would be presumptuous for humans to expect individual direction for each dealing with worldly affairs.31 Locke did not divest the individual person of civic responsibility for his or her actions; nor is this the intent of prophetic religion. The ancient scriptures give colourful accounts of the prophet seized and shaken by the Word of God. Though hesitant and full of misgiving, he acts true to the call of righteousness within. Yet the prophet is also depicted as an autonomous human agent, arguing with God and pleading for mercy in God’s 12

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punishment of the wicked. Though taken hold of by the spirit, the prophet blazes with a human anger and laments with a human misery. It is with the strength of the spiritual armament, however, that we are at present concerned. Many men and women have acted decently, in pursuit of justice, out of a sense of civic responsibility and a fellow-feeling with all humanity. They might be instructed by humanistic observations of a Montesquieu, a Bentham, a J. S. Mill, a John Rawls, or a hundred other modern democratic writers. In some countries they may be martyred for their principles. There remains a sense in which the prophet addresses injustice with a peculiarly irresistible force. John Stuart Mill himself recognized in religious conviction the ‘element’ that ‘made a monk of Wittenberg, at the meeting of the Diet of Worms, a more powerful social force than the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and all the princes there assembled’.32 As that same monk, Martin Luther, exclaimed: ‘Our theology is certain . . . because it sets us outside ourselves.’33 It may be that the outside direction makes Luther, and many other religious and political reformers, from the trembling Moses to the defiant Roger Williams or the resolute John Wesley, declare: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ Yet together with the divine commission comes an unexampled resolve, often explained, whether by metaphor or no, as ‘superhuman’. Reinhold Niebuhr, democrat as well as theologian, wrote: ‘the most effective opponents of tyrannical government are today, as they have been in the past, men who can say “We must obey God rather than men”’.34 It does not require an instruction from God for a person to experience the force of outward direction. Plato poured his energies into educating people to a point where they could glimpse the image of ‘transcendent good’ which so reconstructs the human life that those who see it must share their experience by extending justice and goodness to their fellows. While the path to enlightenment is education, the final vision is something beyond education or human agency, but takes on the force of command from an order that is beyond the self and beyond the tangible world.35

Secularization and the two kingdoms Every ordered community needs its defence against a possible ‘riot of irresponsible divinations’.36 The Antinomians of New England were told it was dangerous to talk of God as their personal friend, and church leaders feared for their flocks being ‘blown up and down (like chaff) by every wind of new notions’.37 At this very time, in old England Thomas Hobbes was addressing the clash among ‘transcendent interests’. Conflict, particularly between religious dogmas, each claiming a universal validity, led to civil war.38 The Calvinist tradition in which Leviathan was written would suppress no religious view but the physically coercive, since under the 13

INTRODUCTION

dispensation of grace some novel view might lead to the truth. Nor should any religious creed be sanctioned by coercive power, as this would be a blasphemous confusion of the spiritual and temporal realms, entailing an impossible compulsion of free wills. The remedy is a purely secular order that makes no appeal to religious sanction; yet ‘Hobbes does not have to deny the existence of God in order to secularize the political world; in fact, by destroying the connection between God’s nature and human virtues, Hobbes enlists divine “care of mankind” in the very project of secularization’.39 The Calvinist project, then, is to separate the temporal and the spiritual orders in a more sharply defined way than even Luther’s ‘two kingdoms’ doctrine had envisaged. Since grace and salvation were God’s work, and therefore perfected in the elect, the saints could cease to worry about the care of their own souls. Secure in their expectation of salvation, they could focus upon the temporal realm which required the redemptive action of grace. Calvin’s apparent rejection of the natural order ‘implies not extreme otherworldliness but on the contrary, the rejection of otherworldliness in favor of a spiritual commitment to this world’.40 In this way, separating the secular and the spiritual orders so that the one might more forcefully impinge upon the other represented the final working-out of the relationship between Augustine’s City of God and the city of the earth.41 Once the state was recognized as fully secular, the separation of the orders could be entrenched along constitutional boundaries; their restraint upon government power reflected the removal of divine sanction from the authority of a pharaoh, a despot or a king. Henceforth government as a secular affair among humans should be subjected to the consent of the governed, and to them alone. Far from this excluding the ‘inspirations of grace’, it opened political institutions to winds of reform from the spiritual world, or from the realm of conscience; the difference was that the spiritual order would work upon the political only through the power of the Word – whose instruments were preaching and persuasion, rhetoric and discussion, which for the proponents of a ‘classical theory’ were the essence of democracy.

DEMOCRACY AND SECESSION The following account attempts to present neither a full history of religious influences upon democracy nor a detailed analysis of those specific influences out of context. It proceeds through a series of ‘analytical moments’, in more or less chronological order, in the history of Western political thought. At the fulcrum of this chronology stands the ‘Augustinian moment’. Throughout the narrative we observe a train of ever-narrowing secessions from some settled, and often domineering, order. Prophetic religion is here taken to mean the repeated attempts of humans to relate directly to 14

INTRODUCTION

the word of God, which, in every case, sets them at odds with the values and practices of the prevailing secular order – at odds with the world.42

RELIGION AND CAPITALISM In time each ‘secession’ or religious renewal will find the temporal powers moving back inexorably into the cleared space, rebuilding Babel from the rubble of each rebellion. In the democratic era a most pervasive domination inheres in the capitalist economic order.43 Churches that were in origin representatives of the spiritual realm have become respectable denizens of the ‘bourgeois’ economic and social world. Congregations that were once gatherings of the poor, inflamed with a mission to serve the even poorer, have become solid pillars of a settled social order. This syncretistic transformation has long since been addressed in the field of sociology and economic history. Any book that makes so bold as to approach the topic ‘religion and the rise of democracy’ must surely recall R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). It is not my purpose here either to supplement or to refute Tawney’s work. It is, rather, to tell a parallel tale with a different emphasis. So persuasive has the Weber–Tawney thesis on the ‘Protestant ethic’ become that it is often difficult to see the modern churches as anything but beams and girders of a capitalist economic structure. Tawney was aware that the purpose of religion was different from the routine manifestations of religious observance in respectable society. Yet the churches had fallen askew, having inherited from late Puritanism an unwarranted affection for the capitalist order. Although Tawney acknowledged his debt to the German sociologist Max Weber, it is not strictly accurate to speak of a Weber–Tawney thesis. As the title of his book announced, Weber had emphasized the ‘spirit of capitalism’, which, in his treatment, meant the transmigration of the spirit from the religious realm to the world of commerce.44 This capitalist spirit emerged from the Calvinist doctrine of the ‘calling’, which made it a moral duty to work hard, to waste neither time nor resources, to save, but not to spend on frivolous luxuries. Such behaviour created the surplus earnings and profits that could be ploughed back into capital formation. Weber himself invested much in the supposition that the capitalist world was created by the ideas of the Calvinists and their fellow-travellers (although evidence for the existence of capitalism since before the Reformation seems irrefutable).45 In preferring to avoid talk of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, Tawney exhibited ‘a traditional British preference for the concrete fact rather than abstract ideas’. He recognized the independent existence of capitalism as an economic force, and suggested a reciprocal relationship between Protestant behaviour and the capitalist economy.46 He is credited with greater fidelity to historical evidence than Weber; 15

INTRODUCTION

and his interpretation had a profound and controversial influence on Reformation historiography without in the end convincing too many historians of a direct link between capitalism and the faithful practitioners of Calvinism.47 Coming from a Christian socialist tradition, Tawney was exercised by the chronic misformation of capitalist society, and taxed the Christian churches for their failure to prevent it, or at least to modify its excesses into a more socially benign form. In a later article (1935) he saw Christianity suffering ‘at the hands of history a double deformation’, undergoing ‘a process of dilution and petrifaction – dilution by the world, petrifaction by the elect’.48 Tawney regretted the passing of the ethic of the Middle Ages, when the church had undertaken the care of its people throughout all aspects of life, and had issued strictures against usury, profit-taking and trade for its own sake. For him the modern problem was essentially ‘a dualism which regards the secular and religious aspects of life, not as successive stages within a larger unity, but as parallel and independent provinces, governed by different laws, judged by different standards, and amenable to different authorities’.49 The church, having been reduced by secularization to a mere department of social and economic life, had failed to extend its influence into the economic sphere. Tawney would scarcely recognize the interpretation, here endorsed, that secularization was a central project of the Reformation. He shared with the Christian socialists what would surely have been anathema to the Reformers – the wish to sacralize the whole of society.50 The failure of the churches to moderate capitalism – and tyranny and oppression of many kinds – remains as historical fact. Tawney wavered on the brink of attacking the churches as un-Christian: ‘A Christianity which resigns the economic world to the devil appears to me, in short, not Christianity at all.’51 To the extent that they condoned unlimited acquisition, the churches were ‘most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian faith’.52 To criticize the churches for failing to stem the capitalist tide – and even tending the floodgates – is justified. Stated baldly, however, the case against them does not give due weight to many mitigations of the industrial system or to a host of social reforms inspired by religious faith. Still less does it account appropriately for the forces of religion on the emergence of democracy. Tawney’s concerns were not our present ones – nor could they be, as long as he was unwilling to maintain a political system open to all influences.53

THE REALM OF CONSCIENCE AND MODERN POLITICS It would be tempting, with Tawney, to drive a wedge between the life of the churches and ‘the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian faith’. The failure of the churches, and of many others claiming to act under the guidance of the Western 16

INTRODUCTION

religious tradition, extends beyond conniving at the disfigurements of capitalism (to use John Dunn’s phrase).54 The story cannot deny inter-faith persecution, violent suppression of ‘heretics’, the perfidy of crusaders, inquisitors and conquistadors. The fiend of the Holocaust usurped the name Christian and appropriated a tortured version of the cross as the emblem of his iniquity. Most Christians would see in Hitler the Antichrist, and many died opposing him. They would disown all manifestations of oppression and violent conquest in the name of religion as, at best, monstrous error, at worst, betrayal of a religion of love and peace. The following account seeks to trace, through the series of ‘secessions’ already mentioned, a thread of renovated prophetic religion kept faithful to exodus and cross. The matter is hardly so simple. Often the conservators of a simple faith were also – apparently in good conscience – perpetrators of betrayal. Luther, misled by his own misconstruction of Paul, was virulent in his anti-Semitism and violent in his rejections of the peasants;55 Zwingli drowned Anabaptists, and Calvin burnt Servetus at the stake; pilgrims in old and New England were experts in drowning and burning and pressing. No doubt the worst excesses may be put down to error or betrayal, or to an opportunistic ‘devil’ quoting scripture to his own ends. Too often the representatives of the church, including Luther himself, forget Luther’s injunction to ‘leave it to the Word’. Yet, too often also, leaving it to the Word means an unconscionable quietism, and therefore surely a complicity with injustice. At least Luther knew that he was at once saved and yet sinner; what other pilgrim could avoid the same confession? Augustine, in all his realism, recognized that the church sat squarely within the city of the earth and was as sorely in need of redemption as the rest of the temporal creation. The story of religion and the rise of democracy is therefore fraught with paradox. Democracy must remain in and of the secular world, insulated through its constitutional fortifications from the consequences of ‘the incalculable inspirations of grace’. Yet the burden of this story is that democracy has taken shape, like molten glass, under the breathing of the spirit. It is a uniquely fashioned vessel open wide to reformatory (as well as conservative) influences. Paul or Augustine might now reflect that, like government itself, democracy is part of the gift of providence to a world crying out for order, peace and justice. In the end ‘the children of light’ can only look back on their patchy inheritance with a humility that entreats for forgiveness, just as Pope John XXIII begged forgiveness for centuries of anti-Semite preaching in the Christian church.56 No human failing, however, can deflect the importunate demand of the exodus and the cross for justice; no amount of subsequent oppression and cruelty can turn Moses into a slaver or Jesus into a warmonger. Their mission was love, freedom and human integrity, and this is yet the core of the Western religious heritage. Whatever static interferes with transmissions from the spiritual to the temporal world, 17

INTRODUCTION

the message is still love, joy, peace and justice. When the call for justice echoes back from the barriers of entrenched interest then undoubtedly the prophet must bring a sword and not peace; but the sword is swung in the secular world, clashing against the temporal shields of restraint and compromise; and while swinging the sword, the prophet ceases to be prophet and turns politician. Prophets, as prophets, lay no hand on the sword. Their method is preaching, translated into the political rhetoric of the courts of secular power, but no less explosive for all its detachment from coercive measures. The democratic ‘prophet’ does not have to be motivated by religion. Throughout the democratic societies an ‘ethical conscience’ draws countless good citizens towards community-building. They are individuals who are trying to rise above whatever is separative and disruptive in their characters to what is highest in each of them. The life they attain is not based on subjective whim, but on the supra-individual authority of ethical conscience. They are ordering their lives with reference to a ‘centre of judgment set above the shifting impressions of the individual and the flux of phenomenal nature’. They are unified with each other through loyalty to a self which is the same in all men.57 They may be inspired by secular writers and statespersons with a similar sense of community. It is not the purpose of the present study to pursue such writings. If we acknowledge that in the age of secularization much of the best democratic work is done by people of good conscience who are not ‘believers’, we have come to the point where we need to equate the spiritual order and the realm of conscience, at least at their point of impact upon politics. Either can be seen as a ‘world apart’, the realm of conscience offering a modern parallel to the ancient philosophers’ sphere of contemplation. Both can supply political sustenance from outside the individual person. The philosopher might draw from Plato the idea that the goodness of human life depends heavily on our having a close connection with something eminently worthwhile that lies outside of ourselves. To live well one must be in the right psychological condition, and that condition consists in a receptivity to the valuable objects that exist independently of oneself . . . there are many different ways of trying to sustain [Plato’s] attempt to connect the goodness of human life with some goodness external to one’s soul.58 Since the Reformation project of secularization has progressed so far, one might ask whether the contribution of the spiritual realm to democracy retains more than historical interest. If in political discourse the world of the spirit and the 18

INTRODUCTION

realm of human conscience may be equated, is there any longer point in distinguishing between the two? A believing person will know intimately where his or her inspiration comes from, and will continue to distinguish the spiritual order from ‘ordinary’ human conscience. There is yet value in continuing to make the distinction, for at least two reasons. First, the realm of conscience has no deep tradition of distinguishing itself from the ‘ordinary’ or the ‘temporal’. The decent citizen will exercise choice conscientiously in all dealings but will not necessarily be fortified by knowledge of a separate and constant order of things that gives substance and permanency to the source of justice welling up within. The spiritual realm, on the other hand, has had the lines of demarcation from the temporal world endlessly and repeatedly etched into the consciousness of post-Reformation religion. It is worth drawing renewed attention to this other order as an exemplar to the realm of conscience. Second (and this must be stated with some caution because there are non-religious martyrs to just causes), there is a sense in which the call of the spiritual realm to political action is more urgent and compelling and irresistible than the direction of unaided conscience. Moses or Jeremiah or Amos; Christ in the Garden of Gesthemane; Stephen, Paul, Peter and a host of martyrs; Hus and Luther, Knox and Wesley, Bonhoeffer, Biko, Martin Luther King and Romero all yearn to have the cup pass from them, to leave behind the controversy, the abuse, the pain even unto death. Yet here they all do stand and do no other. They are not all ‘democrats’, but in their resolutely asserted freedom and justice they join the prophets of democracy. Leo Strauss made the contrast between the prophets and the realm of conscience’s greatest saint of all – Socrates.59 Socrates the wise made a remark obliquely critical of the butcher tyrant Critias, and ‘this remark’, wrote Xenophon, ‘was reported to Critias’. Nathan the prophet went and stood unprotected before the all-powerful king, accusing him to his face of rapine and murder: ‘Thou art the man.’ In summary, this study seeks to recapture the memory of religious contributions to an emerging democratic order. In formal terms, they operate at three levels: the institutional, in which the methods of tribal Israel, the early church, the medieval church council and the modern congregation successively revived the example of peoples attending to their common affairs; the popular, whereby the mass of the people caught the fervour of democratic freedom from congregation and revival meeting; and the personal, whereby democratic leadership was learnt by ‘ordinary’ people through study of the word and through managing the congregational or class meeting. The Jewish and Christian traditions have had a much more profound effect upon democratic sentiment than influencing the shape of institutions, however. From the instant of founding – Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh; the exodus, 19

INTRODUCTION

the judges, the prophets; the impasse between the Roman prefect and Jesus at his trial; from the Reformation to the present – the traditions represent a radical chastening of human coercive power, devaluing its hold over individual conscience. For all its attempts at self-aggrandizement, earthly rule is made a laughing-stock when at its most pretentious. The royal panoply vainly exhibits the most fallible of all fallible human institutions. Paradoxically, though the religious tradition emphasizes the unworthiness of all human endeavour, it nevertheless elevates the human individual in his or her direct association with God. Under God, humans are equal, and made ready for equal partnership and participation in their communal life. They must set up their own governmental organizations but, mindful of the inherent fault of governments and the damage they can do, they keep them under supervision through various mechanisms, such as institutional opposition that translates to the secular realm a role learnt from the prophets, and through constitutional barriers set first along the line of demarcation between church and state. Yet they breathe into the organs of government a demand for just action, insisting that they respond to this call under the pressure of criticism — accroding to the standard of goodness — of the City of God. Though tainted with corrupting power, democratic institutions are open to a ‘prophetic’ insistence that they are controlled power for just purpose.

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1

ANCIENT ISRAEL The prophetic challenge

Emerging as the antithesis of oriental imperialism, the covenantal religion of ancient Israel is set at odds with pretensions to earthly rule. It is not possible for us to reconstruct an authentic history of Israel; nor is it my present intent to disentangle competing strands of interpretation about the formation of biblical material. Rather, it is to pursue a prophetic minority report on the state of Israel,1 an account which undoubtedly bears a hostility towards centralized power and resonates with populist demands for an alliance with God against oppressors. In the Mosaic tradition we receive the first intimations of the ‘separation of church and state’. Moses, like so many of the prophets who followed him, encountered God in the desert, far away from the temples, fortresses and palaces of Pharaoh. When God spoke to Moses, he forged an intimate relationship between the human person and the deity, while at the same time emphasizing the impenetrable distinction between God and human. As Aaron Wildavsky has observed, ‘The radical break Moses makes is to separate what Pharaoh has joined together in one person – the human and the divine – splitting partial from complete power and understanding.’2 When Moses confronted Pharaoh in the name of God, religion was withdrawn from politics, and worship made irrelevant to coercive power. From the point of view of subject peoples, however, this dualism between a political sphere and a separated religious sphere integrated the realms of individual and communal conscience in which freedom, equality and justice could be maintained over against the wielders of oppressive political power. Throughout most of world history the separation of religious and political spheres has remained conceptual, although nonetheless ‘real’ and influential. For a brief moment of our tradition, however, a community of uprising serfs engaged in the extraordinary experiment of submitting to the direct, personal rule of God. For them, direct theocracy was not, as is now commonly understood, religious legitimation of earthly rule by priests. It was ‘immediate, unmetaphorical, unlimitedly real theocracy’ 21

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under which God alone ruled.3 It was not to last long, since a century and a half is the mere twinkling of an historical eye, but its surviving ideology established all the norms for the realm of conscience on which the subsequent conceptual separations of church and state were to be founded. Israel before there were kings remained the inspiration for the seventeenth-century contractarians on whose understandings the modern liberal state was founded. Behind the reality of Israel without kings stood the foundation story of the exodus, which told how a tag-rag bunch of Hebrew slaves confronted the might of Egypt and humiliated a pharaoh. They encountered the God of the ‘tetragrammaton’, JHWH or Yahweh, in whom they reposed all their hope and trust. The covenant held by some to be embedded in this tradition ‘succeeded not only in bonding an astonishingly widespread and diverse population at least for a century and a half, but also in furnishing the ideological foundation for all of Western and Near Eastern civilizations for the next three thousand years’.4 Among the chief messages of the exodus was a lingering resentment at the oppression of slavery. The story dramatizes a sharp ‘cultural antithesis’ between the tormentors and their victims: ‘The servile status of the oppressed Semites served to accentuate the already existing socio-cultural differences between them and their overlords. The oppressed group experienced what Nietzsche in a quite different context called ressentiment – a rejection and trans-valuation of the oppressor’s ways and beliefs.’ Moses offered ‘a new religious idea that repudiated not only Egyptian values but the polytheistic world-view in general’.5 A new sense of freedom was ecstatically celebrated in the ‘Song of the Sea of Reeds’ (Exodus 15.21), one of the oldest fragments of the Hebrew scriptures – a song of liberation sung by a woman.6 THE EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL Alongside the exodus narrative stand the stories of Joshua, wherein the ‘promised land’ was delivered to the Israelites. While archaeological evidence testifies to the violent destruction of Canaanite cities at the end of the thirteenth century BCE, leaving behind the stuff of folk memories about mighty acts of conquest, the point of the story is again the faithfulness of Yahweh to his promises, and his might against the forces of oppression. Since it is now widely believed that the size of nomadic tribes in late Bronze Age Palestine was insufficient to account for the scale of the Israelite community that emerged in the lands of Canaan, new explanations have been sought. Archaeology confirms that Israel established a culture radically different from the one it replaced, but no sources of the innovations have been found outside Palestine, leaving rapid technological advance on the part of a newly ascendant local populace as the most likely reason for the abrupt change. 22

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A compelling hypothesis for the origins of Israel therefore suggests a vast local uprising of peasants seceding from the Canaanite city-states of the plains, often destroying them, and occupying the less hospitable hill-country now made more tractable by the introduction of iron implements, rock-terrace farming and newly invented cisterns to store the scarce rainwater.7 The exodus tradition itself tells of ‘a mixed company of strangers who had joined the Israelites’ (Numbers 11.4) and who held in common with them ‘the deliverance from an intolerable monopoly of force’.8 If the suggestion of Norman K. Gottwald is to be supported, it is scarcely surprising that the poor in Canaan should empathize with stories of slaves in Egypt, since the Canaanite cities, as ‘vassal’ outposts of the Egyptian empire, would have imitated the authority structures, and the methods for keeping subordinate populations under control, of the empire itself.9 In any case, production on the coastal plains of Canaan reflected, on a much smaller scale, the ‘hydraulic economy’ of Egypt.10 Labour was organized into the oppressive structures held to be necessary for draining marshes, building dikes and canals, and running a complex irrigation system. Since the Canaanite city-states stood on the ‘strategic corridor’ linking the Egyptian and Mesopotamian river-valley economies, there was pressure ‘on strong states at both poles to reproduce their governmental forms throughout the corridor in order to control it or, more indirectly, to stimulate the formation of states by peoples of the corridor in defensive response’.11 These economies were rigidly structured, and were outwardly characterized by ‘fine patrician houses surrounded by the hovels of serfs’.12 Outside the towns were indigent village communities off whose labour and produce the aristocracy of the fortified towns lived, giving nothing in return. As John M. Halligan suggests, ‘The peasant’s enemy is anyone who has a claim on his fund of rent. This can be the merchant, the tax collector, the royal commissioner who sets the quotas and market prices, the labour contractor, and, ultimately, the king. They all have one interest in the peasant, namely, profit.’13 Those who fell into debt and could not repay would be bonded into slavery. Some would want to resist their oppressors and withdraw their cooperation from the dominating power. It would appear from the complaints of local monarchs recorded in the rich source known as the Amarna correspondence (between Canaanite kings and Egyptian administrators) that sometimes entire local communities would revolt or large numbers of fugitives would escape their control and flee to robber or guerrilla bands, harassing their former tormentors.14 George E. Mendenhall concludes that there was ‘no statistically important’ invasion of Palestine at the relevant period, but that there occurred ‘the withdrawal, not physically and geographically, but politically and subjectively, of large population groups from any obligation to the existing political regimes’.15 For a number of local revolts to be transformed into a generalized movement for a new community, clearly 23

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a dynamic, galvanizing principle was necessary. In Gottwald’s words, ‘Israelite religion offered just such a broad and sharply combative ideology that gathered rebellious villagers under its banner against the state in the name of a newly active deity who invested disprivileged peoples with historic meaning.’16 If a peasant uprising at least played an important part in establishing the Israelite federation, we still have to contend with the absence of any specific reference to such an event in the biblical record. Although it is likely that the scriptures were later edited by monarchic redactors anxious to make Israel appear like a nation-state ready for monarchy from the outset, Chaney argues that fragments of narrative clearly written from a peasant perspective remain in the ‘conquest’ literature, and many of the anomalies and inconsistencies in the account of conquest may be attributable to the lingering hints of this alternative viewpoint.17 While a monarchic interpretation would wish to present two nation-states, Israel and Canaan, locked in mortal contention, Mendenhall believes that an experience of Canaan, immediate and graphic, is so consistently held up as the complete antithesis of everything Israel stands for, that the force of the scriptural account can only be appreciated on the understanding that the Israelites themselves had suffered at first hand under Canaanite oppression.18 GOD’S MESSENGERS According to the prophetic theme, the first ‘constitution’ of separatist Israel was a direct theocracy; the normal functions of state, such as waging warfare, administering the law and managing the economy were all assumed by God himself.19 Viewed from a purely human perspective, voluntary submission to an invisible ruler who could not be named amounted to anarchism. The tribal organization that developed in Canaan made the ‘direct theocracy’ look very much like a primitive democracy. The exodus tradition, however, bore a conception of a god who delivers and who leads. Having saved his people from serfdom, he continued to provide for all their needs.20 Of course this leader uses human mouths through which to speak. In the Moses story God’s servant was first sent to Pharaoh to demand the release of the slaves, but it was Yahweh who would speak to the emperor through him. When Moses’ work was done, there would be other intermediaries, not to interpret the will of deity, but to pronounce the word of God direct to the people. Though such a position might, and did, tempt people to seize upon the legitimacy of divine commission to establish a political rule of the type that the theocracy had in fact utterly rejected, throughout the century and a half of the tribal federation such temptations were collectively repulsed. God continued to rule through messengers chosen for particular, limited tasks who then returned to the comfortable obscurity of the community. Moses, the first messenger, was a case apart in that he remained Yahweh’s intermediary for more than 24

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a generation. We are not told that he had any ambitions about dynastic rule, or any hopes for imperial monuments, but such as he might have entertained would have been dashed by the ultimate denial of earthly reward, since he was refused entry to the Promised Land to which he had so resolutely helped God lead his people. To be God’s messenger one had to experience his call. One could not be judge or leader under God without first becoming a prophet – that is to say, without becoming possessed of the spirit of God: ‘The Spirit seizes upon and endows him not for power and dignity, but only for a limited mission.’21 The people had long known nebiim, prophets who saw the deity in visions, but Moses typified a new form of prophecy appropriate to the direct theocracy, since, as the Lord told the rebellious Miriam and Aaron, with Moses ‘will I speak mouth to mouth’ (Numbers 12.6–8; Authorized Version; emphasis added). Moses was not the interpreter of God, but his very voice, his very mouth, and so he remained to the end of his life. As Wildavsky shows, Moses died ‘according to the word of the Lord’ (Deuteronomy, 34.5). A more literal translation would be that Moses died ‘mouth-to-mouth’ or ‘by the kiss’ of God. This fond farewell is also a kiss of death . . . . The kiss signifies that it is right for Moses to die, that the kiss seals his lips outside the Promised Land, into which only the written words of the Lord’s prophet can go.22 And so ‘There has never yet risen in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face’ (Deuteronomy 34.10).23 The outlines of direct theocracy were drawn during the pre-monarchic period in Canaan, and theoretical reflections upon it can be found in ‘the Israelite Politeia’, the books of Judges and Samuel.24 In some respects, the judges resembled the Roman dictators who, despite the modern connotations of the term, were fully integrated within a republican constitution and were appointed to meet particular emergencies with an official competence constitutionally limited in time. Similarly, Israelite judges were commissioned for individual tasks. The difference, of course, was that while the dictators were called to plug holes in the regular republican constitution established and authorized by the people, the judges remained only human instruments of the divine will. They were called to office by the ruah, the spirit of Yahweh, which seized upon them with a rushing roar or burnt within them like a divine flame. This sign of the grace of God, given a Greek formulation, introduced ‘charismatic’ leadership to the world. When concerted action was required, judges were called as ‘the direct servants of the national God and the instruments by which the latter exercised his sovereignty’.25 Among the first of the major judges was Deborah, whose song is the ‘oldest coherent historical source’ in the Bible, contemporary with the events celebrated.26 Typically, 25

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Deborah is first called a ‘prophetess’, implying, as with Miriam, that she was seized by the spirit of Yahweh before being called to free the Israelite clans settled in the Esdraelon plain from the threat of harassment by the still ascendant Canaanite general, Sisera. Always the success is attributed directly to Yahweh, especially since a sudden rainstorm bogged the enemy’s chariots. In Deborah’s ancient song, true to the ideals of the direct theocracy, it was the Lord who came marching: earth trembled; heaven quaked; the clouds streamed down in torrents. Mountains shook in fear before the Lord, the Lord of Sinai, before the Lord, the God of Israel. (Judges 5.4–5) More important than the military threat to the tribes had been the cultural and religious threat to Israel’s way of life. In the presence of the Canaanites many tribespeople had forsaken Yahweh: ‘They chose new gods, they consorted with demons’ (Judges 5.8). The Lord’s victory was over the base and oppressive demands of pagan religion. For Buber, the paradigm case of the charismatic political leader, the quintessential judge, was Gideon. As always, ‘the spirit of the Lord took possession of Gideon’ (Judges 6.34), who was eventually given the nickname Jerubbaal, the ‘annihilator of the anti-God and false God’.27 Like Moses, he encountered Yahweh ‘face to face’. He was victorious over the Midianites and when the people asked him to be their king he said to them: ‘I shall not rule over you, nor shall my son; the Lord will rule over you’ (Judges 8.23). He would neither get kings nor be one. When one of his plentiful brood did aspire to kingship, he provoked the most bitter outburst of anti-monarchic ideology in all literature. The anti-dynastic tenor of the judges’ office was underlined by the tragedy of Jephthah, so devoted to Yahweh that he vowed to sacrifice ‘the first creature that comes out of the door of my house’ after his victory over the Ammonites (Judges 11.31). The first creature was his only daughter, and her death as a virgin symbolized the necessity for judges not to attempt to establish dynasties.28 (It also showed how faithful worshippers of Yahweh could confuse his requirements with the cruel demands of pagan deities – the very error which the judges themselves had been called upon to redress.)29 Having decisively rejected the urban civilization of the Canaanites, Israel during the tribal period was founded on a multitude of rural villages in which, we may assume, ‘lesser judges’ played a leading role. There is scarcely a modern parallel to the idea of free community which could exist ‘outside of the state sector’ and be directed largely by the religious and legal observances of a self-motivated people.30 According to 26

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Mendenhall, the Israelite community was constituted by a value-system which made the organs of centralized power unnecessary and irrelevant.31 Under the covenant each person had a direct relationship with Yahweh, to whom he or she owed allegiance. Under the guidance of this commitment, ‘Each individual at least potentially had a part in the formation of legal policy, knew the legal traditions and customs.’32 THE REJECTION OF MONARCHY Just as the traditions of Israel are rooted in a double liberation – the emancipation of slaves from Egypt, and the secession of peasants from the Canaanite kings – so throughout the period of their federation they maintained a healthy contempt for two forms of human domination, the imperial rule of the Egyptians, and the kingship of the Canaanites. In the scriptures no pharaoh is named. Pharaoh stands for an impersonal, intolerable force, pounding such an imprint upon the Israelite psyche as to have it identified by its slave origins. The Passover would be a permanent reminder that without Egypt and without Pharaoh there would be no Israel. But while Egypt is remembered, its style of domination is repudiated forever.33 From the slaves’ point of view, the rule of Pharaoh meant ‘repression, alienated work, humiliation, and enforced birth control’.34 The Exodus narrative (1.14) tells how they were made to serve ‘with rigour’, which, for many authors, implies final degradation: ‘Bondage involves work without end hence it is work that both exhausts and degrades the slave.’35 While the Egyptian empire robbed individuals under its domination of their personality, so also the petty kings of the Canaanite city-states – like the towns of Byblos, Shechem, Gezer, Lachish, Hebron, Jericho, Megiddo and Jerusalem – sought to crush the individuality of their subjects. In a sense the Canaanite cities extended and reflected Egyptian domination, for, while each king exerted total control over and within his city, each was itself an outpost of the Egyptian empire.36 In the Amarna period before the Israelite uprising, each king was originally subject to the pharaoh, paying tribute, offering troops for local Egyptian missions, and seeking imperial support to retain local ascendancy. During this period, however, Egyptian influence in the region began to decline, and with it relapsed the enforced peace of Canaan. Fighting among the kingdoms opened up opportunities for revolt by disaffected rural village populations which could play off one warring monarch against another. As more people at the periphery of the kingdoms seceded from Canaanite control, the kings imposed increasingly heavy burdens upon those who remained. Rule over the city-states, then, was characterized by extreme tyranny. Each king claimed to rule by divine right, and bolstered his tenuous legitimacy with extravagant 27

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displays of wealth surrounding the external trappings of power.37 Each built temples, palaces and immense fortifications.38 Each claimed to hold, originally under Pharaoh, the land on which his city depended. Each maintained an inordinate bureaucracy to control a centralized economy, and used a professional priesthood to reinforce political legitimacy; both institutions gave the added advantage of enabling the king to distribute personal favours in return for loyal service. As the entire structure of power – religious, military and bureaucratic – was parasitic on the neighbouring countryside, exactions from the subject populations were almost intolerable.39 As the source of all the archaeological and literary evidence from Canaanite civilization is the kings themselves, and their aristocratic, military and bureaucratic supporters, the specific conditions of oppressed populations can only be inferred from the edifice of power constructed over them. From the literature of tribal Israel, however, comes the sternest rebuke to kingship the creative mind has ever devised, nowhere to be more sharply focused than in Martin Buber’s Kingship of God. Buber demonstrates the force of the seven anti-monarchic stories of Judges.40 The first of this series, announced at the beginning of the book, derides the fall of the once-mighty king, Adoni-bezek (Judges 1.1–7). The second (Judges 3.5–11) praises the first of the judges, Othniel, in his victory over King Cushan-rishathaim. The third ridicules the luxury and extravagance of Eglon, king of Moab, ‘a very fat man’. When his tormentor, Ehud, plunged a sword into his belly, ‘The hilt went in after the blade and the fat closed over the blade’ (Judges 3.12–25). The fourth (Judges 4–5) tells how Deborah and Barak exterminated King Jabin of the Canaanites.41 The fifth (Judges 6– 8) extols the Lord’s victory over the Midianites through Gideon, the messenger who was offered the kingly crown but rejected it. In the sixth of these passages we find the famous Jotham’s fable, a song of scorn for the pretentiousness and vacuity of earthly rule. Gideon’s son, Abimelech, after killing all but one of his many brothers, sought a crown for himself on his father’s reputation. The surviving brother, Jotham, then addressed to a gathering of the citizens of Shechem his fable of the trees: all the trees came to anoint a king for themselves, and, approaching the fruit trees in turn, were rejected as each thought it was more pleasant and useful to produce fruit; but finally they came to the thorn-bush, which accepted the commission and then threatened to burn up all the trees that did not come under its ‘protection’ (Judges 9.1–21). The seventh passage, the story of Jephthah, which rejects the possibility of dynastic rule for Yahweh’s judges, appears as the antitype to the insolent pretender Abimelech. Buber summarizes the anti-monarchic literature in reference to its climax, the Jotham fable:

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The kingship . . . is not a productive calling. It is vain, but also bewildering and seditious, that men rule over men. Every one is to pursue his own proper business, and the manifold fruitfulness will constitute a community over which, in order that it endure, no one needs to rule – no one except God alone.42 The rejection of royal crowns, the caricature of kings’ ridiculous persons, the denunciation of dynastic ambition, and the derision of royal parasites are all set, historically and geographically, against continuing and new kingships threatening the Israelite pastoral federation on all sides. In the period of the judges, Israelites, armed with their new and vigorous faith, identified kingship as an institution peculiar to, and inseparably bound up with, pagan religion. Whatever else the Israelites stood for, and whatever else they achieved, they represented above all a direct and unique antithesis to pagan polytheism.43 This contrast meant a detachment from the spell of magic which was itself an oppressive tool of slavery.44 The chief characteristic of polytheistic paganism, as Zeitlin shows, was the subordination of the many gods to a supradivine force in nature. The gods themselves are subject to this higher order and cannot prevail against fate. In Egypt this force was Maat, translated as ‘truth’ or ‘justice’, but relating more to the abiding principle of order in the universe, there from the beginning and eternally unchanging.45 The conservators of a kind of proto-Puritan ethic among the Israelites – so necessary for the cohesion and even the physical and medical wellbeing of a new community46 – were revolted by the promiscuity and perversion apparently sanctioned by Canaanite religion and officially practised in its cults.47 For the pagans, agricultural production, centralized economic control and political domination over an entire people were closely intertwined.48 In Egypt, the pharaoh ‘was no viceroy ruling by divine election, nor was he a man who had been deified; he was god – Horus visible among his people’.49 He owned the entire land of Egypt, and all temporal and physical power, concentrated in his hands, was reinforced by a religious legitimacy. In Canaan, the gods of agricultural production and of economic and social centralization consolidated the rule of kings and entrenched a static social order.50 Creation myths reinforced the fixed order of nature and society. By contrast, the religion of Yahweh disconnected worship and ethical concerns from the cycles of agriculture, from the seasons and from all natural forces.51 The innovations of the compact with Yahweh were not entirely unmixed. Even in the stories surrounding Moses’ religious experience there are primitive overhangs, but the juxtaposition of the clearly primitive with the breathtakingly new only serves to point up the contrast between the new religion and its predecessors.52 Again, from the time of the tribal federation onward the story of Israelite religion is one of incessant 29

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contention between a liberating faith and influences – from Canaanites, Philistines and other pagan neighbours – that would contaminate it. This struggle exemplifies the pattern of separations that the prophetic religion, and its social movement, introduced. Accordingly, a picture of a multi-faceted dualism emerges. First and foremost was the ‘impenetrable divide’ between the human and the divine which, while paradoxically placing the human individual in a closer personal relationship with God than had previously been imaginable, also shut off the temptation for humans to challenge the place of God.53 Consequently, the rule of law split off from arbitrary will, community replaced slavery, morality was detached from power, a religious ethic confronted economic determinism, a communal democracy understood as ‘direct theocracy’ displaced earthly monarchy, a person-God annihilated the fickle idols of the pantheon, and, finally, human history emerged from the cyclic chains of nature. THE ‘TRANSITION’ TO MONARCHY To appreciate what tensions the crossing to monarchy created for our minority report54 we need to recall the virulence with which the tribal ideology had rejected imperial rule as represented by Egypt and its Canaanite outposts. Pressures towards centralization that developed after a century and a half of almost anarchic selfdirection aroused deep misgivings. The agrarian way of life remained a feature of the monarchic period. Resentment of the trappings of royal power also continued, and even though the former way of life all but crumbled under the tentacles of kingship, the religious ethic flowed afresh through the work of Yahweh’s new messengers. The classical prophets voiced and penned some of the most eloquent and unanswerable criticisms of centralized power ever conceived. It would be inappropriate to claim that the prophets themselves mark the beginning of organized opposition to government power. They were not primarily or even overtly political. They did not try to rule. They gave no example for later systems of government to follow. Yet their work left a fathomless pool of inspiration for all who would quench the passion of tyranny. Subsequent liberators would again and again draw upon their writings for refreshing reminders that to impose irresponsible rule on others is to usurp the place of God. If the modern idea of a separated church and state finds its intellectual and spiritual roots anywhere it is in the prophetic challenge.55 The movement to establish a monarchy, radically clashing with the tradition of Moses, began a ‘battle for the life of Israel between a liberation faith and a religion of legitimated order’.56 Walter Brueggemann has characterized this battle as one between two separate ‘trajectories’ of Israelite history launched from opposing conceptions of 30

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covenant, the Mosaic and the Davidic–Solomonic. The Mosaic covenant is represented as a direct, unmediated agreement between Yahweh and his people. David’s covenant, however, was struck between king and people, with Yahweh standing by as a kind of religious backdrop (2 Samuel 5.1–3).57 With the monarchy securely entrenched under Solomon, the Mosaic formulation, though falsely called to witness to the legitimacy of the king, went underground, so to speak. Yet its message was irrepressible, breaking out frequently in the marvels of classical prophecy and eventually in New Testament Christianity. THE ‘SAMUELIC CRISIS’ During the early monarchy, systems of power were quickly built up and reduplicated. The imposition of monarchy, however, was never allowed to go entirely unchallenged. Centralization was at first a necessary evil to be endured in the face of the worse evil of Philistine imperialism. Many Israelites had been reluctant to repudiate the direct kingship of God and the rally of the clans. The biblical account of the rise of the monarchy is shot through with equivocation if not downright contradiction. At the very beginning the prophet-priest Samuel greeted the elders’ first demands for a king with an angry denunciation of all kingship: a king would take away their sons for his conscript army; he would force others to ‘plough his fields and reap his harvest’. Moreover, ‘He will take your daughters for perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He will seize the best of your fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his courtiers. He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage to give to his eunuchs and courtiers.’ He would seize the best of their flocks and, Samuel said, ‘you yourselves will become his slaves’ (1 Samuel 8.11–18). While this passage may have been a retrojection of material written after Israel’s own bitter experience of despotism, or a product of post-exilic disillusionment with a kingship that had not given protection,58 doubts about adopting a monarchy ‘were already implicit in the contradiction between the genuine Mosaic Yahweh religion and any leadership which was not charismatic’.59 Samuel tells the elders that, in asking for an earthly king, ‘you have rejected your God’ (1 Samuel 10.19). In his prophetic role he reminded them of Yahweh’s personal rule: ‘I delivered you from the Egyptians and from all the kingdoms that oppressed you’ (1 Samuel 10.18; emphasis added). All kingships are explicitly denounced. In the end monarchy is reluctantly granted on the understanding that it is limited, appointments being filtered through a Yahwist sanction, and the subsequent conduct of office held in restraint by the continuing norms of the tribal federation. Monarchy over a self-governing community was a contradiction in terms, but at least the contradiction would be softened by Yahwist

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limitations. Yahweh’s priest thinks that religious observation should be held quite separate from kingly power when he accuses Saul of usurping the priestly function. When Saul is disobedient to divine instruction Samuel revokes his royal commission: ‘you have rejected the word of the Lord and therefore the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel’ (1 Samuel 15.26). In the Samuel narratives the reign of David was also meant to be limited by religious scruple under the supervision of priest and prophet. Certainly ‘the role of religion was displayed at every major step in his rise’, but that this indicates the king’s subordination to religious authority is doubtful, since both David and his predecessor used religion ‘to legitimate their authority and to help maintain social control’.60 Whatever the case, the narrative implies that social control was less than total under the first two kings, since opposition from interests representing the tribal tradition was articulated by religious spokespeople. When David dreamt of building the temple before Solomon’s time, for example, he was stopped by an oracle of Nathan. The prophet knew well enough that ‘certain Israelites viewed the building of a “house” for Yahweh as an act of infidelity, as a concession to the influence of Baal’s religion, the “established” religion of Canaan’.61 Those of Nathan’s successors who left behind written records were exercised by the contamination of religious observance, but their concerns spread to a condemnation of all kinds of malpractice. PROPHETS AND POLITICAL OPPOSITION To speak of ‘classical prophets’ is to recognize a special group among the thousands who claimed to ‘prophesy’ in Israel and its neighbours. They were distinguished from their officially maintained predecessors by a new intensity and integrity in their work.62 Amos, the first ‘writing prophet’, repudiated the professional tag, declaring that he was not a ‘prophet’. His anger was aroused by a priest of Bethel who said ‘Earn your living and do your prophesying’ somewhere else (Amos 7.13–14). The classical prophets, firm in their conviction, continually denounced ‘false prophets’. Their words gained authority from the immediacy and force of their oracles. Jeremiah was seized with the power of God’s voice: ‘Are not my words like fire . . . are they not like a hammer that shatters rock?’ (Jeremiah 23.29). Gaining in stature when set in writing, the first written prophecies were possibly set down because the threats pronounced, though immediate and dire, were not heeded by contemporary leaders.63 Prophetic oracles took various forms, but were typically visions announced in poetry that could be recited. Always the message was Yahweh’s, ‘the word of God reverberated in the voice of man’. The human applies the perspective of God to concrete situations.64 He is not an empty conduit, but a counsellor of Yahweh,65 interceding for the people, often entreating God to soften harsh judgments. 32

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The radical nature of prophecy emerged with Amos. His threat against the northern kingdom of Israel in the reign of Jeroboam II was hitherto unimaginable in the whole Israelite tradition. In an earth-crumbling blaze of condemnation, too unthinkable for his hearers to bear listening to, Amos pronounced the end of the Israelites as God’s people. His successors continued to shatter comfortable illusions of security in Yahweh’s continuing benefaction, no matter how the people behaved.66 Earnestness in their message was matched by the travail of their call to mission. The prophet, once called, was seized by God and suffused with his spirit. Jeremiah is convulsed by the grip, drunk with Yahweh’s holy words. He writhes in pain as the word assaults his senses.67 The Lord touches his mouth and places his word in his mouth (Jeremiah 1.9). Isaiah is called in an ecstatic vision of the Lord sending a seraph with a burning coal to purify his mouth, preparing it for the word (Isaiah 6.5–7).68 This imagery awakens memories of Moses, who lived and spoke ‘mouth to mouth’ with Yahweh; in Jeremiah’s case the link is conscious. Like Moses, Jeremiah answers back to Yahweh and seeks release from his call.69 Like Moses he intercedes for the people before God. Like Moses, he speaks of the covenant between Yahweh and people.70 The ecstatic vision, the rush of the spirit, the direct word of the Lord form a recurring theme, from Moses to the judges and now to the prophets. Authority claimed in this tradition is often called ‘charismatic’.71 A striking development of the classical prophets is the new emphasis on the covenant between Yahweh and his people. Attempts to link the prophets to some assumed office of ‘covenant mediator’ from pre-monarchic times are now generally discounted,72 and the neglect of the earlier prophets even to refer explicitly to a Sinai covenant suggests to some that the later prophets invented the covenant religion.73 Whatever the case, they came to believe that neither religious ceremony nor legal code could ensure the high standards of morality that membership in Yahweh’s community demanded. In their preaching the tradition ‘becomes the accuser of the present’, supplying the language, but no longer setting the limits, for present action.74 Like the tradition itself, the radical innovations of the prophets advanced on several fronts – religious, social and, in some senses, political. One remarkable development was a recognition of the alternative community for what it really was – an association of the dispossessed. Where Hosea dwelt on the surviving tradition of escaped slaves from Egypt, Isaiah, who was firmly rooted in the urban culture of Jerusalem, saw the community of the faithful as the gathering of the poor. The affluent found comfort in their mansions and their feasts; they had seceded from the community of the faithful; the people of the faith were identified by Isaiah as ‘the poor’.75 Although Max Weber insisted that ‘no prophet was a champion of “democratic” ideals’,76 this is true only in the sense that democracy is a type of regime, a system of government. In so far as the term can be applied in a social context to an ‘alternative 33

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community’ not directly constituted by a governmental system, the tendency of the prophets was profoundly democratic. From the time of Amos they turned their preaching out from the court and priestly circles to address the people direct.77 In their attack upon the religious practices of their day we first encounter the prophets as opposition to the establishment. In official circles, religious sanction and political power were indistinguishable, and in so far as the worship of Yahweh had been mixed with pagan influences, these ‘foreign’ practices, borrowed from alien tyrants, reinforced the illegitimate and exploitative exercise of royal power. However Israel may have detached herself from Canaan, Canaanite religious practices were not removed overnight. Worship of other gods, and practices which the prophets said were not appropriate to the worship of Yahweh, were therefore not ‘foreign’ at all, but part of the folk memories and customs of mixed peoples. Bernhard Lang suggests: During the four and a half centuries of Israelite monarchy (ca. 1020–586 B.C.), the dominant religion is polytheistic and undifferentiated from that of its neighbours . . . . Every individual Israelite clan, from the king down to the serfs and slaves, honours its own tutelary god or spirit who is taken to be responsible for the family’s health and well-being.78 ON FAITH AND JUSTICE It makes little difference whether we regard Israelite religion as polytheism or as monolatry (worship of one god though others exist). Many gods were worshipped among them, in a variety of cult practices. Lang sees a ‘Yahweh alone’ movement, as one among many competing claims, emerging in the middle of the eighth century with the prophecy of Hosea. In him there are no concessions to Yahweh’s rivals. Worshipping strange gods is apostasy from the one God who has chosen and protected Israel: for a spirit of promiscuity has led them astray and they are unfaithful to their God. They sacrifice on mountaintops and burn offerings on the hills . . . . Ephraim [Northern Israel] has associated with idols;

a drunken rabble, they have devoted their lives to immorality, preferring dishonour to glory. (Hosea 4.12–13, 17–18) Israel’s apostasy is ‘harlotry’, an appropriate symbol, since the old Canaanite practices which so exercised Hosea could be likened to an adulterous unfaithfulness to Yahweh.79 Although we do not find such explicitly anti- Canaanite references in 34

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Hosea’s older contemporary Amos, he too condemns the worship of ‘false gods’ (Amos 2.4) and rebukes ‘all who take their oaths by Ashimah, goddess of Samaria, all who swear, “As your god lives, Dan”’ (Amos 8.14). In the next generation Isaiah (1.21), and in the next century Jeremiah (3.1), both liken the people’s faithlessness to harlotry. Religious observances are worthless if they do not reflect high ethical standards (Hosea 6.6–11). Extravagant and ostentatious display not only identifies the religion as the sectional preserve of the well-to-do but also emphasizes the unseemly contrast between rich and poor. It is an insolence before the God who leads a people entire and undivided. Through the famous words of Amos he rages: I spurn with loathing your pilgrim-feasts; I take no pleasure in your sacred ceremonies. When you bring me your whole-offerings and your grain-offerings I shall not accept them, nor pay heed to your shared-offerings of stall-fed beasts. Spare me the sound of your songs; I shall not listen to the strumming of your lutes. And then, without a break, the ethical contrast: Instead let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like a neverfailing torrent. (Amos 5.21–4) It is the constant practice of justice that God requires, not the empty recitation of ritual, or the self-righteous display of extravagance. The vitality of religion is expressed in active justice: ‘A mighty stream, expressive of a never-ending, surging, fighting movement – as if obstacles had to be washed away for justice to be done.’80 The emptiness of ritual compared with the practice of justice is the recurrent theme for the prophets. Jeremiah’s scorn rivals that of Amos: ‘What good is it to me if frankincense is brought from Sheba and fragrant cane from a distant land? Your whole-offerings are not acceptable to me, your sacrifices do not please me’ (Jeremiah 6.20). Not only are sacrifices useless, but it is sheer vanity to think that pious displays in the temple can expiate people’s crimes: You steal, you murder, you commit adultery and perjury, you burn sacrifices to Baal, and you run after other gods whom you have not known; will you then come and stand before me in this house which bears my name, and say, ‘We are safe’? Safe, you think, to indulge in all these abominations! Do you regard this house which bears my name as a bandits’ cave? (Jeremiah 7.9–11)

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For Jeremiah the temple, at whose gates he harangued the visitors, had become the symbol of a decadent community that had put its trust in riches and power. In a mocking parody of its ritual he chanted: ‘“This place is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” This slogan of yours is a lie; put no trust in it’ (Jeremiah 7.4). In challenging the authority of the temple he not only debunked a hopeless religion, but also attacked the hierarchy of power, going all the way up to the king himself. The prophet’s motives were religious, yet the effects of protest were inescapably political. Without implying any political ambition for the prophet, religious opposition inevitably led to political opposition. The Israelite monarchy was introduced with such equivocation that political opposition was unavoidable. Rebellion was one response. In the work of the prophets, however, royal power is challenged with words and symbols of power. In the reign of David the prophet Nathan held the king to account for breaking the moral code.81 David had his servant Uriah eliminated so that the king could take his wife. In an oracle of simplicity and power, Nathan asked David to pronounce a hypothetical judgment on a rich man who stole a poor man’s ewe lamb: ‘David was very angry and burst out, “As the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He shall pay for the lamb four times over, because he has done this and shown no pity.” Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”’ (2 Samuel 12.6–7). Although the work of Elijah is shrouded in legend, the editors of the Books of Kings give an example of the confrontation between abused royal power and the prophet’s defence of traditional morality which Walter Brueggemann takes to be ‘nearly a pure paradigm of the issue’. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel’s seizure of Naboth’s vineyard may well be a generalization for widespread misappropriation of land, but the account leaves no doubt about the prophet’s role in opposition. Elijah taxes the king: ‘Have you murdered and seized property? . . . This is the word of the Lord: Where dogs licked the blood of Naboth, there dogs will lick your blood’ (1 Kings 21.19). And so ‘The prophet appeals to the unfettered work of Yahweh which calls kings to accountability and dismantles kingdoms.’82 Among the classical prophets, who were generally contemptuous of all earthly power, kingship never retained its legitimacy. In the northern kingdom assassination and coup d’état almost became the normal mode of succession after the reign of Jeroboam II.83 Amid the continuing air of conspiracy, ‘the very turmoil and confusion of the age made sovereignty in Israel a burden to be feared and a danger to be dreaded’.84 Chaos and instability have led to oppression of the ordinary people, and, as the prophet Hosea has it, Israel has become ‘utterly loathsome’ to the Lord. Before his word all kings, rulers and graven idols are like chaff: ‘They make kings, but not by my authority’ (Hosea 8.4). Isaiah’s call in ‘the year of King Uzziah’s death’ is a majestic vision of the high king of heaven, a contrast surely not lost on his audience.85 The work of Jeremiah extended through the reigns of five kings of Judah, allowing him a special insight into the 36

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monarchy. He was born in the reign of Judah’s worst king, Manasseh, but saw at close quarters the cultic reforms of the much-respected Josiah. After Josiah’s death in battle with the Egyptians, the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem (in 597 BCE) and the transportation to Babylon of its leading citizens did nothing to inspire confidence in the monarchy. Jeremiah gave counsel on foreign policy, and may have led a kind of ‘opposition party’ – ‘the public mouthpiece of an anti-monarchical faction’.86 The later oracles of Jeremiah form a blistering attack on the illegitimacy of royal power exercised without regard for the well-being of the governed. He denounces the rule of King Zedekiah: house of David, these are the words of the Lord: Dispense justice betimes, rescue the victim from his oppressor, or the fire of my fury may blaze up and burn unquenchably because of your evil actions. (Jeremiah 21.12) The trappings of royalty, especially those won through exploitation and oppression, are no proof of legitimacy, which is demonstrated alone by administering justice to the lowly and by living in the knowledge of the Lord. So the legitimate rule of King Josiah is contrasted to the despotism of his successor: Woe betide him who builds his palace on unfairness and completes its roof-chambers with injustice, compelling his countrymen to work without payment, giving them no wage for their labour! Woe to him who says, ‘I shall build myself a spacious palace with airy roof-chambers and windows set in it; it will be panelled with cedar and painted with vermilion.’ Though your cedar is so splendid, does that prove you a king? Think of your father: he ate and drank, dealt justly and fairly; all went well with him. He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor; then all was well. (Jeremiah 22.13–17) The message here is plain, but Jeremiah goes beyond mere questions of legitimacy and illegitimacy. In the end all earthly rule is vain, and the prophet announces the end. 37

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The king’s hope is ‘to live forever’, ‘to banish time and live in an uninterrupted eternal now’.87 The prophet’s poetry foretells the end of the present order, and, above all, his public weeping dashes open ‘the door of anguish’ kings think must not be opened. In the telling words of Walter Brueggemann, ‘Such weeping is a radical criticism, a fearful dismantling, because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones. Yet the loss of thrones is precisely what is called for in radical criticism.’88 IN DEFENCE OF THE POOR: PROPHECY AND THE DEMOCRATIC IMPULSE Oppression may occur in any society, with or without the seal of kingship; the prophets were the sternest critics of oppression in all its forms. In this respect their words are not confined to their own historical context, for, as Abraham Heschel reminds us, to what society would the words of Amos not apply?89 Listen to this, you that grind the poor and suppress the humble in the land while you say, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain? When will the sabbath be past so that we may expose our wheat for sale, giving short measure in the bushel and taking overweight in the silver, tilting the scales fraudulently, and selling the refuse of the wheat?’ (Amos 8.4–6) That tricks for exploiting the weak and innocent are to be found in almost all societies at all times suggests a necessary backdrop of evil, as familiar and as unremarked as the air we breathe, against which all human life is lived. It takes prophetic sensitivity to expose ‘the secret obscenity of sheer unfairness . . . the unnoticed malignancy of established patterns of indifference’:90 To us a single act of injustice – cheating in business, exploitation of the poor – is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a death-blow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world . . . . To the prophets even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions.91 Such universal expressions of outrage, however, spring from actual situations, and while the prophets wanted the thunder of their voices to roll and echo wherever injustice could be found, their rage was touched off by exploitation taking place before their very eyes and – insolence of insolences – in the name of the God of justice. Around the monarchy had grown what Max Weber called an urban patriciate,92 and whether or not the term ‘ruling class’ is appropriate, the prophet Amos knew he was 38

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dealing with the ‘leisured classes’: ‘Woe betide those living at ease in Zion, and those complacent on the hill of Samaria’ (Amos 6.1). Not only did this parasitic class live off the travail of the poor; they won their easy power by dispossessing the weak, wrenching away their means of subsistence. Much of the property of the rich had been taken over from smallholders who had secured loans on their land and had surrendered it on default of payment. They continued to pay ruinous rents to their landlords and there is a strong presumption that, deprived of the security of their land, they raised further loans on the security of their persons, on default becoming bondservants or even permanent slaves of the wealthy.93 Amos accuses the wealthy of saying ‘we may buy the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals’ (Amos 8.6).94 (Giving a sandal as a token of a concluded contract is attested in the Old Testament.) In Amos 2.6 we find the rich selling the innocent. So Amos accuses the wealthy of a complex system of exploitation: they offer loans at interest and acquire the property of the poor; they corner the grain market, holding prices low for the producers and retaining large ‘middle-man’ profits; they exact high rents from their tenants, who must then borrow more to make ends meet; and in final default their tenants are turned into slaves. Land acquisition had proceeded apace to Judah’s disgrace also: ‘Woe betide those who add house to house and join field to field, until everyone else is displaced, and you are left as sole inhabitants of the countryside’ (Isaiah 5.8). The insolence of expropriation is aggravated by lavish displays of wealth, often connected with the worship of Yahweh. While the possession of wealth appears in the Old Testament to be a sign of divine favour, affluence from exploitation incurs a prophetic condemnation that is total. Extravagance is an insult to the poor and a blasphemy to God. Woe betide you, Amos cries: You loll on beds inlaid with ivory and lounge on your couches, you feast on lambs from the flock and stall-fed calves, you improvise on the lute and like David invent musical instruments, you drink wine by the bowlful and anoint yourselves with the richest of oils, but at the ruin of Joseph you feel no grief. (Amos 6.4–6) It is not that food and drink and music are condemned in themselves, but that luxuriating in them is all that the rich do while the poor slave in misery. Wealth gained by fraud and exploitation is especially abhorrent. Amos’s contemporary Hosea knows of ‘men who move their neighbour’s boundary’ (Hosea 5.10), and merchants who use ‘false scales’ and ‘love to cheat’. Ephraim (northern Israel) says: ‘Surely I have become rich, I have made my fortune, but despite all my gains the guilt of sin will not be found 39

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in me’ (Hosea 12.7–8). In Judah, Isaiah indicts the elders who have ‘ravaged the vineyard’: ‘in your houses are the spoils of the poor. Is it nothing to you that you crush my people and grind the faces of the poor?’ (Isaiah 3.14–15). His contemporary Micah execrates the ‘false measure’ and the ‘short bushel’, the ‘misleading scales’ and the ‘fraudulent weights’ and concludes that the rich ‘are steeped in violence’ (Micah 6.10– 12). In the best conservative sense the prophets were sentinels of the traditional law. The Israelite community had been founded on the Mosaic Decalogue, an unadorned ‘apodeictic’ set of commandments around which was woven a richer tapestry of customary law, so providing for the detailed application of the basic ‘commandments’ to the more complex circumstances of a settled society. What these details were we cannot know, since the elaborate codes of Deuteronomy are the product of a later age, and probably reflect the work of the prophets themselves. Their writings seem to assume a legal tradition with the prophets themselves calling the people back to a morality centred on an ethical code.95 Some of the key passages of prophetic writing presuppose a well-established judicial system, even though this had apparently long since ceased to be guided by the traditional ethic of the Israelite community, at least as far as those who manipulated it for their own benefit were concerned. Amos accuses the well-off for turning justice ‘upside-down’, for intimidating those who would bring a case to court against the wrongdoer and persecuting those who speak the truth in court. The judicial system is used to protect those who ‘levy taxes on the poor and extort a tribute of grain from them’, while those with legitimate grievances but who cannot afford the right bribes are thrust out of court (Amos 5.7–12). Isaiah found justice denied in Judah (Isaiah 5.7), and Jerusalem had become a whore since it was no longer the home of justice: Your rulers are rebels, associates of thieves; every one of them loves a bribe and chases after gifts; they deny the fatherless their rights, and the widow’s cause is never heard. (Isaiah 1.21–3; cf. Micah 7.3) Not only was the existing law ignored for a consideration; the rulers were quite prepared to enact new decrees to deprive the disadvantaged of their just claims: Woe betide those who make unjust laws and draft oppressive edicts, depriving the poor of justice, robbing the weakest of my people of their rights, plundering the widow and despoiling the fatherless. (Isaiah 10.1–2)

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Some scholars believe the decrees in question to have eased the acquisition of land from impecunious debtors by the crown or by creditors, but in any case for the benefit and use of the landowning class. References to widows and the fatherless signify the exploitation of those with no rights at law to plead cases on their own behalf.96 The eighth-century prophets met innumerable acts of lawbreaking for which they had to condemn their communities and, as upholders of ‘constitutional law’, they denied the validity of unjust positive laws enacted at court. Their indictments of Israel and Judah took the form, in Deuteronomy, of God’s lawsuit against his people.97 Such a proceeding is foreshadowed by the prophets, as when Hosea declares that ‘the Lord has a charge to bring against the inhabitants of the land’ (Hosea 4.1), or when Jeremiah, seeing that ‘those who handled the law’ had no thought of the Lord, has Yahweh proclaim: ‘I shall bring a charge against you once more’ (Jeremiah 2.8–9; cf. Isaiah 1.2–3, 3.13–15).98 The law, then, must be upheld, but we have seen sufficient of the prophets’ anguish and passion to realize that the normal constraints of the law are insufficient to provide the high standards of ethical behaviour required by Yahweh as ruler of his people. Yet even the best-intentioned laws cannot account for all contingencies and must sometimes, even when properly enforced, result in unjust outcomes.99 This position the prophet foresees all too clearly, as Heschel suggests: Justice represented as a blindfolded virgin . . . conceives of the process of justice as a mechanical process, as if the life of man were devoid of individuality and uniqueness and could be understood in terms of inexorable generalizations. There is a point at which strict justice is unjust.100 In this context we encounter among the prophets a sense of justice which overspills legal conceptions. It has overtones of ‘righteousness’ (as in Plato’s dikaiosune) which goes beyond the demands of ‘normal’ morality and the requirements of the law. The distinction between law-abidingness and a positive disposition towards doing justice was paralleled by the twin biblical concepts mishpat and tsedaqa. Mishpat, although ‘more complex and more vague than our notions of law and judgment’,101 seems to approximate to the Greeks’ nomos by embracing both custom and law. The prophets added a sense of ethical and religious obligation to this term, but it appears to retain the static quality of ‘conformity’.102 Tsedaqa, on the other hand, extends beyond mere obligation to signify ‘at the same time veneration, respect, legality, love and charity. It symbolizes sacred virtue and secular honesty. It denotes equity and good law no less than strict law and severity. It embraces clemency and rigour. It represents above all sincerity, integrity, poverty and innocence.’103 Although the prophets were concerned with strict adherence to (just) laws, they were more anxious to call people to a just obedience to Yahweh’s leadership which knew no bounds of legal conformity but 41

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demanded ever new experiments of goodness and kindness, and ever greater intolerance of exploitation and corruption. Heschel is content to translate the distinction between mishpat and tsedaqa as that between ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’, the latter encompassing ‘a burning compassion for the oppressed’.104 The distinction between the two modes of prophetic concern – the just and the righteous – is clear enough. ‘Righteousness’, at least in Christian thought, bears unfortunate overtones of an introspective piety which, however unfairly, can scarcely be detached from ‘self-righteousness’. The goodness to which the prophets called their communities was open and external, directed against the ills of society. In the first place, their concept of justice might be expanded from the formal, legal sense into a notion of ‘social justice’. The prophets call on people individually and collectively to undertake a social responsibility. Even social justice is a term insufficient to embrace the prophets’ concerns. In them, we find the first genuine advocates of what might be called political justice. Now it is controversial to call the prophets ‘political’, since they were never politicians seeking political power. Their demand for justice, however, brought a novel dimension to the term which aroused unavoidable conflict in their society. The Israelites were comfortable with the idea of a just war against evil neighbours, but internally the ethos of their society upheld the solidarity and unity of the community against all outsiders. More than any others, the prophets discerned the seeds of internal disunity and recognized the disintegrating force of economic exploitation. Now they had to direct a just war against the internal oppressors of the poor, and although their oracles contained the threat of Yahweh’s anger against those who refused to heed his commands, their call was to engage in non-violent conflict – a war of shattering words – with the governing circle of their community. Political justice in the lawsuits of the prophets gave new meaning to just conduct.105 It recognized that the claims of the dispossessed had to be advanced against those who now had a just claim – according to all the accepted notions of justice – to hold on to what they had. Those who had acquired wealth or property by legal means had a ‘just’ (if not a ‘righteous’) title to defend it. Political justice inevitably meant a clash between rival claims to just action. At this point we encounter the closest parallel between the direct democracy of the Greeks and the democratic impulses of the prophets. We may recall that tsedaqa, according to Neher, represents ‘poverty and innocence’. The problems of the oppressed could not be confronted with anything short of political action, since they had emerged through the reordering of society under changed political sanctions. Political justice demands policy. It is by no means automatic, to be determined by reference to some specific law or decree. It must be proposed, and then compete with 42

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established policy or administrative practice. Here the prophets emerge as political opposition – not merely as generalized opposition to the monarchy or to the ruling class, though they certainly are that, but as constructive opponents, proposing alternative policy. In a society without old-age or widows’ pensions, or single parents’ benefits, the prophets’ repeated emphasis on the plight of the ‘widow and the fatherless’ seems to make them social-welfare reformers. They directed a ferocious rhetoric at those whom they charged with ‘crimes’ of uncaring simply unknown to the law.106 The prophets were so engaged in political questions that they could plausibly be accused of political ambition, but this was categorically denied.107 Yet their words, while disseminated widely amongst the people, were directed at the ‘political class’, the group of educated courtiers and civil servants who ran the king’s administration.108 When Isaiah (29.14) confronted ‘the wisdom of their wise men’ in Jerusalem, ‘it was the actual policies which were being advocated by the politicians’ that provoked him.109 The ‘crimes’ and ‘evils’ attacked by the prophets were so often not those accounted for as breaches of the law. Amos scarcely referred to the sanction of the law.110 The power of his oratory was meant to break down a rhetorical atmosphere in which it was taken for granted that the rich and powerful should enjoy to the full the fruits of their exploitation, sanctifying their prosperity with the universal claim to Yahweh’s favour (Amos 2.6–8; 3.9–10; 4.1; 5.10; 5.15; 5.21–4; 6.1–6; 8.4–6).111 Foreshadowing the charge of ancient reformers from Solon to the Gracchi, Micah decried an economic system that gave no protection to small farmers under threat of dispossession by absentee landlords made quickly rich by royal favours, actions which in the heat of debate deserved to be called robbery and stealing (Micah 2.1–5). But this is rhetoric against those who have both economic and legal power to make the most of the system. The stance of the prophets is ethical and political. They ‘offer a different assessment of Israel’s situation from that of those who guided and administered the nation’.112 In demanding ‘affirmative action’113 the prophets call for reform policies which must provoke strong opposition. With not the slightest hold on political power, then, prophets repeatedly aroused public opinion against political reaction, incubating a rhetorical climate that would make reform not only acceptable, but even inevitable. Possibly the preaching of Isaiah and Micah influenced the social and economic aspects of King Hezekiah’s reforms at the end of the eighth century,114 but the force of the classical prophets on the Deuteronomic reforms of Josiah’s reign in the second half of the seventh century BCE cannot be overestimated. The Book of Deuteronomy, fictionally presented as Moses’ second giving of the law before the crossing into the Promised Land, was probably written in the Northern Kingdom during the era of the classical prophets, and surely bears their stamp.115 The discovery of the book in Josiah’s court was made the focus

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of cultic reforms already begun; Hosea’s fulminations against the contaminated worship of Yahweh are unmistakable in the rigour of Josiah’s cultic purification. The legal system envisaged in Deuteronomy also reflects a new emphasis on the covenant between Yahweh and his people which demands of the Israelite community a standard of behaviour not recently enforced by any legal code. The political programme of the prophets had been translated into a formal demand for covenantal obedience embracing all those concerns for social justice not previously encompassed by the law. The juridical community thus prescribed might well have been ‘utopian’,116 but the instructions of Deuteronomy bear the marks of the same clearcut ethical yardstick planed out of the prophetic oracles. Deuteronomy accepts monarchy only with equivocation, so that ‘kingship is conceived, almost reluctantly, as a concession to historical reality’.117 Its polemical tone reverberates with the passion of prophetic assaults on poverty and injustice. So here the fictional Moses proclaims: When . . . one of your fellow-countrymen becomes poor, do not be hard-hearted or close-fisted towards him in his need. Be open-handed towards him and lend him on pledge as much as he needs . . . . Give freely to him and do not begrudge him your bounty, because it is for this very bounty that the Lord your God will bless you in everything that you do or undertake. The poor will always be with you in your land, and that is why I command you to be open-handed towards any of your countrymen there who are in poverty and need. (Deuteronomy 15.7–11) In chapter 24 Deuteronomy demands fair dealing over debts and insists on wage justice. The needs of aliens, orphans and widows are asserted: ‘Bear in mind that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there’ (Deuteronomy 24.18). Justice here goes beyond according legal rights; aliens, orphans and widows should be allowed to glean a portion of the rich person’s harvest. There must be fair dealing in commercial transactions. Every seventh year all debts are to be cancelled so that there ‘will never be any poor among you’, and after six years’ service slaves are to be offered their freedom (Deuteronomy 15.1–6, 12–17). Despite their hopes for the cancellation of debts, the writers of Deuteronomy knew only too well that ‘the poor will always be with you’, and that there was no end to the prophetic mission in their cause. After Judah had suffered defeat and exile to Babylon, and had at last seen the temple of Jerusalem rebuilt amid visions of a new and just society, the fifth-century prophet Malachi still had to denounce ‘those who cheat the hired labourer of his wages, who wrong the widow and the fatherless, who thrust the alien aside’ (Malachi 3.5). Less than a generation later the governor Nehemiah heeded the outcry of ‘the common people’ who complained of unserviceable mortgages and

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debt slavery, by rebuking the well-to-do and announcing new social-welfare measures (Nehemiah 5.1–13). Even though the need to return to day-to-day issues of economic and social justice remained, however, prophetic utterance had undergone a transformation through the experience of exile. The unknown poet among the Jews in Babylon (represented in Isaiah 40–55, and usually called the ‘Second Isaiah’) experienced a vision of Yahweh of such cosmic proportions as to render all earthly kingship superfluous. Amos and Hosea had announced the immediacy of God by stressing his judgment of a faithless people, while Jeremiah had warned of the conditional nature of Yahweh’s leadership, so dependent on his people’s obedience. With Second Isaiah, Yahweh, who could not from time to time forbear to blaze his anger at a faithless people, now shows his everlasting loyalty and compassion to those whom he has chosen, no matter how they behave (Isaiah 54.7–8). Before a people groaning in their Babylonian exile Second Isaiah holds up the first exodus from Egypt, a memory of overwhelming impact for the ancient Jews.118 Recalling the oldest words in Israelite scripture, the prophet celebrates Yahweh’s victory over the armies of Egypt at the Sea of Reeds (Isaiah 43.16–17; 51.9–10). Although the significance of the deliverance from Egypt seems to have made reference to the conditional covenant of Moses unnecessary, Second Isaiah attaches great importance to the permanent covenant made with David; but now the permanent covenant has been transferred to the people (Isaiah 55.3). With infinite patience, an unending capacity to forgive and an awesome tenderness the God who can command the forces of the cosmos extends to his wayward people an abiding covenant of love founded on his ‘unalterable promises of grace’.119 With this unconditional guarantee that Yahweh will stay with his people no matter what happens, all earthly powers become redundant. The might of Babylon’s kings and armies is reduced to laughable inconsequence, as ‘the poet brings Israel to an enthronement festival’. With the Song of the Sea sung anew, ‘It is as though Second Isaiah means to bring Israel back to the Doxology of Moses, but it is now only a memory recalled. It is a seizure of power in this moment that carries with it the delegitimizing of all other claimants and definers of reality.’120 Through all her trials and torments, her apostasy and faithlessness, Israel has come full circle. Once again her God is her own direct ruler, dismantling the buttresses that prop up earthly powers. Yet this reawakening to an ancient truth is not like the Greek cycling through recurrent but static constitutions. Israel’s constitution, once again a direct theocracy, has broken free of historical conceptions of earthly rule, and burst the barriers between captive and free, race and race. God’s rule is now a direct gift of love to all people.121 It is a love which cannot refrain from trampling the walls of earthbound kingdoms into the dust, a necessity radically reaffirmed by the Jewish founder of Christianity. 45

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EARLY CHRISTIANITY A kingdom not of this world

THE KINGDOM OF GOD At the beginning of his ministry Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed that the kingdom of God was ‘upon you’ (Mark 1.14–15). Like the prophets of the Old Testament he spoke of the direct kingly rule of God over his people.1 Sometimes ‘upon you’ seemed to mean ‘already here’, and sometimes it meant ‘imminent’, like the split seams of a bud showing the colours already starting to burst out.2 His immediate followers were certain that the kingdom was already present in the person of Jesus: he was the kingdom, and in him all the tradition and the promise of the Old Testament had come together. Even though he was reluctant to acknowledge titles like ‘messiah’ or ‘king’, the gospel record shows him to have been aware that God’s presence was uniquely revealed through his own actions and words. In Jesus the presence of God’s kingdom meant not only a radical detachment of the community of his followers from contemporary society, but also a reversal of the values that the wider community took to be normal.3 The upheaval he caused still shocks: those who would follow must leave their families behind, sell their possessions to feed the poor, and leave the dead to bury their dead. Even genuine respectability and honest conventional morality are as nothing in its presence. No candle of ordinary goodness is visible in its blinding light. The drama of the kingdom challenged all who encountered it to make an immediate decision for or against it,4 and for most the conditions of entry were simply too demanding; it was a call to ‘total and radical obedience, to an utterly impossible righteousness’.5 To suggest that the dramatic reversal in forsaking family, friends and possessions was mere histrionics would be too limiting. Yet Jesus was demonstrating that a person entering into the direct rule of God would discover ideals in the new community to transcend all traditional commitments. Family and friends were scarcely the literal targets of Jesus’ revolutionary sermons. This was a call to justice unheard of in the 46

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realms of ordinary morality. Beyond ordinary justice it was a demand for goodness – for ‘perfection’ no less. All the old understandings about goodness were stood on their head, so that now the last would be first, the meek would inherit the earth, and the hungry would be filled. The kingdom would be populated with outcasts – ‘publicans’, sinners, the lame, the leprous, the blind, the profligate and the destitute – whose association Jesus scandalously sought.6 With him ‘the kingdom is now present in history’.7 We may infer from the style of teachings recorded in the gospels that Jesus consciously aligned himself with the work of the classical prophets. The proclamation of the kingdom itself (Mark 1.14) rang with echoes from the Book of Daniel (7.22), which sang of the time ‘when the saints received the kingdom’.8 As John Riches recalls, many of the recorded sayings of Jesus reflected all the known types of prophetic utterances: salvation preaching; woes and threats; warnings and exhortations; apocalyptic predictions.9 He stood within the Yahwist heritage.10 In him the gospels recalled a second Moses leading his people again to a new freedom; his death and resurrection reminded them of a fulfilled and renewed exodus.11 For Paul the Christian person, having ‘died and risen with Christ’, ‘has undergone a New Exodus’.12 The kingdom of God that Jesus announced was itself a new covenant among members of a new community ready to secede from the dominant culture. It is clear from the prophecy of Jeremiah to which they referred that the Christians thought of God’s rule as one that directly impinged on the individual lives of his followers, that his law was written on their hearts rather than in statute books, and that each member of the community, high or low, priest or lay, learned or unlearned, would be reconciled individually to God.13 Yet this was a community, each person being joined with all the others through their personal association with Jesus.14 Jesus himself saw his ministry rooted in the traditions of the Israelite past, and he, like the scribes who long afterwards committed the good news to papyrus, saw his work as an elaboration of or a response to the ancient scriptures.15 In practical terms it began as a reform movement, aimed at renovating the staid routines of the religious establishment and restoring them to the radical hopes of the past. The ‘establishment’ itself was thoroughly grounded on tradition, but, as the people surrounding Jesus believed, it had lost the immediate experience of the presence of God. The movement which Jesus began made ‘an appeal to the tradition over against those who claim to be its true administrators’.16 At the same time, the tradition itself was transformed by this experience of the immediacy of God. Under the glare of this transformation everything becomes more radical.17 The irruption of the presence of God was, for his followers, and even more so for the next generation, manifest in the person of Jesus. In a sense the kingdom was Jesus.18 Never did he suggest a restoration of the kingdom of David. The newly 47

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apparent kingdom of God was radically different from all known earthly kingdoms. It was one in which the outcast and the prostitute were brought as honoured guests into the banquet-hall, where the humble were exalted and the poor were brought good news. This rule needed no vice-regents, armies or police. In Jesus the trappings of earthly power were irrelevant and stupid. The rule of God manifest in him had no need of mediation between God and human. The veil that had shielded humans from the radiance of God glowing in the face of Moses (Exodus 34.34) had been torn away, as each member of Jesus’ community, with ‘no veil over the face’, reflected ‘as in a mirror the splendour of the Lord’. And so, as Paul wrote, ‘we are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory’ (2 Corinthians 3.18). A special intimacy between Jesus and God affirmed the direct ruling presence of God. Never before had anyone addressed God with such directness. His use of the word ‘Abba’, ‘my father’, was complete linguistic innovation.19 Those who have likened ‘Abba’ to an onomatopoeic equivalent of an infant’s ‘Daddy’ have aroused some controversy,20 but this idiosyncratic usage emphasizes ‘a fellowship with God which is not mediated through the covenant, the nation and tradition, and must therefore be termed a direct fellowship’.21 To his followers this intimacy between God and human teacher meant nothing less than the very presence of God, in the person of Jesus himself, among his people. Just as in the desert Yahweh had once dwelt in a tent among his people (Exodus 33), so now the gospel of John proclaimed that the Word had become flesh and had ‘encamped among us’.22 The immediacy of the presence of God in Jesus’ teaching was reinforced by a sense of the imminence of the end of time and the coming of God’s judgment upon the world.23 Among the most forceful in emphasizing this ‘eschatological’ character of his mission was Albert Schweitzer, who placed the radical Christian message squarely within the context of Jesus’ belief in the impending destruction of the world.24 According to this view, his was one of many movements that recognized signs of the coming end of time as foretold in Jewish apocalyptic literature. Only such an interpretation, it was thought, could justify the disruptions to normal life that Jesus’ ministry demanded. Only with eternity threatening to break into human time could the impossible ethical demands of the Sermon on the Mount be made explicable. Nobody could live a ‘normal’ life under such constraints. Of course the end of the world did not come, either in Jesus’ lifetime or in that of his followers. Like all apocalyptical movements, the whole thing had been a glorious mistake,25 even if it had valuable, if puzzling, byproducts for teachers of ethics throughout the years to come.26 This conclusion seems to be the consequence of taking literally, as Schweitzer seemed to do, Jesus’ belief in the daily urgency of his ministry, which had to be complete before the impending crack of doom. 48

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Who could doubt the urgency of Jesus’ ministry, and his belief in the final judgment of God? Whether he was mistaken about what he was doing, however, has been seriously doubted. The message was urgent because every day the pains of the oppressed, with whom he so closely identified himself, seemed to get worse. The call to total perfection in Jesus’ ethical teaching was, rather than an impossible standard for ‘normal’ living, a radical criticism of all that was imperfect in his surroundings. The parables, which to some seemed inexplicable except in the context of the literal ending of time, were relevant to a world turned upside-down – the very objective of his ministry. So what was called justice in a highly structured class society was in fact injustice. What was fair recompense by ordinary standards was nothing in the face of God’s infinite bounty. What seemed legitimate rule within the dominant culture of the day was mere pretension and folly before Jesus’ authority. Throughout his parables Jesus was subverting the ‘normal’ vision of the world, making ludicrous the standard view of the correct ordering of the social world.27 There was no mistake in Jesus’ intention, however. He may well have been sure that the kingdom of God was present in his person and that God’s promise in history was fulfilled, with an air of finality, in him.28 Yet there were no bounds in time or space to God’s final acts. Jesus’ mission may perhaps be better characterized as Jewish apocalyptic rather than ‘eschatology’. God’s intervention through Jesus was decisive, but there could be no end to the benefits he would bring his people in the future.29 So the revision of values, the subversion of authorities, and the call to impossible goodness were made more in the promise of endless grace than in the dread of fearful judgment. The call was urgent and the demands heavy because everywhere evil rotted the fabric of human society; the only answer was to tear it asunder and weave it afresh. The message of Jesus was therefore unmistakably revolutionary. Yet it offered no patterns for social reconstruction; merely the challenge of total obedience to God’s sovereign love, wherever that might lead. For the Christian person the message is a matter of faith, rooted in history but not confined by historical considerations. As far as opposition to temporal political power is concerned it scarcely matters whether the origins of the tendency are rooted in the actions and words of a historical person called Jesus or in a theological movement centred on a vital conception of the Christ. Historical investigations now leave no doubt about the reality of Jesus and the distinctiveness of the movement surrounding him.30 A NEW COMMUNITY Just as in ancient times the Israelites had formed themselves into a new community, founded on the direct rule of Yahweh, by detaching themselves from the oppressive monarchies of Canaan, so also the movement sur rounding Jesus represented a new 49

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secession.31

theocratic According to the gospels, Jesus was conscious of the parallels between the first Israelite revolution and his announcement of a new kingdom. The Christ who rode into Jerusalem, humbly and on the back of a donkey, was staging a demonstration of the new kingdom in fulfilment of a prophecy of Zechariah, a prophet with whom Jesus seems to have been especially familiar: Daughter of Zion, rejoice with all your heart; shout in triumph, daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king is coming to you, his cause won, his victory gained, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.32 (Zechariah 9.9) As the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews declared, the community founded by Jesus was even more of a community than that of the exodus (Hebrews 3.1–6). In the theology of Paul, the Christian person is one who has participated in a new exodus, and in being challenged by Christ’s teaching, has ‘stood at the foot of a New Sinai’.33 This community claimed the place of the new compact, as foretold by the prophet Jeremiah (31.31–4),34 Paul spoke of a new creation (ktisis), or, as the New English Bible styles it, ‘When anyone is united to Christ, There is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun’ (2 Corinthians 5.17; emphasis added).35 The gospel writers were convinced that Jesus was rebuilding a community.36 Yet the new community should never crystallize into rigid institutions, since with the hope of resurrection the new exodus would be suffused with a self-renewing vitality.37 Just as the bond of the community was love, its self-renovating power was based on forgiveness, a radical innovation Jesus introduced into religious thinking.38 Forgiveness, which had scarcely been thought of as a human attribute, was only possible for those whose spirits had been elevated by their intimate contact with God. Just as Jesus had revealed an unprecedented closeness to God, so also his followers found an open path to sharing that intimacy: ‘To prove that you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his Son, crying “Abba! Father!” You are therefore no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, an heir by God’s own act’ (Galatians 4.6–7; cf. Romans 8.14–17). The members of this community were directly adopted by God, and were joined to each other by a close family relationship. In so far as there is anything resembling earthly government among them it would best be called ‘fratriarchy’, a brotherly companionship.39 The community of the kingdom was no mere support group, however. It made demands upon its members which by normal standards would be regarded as simply 50

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impossible.40

It promised danger and sacrifice, and an inevitable clash with constituted authority. It demanded loyalty to the point of death.41 Membership was defined as ‘those who have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, shown mercy to the prisoner and outcast – who have, in short, done the works of Christ’.42 Despite the depths to which spiritual insight and experience shook the individual souls of the believers, this was a community built on love for others, both within and outside the group. Any attempt to avoid contact with the unpleasant or dangerous, and any wish to retreat into a righteous personal communion with God that excluded others, was no less than a denial of the being of God.43 As the manifesto of the post-Easter church declared, love breaks down all barriers between people, so that ‘There is no question here of Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman; but Christ is all, and is in all’ (Colossians 3.11).44 It was of the nature of a dynamically dangerous faith that heresies would break out within the nascent church. False prophets occasionally circulated outlandish stories about the Christ,45 and rivalries between would-be leaders aroused jealousies, but always the words of the great healer, and above all the experience of his death and resurrection, remained as symbols of unity in love.46 Despite the hope of enfolding all peoples, even to the ends of the earth, in a loving embrace, the members knew that in temporal terms they were engaged in a losing battle with the powers of the earth. Like Israel itself, they were a chosen few who must fortify themselves within the kingdom of God against the forces of the world (Luke 12.32). Their new life, while founded on a joyous new beginning, was marked by suffering as soon as it, like the community’s founder, confronted earthly powers (Galatians 5.6). So thoroughly did it reverse the values of the world that its membership was characterized by drawing together all the poor and outcasts, the ‘dregs of humanity’, and investing them with supreme importance as sons and daughters of God himself.47 Those who would bring good news to the poor would challenge the rich in their castles, and so would inevitably incur suffering, but nothing could diminish the impact of the news. GOOD NEWS FOR THE POOR The Christian gospel links up with impulses towards political democracy through the chief targets of its mission – the poor, the outcasts and sinners.48 Just as Greek democracy was government of ordinary people called to a high vocation of equality and justice, so Christianity focused on the suffering of the poor and those cut off from the rewards of social position. As Luke records, Jesus’ mission began with a stunning announcement. Called on to speak in the synagogue in his home town, he turned to the oracle of the Third Isaiah: 51

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The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me he has sent me to announce good news to the poor to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. Then he made the preposterous claim that the prophecy had been fulfilled with his very presence (Luke 4.18–21). By stepping directly into the prophetic stream Jesus identified himself with a tradition of fearless men who, in the name of a God who freed slaves, championed the poor against rich oppressors. The classical prophets had left no doubt that God was on the side of the poor. Amos, Hosea, Micah, the three ‘Isaiahs’ and Jeremiah had all thundered out God’s anger at injustice, violence, oppression and deprivation. The psalmists told of God’s special love for the poor and his wrath against the oppressor.49 The most astounding of the claims made about Jesus was that he was God become poor.50 Whereas once God had shown that he preferred the poor, now he had become one of them. His decisive entry into human history was not simply a partial identification with the humble, but a repudiation of all earthly understandings of power used by the wealthy to oppress the poor. This was the intent of the birth legends about Jesus. When pregnant with him his mother Mary sang of an event through which God has brought down monarchs from their thrones, and raised on high the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.51 (Luke 1.52–3) The scene of his birth was the greatest paradox: though attended by angels from heaven, he was laid in a manger in a cattle stable. The first to come to admire him were shepherds from the surrounding fields. Rich astrologers travelled miles to do him homage, but as they offered their treasures they had to kneel among the cowdroppings. Poverty was the endemic evil of the society into which Jesus was born. All Israel had begun poor together but, as we saw earlier, through time some members of the community had become rich at the expense of their neighbours. Whereas wealth and poverty had once been a matter of straightforward differentiation of possession and income, poverty eventually came to be a mark of social inferiority and personal weakness. As in most other societies, it was convenient for the rich to salve their consciences by blaming poverty on the poor themselves. To be poor was to be simple, stupid, incompetent. Though a poor person might indeed be wise, the pauper’s 52

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wisdom was despised, her words unheeded (Ecclesiastes 9.16). Being poor, according to the rich person, was obviously the result of idleness or lack of ambition. The rich refused to acknowledge that economic and social systems trapped people within their poverty, and no effort on the part of the poor person could loose the bonds.52 In Jesus’ own day poverty was massive, and spread throughout the Roman empire, not least in the city of Rome itself. As in many modern countries, the ancient world had seen the transfer of resources from the many poor into the hands of the few rich, the enclosure of large landholdings in the possession of the wealthy, and the immiseration of the smallholdings of the peasantry. Total dispossession and deprivation were widespread. Debt was ‘the paradigmatic social evil’,53 and the teaching of Jesus contains repeated references to the ‘forgiveness’ – that is, the cancellation – of debts, as is found in the Old Testament tradition of the jubilee year, in which debts were to be annulled and slaves set free. At the centre of the Lord’s Prayer Jesus asks God for the remission of debts in the measure that the petitioner has forgiven the debts owed to him or her. Matthew’s version uses the word opheilemata for ‘debts’, which is a straightforward and literal usage, reinforced by the parable of the ‘merciless servant’ (Matthew 6.12; cf. 18.23–35). As Yoder argues, the Lord’s Prayer could be seen as a jubilary prayer, directly concerned with the evils of poverty and indebtedness: ‘It means “the time has come for the faithful people to abolish all the debts which tie the poor ones of Israel, for your debts toward God are also wiped away (for that is the gospel, the good news)”’.54 Those who held others in debt were required to act, and if they failed to show leniency and remit the debts that others were unable to pay, their condemnation was severe. In his determination to reverse the oppressive social and economic norms of his day, Jesus is held in the gospels to have espoused the minority Jewish philosophy that only the poor are pious.55 To say that the poor have a special place in the providence of God, or that they are righteous, to the extent that they are innocent of the charge of exploitation of others, however, is not to argue that poverty is a good thing.56 God sides with the poor because they are the ones who need his help. He becomes one of them in utter repudiation of all who exploit them, and in total rejection of the economic and political systems that prop up privilege for some and hold others in inescapable subjection. If God took on the metaphor of becoming one of the poor, we cannot infer that the historical Jesus was from a poor family. The portrait of him in the gospels is that of an educated and articulate person. If his father was a carpenter, a term which could cover a number of crafts signifying a relatively well-to-do tradesperson, he would not have been of the down-trodden to whom his mission was chiefly directed; in any case Vermes has offered the suggestion that the word for ‘carpenter’ in the Aramaic stood metaphorically for a scholar.57 That the origins of a historical Jesus were not those of 53

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a pauper is no obstacle either to the authenticity of his role as the instrument of bringing God’s good news to the poor or to the theological metaphor, embodied in the birth stories, that Jesus was God made poor. The classical prophets, in whose tradition he so clearly intended to stand, were all educated men uprooted from their comfort and sent to announce God’s censure against the oppressors. In Jesus God uprooted himself from a throne of power and confronted the oppressors as one of the poor. The metaphor is paralleled in Jesus’ own life, as the word of God within him propelled him from the safety of his home into the harshness of the wilderness or the ghettos of strange towns. His message was one of joy to the oppressed, and his example – far from being a self-denying asceticism – was an affirmation of fulfilment of life. His critics lampooned him as a glutton and drunkard who kept bad company (Matthew 11.19), but the effect of his presence upon any company that received him was to draw it into the circle of God’s favoured ones: ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them’ (Luke 15.2).58 When charged with gluttony Jesus could not at that moment have been in the company of beggars, but some who were quite well-off could be social rejects. Although tax-collectors and prostitutes ‘were not economically poor they were “poor” in the sense of being the social and religious outcasts of his society’.59 At the same time, when Jesus associated with outcasts, the term ranged from the poor who were literally destitute to those who were deprived by some particular circumstance of life: ‘unemployed day laborers, fugitive slaves, or individuals rendered homeless by economic forces as, for example, small farmers driven into an economic corner by burdensome taxes, crop failures, or debt’.60 Despite some exceptions that are clearly acknowledged by the gospels – the centurion’s servant or the daughter of a religious leader, for example – ‘most of the sick are the suffering poor – the blind, lame, crippled, paralyzed – and the lepers who along with beggars cry out for mercy to the son of David’.61 While both his healing ministry and his leisure-time associations show Jesus at one with the ‘poor’, his teachings reinforced the message that the kingdom of God had come specially to gather in and to protect the outcasts.62 The New English Bible translates the famous words at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘How blest are those who know their need of God’ (Matthew 5.3). In Luke’s parallel version of a similar collection of sayings, known as ‘the Sermon on the Plain’, a pious contrast is made between the rich and poor: ‘Blessed are you who are in need; the kingdom of God is yours’. And the sermon goes on: the hungry will be filled; weepers will laugh; the hated and insulted will dance in the promise of a rich reward in heaven, because insults incurred in the name of the Son of Man place them in the tradition of the 54

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mighty prophets. And so the good news to the poor reverses all accepted values, as those in positions to exploit others are cast down from their comfortable thrones: But alas for you who are rich; you will have had your time of happiness. Alas for you who are well fed now; you will go hungry. Alas for you who laugh now; you will mourn and weep. Alas for you when all speak well of you; that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.63 (Luke 6.24–6) This reversal of values is reinforced by the parable of Lazarus, the beggar sitting at the gate of a rich man who lived in magnificence, but who would not even sustain the beggar with scraps from his table. Being so weak that he could not push away the dogs that came to lick at his sores, Lazarus eventually starved to death. When the rich man died he was taken to Hades and was surprised to see Lazarus in paradise with Abraham. When he asked for pity Abraham said to him: ‘“Remember, my child, that all the good things fell to you while you were alive, and all the bad to Lazarus; now he has consolation here and it is you who are in agony. But that is not all: there is a great chasm fixed between us; no one from our side who wants to reach you can cross it, and none may pass from your side to us”’ (Luke 16.19–26; New English Bible).64 It is probably just this chasm that is the whole point of the story, rather than any wish to gloat over the just deserts of the wealthy. By distancing themselves from the plight of the poor, the rich excavate an unbridgeable gulf between the two. This is one of the tragic facts of most ‘normal’ cultures and can only be brought home to the beneficiaries of the system through illustrations of the most lurid kind.65 Throughout the gospels the warnings to the rich continue to be as stark as in the Old Testament. In Luke the familiar parable of the sower is elaborated from the Markan source so that the seed ‘which fell among thistles represents those who hear, but their growth is choked by cares and wealth and the pleasures of life’ (Luke 8.14). Then there was the rich man who built bigger barns to contain the wealth of his produce only to be told by God: ‘“You fool, this very night you must surrender your life; and the money you have made, who will get it now?” That is how it is with the man who piles up treasure for himself and remains a pauper in the sight of God’ (Luke 12.16–21). Later Jesus laments for the rich who will find it so hard to get into the kingdom of God. As his jocular story ran, it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.66 Not only is God’s compassion for the poor reflected in his preaching, but also the lifestyle adopted by Jesus and his disciples, which includes breaking family ties, 55

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rejecting property and avoiding displays of luxury, mirrors a widely held belief among Hellenistic philosophers in the simple life which makes the inner person immune to the effects of external conditions. Since external conditions – such as the social and economic contexts in which one has to live – are usually under the control of others, whether political rulers or economic entrepreneurs and financiers, the integral human personality takes full charge of the variable ‘internals’ – one’s personal needs, desires and emotions. So it seems also with Jesus’ indifference to the impact of outside circumstances upon his choices, although always his personal integrity stems from his intimacy with, and his obedience to, God. While that obedience derives from his immersion in the Jewish tradition of Yahweh’s relationship with his people, there is reason to believe that Jesus’ followers, and quite possibly Jesus himself, were also influenced by the Cynic philosophy of post-Alexandrian Greece.67 One of the chief sources of the gospels as we have them, the lost document (or common oral tradition) known as the Sayingssource, or ‘Q’, seems to have closely resembled Cynic literature. The Sayings-source was possibly a collection of the sayings of Jesus together with anecdotes about him used by wandering prophets who had adopted a Cynic lifestyle, leaving home and possessions, in much the same fashion as Luke reports of the original disciples.68 Whatever its origin, the ‘Q’ source is focused on the plight of the poor. Just as the Cynics had tried to evolve a practical philosophy which would reduce the impact of adverse circumstances on the lives of otherwise defenceless individuals, so also the Sayings-source brings comfort and hope to the poor. There very likely were Cynic philosophers in the Hellenistic Galilee of Jesus’ day, and it can hardly be pure accident that so many of his reported ‘sayings’ closely resemble similar utterances of the Cynics.69 His disregard for established authority is ‘cynical’, and so, overwhelmingly, is his belief in the ‘blessedness of the poor’, and his rejection of ‘the consumer society of the first century’.70 In the Epistle of James the concern for the poor is shown to be continuous from the era of wandering disciples well into the settled community of the church. It seems from the text itself that James is addressing a poor community familiar to him in Palestine or Syria.71 In language strongly echoed by Luke’s stark portrayal of the favour shown by God for the poor (such as in the Magnificat and the Beatitudes), James offers no comfort to the rich: ‘the rich man will disappear like a wild flower; once the sun is up with its scorching heat, it parches the plant, its flower withers, and what was lovely to look at is lost for ever. So shall the rich man fade away as he goes about his business’ (James 1.11). In the second chapter of his letter James castigates the snobbery which, we may infer, had infected relationships between the well-to-do and the poor in the community he was addressing. He rebuked those who insulted the poor person and affirmed the 56

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gospel message that ‘has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to possess the kingdom he has promised to those who love him?’ In any case, ‘are not the rich your oppressors? Is it not they who drag you into court and pour contempt on the honoured name by which God has claimed you?’ (James 2.5–7). In the fifth chapter a deep chill grips James’s words to the wealthy: ‘Weep and wail over the miserable fate overtaking you’ (James 5.1). There are many other passages in the New Testament where the rich are condemned, but few so consciously set out to echo the ferocity of the ancient prophets.72 Here again the rich are directly charged with oppression: their wealth is a cause of the poverty of others. The terror of the gospel is not merely a silent, or even a vociferous, protest against the condition of the poor. In its repeated, dramatic reversal of the roles of rich and poor, it poses a challenge to the existing order of things. As Jesus told his followers: Have no fear, little flock; for your Father has chosen to give you the Kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to charity. Provide for yourselves purses that do not wear out, and never-failing treasure in heaven, where no thief can get near it, no moth destroy it. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.73 (Luke 12.32–4) Drawing parallels with the later Zealots, who, on gaining control of Jerusalem, burnt the archive office to destroy the records of money-lenders and so release the poor from their bonds to the rich, some argue that Jesus actually led a revolutionary movement.74 The observer is hard-pressed to find words or actions to resemble the systematic violence of the Zealots. On the other hand, anything less than ‘revolutionary’ to characterize Jesus’ challenge to the accepted order of economy and society would miss the force of the threat he posed. A REVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGE Just as the community surrounding Jesus represented a detachment from the cultural values of the time, so also the reassertion of the sovereignty of Yahweh posed a threat to the established secular and religious authorities of the day. Jesus announced this sovereignty in proclaiming the kingdom of God and then in daring to speak himself with the direct authority of God. The church subsequently claimed this same authority for Jesus, in whose person Yahweh’s intervention in human history found its culmination. In the Israelite tradition a member of the flock confessed his or her faith by reciting Yahweh’s mighty acts, from the delivery from slavery in Egypt, to settling his people in the Promised Land, to the raising-up of kings to defend them.75

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Paul’s sermon to Jews in Antioch repeats a similar confession, but God’s actions reach their climax in raising Jesus from the dead: the one whom God raised up did not suffer corruption. You must understand, my brothers, it is through him that forgiveness of sins is now being proclaimed to you. It is through him that everyone who has faith is acquitted of everything for which there was no acquittal under the Law of Moses. (Acts 13.37–9) Here, in one blow, the religious and secular establishments are shaken to their foundations. Jesus’ readiness to forgive sin (Mark 2.1–11), which evoked amazement (v.12), also appeared to be blasphemy, that is to say, a threat to the present religious sanctions. At one level the danger is that Jesus stood in the role of God (v.7) and therefore claimed too much, but we should not miss the radical criticism of society contained in the act. Hannah Arendt had discerned that this was Jesus’ most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation. Thus the refusal to forgive sin (or the management of the machinery of forgiveness) amounts to enormous social control. While the claim of Jesus may have been religiously staggering, its threat to the forms of accepted social control was even greater.76 Although the religious establishment reacted as if this was the subversion of God’s law, it was rather the subversion of those whose power over others was based on their right to interpret God’s law. In Jesus the need for mediation broke down, as God’s rule broke through directly to the individual members of the community. In one sense, the kingship of God made all other forms of rule irrelevant, but in practical terms a clash between an unacceptably radical interpretation of the rule of God and the recalcitrant forces of human control over people was inevitable. Jesus’ proclamation of God’s lordship ‘brings to an end the evil world, dominated by the forces of woe, and initiates the new world in which God “appears to full advantage”; “Your kingdom come” (Matthew 6.10)’.77 The challenge Jesus posed to constituted authority took place in a political context dominated by the Roman empire. Despite the determination of local authorities to live quietly within and alongside Roman domination, the Yahwist tradition to which Jesus belonged was born in and nurtured by opposition to oppressive authority. Isaiah had proclaimed a ‘song of derision over the king of Babylon: “See how the oppressor has met his end and his frenzy ceased!”’ (Isaiah 14.4). The Book of Daniel had envisaged the kingdoms of the earth as great beasts which would rise from the ground 58

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only to see their sovereignty smashed, so that ‘kingly power, sovereignty, and greatness of all the kingdoms under heaven will be given to the holy people of the Most High. Their kingly power will last for ever, and every realm will serve them and obey them’ (Daniel 7.27).78 In Jesus’ own time there were many groups intent on putting the Jewish antiimperialist ideology into action, even to the point of challenging the might of Rome. The Zealots would ‘acknowledge none but God as their Lord and King’.79 They argued that ‘anyone who acknowledged the emperor as lord and paid taxes to him transgressed the first commandment, which requires men to worship God alone’.80 Their response to imperial rule was to secede into armed camps in the hills and caves of Galilee and to harass the Roman garrisons with lightning raids. As far as the Romans were concerned, such religious patriots were indistinguishable from robbers who hid out in the hills,81 and any who were caught deserved nothing better than a thief’s or a slave’s execution. Just such an execution awaited Jesus of Nazareth, and there are those who argue that he was tried and convicted on a charge of sedition, since the group of people who surrounded him was a rebellious band: people had come to him to form the nucleus of a revolutionary movement against Roman power.82 According to this view, Jesus planned a series of manoeuvres and demonstrations designed at least to provoke the violent reaction of the occupying force.83 His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which claimed title to the heritage of messianic prophecy, was this kind of a demonstration. The cleansing of the temple was both a rebuke to the religious authorities and an act of provocation to the Roman garrison stationed within the courtyard of the temple. Again, at one stage Jesus quoted ancient scripture to his disciples that said ‘“he was counted among the outlaws”’ (Luke 22.37; New English Bible) and instructed them to sell their cloaks to buy swords.84 When he was being arrested in the Garden of Gesthemane one of the disciples struck at the soldiers with his sword. Other sayings might just be attributed to a political revolutionary: ‘He who is not with me is against me’ (Matthew 12.30) sounds as though it comes from a revolutionary, and ‘leave the dead to bury their dead’ (Matthew 8.22) ‘seems to presuppose an exceptional degree of personal mobilisation such as would characterise the way of life of a resistance movement’.85 One of Jesus’ disciples was known as ‘Simon the Zealot’, and some suspect that others of the band called themselves Zealots.86 The evidence for political revolution is admittedly thin, but those who hold this view find it more surprising that some, otherwise inexplicable, glimpses of a violent Jesus survive in a tradition which has been made by a pacifist church, accommodating itself to Roman rule, and trying to suppress the revolutionary origins of Jesus’ movement. Against a few fragmentary hints that Jesus may have been interested in violent revolution is the overwhelming evidence that, as far as physical action was concerned, 59

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his approach was totally pacifist. His rejection of violence was unequivocal, and those few sayings that may sound violent could equally be construed as allegorical statements of the disturbing nature of his message and example: for there was equally no doubt that, unswerving as was his determination to avoid violence on his own and his followers’ part, he confronted and provoked violence from political establishments that were founded on violence. Martin Hengel has decisively answered the case. The cleansing of the temple must surely have been recognized as an outburst of legitimate religious anger, since the armed Roman guards did not react violently to Jesus. If this action had been seen as the beginning of a revolution it would have been crushed on the spot by the Roman garrison stationed within the temple precincts. In any case the whole incident should probably be seen as a ‘fulfilment saga’ referring to the final words of the prophet Zechariah, that ‘no longer will any trader be seen in the house of the Lord of Hosts’ (Zechariah 14.21).87 Again, the incident of the drawn sword in the Garden of Gesthemane was isolated, and trivial and unthreatening to the guard who came to arrest Jesus, since there was no retaliation against the disciples and no order for their arrest: only Jesus himself was the target of disciplinary action. Furthermore, any connection between Jesus and the Zealots must have been tenuous indeed. The Zealot movement had begun as a tax revolt against the Romans, and he who had allowed that one should ‘render to Caesar what is Caesar’s’ and had openly dined and consorted with tax-collectors, had engaged in an action that the Zealots could only have regarded as traitorous to their cause.88 In any case, the aims of the Zealot movement were at odds with Jesus’ approach to temporal power, since ‘the intention of the Zealots to erect a messianic world empire is a devilish temptation’.89 The arguments against Jesus’ connection with the Zealots, or his leadership of a political revolutionary movement, are insurmountable. A conclusion drawn from this decisiveness by some commentators is that Jesus was not political at all. At one level that is of, course, correct. Jesus made no claims on political power whatsoever, and treated the ‘powers that be’ as irrelevant sub specie aeternitatis. It is a grave misconstruction, however, to conclude from his contempt for the conceits of earthly rulers that Jesus was only concerned with personal piety, the inner life of the soul, or the individual person’s private relationship with God. His teaching embraced all these things, but it also evinced so deep a compassion for the oppressed and the outcast of all kinds – and so open a concern for justice and goodness – that he could not avoid provoking the authorities. His mission ‘was deeply prophetic and therefore profoundly political’.90 As we saw in an earlier chapter, the fact that the classical prophets had no political programme and made no attempts to win political office does not make them one jot less political either in their intentions or in their effects. In the same way, Jesus’ adult life was intensely political. It was as profoundly political as Plato’s Republic, which, while it was also concerned with many other philosophical 60

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questions, and was written by a potential leader who had withdrawn all his ambitions for a political career, nevertheless provided the foundation stone for subsequent secular political thought. So, too, the New Testament, focused entirely on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus – for all the sparseness of explicit political statements, and for all its refusal to propound a ‘Christian’ political theory – is a deeply political statement. In the end, truly religious acts are political.91 So much at variance are the value systems of the secular and religious spheres that unavoidably ‘peace with God means conflict with the world’.92 Nothing could have been more challenging to the temporal order than the execution of God, and nothing more full of promise than the experience of resurrection and the conquest of the fear of death. ‘THE CRUCIFIED GOD’93 The ‘historical Jesus’ may not have foreseen the resurrection event, but he could scarcely have doubted that his public actions would lead to the cross. Death is the fate of prophets who do not take evasive action, and sorely as Jesus may have been tempted to escape torture and death, his integrity, commitment, and obedience to the word of God led him into the final clash with political authority – the forces of organized violence.94 Nor was Jesus under any illusion about the agony he was to face. The cross was notoriously the cruellest form of punishment invented by perverse Phoenician or Roman ingenuity. It was a lingering (and, of course, literally excruciating) death. Roman soldiers, perhaps bored with the monotony of nailing miscreants to trees, vied with each other in devising new contortions into which they could twist human bodies on the cross. It was typically the punishment of slaves or traitors – people who had lost or renounced their humanity – and so had forfeited any right to human dignity in death.95 Jesus had no superhuman powers to avoid the pain of torture. He died with a huge cry of anguish (Mark 15.37), with ‘every expression of the most profound horror’.96 The suffering of Jesus is the culmination of the suffering of all the oppressed in the Old Testament, from the groaning Israelite slaves, to the guilt-ridden David, to the bewildered Job. With the psalmist he cries out: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me and art so far from saving me, from heeding my groans?’ (Psalm 22.1). Yet his cry is more anguished than that of the psalmist, who cried out to the God of Israel’s covenant; Jesus was broken by the incomprehensible loss of a father who was part of himself. In forsaking Jesus, God had forsaken himself: ‘The rift goes not only through Jesus but through God himself. God himself is abandoned by God and God casts himself out.’97 Just as Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom of God had presented the direct rule of God in an unheard of personal intimacy, so his cross 61

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showed a God who had renounced every claim to the kind of glory and power reflected in arrogant earthly kingdoms. Nevermore would this God claim to be called almighty, since ‘almighty gods’ were worshipped by priests, kings and dictators who wished to impose almighty rule over their fellows: ‘Praise of the sheer almightiness of God, of the capricious freedom of God, is only a projection of our own will to power.’98 The cross showed that the God of Jesus wanted no part of the power that human tyrants yearn for. The covenant of Moses and the prophets had given the world a God different from all other gods – a personal ruler who loved and protected his people, but who could not be propitiated either by magic or by displays of pomp and ceremony. Jesus was at one with the Yahweh of Moses and the prophets, but in Jesus God emerged in a new light – as one who, while powerful beyond all thought, emptied himself of any kind of power that humans could conceive of. So we encounter the paradox of the ‘power of God . . . made manifest in the weakness of Jesus, in the meek and dying life which through death is raised to power’.99 The renunciation of all power of which earthly powers might have seemed to be a reflection did not mean that Jesus had no concern with earthly powers. ‘For the way of the cross is also a political course, since it recognizes the narrow limits imposed by constraints, and the loss which these can cause in life and death.’100 The cross is complete freedom in the face of organized constraint, and a provocation to the forces of organized violence that draws out their rage and drags them stumbling on to their destruction. It is ‘neither impotence nor vengeance, but violence that God takes on himself in the death of his well-beloved Son, when there is a rift between him and humanity’.101 But against it the violence is futile. The author of Colossians proclaims the irrelevance of the political and religious powers: For he has forgiven us all our sins; he has cancelled the bond which was outstanding against us with its legal demands; he has set it aside, nailing it to the cross. There he disarmed the cosmic powers and authorities and made a public spectacle of them, leading them as captives in his triumphal procession. (Colossians 2.13–15) Yet the resurrection event exalts one who, in discarding powers like a garment, chose to exert the sovereignty of servanthood, raising with him all slaves, servants and outcasts beyond the reach of the powers. The sovereignty of the kingdom of God was exercised by a servant who suffers. A long tradition about such a person was well known to Jesus, especially through Ezekiel (4.4–8) and the Second Isaiah (53.4–5).102 Luke has Jesus directly quoting the song from Isaiah: ‘For Scripture says, “And he was counted among the outlaws”, and these words, I tell you, must find fulfilment in me’ 62

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(Luke 22.37; New English Bible). The context was the night before the crucifixion, when Jesus knew that, although innocent, he would be punished as a criminal.103 Earlier he had identified his ministry with service, quite possibly in direct reference to the servant song: ‘“among you, whoever wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”’ (Mark 10.43– 5).104 It is difficult to know whether Jesus believed that humiliation, suffering and servitude would make a person ‘great’ or ‘first’ in any sense other than that a preference for suffering over collusion with evil powers would bring a clear conscience. This had been a perennial problem since the time of Plato, who had argued that a person would be happier suffering injustice than causing it, since happiness depended on the balance and harmony of the soul. The historical Jesus could not be certain of his future exaltation, nor yet of his transcendence of the grave, when he faced execution at the hands of the imperial powers. His trust in his Father was absolute, but we have seen with what anguish he faced the pain of crucifixion, and with what despair he suffered desolation in death. But the anguish ran deeper even than the physical pain; it extended to the defeat of his cause itself. He did not seek martyrdom to achieve some bigger purpose. He did not threaten the powers with a hunger strike or expose his suffering to the public in order to wring concessions from the authorities. Facing death as a ‘poor, tired rabbi’,105 he simply would not condone or compromise with evil; and ‘when he suffered he uttered no threats, but delivered himself up to him who judges justly’ (1 Peter 2.23). Here was no hope of release of an eternal soul, nor assurance of a new life to come. Here was trust and commitment alone. All thought of resurrection was yet to come, and for this a new act of creation, a new exodus, a new covenant would be necessary.106 In Christian theology, then, the triumph of Jesus lay in an acceptance of failure, and an absolute resolution to have no truck with the powers, to have no complicity in their dealings, and above all to refuse to combat them on their own terms, using their own weapons. From the first days of the resurrection event, however, his revived followers had no doubt how complete the triumph of the servant had been, as the old Jesus hymn quoted by Paul reveals in all its eloquence: For the divine nature was his from the first; yet he did not prize his equality with God, but made himself nothing, assuming the nature of a slave. Bearing the human likeness, revealed in human shape, he humbled himself, and in obedience accepted even death – death on a cross. Therefore God raised him to the heights and bestowed on him the name above all names, that at the name of

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Jesus every knee should bow – in heaven, on earth, and in the depths – and every tongue confess, ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’, to the glory of God the Father.107 (Philippians 2.6–11; New English Bible) Even though the fight to dethrone the powers meant the likelihood of failure in suffering, Jesus always had a sense of the futility and impotence of the powers in the face of the sovereignty of God. As Martin Hengel aptly observes, the great precept of the prophet Zechariah was worn by Jesus like a motto for his whole ministry: ‘Neither by force nor by strength, but by my spirit! says the Lord of Hosts’ (Zechariah 4.6).108 This attitude culminates in Jesus’ final and definitive statement on the kingdom of God during his trial before the Roman prefect, Pilate. According to the gospel of John, when asked if he was king of the Jews, Jesus replied: ‘My kingdom does not belong to this world’ (John 18.36). Bishop Robinson suggests that the latter section of this gospel was written in part to draw the contrast between the spiritual kingdom and the earthly powers, with the powers being subjected to ‘a kind of cosmic political trial’.109 According to the view of the church, they are condemned, annulled, deleted and made irrelevant by a kingdom which, though not of this world, is very present in this world. THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS POLITICAL CRITICISM The rule of the spirit, which was the medium of the direct rule of God, gave heart to those who suffered at the hands of the state. In a powerful declaration, which has repeatedly been misappropriated by state authorities trying to justify their exercise of power, Paul announces: ‘If God is on our side, who is against us?’ (Romans 8.31). This confidence in a spiritual rule runs through the New Testament. Jesus himself regarded political rank as totally worthless, and when his disciples quarrelled about status he sarcastically denounced all aspirations to royal power: ‘In the world, kings lord it over their subjects; and those in authority are called their country’s “Benefactors”’ (Luke 22.25; New English Bible; cf. Mark 10.42). By contrast, the order of the kingdom of God, paradoxically ruled by a servant, places those who would serve first. The example of a true ruler is one who, in an act of humility, washes his own servants’ feet (John 13.15–16). While people who seek political office may be motivated by a will to power or a thirst for adulation, calling themselves fathers of their country, or ‘benefactors’, such motives are inappropriate in a spiritual community. In the kingdom all are brothers and sisters, and none should seek to be exalted with titles like ‘rabbi’, ‘father’ or ‘teacher’. When Jesus goes on to say that the humbled will be exalted (Matthew 23.8– 12), he is surely not promising a literal exaltation, but seeing the humility, and the recognition of the worth and integrity and autonomy of others, as reward in itself,

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while ambitions and rivalries lead only to discord and unhappiness.110 Let those who want to rule others, and so to remain outside the kingdom of the spirit, seek rank and privilege. Curiously, since their church itself was founded on the result of a direct clash between Jesus’ spiritual kingdom and the Roman state, the early church seemed determined to live at peace with the political authorities. As the author of the pastoral letter called Peter enjoined, ‘Submit yourselves to every human institution for the sake of the Lord, whether to the sovereign as supreme, or to the governor as his deputy’ (1 Peter 2.13–14; New English Bible); or, in the letter to Timothy, prayers and intercessions should be offered ‘for sovereigns and all in high office, that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life’ (1 Timothy 2.1–2; New English Bible); or in Paul’s key statement on earthly powers: Every person must submit to the authorities in power, for all authority comes from God, and the existing authorities are instituted by him. It follows that anyone who rebels against authority is resisting a divine institution, and those who resist have themselves to thank for the punishment they will receive. Governments hold no terrors for the law-abiding but only for the criminal . . . it is not for nothing that [the authorities] hold the power of the sword, for they are God’s agents of punishment bringing retribution on the offender. (Romans 13.1–5) Once again we meet a text that has puzzled those who have found in the spiritual kingdom complete freedom, since they were also told that ‘where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty’ (2 Corinthians 3.17). It has also been used by those who would give religious support to the institutions of the secular state as ‘instituted by God’, and ultimately to seek a fusion of church and state institutions. Such an interpretation denies the history of Yahweh’s intervention against the doubly powerful states from which the Israelite community seceded, and it certainly devalues the significance of Jesus’ death at the hands of the state; Paul’s loyalty to the spiritual kingdom would carry him to his own death in Rome. There is no suggestion in the passage that praying for rulers is somehow a method of appropriating their power, or of attaching power to the religious community. In fact, recognition of the ‘powers that be’ as something other than the direct rule of God is an implied repudiation of the attempt to unite God’s rule and the forceful control of a secular community. Throughout the stories of his temptations, Jesus is shown by the gospels to have rejected human kingship as totally inappropriate for the kingship of God. Yet he does not argue that kings or governors should all be removed. It is only in the light of the illegitimate, oppressive and exploitative use of their power that they are held by the spiritual kingdom to be worthless, and it is Jesus’ post-resurrection 65

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followers who reduce all earthly powers to ciphers before the eternal throne of truth, justice and love. It is a misinterpretation of Romans 13 to suggest that one should always be submissive to the secular powers. Such a suggestion is out of keeping with the violent ends of Jesus, Stephen, Peter and Paul, and all the other martyrs who were put to death by the legitimate secular powers because they would not obey or because they implicitly threatened their authority.111 This passage stands true to the prophetic tradition. The prophets rebuked, castigated and threatened the kings, but they did not try to depose them. They defused a ‘royal consciousness’ which gave approval to the view that all relationships were hierarchical, and in which it was accepted that all in subordinate positions were fair game for exploitation by those set above them.112 Paul’s view of the powers, then, is not ‘a confession of the intrinsic metaphysical value of the state’, but an acknowledgment of the necessity of external order, and ‘a conscious (and thus vigilant and critical) obedience’.113 The famous saying of Jesus, when asked if it was right to pay Roman taxes, that people should ‘pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God’ (Matthew 22.21), far from being a recipe for quiet submission to the state, is a delineation of two orders, a secular and a spiritual. Any suggestion that the two orders are irreducibly separate, having no impact on each other or even point of contact, is, however, a disastrous misinterpretation of which the whole history of Jesus’ confrontations with the powers leaves no doubt. Within the two spheres entirely different rules operate, but the secular cannot remain unaffected by the spiritual: witness the repeated and persistent – and too often successful – attempts of secular powers to misappropriate the legitimacy of spiritual support. Conversely, the spiritual realm, impinging directly on the consciences of individuals, cannot allow them to stand idly by while injustices are done in the secular world. This duality is clear in Jesus’ statement on taxes. The coin is in the realm of mammon: Give the mammon back to Caesar: he has his likeness impressed upon it. So let him have it! But return to God that which is his property, what he has given to us. That means: everything, body and soul. Here there can be no talk at all of equality between Caesar and God. The State is nothing final. But it may levy taxes . . . [yet] do not give Caesar more than his due! Give him nothing that belongs to God!114 In the spiritual realm, the kingdom of God, God reigns supreme. As the apostles, echoing men and women of pious conscience through all generations, told the high priest and council in Jerusalem, ‘we must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5.29).115 Because this belief was central to Jesus’ teaching and ministry, the direct rule of God would draw him into confrontation with the secular powers. According to Luke, 66

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Pilate examined Jesus ‘on a charge of subversion’ (Luke 23.14), since he had accepted as prima facie evidence the allegation that Jesus was stirring up the people (Luke 23.5). Whether or not the effect of Jesus’ large following was to undermine Roman maintenance of order, Jesus was certainly condemned as a threat to the state. That he died for the tenacity of his faith in the kingdom of God was not, of course, the end of the story for believing Christians. Stephen, Peter, Paul and the others died in the hope of participating in his resurrection. To the uncommitted onlooker, however, their defiance of the powers may seem futile, since violence apparently triumphed over the martyrs. They may have found some comfort in the knowledge that all the pomp of Rome or Jerusalem would be one with Nineveh and Tyre. Yet what consolation would such vision be to those screaming under the blow of the hammer and the piercing nail, or trembling before the headsman’s sword, or cowering from the hail of jagged rocks? That their consciences were clear, and that they were guiltless of complicity with evil, may have brought strength to their hearts. For them disobedience to evil powers was inner freedom, but their suffering was more than staking a claim on inner freedom. It was nothing short of a participating in the liberation of humankind. In the theology of Johann Baptist Metz, suffering is the necessary thesis in the dialectical process of a history that produces human freedom: The natural history of man is to some extent the history of his suffering . . . . The essential dynamics of history consist of the memory of suffering as a negative consciousness of future freedom and as a stimulus to overcome suffering within the framework of that freedom. The history of freedom is therefore – subject to the assumed alienation of man and nature – only possible as a history of suffering.116 In the Christian context the suffering of the crucifixion and the hope of the resurrection set the pattern for the dialectical evolution of freedom, while the narrative of Jesus ‘provides a tradition of dangerous memories – memories of suffering with a future orientation’.117 In this way the ‘resurrection–crucifixion is a forward memory that calls us to criticize and interrupt the present sociopolitical situation on behalf of those who suffer’.118 The freedom of the people upheld by those who suffer becomes a constituent of the spiritual world of the sufferers, so that while their bodies are broken or racked with pain, the freedom and joy of the liberated is their own happiness; and they are assured that the community of the spirit will outlive all earthly kingdoms and empires and even human thought itself. In conflicting with the political world – in criticizing and chastening and eventually transcending it – they are shored up by the community of the spirit, which is not, for them, merely a source of alternative authority, but the

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source of all meaning, authority and life. In the political world they are but sojourners: ‘For here we have no lasting city, but we are seekers after the city which is to come’ (Hebrews 13.14). As Paul reminds the Philippians, together they were ‘citizens of heaven’ (Philippians 3.20), and in that company they could achieve ‘the peace of God, which is beyond all understanding’ (Philippians 4.7). Whatever small triumphs the earthly powers might have over their human frames, then, were as nothing compared with the transcending victory of the kingdom of God, ruled by the servant who suffers. The visionary sees him as the sacrificial lamb. He has renounced earthly power, yet before his blinding visage all earthly thrones melt away. Human language stutters to describe his triumph, and the vocabulary of human power is futile. But what other language is there to show how the earthly powers sink and languish before him? Since the ordinary mind can find no higher way of expressing it, all earthly honours that the human mind can encompass are piled on his head, as his victory leaves time and thought behind in its wake. And so the throngs of angels cry out: Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth, wisdom and might, honour and glory and praise! And all creatures of heaven and earth reply: Praise and honour, glory and might, to him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb for ever.119 (Revelation 5.12, 13)

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THE TWO CITIES Sojourners in the world

THIS WORLD OR THE NEXT? After the resurrection experience the Christian community was quickly faced with a perplexing dilemma. Paul had told his companions to adapt themselves ‘no longer to the pattern of this present world’ (Romans 12.2). They had in Jesus the example of one who, while joining in the closest sociability with those rejected by the powerful in this world, had overturned the ‘normal’ standards by which people lived. Were they all to do the same, and follow him to an early death in the hope of an early resurrection? Some had expected the immediate consummation of time and history in God’s apocalyptic judgment. Paul told them that ‘the world as we know it is passing away’ (1 Corinthians 7.31). Yet still the world, with its torment and oppression, seemed to carry on regardless. They could not continue to live in the world without adopting some of its values. They could not all live off charity, and if they were to engage in the world’s commerce, some compromise with ‘commercial’ values seemed unavoidable. Christians began to think of themselves as sojourners in the world, living within it like visitors but, like foreign residents, giving the community only qualified allegiance (Hebrews 13.14). Their true citizenship was in heaven (Philippians 3.20). The Christian feeling of alienation from the world echoed the Cynic, and to some extent early Stoic, indifference to the surrounding society. This was scarcely surprising in that Christian missionaries, while seeking to persuade others to be of similar mind and to detach themselves from the world’s values, had to use a language that could be understood by them. In the cultural world of Greece under the Roman empire, where an interest in local politics had largely given way to philosophical investigation of wider concerns, Christianity found a ready kinship in the language of Plato and the older logos philosophy. The paradox for Christian writers and thinkers was that speaking a language which could be understood by those they sought to convert was itself an accommodation to the world. 69

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At the same time the Greek philosophical heritage harboured an age- old controversy which struck a resonant chord with the Christian dilemma. Philosophers had often wrangled over the relative merits of a ‘life of contemplation’ as distinct from a life of action. For the Greek philosophers, living within the participatory democratic community, a life of action typically meant engaging in politics, and although the locus of political power had long since passed to Rome, there was still a lively interest as to whether it was appropriate to become involved in the transactions of empire. The argument began in anecdotes about ancient philosophers who were said to be so absorbed in contemplating ultimate truth that they were out of touch with the real world. Thales, the first acknowledged philosopher of the West, set the type. Plato tells how a Thracian maidservant had fun at Thales’ expense ‘when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well. She scoffed at him for being so eager to know what was happening in the sky that he could not see what lay at his feet.’1 Similar stories are recalled by Aristotle when he points out that Thales could come down to earth when he wanted, using his scientific knowledge to make financial killings, ‘thus showing how easy it is for philosophers to become wealthy if they so wish, but it is not this they are serious about’.2 The philosophers had already prefigured a Christian indifference to the concerns of the world, and many stories were intended ‘to bear witness to the complete withdrawal of the philosopher from that political life in which the Greek of the classical period was wholly absorbed’.3 Plato gave much prestige to the idea that philosophers are detached from ordinary cares. In a striking prefigurement of Hebrews (13.14), he suggested that a philosopher is merely a sojourner in his city: From their youth up [philosophers] have never known the way to the marketplace or law court or council chamber or any other place of public assembly; they never hear a decree read out or look at the text of a law; to take any interest in the rivalries of political cliques, in meetings, dinners, and merry-makings with flute-girls, never occurs to them even in dreams. Whether any fellow-citizen is well or ill born or has inherited some defect from his ancestors on either side, the philosopher knows no more than how many pints of water there are in the sea. He is not even aware that he knows nothing of all this; for if he holds aloof, it is not for reputation’s sake, but because it is really only his body that sojourns in his city, while his thought, disdaining all such things as worthless, takes wings.4 While it is most likely to be the philosopher who is distracted from worldly affairs, Plato was concerned that all should seek happiness by examining the foundations of their lives, fixing their hearts on eternal verities. To illustrate this case his most famous work, the Republic, described a community so perfect that its pattern or ‘form’ could exist only in heaven; yet, because of the human soul’s kinship to things heavenly, each 70

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person could choose to become a citizen. Elsewhere this same city-state had been said to have been constructed in the realm of discourse, or of communal ‘contemplation’, and even if its heavenly pattern could not properly be reproduced in the external world, it could be fashioned as the commonwealth of the soul in each individual person.5 In the last days of the republic at Rome the life of action had become precarious indeed for the politically involved. Those with no stomach for faction squabbling took refuge in scientific enquiry. The teachings of the Greek sage Epicurus, as elaborated by the Roman poet Lucretius, gave comfort and justification to those who chose to withdraw from political life.6 For others, however, such a choice was decidedly un-Roman. Although he always seemed to stand in the shadow of the Greek philosophers he admired so much, Cicero asserted the primacy of a more typically ‘Roman’ life of action, since knowledge and contemplation of the natural world would be somehow stunted and incomplete if no action were to flow from it.7 Nevertheless, an open choice between two lifestyles was clearly in his mind, especially since at various times Cicero himself was forced by fluctuating political fortunes to choose withdrawal; his biography is divided into episodes of feverish political activity and periods of ‘retirement’ spent in philosophical speculation. At the very time that the Christians were forming themselves into a significant community in the city of Rome, the Stoic philosopher Seneca – a contemporary of Paul – suggested that since nature has endowed us with two basic abilities, to live a life of contemplation or of action, there are actually two states in whose citizen lists we may be inscribed: Let us embrace in our thoughts two republics; one is big and truly public since it contains all gods and human beings; in it we are concerned not with this or that neck of the woods, but set the bounds of our citizenship by the sun’s course; the other is the state in which we have been enrolled simply by being born. This might be Athens or Carthage or any other state which is the concern, not of everybody, but of a particular group of people.8 Seneca assigns this wider community, which clearly corresponds to the cosmopolis, or world community, of the Cynics and earlier Stoics, priority over the ordinary states to which people belong. For Diogenes the Cynic the cosmopolis had been a fanciful way of devaluing and ridiculing the politics of his day, since ‘citizenship of the world’ – with no institutional requirements and no enforceable civic duties – rendered ordinary politics irrelevant. For Seneca things are quite different. Service to the local community is important, and we can live in and serve both his republics at the same time; but the ordinary state we can only serve by engaging in its day-to-day activities; the wider ‘state’ we can serve even in our leisure time – time set aside for philosophical 71

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contemplation – and in fact we can serve it better during leisure. When in quiet contemplation we explore the nature of virtue, or the secrets of creation, or the relationship of God to the world, we see to it that these mysteries do not go unwitnessed.9 The person who takes time for contemplation supplies meaning, even instruction, for those engaged in more practical affairs. It was fortunate for Christian missionaries that the intellectual climate of the Graeco-Roman world was already disposed to embrace two dimensions of life which could be lived by each person and, correspondingly, two conceptual communities or city-states to which each could belong. The one, of course, was the immediate political community as normally understood. The other, however, was a metaphor for a mode of life which could readily be adapted to the conceptual apparatus of politics, so that one could owe this other community allegiance and loyalty – whether it existed in the realm of discourse, or contemplation, or the individual soul, or as a golden chain of right and justice binding all humankind throughout the world. Such an idea was congenial to Christians who had been enjoined to live in the world but not of it. They were expected to give service to ‘normal’ social, economic and religious values. So they lived in two communities; but their wider community was not constituted simply by discourse or contemplation; it was founded on communal prayer and corporate worship of the triune God, and by a personal fellowship, as they held, with the Holy Spirit who dwelt among them. Soaring beyond the scope of Greek and Roman philosophy, their other community was a ‘real’, international association, identifiable in its corporate ceremonies, its mutual self-help, its common oral tradition, its rapidly flourishing literature and, eventually, its hierarchical structures. Not surprisingly, the Christians’ other community was viewed with suspicion from outside.10 Its ritual practices were often misunderstood or deliberately misreported. Ignorant neighbours were all too willing to believe that its secret ceremonies contained orgiastic rites of the kind that had led the Roman state to move savagely against the Bacchanals.11 Although more careful enquiries could find no truth in the rumours, many were prepared to believe that the Christians practised incest and infanticide.12 Together with the Jewish community they were labelled ‘haters of mankind’.13 Persecutions against the Christians were neither as persistent nor always as ferocious as Christian folklore would sometimes suggest. For those who suffered, however, it made little difference, since the wrath of Rome, once aroused, was implacable. There were two main phases, the first spanning the brief outburst of Nero’s madness up to the reign of Domitian, which probably provoked the writing of Revelation,14 the second culminating in the great persecution by Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century BCE. We have not the scope here to trace the details of the events.15 72

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For present purposes, they marked the difference between Christians and the rest of the world. Although the leading lights of several generations were removed, the persecutions did nothing to retard the growth of the church. For years it had won converts at all levels of society, and by the time of Diocletian there were many Christians in the top ranks of the armies and the civil administration. Such people had no difficulty rendering both Christ and Caesar their due, seeking a ‘modus vivendi with the civil power’.16 ACCOMMODATION TO THE WORLD? In order to keep its own faith pure, resolutely prosecuting theological controversy and heresy throughout the empire, and in order to maintain its own unity and integrity, the church had developed governing structures resembling the administrative arrangements of the empire itself. It could scarcely perform its functions without a formal, if loose and complex, official structure.17 While some were prepared to recognize the Christian community as a ‘state within the state’,18 such an unwieldy organization could not avoid contact with the official arms of the empire at all points. If the church was to live within this world through any length of time, it had to accommodate itself to the world. This had been clear from the outset. Luke–Acts implicitly recognized it. Two or three generations later the bishop of Sardis, Melito, wrote in his Apology, addressed to Marcus Aurelius, that Christianity, having been born at the very time that Augustus was unifying the empire under his rule, was good for the empire and that the empire’s continued success depended on the extent to which it would ‘guard that philosophy which has grown with the Empire’.19 Then in the middle of the third century Origen developed the argument into an explicit claim that the empire itself was part of God’s plan for spreading the gospel: God was preparing the nations for his teaching, that they might be under one Roman emperor, so that the unfriendly attitude of the nations to one another, caused by the existence of a large number of kingdoms, might not make it more difficult for Jesus’ apostles to do what he commanded them when he said, ‘Go and teach all nations’.20 Just as some Christian Fathers urged peaceful coexistence with imperial Rome, some were prepared to make use of all that seemed congenial in pagan Greek philosophy. They had all seen in the gospel of John a synthesis between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy, in the manner of Philo of Alexandria, which could be used to elucidate the Christian message through the philosophic equipment of the Graeco-Roman world.21 More than that, however, Greek philosophy contributed to both the 73

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internationalism and the ethical vision of Christianity. Plato’s philosophy, for example, by suggesting ‘that the soul makes its ascent both by reason and by love’, taught the Christian how ‘the logical is joined with the emotional’.22 The Stoics, encountered by Paul in his native Tarsus, in Athens and in Rome, helped to draw earliest Christianity out of its ‘parochial and nationalist form’ towards a vision of ‘cosmopolitanism and universal humanity’ that resulted in ‘Paul’s catholic gospel of a World-Society’.23 Later, Origen and his successors learnt how to elucidate the Christians’ own perplexing doctrine of the Trinity from the Middle Platonist school.24 However much they may have wished to remain uncontaminated by external influences, the Christians could not avoid an encounter with Greek philosophy, which was as much a part of their understanding of the world as was the Palestinian gospel tradition. Some were content to acknowledge the fact. The great martyr of the second century, Justin, arrived at Christianity, which he recognized as ‘the true philosophy’, only after an intellectual pilgrimage through Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Pythagoreanism and Platonism.25 Far from discarding his former philosophic garments, he saw in them threads of divine revelation wholly consistent with Christianity: the logos that had been with God and was God since the beginning of time had settled briefly with Abraham, Moses and the Hebrew prophets, and with Socrates and Plato. Socrates was ‘a model of integrity for Christian martyrs’.26 Even if one could not accept that those who lived before the time of Christ were part of the specifically Christian revelation, they were part of God’s created realm, and if they showed by their lives or their teaching that they were seeking after God’s truth, there could be no barrier to the Christian’s drawing something of value from their example or precept. So Origen’s mentor, Clement of Alexandria, writing his Stromateis, or ‘miscellanies’, at the end of the second century, suggested: ‘Philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness, until the coming of the Lord: and even now it is useful for the development of true religion, as a kind of preparatory discipline for those who arrive at faith by way of demonstration.’27 Much as the early Christians assimilated – indeed, themselves sprang from – Greek philosophy, so also they deliberately set out to explain their faith in terms understandable to the Mediterranean world. Paradoxically, while this acceptance represented an accommodation to the world, the pagan philosophies which they were prepared to assimilate ultimately reinforced their sense of separateness from the world. This was never more apparent than in the Neoplatonist school of the fourth century, with which the Christians had opened a respectful dialogue. The founder of this school, Plotinus, taught that ‘the source of reality’ was ‘the One or Good beyond being and intellect’. Since the One was unknowable except by mystical union with itself, an experience only available to the few who were devoted to achieving that state, 74

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later disciples of Plotinus were to emphasize the distinctions between the One and the world of its creation. At least some who were influenced by this way of looking at things developed Christian attitudes which were to make ‘sharp distinctions between God and creation, or faith and reason, or church and world’.28 A sense of separateness was a strong element of Christianity from the outset. SEPARATIONS From the days of Paul Christians had tended to see themselves as mere sojourners in this world, as citizens of heaven. Being orderly visitors, however, their transience was to have little practical effect until the persecutions sought them out as a race apart. In turn, the persecutions gave the most fanatically devout of the Christians the opportunity they sought for martyrdom and a heavenly reward for having shared in the suffering of their master.29 When the numbers prepared to risk their lives, rather than cooperate with an empire that based its power on the worship of ‘demons’, had increased rapidly, it was little wonder that loyal pagans saw them as politically dangerous. Fronto, one of Marcus Aurelius’ advisers, propagated stories about drunken orgies and ‘incestuous lust’ at the Christians’ private rituals.30 This kind of slander was not the point, however; at issue ‘was a revolutionary substance in Christianity that made it incompatible with paganism’.31 In about 180 the pagan philosopher Celsus launched an attack on Christianity through a tract entitled The True Doctrine. We know it only from Origen’s painstaking rejoinder, Contra Celsum, which appears not to flinch from presenting Celsus’ arguments honestly before refuting them. Celsus accused the Christians of treason when they said ‘It is impossible for the same man to serve several masters’: ‘This, he thinks, is a rebellious utterance of people who, as he puts it, wall themselves off and break away from the rest of mankind’.32 Earlier, Celsus had likened the Christian secession from Judaism to the Israelite exodus from Egypt: ‘in both instances a revolt against the community led to the introduction of new ideas’.33 Persecution of Christians did not take the problem away, of course. Writing under the reign of Diocletian (in about 290) the brilliant Neoplatonist Porphyry of Tyre penned his fifteen books Against the Christians, subsequently lost (except for some fragments) in the Christians’ own persecuting reaction to the pagans.34 Again, ‘his real charge against the Christians was their lack of civic sense, their unscrupulous wooing of the underprivileged, especially the women, and their hostility towards the state’.35 In response to the earliest polemics Christian apologists emphasized their wish to be law-abiding.36 When the inevitable clash between Caesar and God should come, however, there could only be one choice. The strongest stand was taken by Tertullian, 75

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a Christian writer of determination and authority, who unveiled his ‘splendid, torrential prose’ in an Apology written in or about 170. For Tertullian a multitude of activities could signify complicity with ‘the world’; Christians should not fight in the empire’s armies, take positions in its civil service, teach in its schools or attend its public games. They should not have anything at all to do with pagan worship practices.37 ‘This is the reason why Christians are declared public enemies – because they refuse to chant empty, false, or reckless honours to the emperors and because, being people of the true religion, they prefer to celebrate honours according to their conscience rather than in lascivious games.’38 For all their quietude and obedience, however, when it comes down to essentials, Christians find the state a matter of total indifference to them: ‘no other matter is more alien to us than the state. We acknowledge one commonwealth of all people, namely the universe.’39 In the following century Origen also began thinking of the church as a community that transcended earthly associations. In a famous passage of the Contra Celsum (3.30), in which he contrasts the new ecclesia of the church to the old secular assemblies (ecclesiae) of individual cities, he claims the churches to be the more orderly, the better organized and the better led. Moreover, the best leaders of the councils of the church are even ‘worthy to hold office in a city which is God’s, if there is such a city anywhere in the universe’.40 Later in the same work Origen elaborates his belief in a ‘heavenly city’ for which life in earthly cities is no more than a useful apprenticeship: Christians do more good to their countries than the rest of mankind, since they educate the citizens and teach them to be devoted to God, the guardian of their city; and they take those who have lived good lives in the most insignificant cities up to a divine and heavenly city. To them it could be said: You were faithful in a very insignificant city; come also to the great city.41 The idea of the church as a parallel society of greater importance than earthly communities did not mean for Origen that Christians should contract out of earthly society; the presence of Christians in civic societies did those communities much good. Although Origen never approached Tertullian’s intransigence, he did become perplexed by the compromises between church and empire taking place during his lifetime. Even the toleration of the church by the Severan dynasty of his day, which was seeking to unify the empire by focusing worship of the traditional pagan gods under the shadowy umbrella of one supreme deity, was a danger to the church; for the ‘one supreme god’ of pagan tolerance was not the demanding, jealous God of the Christians whose character it was to brook no rivals and whose nature excluded the possibility of other deities. In his Exhortation to Martyrdom, Origen urged Christians to make no compromise with the values of the world: ‘How many days of life can one 76

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gain by loving the world or the things that are in the world, while losing or destroying one’s own soul?’42 Nor could they expect any esteem or comfort from the world.43 Accommodations with the world, however, continued to cause rifts within the church. Decius’ systematic attempt to destroy the church with certificates of loyalty to the pagan system caused many Christians to defect. The ‘lapsed’ fell into two categories: those who had gone all the way and sacrificed to the pagan gods (the sacrificati) and those who had avoided confiscations, imprisonment, exile or death by purchasing fraudulent ‘certificates of sacrifice’ (the libellatici).44 Some Christians avoided both the compromise of their faith and the extremes of punishment by going into hiding, although they would still have had their property confiscated. Those who had stood their ground and gone to prison, however, scorned the weakness of the fugitives. The bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, had gone underground, but had tried to keep touch with his people by sending secret messages. The ‘confessors’ – the ones who had suffered imprisonment for their faith – believed that they had achieved a higher order of spirituality than their bishop himself, and induced their followers to set up a rival bishop.45 Cyprian, however, addressed himself to the problem of the many who had betrayed their faith under duress, but who at the end of Decius’ persecution now wished to flood back into the church. In his treatise On the Lapsed, written in 251, he thanked God for the restoration of peace with Decius’ demise, then justified his own judicious withdrawal by saying that it had been greed and attachment to worldly possessions that had caused others to apostatize and stay at home.46 Probably this attachment to worldly possessions was a greater threat to the integrity of the church, which had a ‘far greater patrimony to guard’, than the persecution itself.47 This attachment to possessions, going hand in hand with peaceful accommodation to the demands of empire, had made the church spiritually effete. The cruelties of the persecution had come as a blessing in heavy disguise: The Master wanted his household to be tested; and because the long years of peace had undermined our practice of the way of life which God had given us, our languid faith – I had almost said our sleeping faith – was now quickened by heavenly visitation and, whereas our sins deserved a punishment still greater, our merciful Lord so tempered the course of events that what has befallen us seems rather to have been a testing than a persecution.48 For all his concern that the church should not be diverted from its true path by the temptations of the world, however, Cyprian was a representative of an orthodox Christianity that had no doubts but that the church should continue to live in the world. A century after the persecution of Marcus Aurelius had witnessed the Montanist schism,49 the ‘great persecution’ of Diocletian provoked a parallel separatist 77

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movement in North Africa known as the Donatist church. The origins of this African schism are obscure, but it seems that Donatists believed that orthodox Christianity in Carthage had lost all validity because its bishop had been consecrated by clergy who had handed over sacred books and vessels of the church to the persecutors, causing a ‘pollution of the moral and ritual purity of the church’.50 The only people who had remained pure during Diocletian’s persecution were the martyrs, to whom the Donatists, underscoring their separation from Catholicism, accorded special honours. One of their number, Tyconius – a thinker greatly honoured even by the Donatists’ arch-enemy, Augustine – universalized this split into an antithesis between rightthinking Christians and those who had betrayed the faith at any time: the Donatist church and the Catholic church were merely the present representatives of respectively the pure Christian community and the traditores (a term that exploits the ambiguity between the ‘handing-over’ of emblems of the faith and the late Latin term for ‘traitors’). The two communities had been there from the beginning, in the church of Peter, where Christ was truly at work, and the church of Judas, which was the instrument of the devil.51 Everywhere people had implicitly made their choice about adhering to one or other; the antithesis represented a world-wide struggle between people of goodwill and those of an evil disposition. Of the two communities Tyconius wrote: ‘One aimed at serving Christ, the other at serving the world. The one desires to dominate in this world, the other flees from this world.’52 The disposition of representatives of the Catholic church to ‘serve the world’ was not merely the result of a failure of nerve during the ‘great persecution’. Donatists who followed the uncompromising lines of criticism established by honoured fathers like Cyprian saw more threat in times of peaceful coexistence with the institutions of empire than under the stress of persecution. For them the era of Constantine following the persecution of Diocletian was dangerous for the true faith. THE CONVERSION OF EMPIRE In some ways the adoption of Christianity by the Western emperor Constantine represented the culmination of the longstanding tendency of thoughtful pagans to interpret their array of gods and goddesses in terms of their subordination to the one supreme being or to the mens divina, the divine mind of the universe. Constantine himself had been a devotee of Sol Invictus before he had been moved to instruct his troops to carry Christian symbols and to ask the Christian God to give him victory over the rival claimant to the throne in the West. It took no great intellectual leap for him to identify the Light of the World with the sun, especially since his appeal to Christ had been rewarded with military success.53 Once installed, the great Christian 78

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emperor’s defence of his throne was almost as bloodstained as that of any pagan predecessor. The effect on the church was sudden and profound. It now received official protection from a state which almost the day before had been hounding it to death. The rejoicing was scarcely imaginable as darkness turned to dazzling light.54 Confiscated properties were restored and soon the emperor was to endow the church with immense wealth.55 Before long the emperor himself had become de facto head of the church, since a unified empire required ‘a Christian role for the emperor commensurate with his past pagan status as a god’.56 His biographer, Eusebius of Caesarea, gave theoretical justification to his role ‘as a human viceroy dispensing Divine justice on earth in God’s name’.57 This function included calling together ecclesiastical councils, and in 325 it was he who summoned all the bishops of the realm to the great Council of Nicaea; they gathered in one of Constantine’s imperial palaces with the emperor, dressed in astonishing magnificence to symbolize his viceregal status in the kingship of heaven, presiding from the centre of the floor.58 It was the emperor who undertook to defend the unity of the faith by championing, together with Athanasius, the learned bishop of Alexandria, an orthodox Trinitarian doctrine against Arian heretics who could not accept the equality of Christ with God the Father. Eventually the emperor reasserted his break with the pagan past and ‘the beginning of a new Christian empire’ by moving his court to a ‘new Rome’ – Constantinople – a city ‘never sullied by pagan rites’,59 and so fit to be consecrated by Christian clergy in 330. Whatever civilizing influences Christianity may have introduced, the annexation of a kingdom not of this world to the very present and violent power of the empire had caused a shattering crisis of conscience within the church. The union of church and state entered an aggressive new phase with the appointment of Theodosius as ‘Augustus’ in the East in 379. Later revered by Augustine as the archetype of the Christian ruler,60 Theodosius, whose genuine piety cannot be doubted, was more than anyone else responsible for a perilous fusion of imperial and Christian legitimacy.61 Viewed purely in terms of administration, Theodosius’ policy was aimed at unifying an empire increasingly prone to collapse – partly because of the withdrawal of allegiance, under the Christian ‘other-worldly’ example, by huge numbers of its own citizens, and partly under pressure from warlike enemies on all its borders. That the emperor should regard a monotheistic religion as its chief cementing force no more implies that his own religious convictions were insincere than a similar policy did for many of his pagan predecessors. Yet Theodosius pursued his aims with a determination scarcely imagined previously. He imposed the orthodox Trinitarian faith with all the might of empire, and reinforced the claims of rule with all the legitimacy a religion could possibly confer. The organs of civil administration, now 79

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representing a heavenly kingdom, were endowed with a religious aura unknown before. The person of the emperor was sanctified, and all his ministers of state shared his mystique. To disobey was sacrilege. To evade taxes was a sin against God as well as a crime against the state. Draft-dodgers and illegal immigrants – alike subversive of general allegiance to the empire – could be burnt as though for heresy.62 Heretics, not recognizing the truth of the Catholic religion, must be simply out of their minds. As ran the mighty edict of Thessalonica, promulgated by Theodosius in 380, all people of the empire were required to profess faith in the ‘sacred Trinity’ which was to be worshipped sub parili maiestate – with equal majesty.63 The ancient majesty of the Roman empire, to harm or diminish which (laesa maiestas or maiestas imminuta) was high treason, now applied to the Christian God: to spurn the Trinity was to betray the empire; to disobey the empire was to desecrate the Trinity.64 In short, accepting orthodox Christianity was a condition of citizenship in the empire. Those who refused became virtual outlaws. It was ‘a fatal confusion of ideas. For to envisage the faith as a political principle was not so much to christianize civilization as to “civilize” Christianity’.65 A similar confusion of purpose reigned within the church, which took the official line that it was appropriate to annex the coercive organs of the empire for its own religious and institutional purposes. Its leaders were prepared to exploit the emperor’s concern for the ultimate destination of his soul.66 During Theodosius’ reign the emperor’s piety, which sat uncomfortably alongside his ruthless use of force, was held to assert the supremacy of the church over the empire and set the lines for the development of theocratic rule by the church. The chief agent was Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who had imposed his will, against the pagans, on the Emperor Valentinian. In 390, the ‘decisive moment’ in church and imperial relations, the bishop now subjected the Emperor Theodosius to excommunication over impious acts.67 To be readmitted to communion Theodosius had to demonstrate his subordination to the church; now a ‘Christian moral order stood above the will of the ruler or any reason of state’.68 Ambrose’s firmness,69 and Theodosius’ ultimate submissiveness, transformed the position of the bishop from one of internal opposition to one of final authority on ecclesiastical matters.70 Since the energies and resources of the empire were now bent on the ‘institutionalization of the Christian vision of the supernatural world’, an undertaking for which the ecclesiastical order was more suited, the locus of authority had shifted decisively towards the church.71 THE TWO CITIES The church into which Augustine of Hippo was baptized, in 387 at the hands of Ambrose himself, had travelled a long way from its humble origins in the death of a 80

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renegade teacher in Palestine. The change was necessary since, if the end of time had not yet come, the world was to be converted in a language, embodying a cultural tradition, that the people could understand. Whether the extent to which church and empire would absorb each other was foreseen by the earliest missionaries is doubtful. Their visions of the victory of the Lamb over all creation were intended to make earthly rule ultimately irrelevant. As Augustine himself was to write, in the view of eternity earthly thrones are as permanent as smoke.72 When he entered the church, however, Theodosius’ decree virtually equating membership of the Catholic church with citizenship of the empire was already seven years old. Under Theodosius the church enjoyed immense privileges:73 as an institution it was freed from local taxes and given a portion of imperial revenues; its clergy were treated like imperial officials and exempted from the levies imposed to supply the military or the bureaucracy. Moreover, since the time of Constantine’s original grants of lands and treasures, the church had become wealthy and powerful.74 The Donatists, separated from the Catholic church as a protest against its unseemly accommodation to the empire, railed against ‘evil priests working with the kings of this world’.75 Such criticism could scarcely fail to sting, especially since an otherworldly tradition was still prominent within the Catholic church. Its chief conservator was the growing monastic movement, founded by Antony in Egypt. A simple peasant, Antony took the gospel prescriptions against wealth literally, breaking all ties with the world and living a life of solitude.76 Under this example thousands of people withdrew from civic life, a phenomenon with devastating effects on families and imperial organization alike.77 Although early asceticism stressed a life of exile from usual associations, the conversion of Basil, in the year following Antony’s death in 356, radically altered the basis of monastic life and put the emphasis on community. Often regarded as the founding lawgiver for a truly Christian polis, Basil established a form of community, equally applicable to men or women, based on mutual care and collective self-sufficiency. If monasticism was a tangible answer to the wealth and power of the church, there was some disquiet in the official organs of church administration as well. Reaction to the new situation was best represented by John Chrysostom, made bishop of Constantinople in 397, a man who refused ‘to play anyone’s game but God’s’.78 Unlike many of his fellow-bishops and the emperor’s courtiers, he shunned luxury. His works of charity won him support among ordinary people. Week after week his ‘socialist sermons’ thundered out the message that the rich held their property as a result of human sin: it was a sin to hold wealth at the expense of the beggars at the gate.79 John paid for his audacity with exile and eventually with something approaching a martyr’s death, but his sharp sermons long continued to prick the conscience of the church. 81

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When Augustine came to write so mighty a work as the City of God, then, it was unavoidable that the relationship between the church and the world should be a major concern. The immediate occasion of its writing was the fall of Rome to Alaric the Goth in 410. To loyal Romans, who had celebrated the official millennium of the city in 247 (actually a wild underestimation of the ‘eternal city’s’ real antiquity) such an occurrence was unthinkable. In that it was a deliberate reply to pagan polemic, the full title of Augustine’s work being De civitate Dei contra paganos, there was nothing novel about this undertaking.80 Augustine’s purposes in writing this mammoth work, begun in 413 and not completed for thirteen years, however, were more elaborate than answering contemporary pagan jibes. It set out to be a vindication of the Christian faith, an investigation of providence in creation and human history, and a reinterpretation of classical culture that was to do nothing less than pronounce its end. He met his pagan critics on their own ground.81 Despite the grand scale of the work, Augustine was also intimately concerned with the individual Christian life. Like Paul, he accepted that Christians were sojourners in this world, but his response was different from that of the most austere ‘confessing’ martyrs. He wished to show how a Christian, though a peregrinus – a registered alien in this world’s society – should preserve a sense of separation while yet living in this world, which was God’s creation.82 Despite the probable fact that Augustine knew little Greek, his knowledge of and versality with classical culture was breathtaking.83 It had two main focuses. The first was Platonic philosophy, particularly as interpreted by Porphyry and Plotinus, but also through ‘his Stoic appropriation of Plato’.84 He thought of Plato as a preChristian Christian, as one who summed up the highest achievement of Greek philosophy and literature. The other focus was Cicero, who, although a self-confessed purveyor of other people’s philosophies, represented the classical attempt to justify Rome’s republican heritage. Both the philosophical aspirations of the Greeks and the practical achievements of the Romans were to be admired, but both had lethal flaws. His search for stability in a fluctuating, decadent material world, had led Plato to a realm of permanent ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’ which, being akin to the mind and perceptible by it alone, were fixed in their perfection through their independence of matter. All instances of the forms were mere imperfect copies because they were impressed upon fluctuating and degenerating material. As C. N. Cochrane points out, materialism alone could scarcely account for the mind; nor could a realm of ideas laid up in heaven come to terms with the problem of matter. In Plato’s philosophy there was an unbridgeable gulf between the two orders. The struggle of the soul to embrace its material ‘imprisonment’ in a human body was not resoluble, and only ended in death when the soul was set free to return to the realm of pure ‘ideas’ or forms.85 82

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In Plotinus the fallacy was compounded into a barrier between scientific knowledge and metaphysical speculation, a seemingly impenetrable problem against which Augustine set the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In the logos of Philo and the gospel of John – the Word made flesh – he found the essential link between the material and supersensible worlds, supplying what ‘classicism had so long vainly sought’: a principle of both ‘being and motion’, a ‘metaphysic of ordered process’.86 The realm of perfect forms – or, in Christian terms, of the pure creative spirit of the Father in the Trinity – had been indissolubly linked with the material world in which people had to live. None of this detracted from the immense respect in which Augustine held Plato, Plotinus and Porphyry. He was equally in awe of the achievements of Roman civilization and was at home quoting Cicero, Virgil, Sallust, Varro or Apuleius.87 Yet more and more he came to believe that the vainglory of empire was of little relevance to God’s concern for the world, and despite the possible interpretation of Romans 13 that would accord the Roman empire a large place in the scheme of things, he rejected any version of world history that made Rome a necessary step in God’s redemptive purpose. In this he was at odds with almost all other Christian interpreters, who had concluded that once the empire had been captured for the true faith it was obvious that the legal and administrative structure of the empire – a millennium in the making – had been a preparation for the spread of the gospel.88 For Augustine, time saw the whole story of Rome evaporate in the twinkling of an eye; in any case, the earthly glory that had accrued to Rome in its long history flickered into obscurity before the blinding light of the ‘most glorious City of God’. Against the admirers of Rome he underlined Sallust’s secular judgment ‘that the Roman state has sunk “to the depths of depravity”’ with his own revulsion at ‘the disgusting infection of crime and immorality which rages in it’.89 In that Sallust’s history yearned for the balance of an idealized republican constitution, it reinforced the ancient conception of history as a given set of circumstances within which various rearrangements took shape. Against this view, Augustine’s conception of the logos, the moving principle of providence in the world, pronounced the end of ancient historiography. For all his ingenuity and insight, the first historian of the West, Herodotus, had been imprisoned in a cosmology that saw the world as a balance of fluctuating material held in tension by a conflict of opposing forces cancelling each other out. The human condition was one of helplessness and futility, since all were subject to an uncontrollable and inevitable fate embedded in the forces of nature.90 Rejecting much of the mythological element in Herodotus, his subtle, magisterial successor Thucydides nevertheless saw ‘human reason defeated and crushed by the forces of irrationality’.91 As in Herodotus, the forces for good and ill fluctuated back and forth with incalculable abandon. The ultimate schematization of 83

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this out look emerged in Polybius’ history of Rome, where events gyrated in repeating cycles. For Augustine, this choking pessimism was the ultimate blasphemy against God’s creative purpose. In any case, it was against the facts of history: I am quite certain that no man existed before the creation of the first man; there were no repeated appearances of the same man, coming round again goodness knows how often in the course of goodness knows what cyclical revolutions; nor had there ever been any other being like him in nature.92 In this way Augustine came to articulate the modern outlook on history as the account of unrepeatable events; for him all focused on the one watershed event that gave human history meaning: semel mortuus est Christus.93 Christ died for the world in God’s single supreme act of sacrifice, love and redemption. It is Augustine, therefore, who stands at the foundation of the Western historical outlook upon the individual.94 The Christian view could scarcely avoid refuting cyclical history, since anyone ‘who takes the Incarnation seriously’ must eventually propose a philosophy which makes sense of history as some kind of linear process.95 For Augustine, the history of the world broke through the entrapment of cycles96 and was ‘transformed into a drama of deliverance’.97 Part of the ancient outlook had been conditioned by an inordinate fear of change, especially as rationalized and articulated by the ascendant conservative philosophers. Aristotle’s defence of the ancient polis, for example, had been instructed by a concern for stability, even to the point of advising that most hated and feared of rulers, the tyrant, how to maintain his regime.98 The Romans were so helpless before the possibility of change that they turned chance into a goddess, Fortuna, whom they could try to propitiate. Augustine brought the stability and perfection of the realm of forms to bear on the fluctuating material world, showing that the working of providence was benevolent and redemptive. Change was therefore to be welcomed, as it announced the Christian hope of salvation. The mind of God was unfathomable in its riches, and held unending promise for true believers: ‘God is the unchanging conductor as well as the unchanged Creator of all things that change.’99 Like the unfolding notes of an endless song, the promise of revelation is without bounds; yet human apprehension of each of God’s treasures reflects upon new elucidations of goodness and justice not dreamt of by the Greeks. This was Augustine’s decisive break with the ancient world. Henceforth moral action will not be the copying or imitation of a changeless pattern – as in a world where changeless patterns are more real than living, changing persons. Morality will be itself creative and growing and developing.100

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The Christian ethic implied a union of the perfect world of spirit with the indeterminate world of matter. Augustine’s theory of history showed how, once for all, it was neither necessary nor desirable for Christians to withdraw from the world. Christian people could be conscious of an ‘otherworldly’ calling to perfection, but that perfection was to be seen in eschatological terms, since in the final consummation of history the judgment of God would separate the faithful from the unfaithful. In the meantime, ‘There was no need for Christians to be set apart, sociologically from the “world”.’101 A Christian could take part in society, cooperating if necessary in its civil administration, even while being conscious of having a special purpose in life. Augustine’s notion of civitas peregrina offered a category of citizenship as a registered alien in this world’s society.102 One lived here and now in this society, but one’s real home was in the non-material realm of perfection.103 Ultimately, when measured against the perfection of God’s love, all human relationships and arrangements were unsatisfactory, as were earthly institutions framed to accommodate all God’s creatures, including those who were neither conscious of nor responsive to his purpose. All were endowed with the capacity to love, but the free will God had bestowed upon his creatures gave them the choice to love what, in eschatological terms, was undesirable. Such capacity to love was given over to lust or cupidity. The worst dislocations in human relationships were caused by cupiditas dominandi, the lust for power over others.104 This was the ultimate form of selfishness, of which other degrees of desire were mere subsets.105 The capacity to choose good or evil was present in every person, and inevitably set up enormous tensions within each. Temptations of all kinds pulled us this way and that, tearing us away from righteous conduct.106 Remorse suffered from yielding to temptation set off a chain-reaction of further tensions, dragging us deeper into despair. ‘What is it’, Augustine asked, ‘that has sown this war in me?’107 These tensions are replicated everywhere – not just in each person, but between people, poisoning all human relationships. Everywhere, people quarrel over territory or possessions. Everywhere, the powerful dominate the weak in the war between pride (superbia) and humility (humilitas).108 Although the world was created good, everywhere it is infected with human sin. All humans are born in sin, from which they can only be released by Christian redemption. This notion of ‘original sin’, actually being worked out while Augustine was writing the City of God, stands at the centre of the work.109 Sin is at the root of the unbearable tensions from which humans seek remission. A yearning for peace and a deep desire to be released from tensions motivate the pilgrim’s search for God.110 How intimate and personal is this longing Augustine announces in the prayer at the beginning of the Confessions: ‘The thought of you stirs 85

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[man] so deeply that he cannot be content until he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.’111 The desire for peace runs through all creation, from the Platonic ordering of the parts of the soul, which is reflected in the ordering of society itself, to peace among all peoples on earth: The peace of the body, we conclude, is a tempering of the component parts in duly ordered proportion; the peace of the rational soul is the duly ordered agreement of cognition and action . . . the peace of the Heavenly City is a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and a mutual fellowship in God; the peace of the whole universe is the tranquillity of order.112 Even wars between peoples, which begin in the evil desire for domination, are a perversion of the longing for peace. In the surge of historical forces the quest for peace becomes the organizing principle;113 it is the human counterpart of, or response to, the working of providence in the world. Too often, however, the inmost desire for peace, congenital to all humans, is obliterated by the equally universal presence of sin. Some remain relatively free from its chains, but most are imprisoned in evil.114 This belief that there are two kinds of human being – duo genera hominum – was pervasive in Augustine’s thought, emerging long before he conceived of the two cities. It stemmed partly from his training in rhetoric, which upheld a tradition of juxtaposed opposites going back at least to the antilogiai of the Greek sophists;115 but it fell in line with the struggle of philosophers to choose between different styles of life, and the Christian martyrs’ determination to maintain a detachment from the ordinary values of the world. It also resonated with echoes from Augustine’s own Manichaean days, when he had subscribed to a belief in the division of the world between the coequal forces of light and darkness.116 Because sin tainted all human institutions, they could offer no hope of redemption. One of the great errors of the classical world had been the belief that human beings could attain to perfection by whittling away at the shape of political institutions. For Augustine human evil ate like termites at their foundations, and conscious efforts to organize human salvation were bound to collapse like rotten beams. In any case, the human being, at the peak of God’s creation, was beyond human understanding; human institutions were therefore not perfectible. Augustine explored the mysteries of memory to try to encompass all that a person is and becomes, but the task was hopeless. How could we begin to embrace a knowledge of a being that can summon up in thought vast mountain ranges or trackless oceans though he or she be hundreds of miles away from them? What arcane treasures are stored in the subconscious, quite unbeknown to the conscious being, but ready for retrieval when sprung by the appropriate trigger? Augustine trembled to contemplate the fathomless human 86

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person: ‘The power of memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am.’117 The indeterminacy of human personality, as Peter Brown suggested, should be the starting-point of any appraisal of Augustine’s political thought. He sees a human as ‘discontinuous’, unable to determine him- or herself ‘entirely in consciousness, in moral intention, in communication’.118 Even with the best will in the world, a person cannot examine his or her own motives and trust the result: ‘For the powers of my inner self are veiled in darkness which I must deplore. When my mind speculates upon its own capabilities, it realizes that it cannot safely trust its own judgment.’119 By insisting that human organization is afflicted by sin, Augustine made a decisive break with the widespread Christian assertion that earthly rule should be exercised in God’s name or on God’s behalf. This was the ultimate insult to God, and a pathetic challenge to his rule in the universe. Not even the ‘best’ Christian person, still being human, could claim the right to rule others. The very idea of a Christian state was heresy.120 In Augustine’s colourful phrase, with justice removed what are all earthly kingdoms but magna latrocinia – great dens of robbers?121 What earthly kingdoms have true justice? Cicero had given us a nice definition: a state (res publica) is the political organization of a people, a ‘people’ being not just any mob but ‘a gathering of a large number of persons united by agreement about what justice and the common good are’.122 Unfortunately, no such community could be found anywhere on earth, since, if justice means something like giving each his or her due, no pagan state has ever given the true God his due, and not even the church itself, as a corpus permixtum, a mixed body made up of the really devout and the nominally faithful, can achieve true justice. But true justice is found only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ; if we agree to call it a commonwealth, since we cannot deny that it is the ‘weal of the community’ . . . we may say that at least there is true justice in that City of which the holy Scripture says, ‘Glorious things are said about you, City of God’.123 This City of God, on which the truly faithful have their eyes fixed, exists nowhere on earth. Augustine’s conception of it in some ways approximates to Plato’s kallipolis, the perfect community by which all earthly associations must be measured. Through the Trinity perfection has been thrust into an imperfect world, so that it is made to penetrate earthly organizations and to bring to them an enlightenment they would otherwise lack. Unlike the martyr or ascetic of an earlier generation, however, Augustine does not accept that accommodation to the world must mean compromise with its values. For him the Trinity has supplied the bridge between the perfect 87

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spiritual world and the evil of the material world. Across that bridge the pilgrim may bring his or her spiritual insights into the everyday world without contaminating them. Without true justice earthly political communities remain imperfect. They are still part of God’s creation. They make life more stable and ordered for pilgrims and for all God’s other human creatures alike. Human passions are indeterminate, and pose a hovering threat to peaceful existence. The state, therefore, is also part of God’s benevolence. It may be ruled by sinners, but they, too, are part of God’s creation. So, in some mysterious way, even so defective an arrangement as a state, which is really a bloated robber band, is a part of God’s plan for the world. Augustine endorses Paul’s letter to the Romans: all the ‘powers that be’ are constituted by God.124 His distance from the martyrs is marked by his exhortation to obey the state. He avoids any invitation to disobedience, for, like Aristotle, he harbours an even greater fear of disorder than of tyranny. If one were to counsel disobedience, ‘Factions, self-seeking individuals and groups would use such doctrines in order to rationalize their own desires to evade the laws, to escape punishment for their evil deeds, and to acquire domination for themselves.’125 States are to be obeyed because they are necessary for an ordered, relatively peaceful, life. If they are to be obeyed, then of course they must exist. Since none can be found that conforms to Cicero’s definition – that each genuine republic is united around a common concern for justice – there must be something at fault with the definition. States are not perfect; they are all to some extent unjust; but for all that they are useful. To accommodate them into human history a more realistic definition must be found. Augustine therefore modifies Cicero’s approach and argues that a people is constituted by a common agreement as to what it holds dear.126 By this definition even Rome or Babylon, with their love of power and corruption, are included as true states.127 Love is the energizing force in all Augustine’s work, just as peace is the desired end of existence. Quae diligit, the objects of love, become the defining characteristic both of individual persons and of communities. Christ’s injunction to love God, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, had delineated three categories of love, but the extreme opposites are love of God and love of self. Those who love themselves alone exhibit the ultimate perversion of true love; self-love ramifies into the corruptions of lust for domination and gratification of appetites. All earthly institutions are undermined by some form or other of misdirected love. They are represented by the civitas terrena, the earthly state. Of an entirely different category is love of God which, as long as sincerely expressed, banishes lesser forms of love except selfless love of one’s neighbour according to Christ’s instruction. Those who truly love God constitute the civitas Dei, an association which cannot be expressed in material terms. It is

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eschatological: ‘living by faith . . . it stands in the security of its everlasting seat,’128 waiting for the last judgment and the final victory. By its spiritual presence in the realm of time, however, it defines that group of sojourners, or resident aliens, who are God’s elect. In a spiritual prefiguring of Marx’s antagonistic classes, then, Augustine characterizes the course of human history as the parallel story of two classes of human being (duo genera hominum): ‘“the crowd of the impious who bear the image of earthly man” and “the succession of men dedicated to the one God”’.129 The antagonism between them is announced in the first human family of the Bible when Cain founds the first city, and Abel, the archetype sojourner with no city, is killed by his ‘civilized’ brother.130 The pattern of fratricide is repeated when the legendary founder of the greatest example of the earthly city, Romulus, slew his brother Remus. Although Remus was no member of the City of God, the infection of jealousy and lust for domination mouldered in the foundations of the ‘eternal city’.131 So it is with all earthly cities, states and associations. Paradoxically, the collision course between the two classes of human, as symbolized by the two cities, is the one saving grace for human life. For, while they are separated morally, as Augustine had suggested in an earlier treatise,132 in the realm of time, the sæculum, the two cities overlap and interpenetrate: ‘In truth, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgment.’133 In this era, however, the task of the City of God is to apply the operative criticism to earthly institutions and associations. The example of Christ, while having nothing to do with the exercise of power, showed up earthly powers for the pretentious inanities they were. The City of God, in its brilliant perfection, cast the ‘deranged relationship’ between God and his creatures into glaring relief. Its task was ‘re-establishing the correct relationship between all created beings and their Creator, and, consequently, between one another’.134 The example of human association in the City of God, with people united in a common orientation of their whole personalities toward the godhead, was profoundly democratic. Augustine himself can hardly be thought of as a political democrat. The spiritual realm of the City of God could not be called ‘political’ at all, since it knew nothing of coercion or power, as understood in an earthly sense. Within it, however, if it is appropriate at all to say that God ‘rules’, his divine sovereignty is ‘constitutional’ – consistent and ordered.135 Moreover, the ideal of the City of God is community, an association in which the collectivity ‘exists to promote the fullest possible development of individual personality’.136 It does not regard race, rank or station: While this Heavenly City, therefore, is on pilgrimage in this world, she calls out citizens from all nations, and so collects a society of aliens, speaking all 89

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languages. She takes no account of any difference in customs, laws and institutions, by which earthly peace is achieved and preserved – not that she annuls or abolishes any of those, rather, she maintains and follows them . . . . In fact, that City relates the earthly peace to the heavenly peace, which is so peaceful that it should be regarded as the only peace deserving the name, at least in respect of the rational creation.137

Here we observe the link between the heavenly city and the earthly. It proffers the example, and transfigures earthly notions of peace into a true perfection. So also with association: it makes no distinction of rank or station, it subjects all equally to the same ‘Law of Love’, it utterly rejects the ‘superman saviour’ and brooks no possibility of despotic or totalitarian leadership.138 With God in his rightful place, before him the unity of the human race is manifest. After true homage is paid to God, the City of God becomes a tribute to ‘the essential sociability of man’.139 Not even the best-laid-out democratic regime can realize the perfect sociability of the City of God. How, then, can we suggest that the heavenly city’s constitution has any relevance to earthly politics? Augustine did not think anything resembling this absolute democracy could be realized in temporal institutions. The answer lies, as Markus’s happy insight puts it, in ‘eschatology as politics’.140 This conception enfolds, first of all, Augustine’s rejection of the classical illusion that shaping human institutions can ever produce true justice, peace and happiness. Such perfection is only thinkable for the ‘last days’ following Christ’s judgment of the earth. Even the best imaginable earthly arrangements will win only qualified assent from the citizen of the heavenly realm: ‘The fullest endorsement of secular value is tinged with criticism.’141 No matter how much the Christian person is constrained by a sense of duty to take part in secular affairs, he or she must, by cognizance of Christian perfection, still be the critic of all human arrangements. By juxtaposing a perfect conception of human association – of community, justice, self-sacrificing service, love – the City of God expresses a profound radicalism. The endless possibility of Christian hope operating upon this world’s institutions means that even the most praiseworthy are still to be subject to revision and improvement. Human goodness will never reach its apotheosis until finally assimilated to its godhead. In the best imaginable circumstances there will still be injustices and acts of inhumanity to be rooted out, and the best earthly institutions will still cause oppression that must be addressed by the pilgrim. Augustine’s revolutionary conception makes a decisive advance on the prophetic tradition. Whereas the Old Testament prophets were called out to renounce specific acts of oppression, the City of God shows that all earthly existence is swathed in injustice. Lest this be seen as a counsel of helpless pessimism, however, the heavenly

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city reminds us of the constant unremitting pressure for reform that it exerts on all human institutions and associations.142 There remains a problem, nevertheless. By applying the standard of perfection to human institutions the dweller of the City of God could give assent neither to any existing form of society nor to any blueprint for a future one. No such aspiration could embrace the perfection of the spiritual example. Political ideology is incompatible with prophetic religion. Recognizing this was scarcely a problem in an age of imperial despotism, even when the emperor was nominally, nay sincerely, a Christian. What is one to say of vastly more congenial conceptions of human association, however, to which any reasonable human being would aspire to belong? Would not a blueprint for some idealized version of Athenian democracy, say, be worthy of assent? There is a great danger in the denial or repudiation of political doctrine. For to be so wary of political theory as to deny its possible application altogether is an invitation to a political pragmatism or relativism that operates on no coherent principle at all. The effect of the City of God on earthly politics is radical – indeed revolutionary – and yet its indiscriminate repudiation of ideology dissipates the force of a revolutionary impulse to reform. As Markus acknowledges, ‘a revolutionary hope of this kind may look very like a liberal reformism, or like “social engineering”, and it is compatible with a widely ranging political eclecticism’.143 One must endorse in this attitude a resistance to all ‘political programmes which seem to make an ultimate claim on men’ and accept the relative merit of living in Bonhoeffer’s ‘penultimate’ sphere.144 Yet Augustine’s two cities force upon us the necessity of choice, and the ‘realities’ of the secular political world confront us with options among coherent political schemes to which ‘tinkering’ or ‘social engineering’ give no guidance. With the example of perfect democracy which the City of God supplies, a Christian person could do nothing other than choose a democratic ‘blueprint’ over an authoritarian one, and any attempt to work for a democracy in authoritarian surroundings would involve ‘ideological’ politics. This becomes a thorny problem indeed for a pilgrim sojourning in a twentiethcentury world where ‘relatively genuine’ democracies press up cheek by jowl against tyrannical regimes, and where those very democracies, in their external relations, deploy oppressive behaviour against their weaker neighbours. ‘Ideological’ politics become an unavoidable necessity for the religious person faced with such dilemmas. Without losing sight of the ‘other-worldly’ nature of perfection, it will be necessary for us to apply the prophetic tradition, now amplified in its omnipresent form by the pervading spiritual presence of the City of God, to modern conceptions of democracy. First, however, we must confront the inordinate claims of individuality set loose by the Protestant Reformation.

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THE TWO KINGDOMS Reformation separatism

THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL However far the City of God may have been removed from worldly affairs, the book that bore that name was so packed with wise, practical observation that it was bound to be used by people looking for sound advice. Charlemagne read it,1 and there he found the first great ‘mirror for princes’ – an encyclopaedia for rulers and designers of kingdoms.2 Lord Bryce was convinced that the Holy Roman Empire was founded on the City of God.3 Christian popes were far ahead of Christian kings, however, in discovering Augustine as a store of sustenance for creating the universal church as a ruling institution. Pope Leo I used Augustine to add theological depth to his discussions on the nature of Christ, so acquiring an authority that would help establish Rome as the seat of learning and the definer of Christian faith.4 He even went so far as to claim that the pope, unworthy heir of St Peter though he be, was the foundation stone not merely of a church, but of the City of God itself.5 The pontificate of Gregory the Great, possibly the seminal period of the papacy, was steeped in Augustinianism. For Gregory all Christians were incorporated in the societas reipublicae Christianae, reflecting on earth the perfect ordering of the community of heaven.6 One could go on repeating examples of the obvious influence of Augustine upon medieval thought and institutions, but this has been done many times before. The medieval era inherited a widespread view that God’s order of creation was of a twofold nature, mirrored at the human level in two kinds of human being – those who loved God, and those who loved self. How deeply this idea was ingrained in medieval thought appears in the view of Thomas Aquinas, the great synthesizer, that all creation bears this twofold nature: duplex ordo in rebus.7 Aquinas was inclined to see diversity as ‘natural’, and therefore acceptable in the sight of God as part of his own creating plan, but for most of Augustine’s immediate 92

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successors those humans who were represented in the corrupt assembly – the civitas terrena or the civitas Diaboli – were scarcely to be tolerated within a unified Christian order. Much of medieval thought is a quest for unity among ‘contending principles’,8 and postulates a corresponding unity among all peoples. One response to the search for unity which Augustine himself could scarcely have supported was to construe the City of God as a community realizable on earth. Some church people could infer from his case an argument that the church indeed formed a state – a Christian republic – that would, in giving due honour to God, satisfy Augustine’s criterion of public justice.9 At times Augustine seemed to equate the heavenly city with the church. At one point he states: ‘It follows that the Church even now is the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven.’10 Yet Augustine has just been arguing, in eschatological terms, that the church will reap the harvest at the end of the world; there is a sense in which the present church participates in the role prescribed for it at the end of time. Whatever Augustine’s intention, his work was used to support the idea of a unified Christian commonwealth organizing and ruling all people according to biblical injunctions. If such a thing can be laid at the feet of any individual person, perhaps more than any other Augustine was influential in shaping the lands of the West into a single polity known as ‘Christendom’.11 ‘Frail aqueduct’ as the church was, across it ‘the cultural reservoirs of the Classical World now passed to the new universe of feudal Europe, where literacy had become clerical.’12 In the meantime, Augustine’s deeper insights into the relationship between the created, changing world and the realm of eternal verities passed underground. His two cities were construed simplistically as ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’; his duo genera hominum, the two species of humankind, became simply Christian and non-Christian. The attempt to construct a single res publica Christiana throughout the territories of Europe owed little to his unendingly subtle insights into human nature. If ‘Augustine’s synthesis of past theology assumed a hegemonic position’,13 the church was but dimly illumined while the other side of his philosophy, the truly eschatological, remained as obscure as the far side of the moon. Despite the terminology, the res publica Christiana was no republic, still less a democracy. Scriptural authority was taken to prescribe a single solution to all problems, and this implied a unified and unanswerable sovereignty over all human affairs. One of the best-known formulations of this idea is Walter Ullmann’s ‘descending thesis of government’: all direction for human life comes from above; the defiant and essentially democratic words of Jesus at his trial – ‘you would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above’ (John 19.11) – are proclaimed as the imprimatur for all kinds of petty domination, as though Jesus concedes Pilate’s authority in this matter to be legitimated by God; and God is made 93

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responsible for the tyrannical earthly rule which Augustine called usurpation of God’s majesty. Although the medieval world searched for unity, the kind of dualism represented by Augustine’s philosophy, and later misconceived as ‘sacred and secular’, slid into the doctrine of dual rule. The descending flood of governmental power cascaded down two separate falls: the sacred or hierocratical, and the secular or monarchical. In the whirlpools below, the contending currents surged one way and another as absolutism was tempered by equivocation between the sacred and the secular. Both pope and king sought supremacy, but in a medieval world where nothing mattered more than the ultimate dwelling of the resurrected human soul, kings were often forced to admit that the church had the last word. RELIGIOUS MITIGATION OF POWER The authority of scripture, being used by both church and monarchy, seemed to be available only to those who claimed power from above. The incontrovertibly democratic elements of the Bible were not often recognized after the time of Augustine, and certainly the democratic implications of the City of God were all but ignored in the Middle Ages. Scarcely anybody talked about democracy. A few scholars remembered it as a primitive and pagan curiosity of passing antiquarian interest. To the extent that any had recourse to popular legitimacy, or conceived of the idea of a community of equal members, they thought of a republic (as in res publica Christiana, or the Sancta Dei Ecclesia Reipublicae Romanorum) as a form of organization very different from the democracy devised by the Greeks. Scarcely anybody thought of democracy as having anything to do with Jewish or Christian scriptures, or indeed with any question of faith. Yet there is an unrelentingly democratic impulse in the idea of the direct rule of God. As Ullmann maintained in his many writings,14 religious legitimacy for the ‘descending thesis’ of government left no means for subordinates to question the authority of their rulers. Yet rulers, whether princes of the church or of the secular power, who grounded their title on scripture, could not but refer to scripture as their guide. There they found judges and kings who ruled in God’s name, but who were often rebuked by God or by God’s priests and prophets when they transgressed the holy law prescribing, and circumscribing, their power. It was a limitation on authority with no more force than the appeal of conscience, a ‘constitutionalism’ of the inner being; yet upon this ‘responsibility to refrain from exercising power’, in the end, all modern constitutionalism is really founded.15 In the Old Testament one could not avoid the example of King Josiah alongside that of Solomon, and the moderate and humane text of Deuteronomy, as an example of lawgiving, was a constant source of admonition.16 94

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The text of Deuteronomy had indeed had a powerful influence on an earlier royal consciousness, that of the Lombard kings of central Italy. The Edict of Rothari, as elaborated by his successors, and especially by the powerful King Liutprand, became in some ways the model for the Carolingian capitulary.17 While much of the edict is concerned with eliminating the vendetta, ‘Rothari states in his preface and again in his epilogue, that the state of affairs in his kingdom and especially the oppression of the poor by the rich, have caused him to correct the law.’18 After the reception of Aristotle’s Politics in the twelfth century the idea of inward restraint on the part of the powerful began to be externalized in a more explicit, if still embryonic, constitutionalism. Thomas Aquinas, for example, insisted repeatedly that legitimate rule must be moderate, conducted for the common good and, above all, according to the law. The tyrant who transgressed these precepts should be resisted by his subjects: if, perchance, they had elected him to office, he could be deposed by those same electors; if he had been appointed to rule by a higher authority, then his subjects could appeal to the higher authority for his dismissal; if ‘there is no hope of human aid against tyranny, recourse must be made to God the King of all, and the helper of all who call upon Him in the time of tribulation’. In his references to Ezekiel and Hosea, Aquinas recognized the prophetic role in containing temporal power, on behalf of God’s direct rule.19 Acknowledging kingship as circumscribed by law, and as full of obligation as of honour, the Middle Ages saw kingship to be ‘office’ in the full Latin connotation of the word – position dignified with a sense of duty. As early as the Council of Paris and Worms in 829 kingship was characterized as a ‘ministry commissioned by God’.20 Aquinas, having compared kingship with the ‘offices’ of doctor, economist and professor, assigned to the ‘office’ of kingship the necessity of directing humans to their highest end – the attainment of the fruits of divinity.21 Just as there were responsibilities in the office of kingship that circumscribed its powers, so it was the duty of the king to appoint ‘lower judges and and other officials’.22 Each of these in turn had his own responsibilities which de facto served further to limit the competences of the crown itself. Aquinas was explicit that the orders of a superior official or ruler were not to be obeyed against the dictates of conscience.23 Ancient Gothic custom imbued the oath of fealty between lord and vassal with a deep-seated mysticism.24 Yet in the Christian era contracts were solemnized by invocations to the Christian God. The very idea of fealty was as much bound up with fides, faith in the religion itself, as loyalty between one man and another.25 Moreover, the universal culture of the church throughout Europe, insisting everywhere on Latin as the language of faith, administration and rulership as well as of learning, both spread and cemented the feudal system far and wide.26 95

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Any arbitrary division of medieval life into sacred and secular, including the distinctions between descending and ascending power, is bound to be a little misleading. As Marc Bloch observed with profound insight: In this Christian society, no function exercised in the collective interest appeared more important than that of spiritual organizations, precisely in so far – let us make no mistake about this – as they were spiritual. The charitable, cultural and economic rôle of the great cathedral chapters and of the monasteries may have been considerable: in the eyes of contemporaries it was merely accessory. The notion of a terrestrial world completely imbued with supernatural significance combined in this with the obsession of the beyond. The happiness of the king and the realm in the present; the salvation of the royal ancestors and of the king himself throughout Eternity: such was the double benefit which Louis the Fat declared that he expected from his foundation when he established a community of Canons Regular at the abbey of St Victor in Paris.27 There is no denying the importance of feudalism in the emergence of the individual person as citizen having a measure of autonomy and an element of choice concerning the nature of the political community in which to live. Eventually this notion of autonomy and respect for persons would filter through the layers of feudal society powerfully to influence the emergence of democracy. Our quest for the roots of modern democracy, however, leads us as much to the role of ordinary church members, laity and lower religious orders alike,28 in producing the notion of the consent of the governed. The answer lies in the idea of the church as a fully participative community. There was direct witness to this in the Book of Acts. More important, as they scoured the authorities for the source of legitimate power, medieval canonists noted an ambiguity – a kind of political pluralism – in the famous Matthaean prescripts. Examining the pope’s title to monarchic rule in Christ’s ‘commission’ to Peter (Matthew 16.18–19), they also discovered a collegial commissioning of all the disciples (Matthew 18.18); and alongside this they found a passage to which they referred again and again: in an irresoluble dispute between members ‘report the matter to the congregation [ecclesia]’ (Matthew 18.17). The church here has become a court of arbitration, but some medieval canonists took this verse to be a commission of sovereignty to the whole congregation. As the twelfth-century revival of Roman law began to apply republican concepts to canon law, so powerfully did the idea of the church as a community of equal members take hold that, according to Brian Tierney, there emerged a doctrine which might be called the ‘divine right of the community’.29 96

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Exploring the passage of republican ideas about popular sovereignty into the jurisprudence of the empire, the canonist Gratian sought to harmonize the body of church law around the theme of reciprocal duty contained in the ‘golden rule’. His Concord of Discordant Canons, composed in about AD 1140, established a precedent in couching canon law in the conceptual framework of republican and Stoic Rome, as a whole series of commentators, known as the Decretists (since Gratian’s Concord was often simply called the Decretum), elaborated and ‘glossed’ his work with more expansive understandings of scripture and the law. His greatest successor, Huguccio, held that ‘the church is the aggregate of the faithful, for if it does not exist at Rome it exists in the regions of Gaul, or wherever the faithful are’.30 As a community, ‘the faithful’ were elevated to a plane higher even than that on which the Greek democrats had felt they stood. The Athenians were inspired and constrained by a sense of religious duty, but their multiplicity of gods gave them no such measure of unity as that felt by a Christian congregation bound together by the Holy Spirit. At one with God, whose presence moved amongst them, they felt close to the peak of creation. In the thirteenth century Bonaventure wrote how the Holy Spirit produced in a congregation a consensus which was to be called ‘the way of the Spirit’.31 The sense in which the people of God participated in sovereignty with God himself was paralleled by the civilian study of Roman law, which reemphasized that, even under the most authoritarian periods of empire, the sovereignty of the realm was still vested in the people. The thirteenthcentury Bolognese doctor of law Azo, who taught for a time in Provence, argued that the power of the people resided in their custom, which took on the force of law and overrode and suspended any written law.32 Moreover, while the emperor was legitimated by a transfer of the people’s power through the lex regia, that transfer never meant a surrender of power; the people kept the authority to resume power from the emperor should they so wish. In these two ideas – namely the will of God as discovered by a community, and the republican idea of popular sovereignty – we find the reconciliation of ascending and descending theses of government. John of Paris, taking up the theme at the beginning of the fourteenth century, taught that emperors were created by the people under inspiration from God.33 Similarly, though the pope acts as the vicar of Christ, he is elected to office by the community of the church; if he should fail to promote its welfare, the congregation of the faithful, or the congregation represented by the college of cardinals, should withdraw his authority.34 In either case, God and people are at one in requiring the ruler to act according to God’s will as revealed to, or inspired among, the people. The idea of a people acting in God’s name while it consults its own interests as a community reached a high point in the conciliar movement of the early fifteenth century. Although the circumstances, which arose from the Great Schism of the 97

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previous century and eventually resulted in the existence of three rival popes, may not detain us here, authority in the church had been severely shaken by division. The tendency of writers like John of Paris and William of Ockham, in any case, had been to question the centrality of authority in a church made up of hundreds of congregations working in their own localities. Regional pluralism in the church was overlaid by the growth of religious orders, each with its own organizational structure and authority system; the whole was a type of ecclesiastical federalism.35 Conciliarist theory insisted on the community of the church as a plural society. It came to fruition in the attempts to solve the irreconcilable divisions exemplified in the three rival popes. Meeting in 1414, the Council of Constance removed all three claimants and elected its own new pope, Martin V, to replace them. The leading figure of the council, Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, was much exercised that to be properly constituted a council must meet as pope-in-council. Nevertheless, the church was greater than its ruler, and had every necessity to discard a defective part, even if the weightiest, of its body politic.36 Above all, the church itself was ‘the mystical body of Christ’.37 Nothing better symbolized the unity of the congregation in its diversity, in its oneness with the godhead. An essential political link between God and community, however, was made by Nicholas of Cusa. In his treatise on universal concord (De concordantia catholica) addressed to the Council of Basle in 1432, convened by Pope Martin V to deal with continuing divisions, Nicholas pronounced the doctrine in which is surely grounded the first attempts, among the later Calvinists, to revive democracy as a political system adapted to a Christian – and rapidly modernizing – world. Along with most of the tradition Nicholas recognized that earthly power was ordained by God. As Gierke explains, however, ‘a God-inspired Will of the Community was the organ of this divine manifestation. It is just in the voluntary consent of the Governed that a Government displays its divine origin: tunc divina censetur, quando per concordantiam communem a subiectis oritur’.38 Power ‘is considered divine when it arises through the common agreement of those subjected to it’. Although the conciliar movement was ultimately a failure, resulting in the reassertion of centralized bureaucracy in both church and state, the ideas it developed, inherited from deep in the medieval and classical past, brought about that conjunction of apparently contradictory forces which later divines could deploy in establishing the supremacy of the congregation and of the civic community. There were problems with popular sovereignty. If power resides in the whole community, and that power is not surrendered to a ruler, how can all rule all? If all rule, then who are the governed? The difficulty was to resurface in the dilemmas of Rousseau,39 and has never been entirely overcome in American political theory.40 The 98

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Middle Ages addressed the problem by seeing the people, when combined for religious or political purposes, as a universitas with a single persona. As individuals they had no authority, and were merely subjects of the ruling power. As universitas, however, their corporate personality held authority.41 While the conciliar movement revealed a way in which a form of direct democracy, operating through the congregation, might be brought to life in the Christian world, it also transmitted the idea of representation, first worked out in the religious orders of the thirteenth century, to the modern world. The council represented the whole church. The conciliarists drew on the ancient Roman legal idea that a law or executive action should be approved by the people affected by it – and ‘what touches all in the same way should be approved by all’ (quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur).42 At the Council of Basle Nicholas of Cusa invoked the right of congregations and peoples to have their interest consulted since it was by their authority that rulers were elected and councils summoned.43 That councils represented the whole people had already found what was probably its highest expression in the opinion of the Perugian jurist Bartolus of Sassoferato: ‘the council represents the mind of the people’ (Concilium repraesentat mentem populi).44 Undoubtedly this work was in the minds of those who met at Constance and Basle.45 The conciliarists also had recourse to a powerful statement of popular sovereignty, the Defensor pacis of Marsiglio of Padua. Like Aquinas, Marsiglio was a devotee of Aristotle, using him to assert the autonomy of the political community. He departed radically from Aquinas, however, the project of whose ‘great synthesis’ was to bring faith and reason into harmony as complementary aspects of God’s creation. Marsiglio, on the other hand, saw faith as having nothing at all to do with the temporal world, being concerned only with people’s ‘inward’ actions and pertaining only to the intangible world beyond the physical. In his tendentious attacks on the papacy he cut across hundreds of years of doctrine about temporal swords being wielded at the behest of spiritual rulers, and sought to remove spiritual teaching from the realm where physical coercion might be necessary for the sake of peace and order; coercion could only be exercised through a clearly identifiable authority vested in the community itself; any attempt to require service to two masters, namely secular community and church, could only result in confusion that would threaten the peace and disrupt the harmony of society. Although for nearly a thousand years it had been claimed that the unity of Christendom, cemented together by the universal church, had been founded on Augustine’s City of God, Marsiglio revised a doctrine that, in so far as it addressed matters spiritual and secular, more truly represented Augustine’s own theme of the two cities. Augustine had rejected any idea that spiritual growth should be marked by worldly prosperity, or that the spiritual kingdom could be represented by earthly 99

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dominion. Now Marsiglio referred to Christ’s reply to Pontius Pilate in John 18: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Marsiglio’s own gloss followed: ‘that is, I have not come to reign by temporal rule or dominion, in the way in which worldly kings reign . . . . If I had come into this world to reign by worldly or coercive rule, I would have ministers for this rule, namely, meant to fight and coerce transgressors, as the other kings have.’46 Christ did not impede Pilate’s rule in this world, since the kingdom of faith did not impinge upon it; he had no authority ‘to coerce transgressors of the law’; he had no wish to engage in ‘carnal rule over contentious and carnal acts’.47 ‘It is certain, therefore’, concludes Marsiglio, ‘that Christ avoided rulership, or else he would have taught us nothing by his example.’48 By contrast, the institutions of secular rule, the ‘powers that be’ of Romans 13, are to be obeyed by all, clerical and lay alike, for to resist them is to disobey God.49 As Quentin Skinner suggests: ‘These arguments culminate, to speak anachronistically, in a remarkably “Lutheran” vision of the powers and jurisdictions which Marsiglio thinks it legitimate to claim on behalf of the clergy and the Church.’50 THE TWO KINGDOMS More often, Luther sounded ‘Augustinian’. As an Austin friar he was bound to study the works of Augustine alongside the scriptures, and became convinced of the potency and authenticity of Augustine’s work as compared with most recent church scholarship. There are strong overtones of Augustinian thought in Luther’s own, and the ‘two kingdoms’, for all their difference in application, resonate with the discourse of the two cities. Luther lived in a world very different from that of Augustine, however. Whereas Augustine had been concerned to justify orthodox Catholic Christianity to the world against the powers and principalities of empire, he had been used perversely to justify the church itself becoming a worldly empire. A thousand years’ experience of people under imperial church rule had not always been happy. Striving for municipal autonomy, the cities of northern Italy had protested against papal domination, but the further one moved from the centre of church power, the deeper became the disenchantment with distant ecclesiastical rule. The kingdoms of France and England eventually asserted a secular sovereignty against papal incursions. Taken to its extremes, this sovereignty took the form of usurping the special grace claimed by the papacy, so that temporal and sacred authority were united under the ‘divine right of kings’.51 Luther was far from alone in rejecting the dominance of papal government over German affairs. Yet, despite the almost unbounded political consequences of his actions, Luther was no political reformer. His revolu tion was religious, and stemmed 100

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from one German characteristic in which he was consonant with his fellowchurchpeople. In a famous paper Gerhard Ritter emphasized the peculiar influence of the intense piety of German Christians.52 Their faith was personal, introspective and immediate. Matters of conscience were deeply and personally felt. The core of religious experience was private as each individual person had a direct encounter with God. The trappings of external public worship, while necessary, were peripheral to the experience. Taken to excess, the pomp and ceremony of much public worship was a distraction, rather than an aid to a person’s relationship with God. Indeed, the idea that someone should need a vast institution, with ordained priests who were often demonstrably imperfect human channels, to mediate an ‘immediate’ religious experience seemed to many quite superfluous. New religious ideas further undermined the authority of the church. Some sects were teaching that the soul of each person is ‘predestined’ for heaven or hell, since God, standing outside time, which after all is his creation, sees all at a glance. God already knows who are the elect and who the damned, so one might suppose that a priest whose private life was less than perfect might be presumed to be among those not numbered in the ‘true’ church of the elect. Furthermore, enthusiast sects were teaching that the second coming of Christ was imminent – certainly likely in people’s lifetime – which made the ancient and ornate institutions of the church, so often praised for their continuity and durability, somewhat irrelevant.53 All Luther’s early devotion was channelled through institutions of the church which he had no external motives for changing or attacking. His own transformation was entirely religious. As he desperately searched for salvation through good works, selfdenial, humiliation and tortuous confessions, he became more frustrated and terrified before the righteousness of a God whom he was quickly learning to hate. If God was so remote from the human condition because of his absolute righteousness, why had he created us as fallible beings, prone to sin, and then heaped upon us impossible demands for perfection and piety? There could be no love in such a God. As the well-known story goes, however, Luther’s life was transformed by his Turmerlebnis, that special experience in the tower study of the monastery at Wittenberg. Much later Luther recalled how he hated the phrase, ‘the righteousness of God’, which he understood as the doctrine that God ‘punishes sinners and the unrighteous’:54 I did not love, indeed I hated this just God who punished sinners, and if not with silent blasphemy, at least with huge murmuring I was indignant against God, as if it were not enough that miserable sinners, eternally ruined by original sin, should be crushed with every kind of calamity by the law of the Ten Commandments . . . .

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At last, God being merciful, as I meditated day and night, pondering . . . ‘The Justice of God’. . . there I began to understand . . . ‘the Justice of God is revealed in the Gospel’ to be understood passively as that whereby the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, ‘the just shall live by faith’. At this I felt myself to be born anew, and to enter through open gates into paradise itself.55 The passion of this conversion, prompting in him reminiscences of the conversions of Paul, Augustine, and Bernard of Clairvaux, stayed with Luther all his life as a sign of ‘a conscious assurance of forgiveness and salvation with an attendant happiness and peace’.56 If Luther’s experience was so deeply religious, and if he was at all times determined to confine religious piety to the spiritual realm, in what sense can his work be said to be political? J. W. Allen’s study Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, while accepting the political implications of the Reformation, may have been influential in persuading a generation of political theorists to assign Luther to the margins of their work.57 However much Luther himself may have wished to shun political theory, his new discovery of a world of faith brought him into conflict with a church that had transformed itself into a political institution. There was no possibility of avoiding the political implications of his preaching. It may be even more pertinent to ask, since our present concern is with democratic politics, whether Luther’s apparent absolutism might not deny him a place in democratic theory at all. J. N. Figgis was convinced that the state, exalted beyond imagination, was one of the chief beneficiaries of Luther’s career: ‘Had there been no Luther there could never have been a Louis XIV.’58 Luther placed great stress on the need for order in the temporal realm. At times he reposed a surprising confidence in the will of earthly rulers, sounding quite Platonic in his belief that good rulers, if you could find them, would be much preferable to good laws.59 Ignoring Luther’s emphasis on acting ‘equitably’, some commentators see an embedded absolutism in the wish to do without positive law. Luther had little patience with any form of overt disobedience to constituted rulers, and his vituperations against uprising peasants have tainted all his views on secular authority with the bitter tang of absolutism. Luther was in fact no political absolutist. He had nothing but contempt for the rapacity of princes, and said so openly. The freedom to criticize their follies was central to his work: the Christian person must speak out against tyranny that by definition challenges the place of God above his creation. The idea of ‘the modern omnicompetent and secular State, is not only foreign to Luther’s thought but would have appeared to him as a deadly blasphemy’.60 No one could call Luther a democrat. He had no interest in the Greek passion for comparing different forms of constitution, and rejected the basis of any philosophy that suggested that human 102

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perfec tion was achievable through political artifice. Yet his work has implications as profound for democratic thought as are the transcending insights of a Plato or an Augustine and, being more historically proximate to the emergence of modern democracy, has an immediacy and directness of unmeasured importance to our theme. The righteousness of God, once discovered in its benign aspect, set up for Luther a realm of faith on collision-course with the ‘earthly’ concerns of the temporal world. This discovery meant liberation from the bonds of earth, slipping the human spirit for its encounter with ultimate verities.61 Among the earthly ties was human reason – valued in its place, but inadequate for the soul’s upward journey to a higher plane of truth. Luther’s new way was tinged with irony, since his faith journey received a gentle prod from the humanist staff in his own education. Its influence affected theology through the via moderna, the modern way, transmitted to Luther from William of Ockham through German instructors, notably Gabriel Biel and Johann von Staupitz. The trend was to bypass or reject the Thomist reliance on human reason and to reassert the reflections of Augustine and the early Fathers. It was senseless to try to encompass the mind of God in human thought, and outrageous impertinence to construct a psychology for God. As a consequence, human reason was of little avail in the spiritual realm where instruction came through the revelations of God in his wisdom and in his own good time. This was not a counsel of despair, since, while God had given humans reason to help them cope with the intricacies of daily existence, he had also implanted in each a faculty for a faith peculiarly responsive to his grace. As Luther’s conviction about the potency of the faith faculty grew, so also did his hostility to the misuse of reason. Reason was ‘the devil’s whore’, not because it was useless, but because people had asked it to supply answers beyond its capacity to do so. It was one of the devil’s favourite tricks to confuse humans by making them think they could apply reason to the faith world. The appeal to ‘the blind heathen teacher Aristotle’ in Christian theology was just one symptom of this deluded trust in reason.62 Aristotle taught that by good behaviour a human could become a moral being; for the Christian true righteousness was unattainable by human action; only the grace of God, received through faith, could ‘justify’ human existence. It was the devil’s stratagem to seduce people into thinking that they could attain to salvation by their own efforts. This was the fatal error purveyed by Thomas Aquinas and the other scholastics. Although Aquinas did speak of ‘unmerited grace’, full salvation required the completion of good works – to Luther a hopelessly futile gesture. Moreover, the scholastics were accused of preferring ‘human teaching’ (Menschenlehre) to the Word of God.63

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That each human was endowed with both the power of reason and a capacity for faith proved, for Luther, that each person had a twofold nature. The human lived on two planes, or in two worlds: a world of reason and a world of faith.64 Luther’s political comments pertain to the world of reason. They carry little democratic content. Far more important for our purposes is the duality of the worlds of reason and faith, the relationship between them and the impact that the world of faith has upon the temporal world. Before we can explore the connections between the two realms – a task essential for grasping the import of Luther’s doctrine for democratic theory – we must appreciate the absolute distinction to be drawn between them. The separation between the two worlds was conceptual and more than conceptual, since in dealing with Luther’s world of ideas we are concerned with ‘real’ aspects of human life and of creation.65 Each world is represented by a kingdom: the Kingdom of the Spirit and the Kingdom of the World. Each kingdom has a system of government or Regiment, peculiarly suited to its characteristics. Augustine’s two cities had appreciated the difference between spiritual and temporal worlds, if in heavily eschatological terms, but almost immediately people had begun to misuse his doctrine and to confound the incompatible aspects of the two realms. While in the late Middle Ages the confusion was compounded by Aquinas’ subtle teachings, some other medieval Aristotelians maintained a greater appreciation of the force of Augustine’s insights. Marsiglio had wished to make a sharp distinction between external and internal actions. William of Ockham had distinguished clearly between temporal and spiritual affairs: so that by temporalia may be understood those things that pertain to human government or [the government] of the human race insofar as it is established solely in its natural condition without any divine revelation, which things would be observed by those who recognized no law beyond natural and human positive law and on whom no other law was imposed. By spiritualia, however, are understood those things that concern the government of believers insofar as they are instructed by divine revelation.66 None of Luther’s predecessors sought to divide the temporal and spiritual realms as strictly as he. Both Marsiglio and Ockham, amongst others, had rejected the papal power of coercion, but Luther argued for an absolute restriction on the Regiment of the spiritual world having anything at all to do with physical rule in the temporal world. The characteristic implements of rule were the sword for the temporal regime, and the Word for the spiritual. The temporal world and its Regiment were as much God’s business as was the spiritual world. No one could use the authority of the spiritual world, however, as an excuse for physical coercion or punishment. The sword was necessary to save the 104

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majority of humanity from their own sinful natures and to create some kind of reasonable certainty in the business of their daily lives by curbing and punishing crime and aggression. After the fashion of Augustine, Luther argued that the sword, in the hands of a secular ruler, was God’s gift to a frail and wayward humankind. It was God’s gift as much to the heathen as to the faithful. Within the structures of God’s created world, the godless could serve divine purposes; a Christian might make a good ruler as a reasonable and just person, but, qua Christian, had no business ruling at all. Augustine had conceded that a ruler served the godly plan for human order though a ruler, by definition, was a bad person, showing the worst of sins in a pride which challenges the ruling place of God. Luther agreed that the Fall made secular rule an urgent necessity, but he took a more benign view than Augustine of institutions in the natural world, almost conceding to Aquinas that even good people require some form of organization. Earthly rule, then, belonged to the order of reason, the law and the world of good works. A Christian lived in the earthly realm as a Weltperson, a being of flesh and blood whose existence might be quite independent of the spiritual realm.67 Its characteristic form of rule had to be adapted to the infinite variety of waywardness to which fallen humans were prone. It was necessarily coercive, and Luther’s contemporary and associate Philip Melanchthon gave the definitive characterization of secular government: it had the power of life and death over its subjects, and such awesome authority could come only from God.68 It pertained to people’s external actions, using coercion to ensure peace in transactions between and among people. It was hierarchical, with reciprocal obligations up and down the chain of command. Luther’s words for rule, Obrigkeit and Oberkeit, the standard terms in the Germany of his day, signify an elevated view of an authority that reigns over us.69 As Luther might have learnt from Plato and Cicero, the process of temporal government should be instructed by the counsels of reason. Much as he abhorred the application of reason to spiritual questions, he approved as appropriate the use of reason in the natural order. This temporal order is ruled by natural law, and though the Christian scriptures may have some pronouncements to make upon it, they do so incidentally and descriptively, adverting to the law planted by God in the hearts of all creatures (cf. Romans 2.14–15): ‘In temporal affairs and those which have to do with men, the rational man is self-sufficient . . . . Therefore, God does not teach us in the Scriptures how to build houses, make clothing, marry, wage war, navigate and the like. For here the light of nature is sufficient.’70 Although Luther expressed his preference for the (earthly) rule of men, not laws (positive laws), it was not so much the personality of the rulers that was important as the offices they held. He had been raised in a papal tradition, running back to Leo I, which taught that the papacy was greater than its unworthy office-holders. Similarly, 105

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he now wished, in the temporal realm, to distinguish between the persons in office and the offices they held. God placed offices in the natural order of things to assist in establishing order. In discharging the role of ‘father, husband, magistrate, teacher, farmer and the like’ with honour, a person is true to a calling (Beruf). He or she achieves justitia civilis, a respectable ‘civic’ righteousness.71 In this Luther advocated a conduct reminiscent of that civic virtue enjoined by his very different Italian contemporary Machiavelli. While wishing such ‘offices’ to be fulfilled with love and justice, in the real world one does not encounter rulers brimming with virtue. Luther denounced the majority of princes as the world’s biggest fools, yet did their office the honour of according it a high place in God’s plan for ordering the natural world. A ruler is relatively good if he helps stabilize the world. To do this he is not necessarily a good person in the Christian sense. A Christian’s calling, as Christian, is not to rule at all. Would this mean that Luther thought, in the fashion of the early martyrs, that Christians should withdraw from worldly affairs as though such were unequivocally the work of the devil? Or, to put it the other way round, could a soldier, enlisted for the work of the sword in the service of coercive temporal rule, be a true Christian? Luther addressed the question specifically in his pamphlet of 1526, Whether Soldiers Too Can be Saved. Clearly, in assisting a prince to do his lawful duty of protecting the peace a soldier is taking part in God’s plan for the secular world:72 ‘Worldly government through the sword aims to keep peace among men and this God rewards with temporal blessing.’73 Clemency, though appropriate for a Christian as a person, is not one of his attributes as a soldier, for it may involve a dereliction of his coercive duty. The responsibility for the consequences of coercive action must lie with the ruler who gives the orders. On the other hand, if a soldier is given an order he knows to be unlawful, his duty is not to obey, for no one has the right to counsel anyone to act unrighteously.74 The Christian’s duty is to live righteously in this world, but there may be a sense for Luther in which the Christian can only be a Christian to the full in the spiritual world. If the world were peopled by true Christians, there would be no need for government, since coercion of people living according to utmost justice and goodness would be unnecessary. In this, Luther remains true to Plato and Augustine, and asserts his difference from Aquinas, who held that even angels could need some kind of regime. The question is in the end futile, since Luther believed that, given God’s insight, one could count the number of ‘true’ Christians on one’s fingers. In any case, even Christians earnestly intent on salvation, though given the promise of redemption, are still sinners. The Christian is simul justus, simul peccator – ‘at once righteous and a sinner’75 – and in his or her sinful moments is as much in need of restraint or 106

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punishment as anyone else. As Weltperson the Christian dwells in the temporal world as surely as the heathen or the unrepentant sinner. Yet the two worlds are equally God’s domain. It would not be possible for the temporal world of human failings to attain to the perfection of the spiritual world, but in so far as God rules within it, earthly government is ‘a kind of parable’ of the spiritual: ‘For God wills that the temporal rule (Weltregiment) should be an image of the true blessedness and of the Kingdom of Heaven, like a conjurer’s mirror or mask.’76 The instruments of rule in both worlds, the sword and the Word, are masks (larvae) behind which God rules.77 Yet the Word controls a different kingdom – a kingdom not of this world of physical trappings, though it inevitably impinges upon it. The rule of the Word is a Regiment without coercion, without physical punishment, without hierarchy. God alone rules through the Word; he needs no intermediaries and before him all his subjects are equal. They respond to his love in faith, they are compelled by persuasion alone. It is a Hörreich, a kingdom of preaching, of listening, of learning, of discussion and of conviction.78 To the profoundly democratic implication of this kind of realm we must return in a moment. The medium of learning and persuasion is the gospel. This ‘word’ is not exactly scripture – Christ himself wrote nothing, and the words his followers wrote about him must be interpreted and preached to every new congregation of hearers. A partner in this interpretation with the preacher is the Holy Spirit, which moves to constitute the spiritual world. In the spiritual realm each Christian is called upon to practise perfection. The Sermon on the Mount is the guide and rule. In a way the Christian soul leaves aside that part of the person which must engage, by confinement in the physical world, in works that by definition fall short of perfection. As a soldier or hangman the Christian might be called upon to act contrary to the Sermon on the Mount, but in the private world of the spirit she or he can and must practise a perfection only attainable through justification by faith.79 Among the first duties of a Christian, then, is to recognize the two realms and distinguish between them. Only then can the pilgrim understand what is the appropriate action for each realm. Luther never ceased to drive a wedge between the two worlds: I must always drum and hammer and force and drive in this distinction between the two kingdoms, even if it is written and spoken of so often that it becomes tiresome. For the Devil himself never ceases cooking and brewing up the two kingdoms together. The secular authorities always seek, in the name of the Devil, to teach and instruct Christ how he should conduct his Church and his spiritual rule. Similarly, the false priests and the sectaries, not in the name of 107

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God, always seek to teach and instruct people how they should conduct secular rule.80 This mixing-up of the kingdoms, confusio regnorum, is the supreme work of the devil.81 Priests who would raise taxes or run a commercial enterprise for selling indulgences, or popes who would arrest, imprison and even execute people for allegedly spiritual reasons, would be working in the devil’s service. Similarly, temporal rulers, who rightly held the weapons of coercion and good order, would act falsely if they tried to justify their actions on spiritual grounds. Later in his career, it is true, Luther conceded that the temporal sword might be used in defence of the gospel, but even here the action would probably be acceptable only for maintaining the peace. Certainly a Christian might not rebel or resort to arms on the dictate of a spiritual conscience, for the spiritual world supplied no comfort to the wielder of arms for any purpose. A Christian might object to unjust or tyrannical acts on the part of a ruler, but could draw no weapons, save the Word, from the spiritual realm. Over and again, Luther avowed, ‘I left it to the word.’82 A Christian might – nay must – preach against evil to the point of denunciation; this was the province of the Word, but physical force was not part of the armoury. Religious war was a contradiction in terms – the worst form of confusio regnorum. The Protestant reformer was as much in thrall to the devil if he or she tried to coerce people in the name of religion, but for Luther the most blatant example was papal rule that had massively institutionalized a compounding of the categories beyond the point of redemption. For centuries the Catholic church had built up institutions designed for this world’s commerce. The church itself, having succeeded to empire, had adopted many imperial trappings. Its foundation was an inherited, and then intricately elaborated, legal system. It had interpreted the Christian scriptures along legalistic lines. Although setting a nasty precedent for his followers, Luther hardly surprised by a heavily symbolic burning of copies of canon law; in his view such laws had nothing at all to do with the spiritual realm which alone the church should have represented. Its hierarchy put the church outside the boundaries of the spiritual kingdom. The clergy, in making themselves rich from the profits of church property, and in commercializing the symbols of the spiritual world, used their authority to raise themselves as a political class above the laity. Except for the mendicant orders, who were themselves execrable for trying by their ostentatious poverty to secure a place in heaven as their ‘good works’ were recorded on high, the clergy had established themselves as a privileged order which, in Germany as elsewhere, was greeted with smouldering resentment. Their privilege and their status had nothing at all to do with the gospel. 108

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Yet privilege was officially condoned. The church had constituted itself as a political institution. It had imported into the spiritual realm concepts and institutions foreign to its landscape.83 Every law that it formulated, every decree that it issued, every order that it transmitted down the ranks of the hierarchy, every arrest or imprisonment it ordered, every tax that it raised, every sacred relic that it sold, every indulgence that it purveyed, was for Luther a work of the devil. The traditional date for the beginning of the Reformation is, of course, 31 October 1517, when Luther is said to have pinned up his ninety-five theses on the door of the castle-church in Wittenberg. In the manner of such announcements on notice-boards in any university town, this notice invited disputation on the sale of indulgences. There was no debate, but the theses circulated widely nevertheless. The Reformation may have been brewing for decades, even centuries, but this convenient starting-point marks the beginning of a storm of controversy around the theology of Luther. In Catholic doctrine, the sacrament of penance had three requirements: contrition, confession, satisfaction.84 Indulgence was a dispensation of punishment for sin which had developed into a kind of certificate of remission. It was not the sole means of absolution, which required genuine contrition and a state of grace. Yet when the demands of ‘a treasure for the Church militant’85 became ever more pressing, the practice of selling indulgences sank further into abuse. The day Luther launched his attack many pilgrims had gathered in town to venerate the relics purchased by the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise: There were plenty of them – several thousand – and they were of the most varied kind: they included not only the complete corpses of various saints, nails from the Passion and rods from the Flagellation, but part of the Child Jesus’ swaddling-clothes and some wood from His crib, and even a few drops of His Blessed Mother’s milk! Large numbers of most valuable indulgences were attached to the veneration of these distinguished treasures. Frederick had managed to buy himself almost an eternity of remission. In twelve months he had ‘laid up no fewer than 127,799 years [and 116 days], sufficient to empty a whole province of Purgatory and ensure himself more than one heaven’.86 Luther’s ‘theses’ were trenchant, sarcastic, vituperative. He had not yet decided that the pope had no right to office, but he made it clear that the mediation of the church was irrelevant to salvation, and that the grace of Christ, working in the inner soul of a person, was all-sufficient. Raising money for building a basilica in Rome was a worldly enterprise unconnected with the remission of sins. ‘The true treasure of the Church is the holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God’ (no. 62). Yet the doctrine of the church that the pope could grant pardons in God’s name, and that such pardoning could become bound up in a pernicious, exploitative com merce in letters 109

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of indulgence, cut severely across Luther’s assurance, derived from Paul, that a sinner was pardoned through faith alone. As the last two theses read: 94. Christians should be exhorted to seek earnestly to follow Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths and hells. 95. And let them thus be more confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through a false assurance of peace.87 Indulgences were the worst abuse stemming from the church’s arrogation of the power to mediate between Christian souls and their God. The sacraments, too, could be tyrannical. Within three years of the publication of the theses Luther was denouncing the papacy as the ‘Roman tyranny’ (Romanam tyrannidem) exercising an oppressive control through the sacraments.88 It was a ‘tyranny’ for priests to refuse the elements of holy communion in both kinds.89 Luther deploys the language of politics to highlight the inappropriate infusion of political categories into spiritual affairs. He reasserts the prohibition against a violent response to spiritual injustices, but insists on their denunciation in preaching and writing. In this way he seeks to preserve the sharpest distinction between the temporal and spiritual realms. Although in making the distinction Luther felt himself able to comment on political affairs only in relation to the temporal order, it is his conception of the spiritual realm that is most relevant for our modern understanding of political democracy. For it is just at the point where the spiritual realm – the world of individual conscience – comes into contact with the temporal that it shines a searchlight on the failings of the temporal world, and sets up an order of constant criticism and a pressure for revision on which modern democratic thought is founded. Nowadays Luther might well be persuaded to accept that the conceptual separation of the two worlds has democratic implications, and that a modern democracy, while remaining infected by all the human inadequacies of the temporal world, might have evolved as a system subject to revision under the force of ideas drawn from another realm uncontaminated by such weaknesses. THE DEMOCRATIC IMPLICATIONS OF THE SPIRITUAL REALM In the first place, Luther conceived of the church as an association in no way resembling the vast, imperial organization administered from Rome. For him it was a communio sanctorum, a union of all those souls who, without hypocrisy, were bent on attaining to righteousness. It was easy for critics, like Hieronymus Emser, to charge that his church was an idealist’s construct devoid of any actual existence, but Luther insisted on its reality.90 The sure and visible sign of the existence of the church was 110

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God’s larva, the mask through which it was brought into being and by which it was ruled – the Word. Wherever the Word was preached and the sacraments administered, there was the church. It was not for humans to say who, in hearing the Word or in partaking of the sacraments, was or was not a true Christian.91 Knowledge of the composition of the congregatio fidelium, the body of true believers, might be obscured from human view, but that did not make it any less substantial. The real point was that the faithful were constituted a church by their direct relationship, without any mediation, to God himself. There is something profoundly democratic in this notion. For within the relationship all were equal and, while communion with the godhead was deeply personal, it was a shared experience uniting all those who engaged upon it. The true church was therefore a fellowship, an association without laws and rulers, save God alone.92 Moreover, it was not exclusive. The gospel was available to all, and the missionary task of the church was to see that it was preached to all; no person was beyond its compass, no soul unworthy of redemption in the eyes of God. Within this community of equals all authority belonged to God, but it was to be translated by the congregation as a whole. In human-spiritual terms the congregation itself became the source of authority, and indeed it had to decide such quasipolitical matters as the choice of a minister. But there could be no question of coercion or the enforcement of binding laws.93 The church remained a voluntary association, with an authority only over people’s consciences, to be exercised through the power of persuasion alone.94 There was yet something more profound than the formal equality of like-minded members of a congregation in Luther’s conception of the church. The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers added a depth of authority that established equality as a scarcely questionable article of belief. The Athenian democratic hoplite might demand equal status with his peers because of their collective achievements and their collective courage and wisdom. Luther taught an equality that was granted from above; he therefore radically reversed the medieval understanding that concentrated power descended from above through a hierarchically structured pyramid of control. Now equality descended, and authority was dispersed. For God was infinite in his power, majesty and wisdom, and entering a filial relationship with this being endowed each faithful person with an inheritance greater than all heaven and earth. Commenting on Galatians 4.7, Luther wrote: so assuredly you are children, not slaves, and therefore without the law, and also without sin, without death; and salvation is there, and no more evil, and the state of being a son brings with it an allembracing and eternal kingdom . . . . Thus someone who apprehends the fatherhood of God in his heart and through his

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hearing should not be judged by what the eye can see, but should be compared with the greatest circle, and that is called God, who is infinite.95 A person in this kind of relationship with God, having glimpsed the unending majesty of the Father, had no need of church or priest as a mediator of her or his salvation; all the faithful had acceded to the office of priesthood: If they are forced to grant that as many of us as have been baptized are all priests without distinction, as indeed we are, and that to them was committed the ministry, yet with our consent, they would presently learn that they have no right to rule over us except in so far as we freely concede to it.96 Here, explicitly, the ‘priesthood’ of each faithful person is construed as an office, and one which effectively dislodges that priesthood sanctioned by the Roman church. Moreover, this new office is not something dreamt up in the imagination of each person; nor is it a projection of some fantastic desire of the protesting Christian to achieve high status within a reformed religious order. Even a person who has received grace, as Ebeling explains, has no certain knowledge welling up from within: ‘“Our theology is certain”, says Luther, “because it sets us outside ourselves”.’97 That Protestant individualism should have a foundation outside the self is greatly important to our story. With the institution of the church dismantled in the eyes of the individual person, the danger for each was a perilous slide into religious solipsism. Max Weber made much of the dreadful loneliness that it is possible to suffer from a religious experience so intensely personal.98 Yet for Luther the Word, as rooted in scripture but as renewed daily by the Holy Spirit, was a safer stronghold for the individual personality than all the citadels of Rome. For democratic theory there is a paradox in the implications of Luther’s thought for the individual person. The personal experience of religion begins with the annihilation of self. There is a striking political or rather antipolitical reason for this position: the religious experience is one not of power, but its opposite: the complete surrender of the ‘I’ to the divine being. Spontaneous charismatic leadership owes its overwhelming impact upon those with whom it comes into contact precisely to this sense of being an instrument of transcendent powers.99 The notion of a universal priesthood made all Christians, in this sense, ‘charismatic’ leaders, since they each tapped directly into the fountainhead of spiritual power through their intimate relationship with God. In the eyes of God, each individual Christian soul had become supremely valuable.100 From the spiritual viewpoint, each person entered a condominium with God and became lord and arbiter of all things.101 112

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Although Luther refused to allow such spiritual lordship any bearing on the temporal realm, his concern for the Christian to live in both the spiritual and the worldly kingdoms implicitly invited his followers to make the transition across them.102 Whatever misgivings he might have had about human equality in the political sphere, nothing was going to stop the idea of the individual lordship of all people (for him Christians), once unleashed, from impinging mightily on the political structures of Europe. Some writers therefore go so far as to identify Luther as the ‘inaugurator’ of modern political individualism: inevitably it would develop an ‘irresistible force’ and once ‘dissociated from the religious factor’ would become ‘the spiritual principle of things’.103 It is always difficult to determine ‘inauguration’ of ideas, and Luther’s concept of the individual is powerfully influenced by Augustine’s introspective psychology.104 Nevertheless, in terms of the political movements that were emerging in the sixteenth century Luther’s translation of a spiritual idea (willy-nilly) into an inevitably political context had abiding consequences for modern history. The political individual, once discovered, would importune for himself (and eventually herself) a place in the lordship of secular affairs, and would demand the right to control the political system to which each had previously been subjected.105 If the priesthood of all believers meant equality, it also meant freedom. There was no question of these two ideals, as in political liberalism, being in contention or cancelling each other out. For Luther the reconciliation depended, once again, on both being confined to the spiritual world, where there was no incompatibility between them. Equality meant a similar relationship of each Christian person with God. It was a spiritual association, of no relevance to the secular world. Likewise, in subjection to God alone, the Christian person, in his or her spiritual aspect, was subject to no other human being. In 1520 Luther wrote three important tracts which form a sort of declaration of independence from the Roman church. As always, they concern spiritual freedom, but in that the Catholic priesthood was seen by the German protesters to be a privileged class, Luther’s attack on their dominance could scarcely avoid political ramifications. In his Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality (often translated as ‘Address to the German Nobility’) he began by pointing out to the emperor and German princes: ‘All classes in Christendom, particularly in Germany, are now oppressed by distress and affliction.’106 He moved on to the fiercest diatribe against the rapacity of the cardinals and the ‘immeasurable greed’ of the pope. The point of the attack, however, was not merely the abuse of privilege, but rather the claim of the church to exercise any temporal powers at all.107 If believers were priests, the claim of the Roman priesthood to any kind of dominion over the faithful slumped into irrelevance. In the Pagan Servitude of the Church (or ‘Baby lonian Captivity of the Church’), he attacked 113

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the oppression, dictatorship and ‘tyranny’ of Rome, especially in respect of its centralized control of the sacraments. The third important libertarian tract of 1520 was The Freedom of a Christian, which insisted that faith supplied all the strength to be free, so that ‘a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none’.108 At the same time, Paul taught that ‘though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all’ (1 Corinthians 9.19; New English Bible). The paradox dissolves as long as we stay in the spiritual world. The faith that fortifies for liberty ‘can rule only in the inner man’ (p. 10). Each faithful person is united to Christ in a kind of royal marriage, and since ‘Christ is God and man in one person’ (p. 14), the believer shares in both his priesthood and his kingship: with respect to the kingship, every Christian is by faith so exalted above all things that, by virtue of a spiritual power, he is lord of all things without exception, so that nothing can do him any harm. As a matter of fact, all things are made subject to him and are compelled to serve him in obtaining salvation .... This is not to say that every Christian is placed over all things to have and control them by physical power – a madness with which some churchmen are afflicted – for such power belongs to kings, princes and other men on earth. Our ordinary experience in life shows us that we are subjected to all, suffer many things, and even die. As a matter of fact, the more Christian a man is, the more evils, sufferings and deaths he must endure, as we see in Christ the firstborn prince himself, and in all his brethren, the saints. The power of which we speak is spiritual. It rules in the midst of enemies and is powerful in the midst of oppression. (pp. 17–18) As ever, the distinction between spiritual power and coercive temporal power is kept unblemished. They meet, and clash, where the temporal power is used to coerce a Christian in spiritual matters, or where supposedly ‘spiritual’ authorities attempt to impose their will by physical impositions. From both kinds of abuse the Christian is utterly free in his or her inner person. What is done to the flesh is irrelevant as long as the integrity of the spiritual being is maintained. Like the martyrs of old, Luther believed it was the Christian’s lot to suffer in this world. His ‘theology of the cross’ united the Christian with Christ in his physical suffering. Christian freedom, then, had nothing to do with immunity from secular laws, and conferred no rights of disobedience to the powers and principalities of this world. It is at this point that some modern commentators deprecate Luther’s freedom as a mere phantom. Secular government was left to the temporal powers, and Luther’s instructions to Protestant Christians fell in line with Paul’s assertion that the powers that be must be obeyed. Once the church’s structure had been rejected, Luther 114

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increasingly found that some form of coercive organization was necessary to preserve new freedoms in worship from collapsing into chaos. The theology came from outside the person – from the Word. The authority to give it institutional expression eventually came from the secular powers. At length he advised the princes of Germany to take control of their subjects’ worship. Luther was in danger of confounding the spiritual and temporal categories himself. Although he had much to say in elaboration of Paul’s injunction to obey the powers, the work he himself regarded as important was theology, an instance of the spiritual world. His advice on secular government was incidental, forming a tenuous bridge between the very different pessimisms of Augustine and Hobbes. As he suggested in his On Governmental Authority (1523): All who are not Christians belong to the kingdom of the world and are under the law . . . . For this reason God has provided for them a different government beyond the Christian estate and kingdom of God. He has subjected them to the sword so that, even though they would like to, they are unable to practise their wickedness, and if they do practise it they cannot do so without fear or with success and impunity . . . . If this were not so, men would devour one another, seeing that the whole world is evil and that among thousands there is scarcely a single true Christian. No one could support wife and child, feed himself and serve God. The world would be reduced to chaos. For this reason God has ordained two governments: the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteous people under Christ; and the temporal which restrains the un-Christian and wicked so that – no thanks to them – they are obliged to keep still and to maintain an outward peace.109 Profound as the impact of his theology was to be on political history, Luther’s ‘theory of the state is no more than the urgent pragmatism to which every revolutionary is impelled; it is simply a search, on almost any terms, for the condition of victory’.110 It is therefore false to construe his ‘theory’ as a justification for absolutism. It would be inconceivable for so resilient a libertarian theology to allow the political absolutism that some modern observers impute to Luther.111 Certainly obedience was enjoined on believers; they were meant to contribute to order rather than chaos, and to assist in the legitimate control of a political regime. Moreover, disobedience, besides being defiant to the God who ordered his world, was improvident – it could only lead to bloodshed and suffering. If the Christian is instructed by conscience to disobey a ruler, the only path to follow is the way of the cross: ‘Leiden, Leiden, Kreuz, Kreuz.’ The dissenting Christian can only expect in this world the suffering and cross

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of Christ and the martyrs. While the Christian might be called upon to bleed and suffer, there could be no calling to inflict the painful consequence of civil disturbance on others. The modern reader is shocked by the ferocity of Luther’s attack on political dissenters. Even the title of his tract, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, is startling, and one wonders with Wolin why it should be permitted for anyone to kill a rebel peasant, and no one a tyrant. Yet the modern reader approaches Luther’s calls to obedience from the subject’s point of view. This is a far cry from legitimating absolute rule on the part of the prince – or on behalf of any form of state. As much as any liberal of a subsequent age, Luther had a fair assessment of the corruptions of ‘power, honour, riches, authority’. A prince who thought God placed him there just to enjoy his power, wealth and honour was not just one of the heathen, but a fool. In fact, ‘princes are usually the greatest fools or the worst knaves on earth, therefore one must constantly expect the worst from them, and look for little good’.112 Since scripture and the living, moving Word had provided sufficiently for human moral instruction, incorporating what the ancient pagan philosophers called natural law, positive law (law made by present rulers) was not only superfluous but also suspect. It was likely to be promulgated in the ruler’s own interests, and therefore to be exploitative of the subjects. In any case, the incidence of positive law fell differently in different cases and was likely to produce unjust decisions.113 On the other hand, scripture and the natural law supplied sufficient restraint to keep a ruler’s actions within the bounds of justice. The lex naturalis was expressed in human conscience and, despite all Luther’s exhortations about obedience, if conscience should declare the natural law against a ruler’s decree, then indeed the ruler should not be obeyed.114 The apostles had given the example in Acts 5.29: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Where conscience tells the Christian that a ruler is in the wrong, particularly by trying to exert power in the realm of belief and the spirit, the Christian should respond: ‘if you command me to believe and to put away books I will not obey: for in this case you are a tyrant and over-reach yourself and command where you have neither the right nor the power’.115 Moreover, to witness injustice and to keep silent is to be guilty of complicity in the injustice.116 Even so, the Christian must not take up arms or rebel. His or her duty is to preach, expose, denounce. It is difficult for us to appreciate the power that Luther attached to the Word. Over and again, he ‘left it to the word’. The prophetic word of preaching, and, where necessary, accusation, was one thing; but the Word did not belong to the preacher alone; the preacher remained the vessel of the ‘living Word’, the power of the Holy Spirit unleashed in human 116

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affairs. Even if Christians had to keep the categories of spiritual and temporal rigidly separate, anything was possible for the power of the Word. If Luther wanted us to draw no specifically political conclusions from a theological doctrine of the equality, autonomy and even sovereignty of the individual believer, there was no escaping their political implications when the worlds of the spirit and of earthly affairs were brought into confrontation. Perhaps the most far-reaching, if least easily definable, implication of this theology for the political world was his dethronement of the idea of authority itself. For many Christians he and his reforming colleagues broke the power of Rome; but Rome was not the only victim. The idea that there can be an overarching, institutional authority was set aside in a theology where the Word was spoken direct to each individual conscience. The power of the church was scarcely to be replaced by a raft of princes whom the reformers were to denounce as fools and knaves. For Luther there was to be no authority save the Word, and certainly no institution to uphold, mediate and enforce its precepts. To generalize, Luther broke the authority of authority itself, and ‘loosened the hold of tradition on men’s lives’.117 However conservative Luther may have been in his own political predilections, his theology was one of the forces to break the monopoly of political conservatism – or, rather, conservatism emerged as an ideological defence against the innovative forces that movements like Luther’s unleashed. A double paradox of the sixteenth century was the way in which ancient sources were used against more recent literature to invite progress against the inherent conservatism of the later Middle Ages. For the Renaissance, and Machiavelli in particular, the appeal was to secular classical texts. For the Reformation, theologians reached back beyond a thousand years of canon law to the pristine statements of Paul and his early interpreters, particularly Augustine.118 Standing with Augustine in the tradition of the prophets,119 the reformers did not look to the past alone, but waited upon the Holy Spirit to work its wonders amongst humans.120 Luther would have been astonished at any suggestion that one look for human progress in political affairs, but the example he provided in the spiritual world became available for application in the temporal world nevertheless. From the human perspective this unveiling of the spirit is most evident from the study of the scriptures. Setting up an antithesis between the letter of the scriptures and the understanding imparted by the life-giving spirit, the student discovers through the dialogue between them a word spoken to the present generation in a new, fresh form. Ebeling explains: As existential life continues, so the understanding of the scripture is a continuous task which can never be brought to a conclusion. For there is a constant threat that an understanding once achieved will cease to be the Spirit,

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and return to being the mere letter, unless it is constantly attained anew and made one’s own. Thus unceasing progress is necessary in understanding the scripture.121 People making progress in new understandings of the sacred scriptures were likely to seek new interpretations of other writings as well – political writings included. Luther’s new illuminations of scripture were not merely to be received by each generation; each individual person was open to fresh instruction from the spirit. Though Luther would reject the idea, one might interpret the effect of the new theology as substituting ‘reason for authority as the main criterion of the right to believe’. As Laski continues, ‘Luther’s bibliolatry is inevitably anti-authoritarian simply because he had no criterion save individual insight to which to appeal for validation of his own views.’ In short, all truth ceased to be absolute, and as the bastions of authority crumbled space was cleared for the application of reason to all things natural and human.122 This development was reinforced by the distinction Luther made between the two kingdoms. Since God was placed unequivocally beyond the scope of human reason, to be approached only through the channel of faith, ‘the natural world was left subject to the rule of reason, free from religious intervention, empty of God . . . . This withdrawal of religion from the world is paralleled by the withdrawal of theology from the study of the world.’123 Not only did the spirit of enquiry and experiment in the study of the scriptures serve as a fruitful example to enquirers into the natural world; the natural world itself became more evidently a subject open to enquiry by human reason. However far from his own purposes, the pursuit of progress was one of the most important consequences of Luther’s work. His own conception of history made little room for the idea that human beings might improve their own lot by positive, collective action. In what would one day become the classic ‘conservative’ position, he believed that such social movements as could only achieve change by defiance of the existing order would reap nought but the whirlwind. Nevertheless the Christian conscience could not keep silent at perceived injustice. While shunning revolution, Luther demanded that the secular authorities provide for the poor. In his Appeal to the Ruling Class Luther advocated that the princes establish a common fund for the relief of the poor, and in 1523 he was asked to draw up a detailed proposal, appearing as an Ordinance for a Common Chest of the Town of Leisnig, for just such an initiative.124 The striking fact about Luther’s approach to providing social services, such as poorrelief and education, was that these were not charities to be undertaken by a church stripped of its wealth and power (and relieved of its temporal responsibilities) but were the unequivocal duty of secular authorities. The task of the reformed church, speaking from and for the spiritual realm, was to instruct and admonish the secular authorities

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in their social responsibilities. It was preaching, yet preaching understood in its most dynamic and active form. For Luther, preaching was speech in action. As he said, ‘I have done nothing, I have let the word act.’125 The word belonged not to the speaker alone, but represented a potent release of the spirit’s dynamic efficacy. It was ‘the word which creates what it says’.126 If the spiritual realm had no rights or responsibilities in exercising the power of government, it was a kingdom of spiritual force nevertheless. It was a Hörreich, a kingdom of learning, persuasion and conviction. When it came into contact with the secular world, which, except in the moment of conceptual separation between them, was all the time, its impact was mighty indeed.127 The Word brings the two kingdoms into direct confrontation, providing both the buffer and the link between them. The temporal world is given meaning by the existence of the spiritual, but the spiritual world is not understood except by contact with the temporal world. In his profound interpretation of Luther’s impact, Ebeling suggests: To say that faith possesses a kingdom which is greater than heaven and earth, would be mere words, if it did not bring the believer into a relationship, fraught with tension, with the kingdom of the world. The eschatological hope would be mere rhetoric if it was understood in isolation from history, and not in the enduring of history. It would no longer be possible to identify the kingdom of Christ as a kingdom which is not of this world, if it were not understood, and witness were not borne to it, in this world, and if it were not in confrontation with the kingdom of the world.128 The two kingdoms are separate, yet intermingled. In the presence of God (coram Deo) they cease to be two separate spheres of existence, but represent aspects of creation in its fullness. One could try to point to practical results of the confrontation between the temporal and spiritual spheres, even if such empirical examples bore no resemblance to the things Luther intended. Undoubtedly, however, Luther’s critical preaching against the church establishment opened the way for dissenting preaching of all kinds, and set the example for a critical, oppositional rhetoric in the political world. His preaching to Christian rulers, though confining their coercive, peace-keeping, orderestablishing work to a temporal world which could never be called ‘Christian’, hollowed out a channel down which reforming Christian influences could be brought to bear upon secular government. When he pronounced on politics at all Luther was not democratic. When we presume to draw ‘democratic’ examples from his theology, we are encroaching upon a realm from which he stoutly repelled the incursions of politics. For Luther, 119

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theological matters could not, in themselves, be political. In drawing democratic inferences from his theology, then, we venture on the dangerous mire of confusion between the two realms, and lay ourselves open to Luther’s inevitable charge of complicity in ‘Satan’s work’. If we see the ‘democratic’ elements in Luther’s theology, and they are undoubtedly there in some form – the fellowship of saints, the liberty and equality and sovereignty of the individual person, the necessity of dissent, the end of authority, the imperative of reform and above all the context of discussion set up by ‘the word which creates what it says’ – we are construing them as political categories in a way that Luther would reject. The profundity of Luther’s political influence, however, lies deep in the theology of the two kingdoms and the relationship between them. At their point of contact even Luther himself can no longer maintain the strict division between the two categories. He places himself in the ancient Israelite tradition of the direct rule of God, in the revival of this tradition by the Jewish prophets, in the non-material kingship of Christ and in the heavenly city of Augustine – all of which confronted the temporal world of injustice and oppression. In that Luther ‘left it to the word’ he may have excused himself – or at least some of his latter-day followers might have felt themselves excused – from direct involvement in political reform. In that his own words were a participation in the action of the Word, however, he himself was in confrontation with the secular order and, however personally unwilling, he was engaged in a political action much larger than the events of his own life.

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While Luther never had any doubt but that all creation belonged to God and remained under his sway, the clear separation of the two regiments had deadened any impact ‘godly rule’ might have in the temporal world. The democratic implications of Luther’s spiritual realm were powerful but indirect. The link between Protestant understandings of the spirit and the real world of politics was forged by the tradition known as Calvinism. Because of its restless activism and its determination to engage with the world in a less tolerant fashion than Luther’s way, Calvinism became, through its missionary zeal, the more widespread Protestant influence. Jean Calvin, the French classicist and lawyer who came to be the dominant religious and political figure of Protestant Geneva in mid-sixteenth century, inherited much intellectual treasure from Luther – and of course from Luther’s own chief mentors, Paul and Augustine. He produced the first, slim version of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, when he was 27, but he continued to embellish it throughout his life; the book now consulted is a compendious tome of classical erudition and biblical scholarship. In it he accepted Luther’s doctrines of the two kingdoms and the ‘twofold government in man: one aspect is spiritual, whereby the conscience is instructed in piety and in reverencing God; the second is political, whereby man is educated for the duties of humanity and citizenship that must be maintained among men’.1 By the time he held full sway in Geneva, however, Calvin had already experienced the unpredictable claims of the spirit liberated in the individual person. Luther himself had trained a stream of vituperation on the ‘murdering hordes’ of peasants. Calvin set out to restore order to God’s created realm by instilling the strictest discipline into the Protestant faithful. To do this, he had to apply the lessons of the spiritual world more directly to the dealings of the social and political world than Luther would have countenanced. It was Calvin’s purpose to arrest ‘the flight from civility’ by restoring an institutional structure for church and society that would invest both with religious legitimacy.2 The close association he wrought between 121

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church and social order might have been denounced by the pure ‘spiritualist’ as a return to Caesaro-papism had it not been for the continuing impact of the Word on the Calvinist church.3 As far as earthly rule was concerned, Luther relied heavily upon the injunctions of Romans 13. Calvin respected the passage no less, but inaugurating a ‘new Israel’ drew his close attention to the surviving records of the ‘old’ Israel before Saul. Like the prophet Samuel, he valued the liberty of an Israel before there were kings. Writing Sermons on Job (1554), Sermons on Deuteronomy (1554–6) and Lectures on Daniel (1561) he denounced the insolence of kings, claiming that rule by Israelite judges would be the form of government best able to provide freedom.4 Those who would attempt by earthly rule to usurp the place of God in his kingdom should take stern warning from the scriptures.5 In his contempt for earthly rule Calvin leant heavily on Augustine.6 The Institutes begins with a very Augustinian address to the king of France, adjuring him to pious rule: ‘that king who in ruling over his realm does not serve God’s glory exercises not kingly rule but brigandage’. The Latin version loudly echoes the diction of Augustine: Nec iam regnum ille sed latrocinium exercet.7 Calvin shared with Augustine and Luther, nevertheless, the view that all rule, however impious and predatory it might be, was part of God’s plan to introduce order into a world made chaotic and corrupt by the Fall of Adam’s race.8 Because all power came from above, disobedience to established rule on the part of private individual persons was indeed disobedience to God. The problem for Calvin was how to transform earthly rule into a true reflection of God’s goodness; the only way to do this was to suffuse the temporal realm with the ideals of the spiritual realm; henceforth earthly rulers would have to ground their authority in the ultimate reference point – the Word of God. For Augustine and Luther, the Heavenly City or the realm of the spirit represented a Platonic perfection that was simply unattainable in a world ever in need of redemption. The Calvinist attempt to compose a temporal order that would redound to God’s glory risked a disastrous confusion of two orders which should be kept conceptually separate, and, paradoxically, also risked tempting providence with a devilish scheme to impose perfection by force.9 It presaged an authoritarianism of frightening dimensions. THE ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD Whether conceived of as two quite distinct orders or as one realm with two aspects – the spiritual and the temporal – all creation was under God’s sway. No Protestant could doubt, whatever havoc the devil might play, that God was ultimately sovereign. The direct link that all Protestants claimed with the sovereign deity invited in the less 122

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truly pious an inordinate sense of their own importance. The priesthood of all believers bestowed on each faithful person an ‘office’ which encouraged each to an inner spiritual freedom. Often the outward expressions of freedom were somewhat less than spiritual, and were potentially endless in variety. In any case, whether they professed a Protestant belief or not, most people were directed towards self-interest – this for Calvin was the inevitable human condition after the Fall. Self-love meant estrangement from God, a state of affairs that could only make life brutish and nasty, if not short. As the Calvinists had learnt from Augustine, it was already determined who were among the elect, and for the rest there was no hope in the next life. At least the circumstances of this life could be ameliorated by a regimen designed, with reference to God’s goodness, to impose some kind of regular order.10 There was more to Calvinist rule than parrying the chaotic blows of human wantonness. Human nature had another side. Augustine had construed it as an ultimate yearning for peace; Aquinas had seen the instinct for organization as a perfectly normal human attribute.11 In a way never quite understood by Luther, Calvin sought to restore to Protestant arrangements some tangible acknowledgment of these human attributes.12 Without aiming to negate the Reformation, he wished to reintegrate the person ‘into a double order, religious and political, and the orders themselves were to be linked in a common unity’. Such action would repair the ‘discontinuity between religious obligations and restraints and their political counterparts’.13 Above all, it was essential for the saints to ensure that all creation, including the political order, should be directed towards a justice which gave God his due. Where the saints ruled, this hope could be acted upon. Where they did not, as a congregation they would always have an obligation to instruct magistrates and princes in their true calling, even if it was never right for Christians, as individuals, to disobey the constituted powers. For Calvin, the ‘absolute sovereignty of God’ was the overriding fact of life, as was God’s relevance to every feature and every moment of each day:14 it was not simply the church’s role to give God his due worship, then; it was, indeed, ‘the ultimate purpose of all civil authority to serve the interests of God’s kingdom’.15 No less than the church, the whole political order should reflect God’s glory: [Civil government] does not merely see to it . . . that men breathe, eat, drink, and are kept warm, even though it surely embraces all these activities when it provides for their living together. It . . . also prevents idolatry, sacrilege against God’s name, blasphemies against his truth, and other public offenses against religion from arising and spreading among the people; it prevents the public peace from being disturbed; it provides that each man may keep his property

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safe and sound; that men may carry on blameless intercourse among themselves; that honesty and modesty may be preserved among men. In short, it provides that a public manifestation of religion may exist among Christians, and that humanity be maintained among men.16 While the aims of civil government are therefore to facilitate positive actions, its methods are negative: it is an ‘order of repression’. It backs with force the spiritual values of the church. It counters the negative effects of human dissension and renders human life a little less dangerous than it otherwise would be.17 The state, therefore, is a divine institution; it demands pious obedience, as to God himself: divine providence has wisely arranged that various countries should be ruled by various kinds of government . . . . For if it has seemed good to him to set kings over kingdoms, senates or municipal officers over free cities, it is our duty to show ourselves compliant and obedient to whomever he sets over the places where we live.18 It matters not one whit how, in human terms, earthly rulers won their power. Suffice it to know that, holding power, they are serving God’s ultimate plan for creating order.19 To attempt to overturn ‘this divinely established order’ is the folly of ‘insane and barbarous men’.20 Calvin particularly had in mind the Anabaptists, whose liberty of conscience had led them to spurn the instruments of established order, including due process of law.21 Under Calvin’s influence the government of Geneva integrated the official functions of church and civil government almost as effectively as had the medieval Catholic church.22 Church government was shared between the orders of pastors, who were ministers of the Word, and lay elders. The pastors, with authority resting on no human institution but deriving from the Word of God which they were appointed to expound, met in council, and exercised a close moral authority over the members of the congregation. The elders, however, were elected by the civic council, and met regularly with the pastors in the consistory, the governing body of the church, where nevertheless ordination gave greater legitimacy to the pastors than election did to the elders. The city-state continued to be governed by a civic council, but the formal connections between church and community brought Geneva close to being a churchstate.23 Even if all spiritual and secular authority was in common rooted in a divine origin, the ‘conciliar’ form of Genevan institutions made that authority constitutional. For the Christian (and for the Israelite) natural law had been neatly codified in the Decalogue.24 Probably more important for modern constitutionalism than Calvin’s restatement of natural law, however, was his theory of office – particularly the importance that he 124

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placed on ‘lesser magistrates’. Both Aquinas and Luther had strong doctrines of a person’s calling, which Calvin elaborated into a powerful theory of the duties and privileges of office. At one level, each person’s ‘calling’ should impose limits upon desire and ambition.25 At the same time an office, clearly designated within the structures of church or civil administration, assigned responsibilities drawn from the purpose of the organization itself. In Calvin’s terms, both the organization and the position of each magistrate drew authority from the word of God and from the overriding duty always to render God his due. Each magistracy rested on a divine authority.26 Calvin’s theory of office informed later Calvinist arguments about the duty to resist tyrannous commands. Although Calvin drew upon the example of feudal lords resisting unlawful commands of a king, the authority of lesser magistrates never sprang from any kind of popular legitimacy.27 To be sure, the corollary of resisting the tyrant was protecting the liberties of subjects, but in this the lesser magistrate was rather obeying the command of God as a functionary in God’s system of care for his people. The importance of office became the foundation of what was later called the Rechtstaat – the state whose array of official functions was given a legal foundation; each was to be conducted according to principles of right. Such a state was the antithesis of a despotism, since it had become the bounden duty of all holding office within a legal structure to resist unlawful commands from superiors. Simple obedience to unlawful instructions – no matter how ‘legally’ constituted – would be no defence for unconstitutional behaviour on the part of any duly installed officer. Such a responsibility was consonant with the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers; since all the saints had a calling from God, it was incumbent on all to judge the actions of rulers. While Calvin would never allow a citizen a private capacity to disobey the commands of governments, the judgment of all came to be part of the culture in which lesser magistrates might be constrained to resist.28 Constitutional implications in Calvin’s theory were later drawn out in academic detail by Johannes Althusius, a scholar who settled in north Germany and became an apologist for independent city-state government. His Politica methodice digesta, first published in 1603, managed to civilize the theoretical base of Calvin’s work by uniting religious legitimacy with reference to Aristotle: ‘The first proposition of politics is consociatio’ – it is the way of humans to associate together, and civil society is a compound of various forms of association ranging from the household and the college to the city and the province.29 Although Althusius is often nowadays referred to as a precursor of the theory of federal government, he gave a formal imprint to Calvin’s foreshadowed Rechtstaat by establishing a ratio administrationis: an organization (or a state) has its own purposes that may be different from the various 125

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interests of the people comprising it; each magistrate within a state system takes the Decalogue as the ultimate reference point for the conduct of office.30 Political office is, for the Calvinist, unequivocally a matter of religious vocation. The political edifice is orientated towards ‘systematic innovation’: The pious magistrate must be as vigilant and active as God himself. In the important Sermons on the Fifth Book of Moses, Calvin returned to the attack with a sharp denunciation of passivity and lassitude among officeholders. ‘Inquire diligently . . .’ he urged the magistrates and judges, ‘be rigorous in making search . . . search out matters to the very bottom’ [sermon 120, pp. 737–8]. Only thus might Satan be rooted out of earthly societies.31 CALVINISM AND OPPOSITION By its nature the Reformation was ‘oppositional’. In many countries it ‘indirectly favoured the development of democratic ideas by the creation of religious minorities’.32 In Calvinist circles the doctrine of predestination led many saints to wish to prove their sainthood by declaring war on the devil.33 Sometimes the devil’s work was evident in the commands of a tyrant. Although Calvin ‘monotonously urged obedience’, ‘where the honor of God is involved, we must put obedience to God first’.34 At the end of the Institutes Calvin urges the estates to withstand ‘the fierce licentiousness of kings’.35 Elsewhere Calvin was actually prepared to revoke the legitimacy of ungodly rulers: ‘For earthly princes lay aside their power when they rise up against God . . . . We ought rather to spit on their heads than to obey them.’36 As scholars of the Reformation searched the scriptures for guidance they found in the direct theocracy of Israel before there were kings an implicit censure of earthly forms of domination. Tribal Israel reflects from their pages like a beacon. It was the guiding light of Bullinger, Bucer, Beza, du Plessis-Mornay and, in England, Hobbes, Milton and Harrington. If scriptural authority alone had not been enough, conciliarist theology had prepared the way for the centrality that the Calvinists would give to the people. The face of Protestant dissent in Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli, known with some affection as ‘the people’s priest’, was the most libertarian of the Reformers.37 Each person was endowed by the law of nature with the capacity to be the supreme judge of her or his understanding of the scriptures.38 Imputing even more force to the Word than had Luther, he developed the sermon as the galvanizing weapon of opposition.39 He urged his fellow-ministers ‘to expose the corrupt self-interested behaviour of the mighty’.40 Zwingli’s successor at Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, established the covenant of Moses as the only true foundation for temporal authority,41 while the peaceable Reformer 126

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of Strasbourg, Martin Bucer, inferred from the same covenant that the installation of a ruler should proceed from a partnership between God and people.42 While in exasperation Calvin had finally been brought ‘to spit on the heads’ of the godless, and the Lutherans had by 1550 come to declare, in the Confession of Magdeburg, that power from above had no more than a measured legitimacy,43 the strength of Paul’s injunction to obey the powers left little room to manoeuvre into place the conditions for delegitimating unacceptable rule. Calvin himself had invested all office with divine significance, so that lesser magistrates would ex officio moderate the absolutism of monarchs. Bucer equated the role of lower officials with that of Israelite judges, but there was still no warrant for thrones to be destroyed. Calvinist opposition took a ferocious turn with the Scottish Reformer John Knox, who, while preaching in terms acceptable to Calvin that vengeance belonged to God alone,44 showed himself not averse to helping God make up his mind, asking him to ‘stirre up some Phinees, Helias or Jehu, that the bloude of abhominable idolaters maye pacifie Goddes wrath’ (A Faithful Admonition to the Professors of God’s Truth in England, 1554).45 Knox floundered in his clumsy attempts to destabilize the Catholic Mary Tudor by denigrating the ‘monstrous regiment’ of a woman’s rule as contrary to nature,46 the embarrassing scriptural example of Deborah the judge notwithstanding. Knox, instructed partly by the more sober anti-monarchic literature of his contemporaries John Ponet47 and Christopher Goodman,48 focused more sharply on prophecy than did Calvin, insisting that the prophet’s call must lead to direct action. It was one thing to denounce the tyrant, but Knox now stood Calvin on his head, defying his call to obey constituted authority. It was blasphemy ‘to say that God hath commanded kings to be obeyed when they command impiety’.49 Silence in the face of idolatry was complicity in crime. No one could escape the implications; there was no middle path; every person had to make a choice for the scriptural faith or against it. His strictures reached down to the lowliest in the realm and embraced whole congregations; there was no escaping responsibility through anonymity or lowly station.50 Yet Knox stayed Calvinist enough not to allow ordinary citizens to initiate rebellion as individuals; still less would he trust the mob to take over. Once the legitimacy of the crown was withdrawn there was no means for ordinary people to reconstitute their sovereignty in any formal way. Calvin had assigned an important role to the ‘lesser magistrates’, and Knox emphasized the prophetic duty of ministers of the Word, who were to give homiletic leadership to their people as much in politics as in religion.51 For active leadership in rebellion, however, he looked to the nobility, viewing their position as a blend, in their judicial function, of Calvinistic ‘lesser’ magistracy and feudal lordship which, through partnership with the monarch, set strict legal limits to the royal prerogative. At least he agreed with his friend Goodman that nobles were appointed by God ‘to be as bridles to repress the rage and insolency 127

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Kings’.52

of your Where the monarch refused to be bridled, rebellion was the only course, and in the First Blast Knox called upon the English nobility to revolt against Mary Tudor and condemn her to her death.53 Resting so much reliance upon the nobles is scarcely democratic, yet there was a democratic turn to Knox’s approach. He embraced the ‘commonalty’ as the source of sovereignty, but the doctrine of Christian obedience could not be so completely annihilated as to leave the sovereign people without some constituted authority to give shape and substance to their restrictions upon the monarch. In any case, in Knox’s own experience it was always noblemen who had led the attacks on the Roman church in both Scotland and England.54 Once the leadership and legitimate authority were supplied to the underlying power of the people, however, there were deep democratic implications in Knox’s revolutionary exhortations. HUGUENOT OPPOSITION The theme of regicide, so inherently repugnant to Calvin, soon took hold on the continent. Whereas Knox had supplied the passion and anger, his French counterparts approached the touchy subject of rebellion with caution. For all Knox’s deep respect for Calvin, the circumstances provoking the rebel in him were far removed from Calvin’s experience. The French Protestants, on the other hand, had never experienced an established Protestant regime such as Geneva, or England under Edward VI. The Huguenots were always a minority party who at first tried to accommodate themselves to continued Catholic rule. They were strengthened by the conversion of many nobles to Protestantism, but the caution with which they approached the need to remove the tyrant had to stop short of social upheaval in their own Protestant strongholds. Their call to disobedience and rebellion was therefore more constitutionalist and legalistic than ‘prophetic’. It took great provocation for the Huguenots to strengthen their attitude to resistance of constituted powers. The best examples from the plethora of Huguenot pamphlet literature appeared after the massacre on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. The Franco-Gallia of François Hotman circulated in 1573. Claiming ancient rights for the French people, it is a ‘juristic rather than a religious tract’,55 yet it endues the people with a divine authority usually attributed to the king.56 A more thoroughly ‘Calvinist’ argument for resistance was traced by the pen of Theodore de Beza, Calvin’s associate, and then successor, at Geneva. Likewise motivated by the Huguenot massacre, Beza departed from Calvin’s teachings on obedience, which, of course, he had previously shared. A true citizen of Geneva, he acknowledged only the absolute sovereignty of God and the necessity of all crea tures to live to God’s glory.57 His Right of Magistrates, which appeared in 1574, opened with the declaration: ‘The 128

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only will that is a perpetual and immutable criterion of justice is the will of the one God and none other. Hence Him alone we are obliged to obey without exception.’58 As with Hotman, political authority is vested in the people, but only in so far as a people is constituted by the sovereign God. In human terms, political sovereignty is exercised by monarch and people represented by the whole array of official magistrates; taken together, the magistrates are no less participants in its exercise than is the monarch.59 Beza regards the direct theocracy of Israel, where ‘the Eternal Himself was its monarch’ as ‘incomparably the best [government] that ever was’. God governed directly by ‘visibly’ giving the law to Moses, leading his people to the Promised Land through Joshua and finally protecting them ‘through the judges whom He alone had chosen’. Through Samuel God warned the people against having a human monarch, and only granted them their wish ‘in His wrath and anger’, since they so foolishly refused to see what ‘fine justice’ a human king would do to them. In his mercy, then, God limited the Israelite monarchy by allowing the person he designated also to be elected by the people.60 Like Calvin and Hotman, Beza is steeped in the humanist classical tradition, but his preference for direct theocracy leads him to emphasize the biblical examples. The clearest sign of tyranny is persecution of the true, scriptural religion, and it is the Protestant Christian’s bounden duty to depose the ruler who subverts the scriptures. Along with the rest of the pamphlet literature, Beza’s does not allow the private person to initiate resistance, but places the duty of deposition squarely upon the constituted lesser magistrates.61 None of this reduces the responsibility of the individual person for refusing to comply with impious or idolatrous commands of the ruler. In a remarkable passage, Beza shows how the safety of the true religion really rests on private shoulders. Whereas Catholic doctrine construed the gospel in juristic terms and attached the majesty of state and empire to Christ, Beza argued that ‘it should cause no surprise that Jesus Christ, the prophets, the Apostles, and the other martyrs remained, as private persons, within the bounds of their station’.62 It is the patient suffering of the faithful that lends substance to the legitimate decision of magistrates to initiate the physical act of deposition. Beza’s argument bears profound implications for the thesis of this book: the realm of conscience remains detached from the compromising necessities of political action, while yet motivating action within the legitimate circumference of the political arena. The most famous Huguenot pamphlet was the Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants (Vindiciae contra tyrannos) (1579), possibly written by the aristocrat, diplomat and regional governor – a classic ‘lesser magistrate’ – Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. It has been pointed out that this tract con tained little original, and rather tended to 129

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summarize the arguments circulating in other pamphlets, but there is no doubting its influence, particularly outside France, for generations to come; it was seized upon by English regicides and constitutional revolutionaries of the succeeding century.63 An English version was made, significantly, in 1648. It was publicly burnt in Oxford in 1683 and reprinted in 1689.64 While both Hotman and Beza had been cautious about the circumstances under which rebellion might take place, reserving the decision for cases where the recognized strictures of the law could be clearly applied, a more passionate defence of the scriptural religion sprang from the pages of the Vindiciae, allowing the spirit to move ‘where it listeth’. In the days of theocratic Israel, where the Lord had breathed ‘mouthto-mouth’ with Moses and where, after Moses’ passing, the Lord had raised up any humble person to be ‘judge’ and to lead the people towards some holy purpose, so also the spirit might even now alight on someone chosen by God to bring the people back to the true religion.65 Even so, the people must be circumspect, and not hasty in recognizing the fruits of grace falling upon some would-be ruler ‘where God has not spoken with his own mouth or through His prophets in some extraordinary fashion’: Let any man who would assume a responsibility like that, as though he felt the inspiration of God’s Spirit, make sure that it is not his own arrogance that swells within him, that he does not confuse himself with God, that these great inspirations of his are not creations of his own, and that he does not, therefore, conceive vanities and beget lies.66 When all precautions have been seen to, God may still choose any leader to resist the idolatrous tyrant. For His justice and His mercy are the same in any age. And if we are given no evident external signs, we should at least look for these internal signs through their effects – absence of all ambition, genuine and earnest zeal, conscientiousness, and finally, learning – which indicate a man who will not be led by error into the service of false gods.67 We now have the elements of a full-blown theory of revolution: all legitimate rule must be to the glory of God, to which end human sovereignty is vested in the entire people of a realm; a ruler therefore enters into a covenant, sanctioned by God, to protect the people and to uphold the true religion; the glory of God is diminished, and the covenant broken, whenever his name is blasphemed by the practice of false religion, or whenever the people are harmed by tyrannical acts; the nobles of the land are a bridle upon the monarch to keep him or her to the true path, which includes ruling according to the law of nature, the commonsense law of nations, and God’s law as revealed in scripture. If the ruler commands falsely, the people must in no 130

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circumstances obey; if the monarch continues on an idolatrous or tyrannical course, the people should rise up and remove the monarch, but only when led by constituted lesser magistrates who actively participate in the sovereignty of the realm; even so, the spirit might yet raise up the charismatic or prophetic leader to champion the cause of righteousness against the tyrant.68 The Catholic response to Calvinist political doctrines recognized that there could be no turning back to thoughts of a unified Christendom. Catholic theologians had to come to terms with the reality of Protestant secular rulers as in England and north Germany, and to confront the Protestant doctrine that the secular ruler claimed supreme title to obedience. The newly formed Society of Jesus fostered scholarship (and the popular dissemination of the ideas thereby illumined) into the Thomist ways of looking at the church and the world. They tended to reaffirm the autonomy of the political sphere, according it a place in God’s scheme of things independent of the requirements of theology. At the same time, setting a firmer wedge between sacred and secular prised the temporal ruler away from religious legitimacy. In 1610 Robert Cardinal Bellarmine published The Power of the Pope in Temporal Affairs. There were now three centuries of distance from Pope Boniface VIII’s demand to subject all human creatures to the temporal sway of the pope, yet still, in his indisputable closeness to God, the pope remained at the pinnacle of human affairs, a position which could be matched by no temporal monarch. Bellarmine disposed of any argument tending towards a divine right of kings: only the pope received his power directly from God, and popular sovereignty was no substitute. No secular government could claim absolute obedience, and with due spiritual guidance from the church, a people might with clear conscience disobey a tyrant. REGICIDE A few years beforehand, the Catholic philosopher Juan de Mariana had already gone much further. Learning a good deal from his Calvinist opponents and from their common ancestor, Augustine, de Mariana argued that government had only become necessary because of the Fall; government was a human device, formed by people to alleviate their fallen condition, but as a human institution it was necessarily fallible; the people never totally or unconditionally transferred their power to their ruler through the political contract; under the terms of the pact they could call their king to account.69 De Mariana produced a passage that would have shocked his Huguenot forerunners, and indeed their Scottish associate George Buchanan, whose The Right of the Kingdom in Scotland (1579) rehearsed the contractarian arguments to appear in de Mariana’s own work. The Huguenots wrestled with how a people might legitimately 131

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be led to rise up against their ruler. Buchanan suggested that majority opinion might carry the matter.70 Time and again, however, the Huguenots had sought to retain the semblance of order within revolution by denying the right of individual persons to initiate subversive action. For de Mariana the removal of manifest evil, whether by stealth or in the open, was an end to justify almost any means. Quite simply, it was better to be without the tyrant, whose removal was always a good. Tyrannicide, therefore, ‘can be exercised by any private person whatsoever [cuicumque privato] who may wish to come to the aid of the commonwealth’.71 Having been espoused by both sides of the controversy, popular sovereignty was now set free from any particular religious affiliation, and had become ‘available to be used by all parties in the coming constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century’.72 We have long been warned against attributing influence upon later authors to earlier writers, or suggesting that the texts of one generation are in conversation with those of a previous era.73 Each author has something to say to the contemporary generation, and probably has a particular audience in mind. To argue that things are easier to say because they have been said before would quite likely belittle both the intentions and talents of any one writer. Nevertheless, the context in which things can be said may be radically altered by the claims which have been made previously and have become part of the rhetorical apparatus of the present generation. As far as our current topic is concerned, the more people continued to write and speak and repeat that the removal of a ruler might be constitutionally proper and might even be an imperative of right religion, the more likely it became that ‘tyrannicide’ would occur. The causes of the English civil wars of the 1640s that led to the execution of King Charles I are many and complex, and may have had less to do with religious dissent than had the calls to tyrannicide which long preceded its actual occurrence. A good part of it was a tax revolt, as in most rebellions;74 but the Independents who dominated the Rump Parliament when matters were brought to a head felt secure in a long train of righteous argument from later Calvinists (and Jesuits) about the right to remove a tyrannical monarch. In a famous passage, Bishop Burnet recalled how Oliver Cromwell, in argument with Scottish commissioners sent ‘to protest against putting the king to death’, fell back on the old demand that a king defend ‘true religion’: Cromwell entered into a long discourse of the nature of regal power, according to the principles of de Mariana and Buchanan: he thought a breach of trust in a king ought to be punished more than any other crime whatsoever: he said, as to their covenant [to be faithful in the preservation of his Majesty’s person], they swore to the preservation of the king’s person in defence of the true religion: if then it 132

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appeared that the settlement of the true religion was obstructed by the king, so that they could not come at it by putting him out of the way, then their oath could not bind them to the preserving him any longer.75 If this was an accurate report, Cromwell had not been too much influenced by de Mariana’s suggestion that any ‘private person whatsoever’ might take the notion to do away with the king. He adhered more to the orthodox Calvinist position that ‘Authorities and powers are the ordinance of God’ and could only be resisted according to strict interpretations of breaches of the law. Furthermore, seeking a constituted authority in the absence of the king, he asked ‘whether this Army be a lawful power, called by God to oppose and fight against the king’.76 Yet in the end he had no doubt of the justice of the king’s sentence.77 While most of the arguments from the opposition to Charles I continued the constitutionalist vein of the French religious wars,78 and were occasionally watered down by the pragmatic considerations of men like Cromwell, some among them blazed with prophetic fire for the intrinsic value of each human person as created in God’s image. In the face of God’s concern for his creatures, the idea of a monarch elevated over them was an outrage. John Milton, who was to become secretary to the council of state set up by the Rump Parliament in 1649, repeated many of the constitutionalist arguments when he defended the people’s right to try their monarch, but he spoke with the immediacy of a prophet, ‘and this belief in intimate impulse and divine favor sustained him through most of his life’.79 His vision of a Christian commonwealth left no room for kings, not even those whose divine selection was confirmed by popular acclamation. In the prophetic tradition he discerned an abiding aversion to kings; it re-emerged in his own tract The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written to justify the king’s trial: the ancient Israelites, through their prophets, had repented taking on kings (Isaiah 26.13), and later ‘our Saviour himself’, although he himself were the meekest, and came on earth to be so, yet to a Tyrant we hear him not vouchsafe an humble word: but Tell that Fox, Luke 13. So far we ought to be from thinking that Christ and his Gospel should be made a Sanctuary for Tyrants from justice, to whom his law before never gave such protection. And wherefore did his Mother the Virgin Mary give such praise to God in her prophetic song, that he had now by the coming of Christ Cut down Dynasties or proud Monarchs from the throne.80 A few years before the king’s execution Milton had, in his Areopagitica, penned the stoutest defence of free thought and free speech yet known, and one that, though anticipating Locke and Mill in later centuries, already outstripped them in the force 133

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of his demand for freedom. Diverse constructions marked ‘this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty’.81 This individual freedom of thought, interpretation and innovation produces the implements for building a new world: the shop of war hath not there [in the mansion-house of liberty] more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.82 Throughout the English civil wars a babel of voices signified the assertiveness of individuals following their reason, or responding to the inner light of truth as revealed to each.83 The problems of such an unending series of possible truths were enormous for those who yearned for a settled political order. The Reformation began as an attack on a particular authority, but slid headlong into the dethronement of authority itself. Calvin’s attempts to arrest the slide were short-lived. A creed which made every person the arbiter of his or her own destiny tended to make everyone a law unto him- or herself. It could mean the destruction of Law. FROM RELIGIOUS COVENANT TO POLITICAL CONTRACT Recoiling from the ravages of civil war in England, a writer like Thomas Hobbes could see the evidence of political and social chaos on all sides. His Leviathan, published in London in 1651, just two years after the execution of the king, observed the Diseases of a Common-wealth, that proceed from the poyson of seditious doctrines; whereof one is, that every private man is Judge of Good and Evill actions . . . . From this false doctrine, men are disposed to debate with themselves, and dispute the commands of the Common-wealth; and afterwards to obey, or disobey them, as in their private judgements they shall think fit. Whereby the Commonwealth is distracted and Weakened.84 In most mortals, the Protestant demand for inner freedom of conscience spilt over into the unrestrained gratification of the appetites. Chief among the appetites was the desire to rule; in a time of religious controversy individual interpretations of the scriptures (and of morals) opened new opportunities to elite factions, armed with the necessary power, to destroy the peace for their own advantage:

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among men, there are very many, that think themselves wiser, and abler to govern the Publique, better than the rest; and these strive to reforme and innovate, one this way, another that way; and thereby bring it into Distraction and Civille warre.85 In a state of nature, people would as of course pursue their own interests, but in the absence of a civil authority, there was nothing to stop them invading each other’s rights.86 Hobbes’s response was to postulate a secular commonwealth, established by a covenant amongst the people and controlled by a ‘sovereign definer’, that could, by stipulating meanings for people, create both certainty and security in their lives. In Leviathan Hobbes examined human nature and the motives of association from first principles.87 His commonwealth, constructed on the laws of physics, resonates with a confidence in the limitless possibilities of scientific discovery, yet a confidence ironically at odds with Hobbes’s aversion to the limitless manifestations of grace and religious experience. Conventionally Leviathan is construed as a purely secular work – indeed, along with his earlier De cive, it incurred parliamentary censure and a charge of atheism in 1666.88 Hobbes’s political construct abjured all notions of divine right. It is ‘secular’ – very much in the Augustinian sense that it is confined to a period of history in which true godly rule had receded from the earth after Israel, demanding a king, had defected from God’s direct rule over his people.89 In the meantime, life had become nasty and dangerous, and people needed protection from their own ‘fallen’ nature – just as Augustine and Luther had argued.90 According to some recent interpretations, Hobbes stood in the Calvinist tradition and was perhaps the greatest in a line of British and German political theorists who offered ‘a further unfolding of the programme of Christian Reformers’ – that is, to look to the secular state for the protection, and indeed the fulfilment, of ‘true religion’.91 In this Hobbes was more at one with the earlier Calvin than were Calvin’s Huguenot disciples. Calvin had equated right religion with natural law, and Hobbes too attached the duty of obedience to each individual’s obligation under natural law.92 The worst threat to the keeping of covenants in Hobbes’s own day was the unpredictable exuberance of the ‘spirit’ among newly liberated saints.93 Typical of the individualism of the enthusiasts was the claim, made repeatedly throughout the Putney debates of Cromwell’s army in 1647, that each person may individually assume the right to decide which laws to obey, which to disregard as unjust. As Wildman urged: an unjust engagement is rather to be broken than kept . . . . I make a question whether any engagement can be [binding] to an unjust thing. [If] a man may promise to do that which is never so unjust, a man may promise to break all engagements and duties.94

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The enthusiasm by which the ‘spirit’ could lead an individual person to an absolute confidence in his or her own belief was to Hobbes nothing short of madness, and a recipe for the dissolution of the commonwealth.95 To the philosophic materialist, the idea of a separated spirit that could take hold of a person was deeply suspect. Yet, according to J. G. A. Pocock, his writing was no less prophetic and eschatological than that of the ancient prophets. He took Paul literally on the resurrection of the body, and looked to the future direct rule of Christ, when the elect of Israel would be restored to the kingdom of God, and when the need for Leviathan would have passed. During the real interregnum – the one between the election of Saul, which signified the rejection of God, and the future return of Christ – such powers that be must be obeyed prudentially, both for the maintenance of the commonwealth and for the protection of the people.96 Like Calvin, Hobbes saw as much damage to the commonwealth in the ‘politics of victorious humanism’ as in the medieval church – to him ‘The Kingdome of Darknesse’. No contemporary regime could truly claim to be godly rule, and Hobbes stood firm against presbyter and priest, saint and scholastic – ‘against anyone, that is, who may claim that the process of salvation authorizes his civil actions or power in the present’.97 No faction could validly claim to represent true religion, and any attempt to assert such a claim with violent threats was especially pernicious. In his commonwealth the sovereign is constituted to see that this does not happen, and his ‘minimalist interpretation of essential Christian doctrine’98 should demonstrate how futile disputation on trivial points of doctrine really is: ‘All that is NECESSARY to Salvation, is contained in two Vertues, Faith in Christ, and Obedience to Laws.’99 Obedience to laws promulgated by the powers that be has become tantamount, through the operation of natural law, to religious virtue. The sovereignty vested in the de facto power is constitutional in that the sovereign ‘is obliged by the Law of Nature . . . to render an account [of the safety of the people] to God, the Author of that Law, and to none but him’.100 The flaw in such a theory of obligation, however, is that it makes lethal concessions to the other side: The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them . . . . And though Soveraignty, in the intention of them that make it, be immortall; yet is it in its own nature, not only subject to violent death, by foreign war; but also through the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it, from the very institution, many seeds of naturall mortality, by Intestine Discord.101 Writing a few years after the publication of Leviathan, James Harrington took issue with Hobbes’s rejection of classical scholarship and his insistence that the only sources of authority, both God-given, were human reason and scriptural revelation.102 136

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Harrington syncretized the religion of the Jews and the Christians with the civic virtue derived from the classical Greeks and Romans via Machiavelli and other Renaissance philosophers.103 His Commonwealth of Oceana, published in 1656, was more democratic in tone, where Hobbes had sounded authoritarian. It reviewed the Mosaic theocracy of Israel, where every believer was both priest and monarch,104 and absorbed the popular elements of consent from the institutions of democratic Athens and republican Rome. Things ‘ecclesiastical’ drew their sustenance as much from the democratic ecclesia of the Pnyx as from the early church.105 The intention, in line with the project of the Reformation, was to create a civil society which allowed for the sacralization of politics as of all other aspects of life. Since the world was God’s domain, all its features should redound to his glory; humans could praise God through political activity that built up the authority of the commonwealth. Like Hobbes, Harrington believed that its function could only be upheld by containing ‘both the ignorant zeal of self-proclaimed “gifted men” and the corrupt self-interest of the clergy’.106 If Harrington was more determined than Hobbes to recruit the virtuous talents of the people to his cause, whereas Hobbes had rather required them to stand aside when Leviathan wished to pass, Harrington ‘came close to leaving the practice of civic virtue by citizens as the sole prerequisite for the regnum Christi’.107 In either case, the boundaries between the two kingdoms had been obliterated. If the political world were to hold up a mirror to God’s glory, its glass would be flawed. In the Hobbesian realm where Leviathan held sway, human protection seemed to be the highest good that a political order could purvey – surely a long way short of the spiritual fulfilment that the Protestant reformers desired for humankind. Similarly, the civic virtue of the republicans, while demonstrating a Pauline obedience to the powers that be, scarcely left room for the higher reaches of the Christian soul’s aspirations. LOCKE The other towering figure of English political philosophy during the seventeenth century, John Locke, was no less impelled by the politics of Protestant reform than any of his contemporaries. For him the centrality of the Calvinist notion of the ‘calling’, however, led to different emphases. To each person God had assigned a specific function in life, and it was the duty and responsibility of each, first, to discover God’s particular assignment and, second, to work tirelessly for its fulfilment. It was also the responsibility of each person to see to it that the social and political world placed no obstacles before individual persons in their search for God’s purpose in their lives. Yet the political and social world gave out evidence a-plenty that 137

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obstacles to people’s God-given duty bristled on every path. As John Dunn shows, Locke saw no alternative but to desacralize Christian society: ‘the attempt to conceive it in Christian terms resulted simply in the sanctification of corrupt human purposes’.108 How then would one relate the concept of a Christian calling to a manifestly nonChristian society? The answer lay at the heart of Lutheran and Calvinist two-realms doctrine. Locke scarcely needed to elaborate upon this conception, and his specific application of it may have been less subtle than Luther’s, or indeed Augustine’s. Yet throughout his writing life he seems to have been quite clear on this: from his Essay on Toleration, written, but not published, in 1667, to his Letter Concerning Toleration of 1685, he consistently maintained that religious belief was an individual and private matter subject to no external coercion. Ancient Israel of Moses’ time upheld a direct theocracy in which there was not, nor ‘could there be, any difference between that commonwealth and the church’. With the coming of a Christ who announced a kingdom not of this world, however, the separation was complete: there is absolutely no such thing under the Gospel as a Christian commonwealth. There are, indeed, many cities and kingdoms that have embraced the faith of Christ, but they have retained their ancient form of government, with which the law of Christ hath not at all meddled. He, indeed, hath taught men how, by faith and good works, they may obtain eternal life; but he instituted no commonwealth. He prescribed unto his followers no new and peculiar form of government, nor put he the sword into any magistrate’s hand, with commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former religion and receive his.109 Since Christ had sanctioned no magistrate’s power, authority was withdrawn from any regime that claimed religious legitimacy. The powers that be in the temporal realm, though part of God’s order, retained their title to rule only so long as they fulfilled their prescribed function. It was Locke’s achievement to set out the conditions whereby their legitimacy might be challenged. At the centre of his approach stood his most famous work, the Two Treatises of Government, now accepted as an ‘Exclusion tract’.110 Although it appeared with the publication date 1690, two years after the Glorious Revolution which deposed James II, and contained passages claiming the author’s arguments to be a justification of that event, the main body of the text was written as a justification for rebellion before the event, and could even be seen as an incitement to revolution; for Locke’s patron, Shaftesbury, was plotting armed rebellion should his Exclusion Bill fail.111 In some ways Locke’s political work stood in the tradition of Protestant pamphleteering against religious tyrants. Huguenot arguments sprang from the pages 138

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of Patriarcha non monarcha, a work written by Locke’s close confidant James Tyrrell in 1681; Locke also had read the Vindiciae contra tyrannos.112 The age’s truest champion of toleration, however, was scarcely going to advocate the removal of a ruler simply because he was of the wrong religion, and indeed Locke held consistently that religion, belonging to the realm beyond physical coercion, could not be used to justify violent action in any cause.113 By the same token, religion was no ground for legitimating the authority of any ruler: if the powers that be had to be obeyed because of scriptural injunction, there was no instruction to support and obey any particular rule on religious grounds. It was just that sort of argument – one or other version of the ‘divine right’ of rulers – that Locke was most anxious to refute. In 1680 Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha set on record views that had been current for some time. The need to redress the balance of public debate seems to have caused Locke to break off his general speculations on political obligation and produce a point-by-point refutation of Filmer which became the First Treatise of Civil Government, though it was written after the bulk of the work for the Second Treatise had been completed.114 Filmer had argued that the origin of all political power was divine and, however established in any particular instance, partook of the nature of patriarchal authority: God had given dominion over the world to the first man, Adam, and all legitimate rule derived by inheritance from Adam; just as a child was subject to the authority of a father without question, disobedience to a divinely constituted ruler was a blasphemous rejection of God’s sovereignty.115 What rankled with libertarian thinkers like Locke was the implicit rejection of human freedom altogether; children were not ‘born free’, but were born simultaneously into the patriarchal authority of both father and monarch. Locke responded with an attack on the inflated importance that some attributed to the notion of power: the will to power marked a defect in human nature rather than a positive attribute.116 In the subsequent Letter Concerning Toleration Locke was scathing in his contempt for those who used the excuse of Christian charity to inflict physical punishment on their fellows – the misuse of power was far more patent evidence of corruption than any of the petty ‘crimes’ it was used to punish.117 In a stout rejoinder to Filmer’s claims, Locke held that the real blasphemy was the attempt to use God’s name to approve the corruptions of power. ‘Divine right’ was the arrogation of despotic powers and the ultimate blasphemy. As against Filmer, Locke held that procreation was nothing more than an instrument of God and conferred no political rights over another person, although both parents of a child had responsibilities of tutelage.118 Each person is crafted by a divine hand, and this endows each with special, and equal, value:

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For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure. And being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us.119 People are born equal, and their reason makes them free. God has endowed each with the capacity to identify and discharge a particular function; provided that the legitimate freedoms of others are observed, the government should place no obstacles in the path of those trying to fulfil their calling. When people take the decision to rebel against their government, it is as a conscious exercise of their reason. Rebellion is entirely contained within the secular realm, as is the rule against which the rebellion occurs. Religion offers no legitimacy for any instance of rebellion, and yet the conditions for making the decision to rebel are set on grounds established by religious principle. The separation of the world into temporal and spiritual is a way of constructing and understanding the order of God’s creation. The secular realm exists to provide the conditions whereby people might fulfil their ordained function. Yet too often the social order is oppressive and obstructive to the proper discharge of its responsibility. And so ‘The political norms which Locke affirms are to be seen as insistences that conventional social morality has no right to make the assignment still more difficult. No human authority had a status which justified it in encroaching upon men’s individual religious understanding.’120 The Calvinist doctrine of the calling, then, stands as the base of Locke’s work. It loads a heavy responsibility on each person, not only for his or her own activities, but also for providing a communal structure in which all individual functions might reasonably be fulfilled. When things go wrong, individuals must take responsibility for setting things to rights. In the final emergency, this might well require revolution. Whereas Hobbes sets down that dissolution of a government must mean dissolution of the entire political community, Locke avoids this disaster by assigning to the people two constituting acts. They proceed from a ‘state of nature’ which is benign – a ‘theological axiom’ that removes the charge, derived from historical argument, that people are evidently not born equal – and which establishes a ‘jural equality’.121 It is a state of equality ‘wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another: there being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature . . . should all be equal one amongst another’.122 Political society is formed by the first constituting act in order to establish a collective authority to remove from people the necessity ‘to be Judges in their own

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Cases’.123 In

the second stage, government is formed by pooling the separate powers of individuals and allowing an executive to discharge them on the community’s behalf. In investing the executive government with prerogative – the use of power in cases where the general rules cannot be applied – Locke implicitly acknowledges that a government of laws, not persons, is an impossibility. Indeed, supported by a general agreement of the community that its overall purposes are being fulfilled by its use, prerogative may be exercised against the positive laws of a political society. As Dunn explains, it is precisely because they have created social problems as a result of their actions and because these are problems and not merely vehicles of the divine wrath, to be borne with patience, it is men who must grapple with these problems. There is no one else to grapple with the difficulties on their behalf.124

The power of government is held only in trust. When that trust is betrayed, it is the community’s right and duty to rebel in order to reconstruct the social conditions under which people might respond appropriately to their individual callings. Dunn argues that rebellion for Locke is not an outburst of passion or an act of vengeance, but a corrective measure to restore the legal order. The decision to take action proceeds from ‘the religiously guaranteed framework for action’ and is based on ‘an order of intelligible truths accessible in principle to all men’.125 Locke’s work constructed a platform from which future revolutionaries could launch their enterprises. The proposition that Locke was a powerful influence on dissenting politics through the eighteenth century in England and America has been stoutly challenged. Questions of ‘influence’ themselves are now often held to be so intractable as to be scarcely worth asking. It seems an extreme position, however, to suggest that the politics of the eighteenth century could be understood without reference to Locke. The political thought of the era may indeed owe more to Machiavelli and Montesquieu,126 but one can hardly write off thickets of references to Locke in the American pamphlet literature of the revolution as merely incidental. And even after announcing the ‘shattering demolition’ of Locke’s myth, Pocock admits of the possibility of fitting Locke back into the picture after the historical context has been ‘reconstructed without him’.127 While this controversy cannot be pursued here, it is important to note the sense in which Locke represents for us a culmination of the anti-tyrant literature, based largely on the emerging notion of constitutional rights, which began in the sixteenth century and was a factor in the revolutions of the seventeenth. In particular, we should note how strong a link he remains in the chain of Protestant individualism from Europe to America. In his attempt to rehabilitate Locke from the ravages of republican revision ism Isaac Kramnick notes how much ‘the unenfranchised middle class and 141

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especially the Protestant dissenters found intellectual authority and legitimacy for their radical demands’ in Locke after his ideas ‘made a dramatic and decisive comeback in the 1760s and 1770s’.128 Locke stands as the sure authority on the ‘state of nature’ (discovered as a literal fact on the American frontier), on natural rights, on the political contract and on government as a commission from the people; and he inspired American slogans about the evils of taxation without representation.129 There is a less easily definable sense in which Locke may be presumed to have been influential in revolutionary America. That he was read we know from the citations; we do not need direct evidence for the most important influence. Having made revolution against tyrannical power legitimate, or at least plausible, Locke had helped create a rhetorical background before which the actual drama of revolution could win a more approving audience. Whatever influence Locke’s writing may or may not have had on the rebellions of his own day,130 once his justifications of resistance, together with those of his Whig contemporaries, were absorbed into Western political consciousness, they helped design a feasible alternative to obedience acceptable at least to activists persuaded by them. After Locke, revolutionaries were spared the soulsearing process of self-doubt and equivocation on the legitimacy of their actions. If the colonial constitution writers (including Locke himself) set out to protect an order of rights, they relied a great deal on Lockean arguments.131 The force of his insistence that government be subject to, and servant of, the people gave impetus to the growth of modern democracy. He differed from Calvinist predecessors in locating the authority of both community and government in the ‘body of the people’ and not in the people as represented by assembly, lesser magistrate or charismatic leader. As the final words of the Two Treatises proclaim: ‘the People have a Right to act as Supreme, and continue the Legislative in themselves, or erect a new Form, or under the old form place it [their political power] in new Lands, as they think good’.132 There are democratic implications to the work of the two greatest contractarians of the seventeenth century, both of whom were dealing with the consequences of the Reformation, which had freed the individual conscience for participation in politics. Hobbes’s polemic may be seen as ‘grounded in the possibility of a mass politics of rational judgment and clarity of understanding, for which he saw the Reformation as prerequisite’. Perceived one way, the authority of the scriptures leads to civil war; in another ‘it underpins civil peace’.133 This was the dilemma of Calvinism-after-Calvin, and Hobbes came down on the side of civil peace through obedience required by a covenant freely entered into. While there may be less difference in emphasis between Hobbes and Locke than is sometimes supposed, Locke follows the implications of an oppositional Calvinism to construct the ground-rules for legitimate resistance. There are democratic aspects to both systems, as there are indeed to the covenant theology from which both proceed. 142

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In these approaches the assent of the people – whether to Yahweh’s rule of the Old Covenant, the kingdom of God of the New, or the political contracts of the seventeenth century – is required to establish the community, and, in all the cases, that assent may be withheld at the outset. Locke made explicit how assent may be withdrawn from a government deemed by the people to have betrayed its trust. Those who confine Locke to the individualist cells of a bourgeois liberalism, however, neglect in him a response to the aspirations of grace associated with the Calvinist doctrine of the calling. While he was not himself to pursue the future manifestations of the spirit, his doctrines, liberating from their subjection to oppressive governments those who would, opened up new vistas of political and social improvement to the dissenting visionary.

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PURITAN DEMOCRACY The rise of popular consciousness

Although the theology of the ‘magisterial’ Reformation was charged with import for the notion of the legitimate ruler, at the congregational level its contact with a living, ‘grass-roots’ democracy was immediate. The attack on the authority of governments conversely fashioned a covenantal political theory to elevate the governed above their rulers. THE COMMUNAL REFORMATION At the communal level, so intimate was the connection between the Reformation movements and emerging democratic practices that one might speculate whether the Reformation could have been at all possible without a democratic predisposition among the peasants and burghers of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Bohemia, England and Scotland. The gauntlet flung down by the leading Reformers would scarcely have been taken up but for a widespread frustration with remote political control. In turn, the Reformation movements gathered, enlivened and transmitted the democratic experience, raising it to the plane of national churches, whence it eventually flowed into national governments. This prototype democratic experience had flourished for a long time in pockets left untouched by the hierarchical structures of medieval church or feudal order. These lacunae of popular cooperation lent the material for an ‘ascending thesis’ of government (as proposed by Walter Ullmann) and tilled local plots where the seeds of libertarian theologies, windswept over a broader terrain, might alight and take root.1 In thousands of villages across Europe, life had evolved along essentially cooperative lines. Farming practices required communal efforts, while particular tasks were assigned by consensus of, or election by, entire villages meeting in assembly. Collective decisions could even embrace lord of the manor and village tenants together.2 The administration of justice was ‘so obviously communal in principle . . . that [it] naturally imposed upon the village a great variety of functions requiring inquests’.3 144

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If medieval examples of inchoate local democracy may seem too remote, we may be reminded that in ‘Switzerland and upper Germany, the “medieval” village, with its reserves of common land and elected village leaders, survived into the nineteenth century’.4 Our attention is drawn, however, by the affinity between European village life at the end of the fifteenth century and congregations of the Christian church. During the so-called Communal Reformation (Gemeindereformation) the rural peasantry converted to Protestantism with an ‘enthusiasm for the new teaching [that] proved to be a mass event’.5 When the doctrines of the great Reformers arrived at many villages the peasants were already asserting their communal customs more vigorously than ever before. In Switzerland and upper Germany, where the lands of old feudal manors were redistributed, the gradual disappearance of labour service left family farms to organize their life and work in cooperation with neighbours. Local administration developed ‘a degree of statutory sovereignty . . . personified by the village mayor (“Amman” or “Vogt”), the village council (“Vierer”), and the village jury courts’.6 A similar process in the church had smoothed a path for the reformed teaching. The piety of the Swiss and German peasantry had led to calls for pastoral priests in every village, a demand that the hierarchical church could not easily meet. The alternative was self-help measures on the part of peasant congregations who in hundreds of locations made their own priestly appointments. This ‘alternative’ church found ‘its niche in gaps within ecclesiastical law, where believers are no longer subjects (or “subditi”), but the partners of their priests’.7 New teachings that persuaded all believers they were priests increased the selfconfidence of local congregations, placing in their hands a scriptural authority to reinforce their self-help projects. Not until we appreciate the strength of community feeling in the hinterland of Zurich, for example, do we fully understand the significance of Zwingli’s dispute with Luther over the eucharist: ‘Zwingli conceived of the sacrament as an oath, by which the believer confessed himself publicly and bindingly to a Gemeinde that had committed itself to Christ, its Lord.’8 If communalism were confined to the villages alone, we might see the magisterial Reformation washing by their shores almost unheeding. It was paralleled in the boroughs, where new industry and merchant prosperity challenged the old orders of control. Artisan guilds based their association on fraternal affection and the need for cooperation long experienced but barely articulated. In Luther’s ‘profound and touching notion of the Christian community of love and brotherhood’ they found a precise expression of their own hopes.9 Since honest labour that contributed to the welfare of God’s people was a high calling ‘artisans and farmers are placed alongside princes and lords’.10 The Protestant message first took hold among teachers, printers, clothmakers, miners and textile workers, from whose ranks emerged the ministers of 145

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the Word, underlining the revolutionary impact of the new teaching. Luther had attacked priests not merely as purveyors of false doctrine, but also as a privileged caste who consumed luxuries at the expense of the poor. While Luther himself would give no comfort to those who wished to drag the rich down from their perches, he could do little to prevent the teachings he himself addressed to the spiritual world catching fire in the social realm. Already in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries guilds of artisans had rebelled against aristocratic rulers in many German cities. Protestantism reinforced their solidarity against the town nobility; eventually ‘pre-Reformation political and social conflicts merged into the religiopolitical issues raised by the evangelical movement of the 1520s’.11 In some areas communalism was quickly radicalized into calls for a Spartan asceticism that toughened its adherents for revolutionary action. Denouncing Luther as that ‘unspiritual soft-living flesh at Wittenberg’,12 Thomas Müntzer of Zwickau looked to the early arrival of God’s millennial rule in the here and now. The twokingdoms doctrine had left too much autonomy to the temporal order; it should be subdued immediately by those ready to impose the gospel by force. It was the weavers’ guild of Zwickau that spurred Müntzer, their radical ex-priest, on his millennialist and revolutionary path.13 The agents for change would be the poor, who would flaunt the Magnificat as their banner. Casting down the exalted from their thrones, the ‘nobodies’ of the world would bring in the rule of God.14 Yet their present suffering was itself an obstacle before the march of the Spirit. Ground down with labour and poverty, with all their energies bent taut towards a miserable subsistence, the lowly were in no mental, physical or spiritual shape to study the scriptures or tend their souls.15 There would have to be a social revolution before the kingdom of God could come. If Luther, following Augustine, could defend the just war, Müntzer could defend the ‘just revolt’.16 The Peasants’ War was not the imaginary social revolution that Müntzer had preached.17 A prosperous peasantry, chafing at the resurgent absolutism of regional princes, was joined by the really destitute; near-starvation had been the cause of earlier revolts.18 As so often, taxes and tithes were at the head of the grievance list, but there was also resentment at the threat centralized systems of ‘Roman’ law posed to societies regulated by custom. Yet everywhere the peasants were routed by the princely forces.19 Müntzer’s revolutionary movement died with him, but the influence of his radical alternative to Luther’s political quietism lived on.20 A direct religious outgrowth of ‘communalization’, Anabaptism can only with difficulty be spoken of as a single movement; its variety could be as manifold as there were congregations. Each community, open to the peculiar revelations of charismatic ‘prophets’, assumed the right to determine the meanings of scripture.21 More radical ascetics wanted the mass abolished; as practised by Rome it had nothing to do with the Lord’s Supper 146

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prescribed in the gospels. They were impatient for the inauguration of a holy, apostolic life following exactly the scriptural example: ‘Why wait? they demanded. There could be no compromise with God’s word. Annul the fasting laws, smash images, get rid of the mass without further delay, establish a church of true Christians, elect a new and Christian town council.’22 We have not the scope to trace the rapid spread of Anabaptists from Switzerland to the Netherlands and Germany. Despite local differences, possibly forty sects of Anabaptists shared a fervour to relive the example of the New Testament church. In only a few places did they organize themselves on communistic lines, but they took seriously the scriptural injunction to share goods and services and to care for the needy.23 Beyond the model of Acts, persecution also lent them a kinship with the church under the Roman persecutions. Some referred to Tertullian, who had enjoined Christians to avoid the entrapments of this world. Grebel and Hubmaier told believers to abstain from taking on public office and to reject all military service.24 True Christians had no need of correction, and the coercive regiment had no place among them. Government was a part of the fallen world and would be damned along with the rest.25 Most of the early Anabaptists died young; their congregations, languishing under state persecution, had little lasting influence in their own locations. Müntzer and the communistic Hütterites might be a source of misplaced inspiration to later anarchists,26 but the importance of Anabaptism to this discussion is the transport of ‘congregationalist’ attitudes into the new democratic movements of the Englishspeaking world. ‘A most important fact often overlooked is that the very concept of the gathered church, the heart of Separatism, was evidently Anabaptist in origin and not a conscious product of the Magisterial Reform. None of the Reformers developed an ecclesiology of churches composed of committed disciples only.’27 One Anabaptist leader who did, by deft disguise and clandestine travel, manage to survive young manhood was Menno Simons (1496–1561). Rejecting chiliasts and self-professed prophets, he wanted to know nothing of ‘his own opinions, dreams and visions’ but to rely on scripture alone.28 His church in the Netherlands, surviving vigorously to this day, transmitted the benefits of free church life to a world gradually becoming aware of the fruits of democracy.29 PURITAN DEMOCRACY As on the continent, there had also been prefigurements of the Reformation in England. In the fourteenth century John Wyclif, an Augustinian and Platonist scholar at Oxford, challenged Rome and denied the authority of the pope. He foreshadowed Zwingli’s rejection of transubstantiation and undermined the authority of the 147

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priesthood. Inspired by such teachings, the Lollards had set up study circles to reflect on the scriptures, and laid great stress on preaching the Word.30 Although we may not presume too direct a connection between the Lollards and the great peasant uprising of 1381, historians have remarked the apparent readiness of farflung groups for the revolt facilitated by a sophisticated communication amongst a literate leadership. One of the peasant leaders, John Ball, was a priest of the people who railed against the insolence of the aristocracy, both lay and clerical.31 The crushed peasants were to have no influence on the politics of the day, but the radicalism of Wyclif’s theology is often poorly appreciated. It pointed a way not merely to the reform of the church by laypersons, but also to a ‘holy democracy’ of true believers – the Augustinian ‘elect’ – founded on scriptural precept.32 Tracing ‘influences’ is a hazardous procedure, but the revival of Lollard groups at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and their melting into reform congregations, is surely of significance.33 The official Reformation in England had less to do with doctrinal matters than with the dispute between the pope and Henry VIII in 1527. When Henry began his anti-clerical legislation, however, it impinged on a priesthood already badly eroded by the swelling tide of scriptural religion. Quite separately from the official break between king and pope, Lutheran and Calvinist ideas surged into England and Scotland on a wave of pamphlet literature, and swayed many leaders of the church in England.34 Although Henry had never intended to depart from Catholic doctrine, the brief reign of his son, Edward VI, saw decisive accommodations to Protestantism symbolically embraced by the Book of Common Prayer. In the even briefer reign of his Catholic sister, Mary I, while attempting an official reinstatement of Catholicism, she rather entrenched the resistance of Protestants by the brief savagery of her persecutions. The term ‘Puritan’ does not seem to have been used before the Protestant leaders who had taken refuge from Mary Tudor in Switzerland or Germany began to return in Elizabeth’s reign, but it was increasingly applied to those who would ‘purify’ the church of its surviving ‘idolatrous’ practices. The speed with which the influence of Puritanism had filtered down through all levels of society, however, can only be explained by the special circumstances of England’s return to Protestantism after Mary’s reign. Following her father’s careful precedent, Mary had scrupulously reenacted laws through Parliament to restore ties with the papacy. Her settlement was entirely constitutional, and whatever ammunition anti-tyrant literature could give her opponents, unconstitutional action was not open to them as a charge against the queen. The recourse of the Marian exiles, therefore, was to turn to the people. Jane Dawson explains: ‘The main group who were suffering persecution and martyrdom for their faith were the common people. They were normally excluded from all forms 148

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pation.’35

of political partici The Protestant radicals differed amongst themselves as to the part of magisterial or prophetic leadership in times of necessary rebellion, yet often enough they had been clear that the people should have an autonomous role as the last resort. As Christopher Goodman had written in 1558: And thoghe it appeare at the first sight a great disordre, that the people shulde take unto them the punishment of transgression, yet, when the Magistrates and other officers cease to do their dutie, they are as it were, without officers, yea, worse then if they had none at all, and then God giveth the sworde in to the peoples hande, and he himself is become immediately their head.36 The effect of such opinion was at the least to make people wary of any further official relapses into Catholicism, galvanizing public feeling against Mary Queen of Scots, for example. The radicalism of the exiles, and the insistence of radical Puritans at home on the autonomy of their congregations,37 became part of a political background in which people would be sceptical of the claims of rulers for a long time to come. The Levellers in Cromwell’s army came to adopt a position of extreme suspicion of governmental authority. Along the way they laid down for the modern era norms almost universally recognized as the ‘birth of political democracy’.38 Modern books on democratic theory tend to take the Levellers for granted as having made an inconsequential contribution to opinions not finally to be acted upon until two centuries later. Moreover, they are viewed hindward through secular spectacles: they stood for natural rights, equality, individualism, representation on adult male suffrage, and government by consent and founded on contract.39 Retrojection of liberal sentiments palatable to modern taste severely underestimates how strongly the Puritans of the seventeenth century were subject to the dictates of conscience, or how much their genuinely democratic aspirations were received under instruction from the spiritual realm. A preoccupation with conscience had been with the Puritans from the outset.40 Leveller influence is ‘inconsequential’ to the immediately succeeding generations only when it appears in a purely secular light. The modern democratic mind is apt to forget how saturated in religious idiom, how driven by religious inspiration, how dependent on the favour of providence, seventeenth-century activists were. Subsequent populist movements, embracing Chartism, Marxism and social democracy, would obviously locate the Levellers, standing as they did in the period when the Reformation emphasis on secular government began to take effect, in a secular tradition. Along with Cromwell himself, the Levellers emerged from the Independent congregations of England. They were part of a ‘New Model’ army organized for participation in and dedication to a righteous cause to which all fighting men gave 149

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assent. The army debates at Putney, apart from the arguments proposed on either side, demonstrate the emergence of the democratic form from Puritan conventicle to the temporal sphere of armed might. An army engages in discussion not only that all, through their agents, might know that they have taken part in decision-making, but also that some hitherto undiscovered truth or unconsidered policy might emerge from the consultations. This conviction lay at the heart of the Independent congregation. A Christian community, acknowledging only Christ as head, and each member having a direct communicative relationship with the Head, had no need of intermediating priest or bishop. All believers were united in their dedication, and equal in their worth as infinitely valued souls. They met to read, pray, discuss and interpret. They were convinced that, although God had ‘revealed’ his truth once for all in the canon of holy scripture, the individual human mind could not of itself apprehend the whole truth. The Christian life was therefore a communal voyage of discovery, seeking ever new light and truth ‘to break forth out of his holy word’.41 Meetings could be formal gatherings of an entire congregation, or smaller, informal ‘conventicles’ or ‘seekings’ – prayer and study groups that formed the obscure but crucial body of Independent Protestant Christianity.42 At the core of seeking and understanding in the Independent congregation was discussion. Under the weight of representative systems the modern democrat is apt to forget the centrality of mutual, face-to-face discussion in the original democracies – both ancient, in fifth-century Athens, and modern, in seventeenth-century England. In the Puritan congregation each person was worthy of full participation in discussion not merely out of respect for her or his worth before God, but also because each person in a gathering in Christ’s name could be a vessel for the outpouring of the Spirit – each could be moved by God to add something genuinely revealing, or revealed, to the collective understanding. And centuries before it became a commonplace for liberals to insist upon a free marketplace of ideas, Puritan Independents, questing for scriptural truth, foreshadowed John Stuart Mill’s competition of opinions. As a tract of 1645 declared: There are two things contended for in this liberty of conscience: first, to instate every Christian in his right of free, yet modest, judging and accepting what he holds; secondly, to vindicate a necessary advantage to the truth . . . . I contend not for a variety of opinions; I know there is but one truth. But this truth cannot be so easily brought forth without this liberty; and a general restraint, though intended but for errors, yet through the unskilfulness of men, may fall upon the

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truth. And better many errors of some kind suffered than one useful truth be obstructed or destroyed.43 The scriptures themselves enjoin judgment upon believers: The Apostle requires us (1 Thess. 5) to prove all things . . . . And this is the dignity, as well as the duty, of a spiritual man, that he judges all things . . . . Now this liberty of trying and judging is in vain if there be not a liberty of profession; and to hinder this were a most tyrannical usurpation over that connection which God hath made between the act of the understanding and the will.44 The Putney Debates of the Cromwellian army bristle with references to the importance of discussion in the discovery of God’s will for the country. Lt-Col. William Goffe urged his hearers not ‘to throw off some of our friends when that they would have it discovered whether God goes along with us’.45 Cromwell himself was convinced ‘that ’tis God that persuades the heart’ when a meeting of earnest endeavourers comes together.46 Above all, open debate can bring new understanding, as Cromwell averred: I desire that we rightly understand this thing. If this be so, I do not understand what the end of the meeting will be. If this be not so, we will [not] draw any men from their engagements further than the light of God shall draw them from their engagements; and I think, according to your own principle, if you be upon any engagement you are liable to be convinced – unless you be infallible. If we may come to an honest and single debate, how we may all agree in one common way for public good.47 It was this enlarging aspect of discussion that A. D. Lindsay believed to be at the heart of the promise of democracy: ‘the moment we take discussion seriously, we are committed to the view that we are concerned not primarily to obtain or register consent, but to find something out. We discover something from [discussion] which could have been discovered in no other way.’48 The democratic message of the Puritan rebellion is therefore not confined to Protestant individualism or theories of consent. Together the religious experience of the individual person and the collective discovery both of scriptural illumination and of God’s will for the temporal realm expand the range of possible courses of action, and of possible endowments of providential grace, beyond any person’s or any party’s imagination. For the Puritan, as for Lindsay, in secular affairs as in religious, democracy opens a vision of progress and of hope.49 In bringing the arguments inspired by religious hope into the arena where decisions affect the course of a nation’s affairs, the Levellers engendered a process that would infuse the secular world with religious hope. Such was the inevitable consequence of 151

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bringing the method of the congre gation into the political world. Equally important were the arguments about the grounds of congregational association. Without priest or hierarchical structure, free worshippers were able to found their own substantive association on the footing of the biblical covenant.50 The idea of the covenantal church stemmed from English Puritanism as early as 1567, when some Puritans, having found the Church of England too resistant to their demands, separated to form their own congregation in London.51 Separatism was to receive its more theoretical underpinning from Robert Browne, who helped form a Separatist congregation in Norwich, whence it removed, in about 1582, to a more receptive and hospitably Calvinist Holland. As Browne wrote: A covenant was made and their mutual consent was given to hold together. There were certain chief points proved unto them by the scriptures; all of which being particularly rehearsed . . . they agreed upon them, and pronounced their agreement to each thing particularly, saying, ‘To this we give our consent.’ First therefore they gave their consent to join themselves to the Lord in one covenant and fellowship together and to keep and seek agreement under his laws and government.52 In 1643 Richard Mather elaborated the substance of ‘voluntary relations’ which, not being based on force, nor being ‘natural’ as in the bond between parent and child, are founded on a covenant. Just as a church is established by a covenant between minister and people and thereby becomes a unified group, so also people ‘may be united into a body politic or incorporate . . . by some contract or covenant’.53 What came to be called the Congregationalist church emerged from the sundry groups of ‘gathered’ congregations, some of which were so critical of the Church of England that they found their differences with it irreconcilable, although others refused to ‘unchurch’ the Church of England. We are cautioned against too ready a connection between the sacred covenant of a ‘gathered’ church and the contract of secular associations; when a church congregation was formed ‘it was of the essence of it that it is God himself who gathers people together into fellowship with Himself and with one another’.54 At the seedtime of democratic ideas in the seventeenth century, however, secular and religious designs were scarcely disentangled as most concerned people sought the will of providence for both church and nation. Many of the early congregations formed around groups of the very soldiery who in the 1640s debated high matters of state with their commanders.55 When the focus of political debate shifted largely to secular affairs, the political legacy of Puritan congregationalism remained deeply embedded in democratic thought and practice. The importance of voluntary association, in which people 152

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could find a spiritual, philosophical or social life, remained a resilient feature of English-speaking democracies. Lindsay insisted that it was the absolute priority of voluntary associations that characterized modern democracy; the state itself recedes in importance and exists, rather than for its own sake, for the purpose of protecting and enhancing the life of voluntary groups of all legitimate kinds. Being diverse, they also represent in tangible form the democratic insistence on the right of people to hold different opinions associated with their private or social interests and ambitions. The state, therefore, according to Puritan opinion, should not privilege or be associated with any one of a diversity of opinions.56 There is yet a further dimension to the impact of Congregationalist associative life upon the modern democratic community. It is one thing to suggest that individual persons might pool and expand their individual purposes, whether secular or sacred; it is quite another to contemplate an association which places all the emphasis of the covenant on the interests of, and indeed on love for, the other persons with whom one associates. The bonds of community submerged individual, private interests and created a new fellowship of love in which all participated equally. This ‘incorporation’, ‘embodying’ or ‘inchurching’ as it was synonymously called, involved a transcendence of personal interests, ‘the joyning together of severall grains of corne into one loafe or bread, 1 Cor. 10.17’.57 It would be absurd to extrapolate from such images a view that the modern democratic community could be founded, in Aristotelian fashion, on friendship or love. A diversity of ends and means, which the associative life implies, excludes the possibility. There is nevertheless a strong sense in which the fellowship of the Congregationalist association spills over into the secular demand for mutual protection and sustenance that came to be known as the welfare state. It was unlikely that all democratic citizens, in their diversity, would subscribe to a single conception of ‘welfare’, but this idea became an essential part of the Christian, and post-Christian ‘socialist’, input into democratic dialectic. It is still important to emphasize how close in its origin the modern political contract idea was to the church covenant. Although it might be fanciful to construct a chain of causation for an idea with so many legitimate antecedents, nevertheless a classical exponent of the contract, John Locke, derived much intellectual and spiritual sustenance from George Lawson, who, while a conforming clergyman, was in turn greatly influenced by the Congregationalists John Owen and Thomas Cole.58 In his own account of political association, Lawson promotes a ‘quasi-Aristotelian’ view of neighbourliness which derives in fact from the Calvinist Althusius, and is reflected in the Congregationalist view of embodiment.59 The covenant is not merely a voluntary congress of autonomous individual persons, but is grounded upon supra-personal 153

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authority: ‘The principal force of a Covenant depends on the will and consent of the immortal soul, which fears a Deity, and believes a supreme Judge of the world.’60 However fanciful the idea of a political contract might be as an explanation of the foundations and binding cement of a state, the theorists of the seventeenth century had concrete examples before them, such as the company charters of colonial expeditions, or the Solemn League and Covenant between England and Scotland in 1643. These did not attempt to embrace the assent of entire political communities, but such a conception was not beyond the wit of the Puritan mind. In 1647 the Levellers proposed An Agreement Of The People For a firme and present Peace, upon grounds of common-right and freedome. They clearly had in mind a fundamental or antecedent law, since, as John Lilburne wrote, ‘that which is done by one Parliament . . . may be undone by the next’.61 An engagement was to be entered by all the people, and to be beyond the reach of government or parliament to amend. As Zagorin argues: The first Agreement was a democratic constitution, and much more. It was also the re-enactment of the great myth of the social contract, indeed, the very pact by which the political society was to be created anew, and England removed from the state of nature into which Lilburne believed she had now been dissolved.62 Because during the uncertainties of a civil war the people had lapsed into a state of nature, only their own action, ratified by every man in England, could reconstitute a body politic. The form of the Agreement resembled the establishment of gathering congregations; the law it set up would be fundamental only in so far as it accorded with the word of God as discovered by human reason.63 When the Agreement appeared in two new versions, the careful enumeration of government powers laid further stress on the engagement as a fundamental written constitution. In his early thinking and writing Lilburne had sought to rely on his ancient rights as an Englishman, grounded as he believed in the common law and the traditional constitution. These rights had correspondingly diminished as the wealth and power of bishops had increased, as sharper divisions had opened up between the poor and the wealthy, as more peasants were imprisoned for debts, and as church tithes bit deeper to the bone of the dispossessed. Scarcely anything signified the erosion of ancient rights as much as the enclosure of common lands. The Levellers, most explicitly through the pamphlets of Richard Overton, called for their restoration, the abolition of tithes, the setting-up of healthcare and education for the poor, and the empowerment of people through the return of more decision-making to the local communities. This ‘federalizing’ of political demands closely paralleled the ‘federalized’ theology introduced by the autonomous congregations. In so far as demands for a return to the de facto democracy of the medieval community gained 154

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currency, they reinforced a ‘congregational’ and ‘parochial’ link to democratic practice. While Lilburne called for the restoration of ancient rights, his Leveller colleague William Walwyn took the recent ills of the poor as sure sign that those rights were an empty shell, a rhetorical appeal those in power were unlikely to heed.64 Magna Carta had disappeared into the mists of time, and a new agreement, to embrace all the people, should establish a new substructure for the rights of Englishmen. Walwyn, the proponent of discussion as the political method most conducive to discovering the truth, claimed that an Agreement of the People would not entrap any one configuration of powers, but would open up a future of unending improvement for the people when new discoveries were accommodated.65 If, as is contended throughout this book, democracy is a system of government that makes provision for the needs of the poor, the Levellers undoubtedly share an elevated place in its evolution. Colonel Rainborough’s remarks at Putney, that the poorest in the land has a life to live as worthy as the greatest, and should therefore be included in any granting of consent to government, reflects Protestant belief in the equal worth of every believing soul, and stands at the foundation of subsequent demands for political equality.66 The Levellers’ cry was for much more than political equality. The very existence of poor people was evidence of oppression by the rich and powerful; the Levellers discovered ‘a confederacy amongst the rich and mighty, to impoverish and so enslave all the plain and mean people throughout the land’.67 Walwyn observed the sufferings of the poor with outrage, and condemned the impious contrast to the luxury of the rich.68 As the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens addressed Parliament in 1646: ye are rich and abound in goods and have need of nothing; but the afflictions of the poor, your hunger-starved brethren, ye have no compassion of . . . . Nay, ye suffer poor Christians, for whom Christ died to kneel before you in the streets, aged, sick and crippled, begging your halfpenny charities, and ye rustle by them in your coaches and silks daily, without regard . . . it moves not you nor your clergy.69 From the modern, post-Marxist perspective, the most forceful statement on behalf of the poor came from the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, leader of a radical group of the Levellers calling themselves ‘True Levellers’ or Diggers. Taking literally the idea that the world belonged to all God’s human creatures, Winstanley announced that Christ should rise up in the poor of the land, who would demonstrate that unenclosed land could supply sustenance a-plenty for all those that wanted if only the peasants took it upon themselves to plough, ‘manure’ and sow the wasteland of England.70 Eschewing any calls to violent appropriation of others’ prop erty,71 Winstanley 155

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believed that if the poor held and used unoccupied land for their common benefit, they would demonstrate to the world the inequity and blasphemy of private property. The best known of the Digger settlements was led by Winstanley himself at St George’s Hill in Surrey. Winstanley and his confederates occupied the land in April 1649, and although they won the patient and respectful attention of Sir Thomas Fairfax, who visited the settlement, they failed to move Cromwell with either their plight or their precepts. There were other Digger communities, such as at Dunstable, Wellingborough and Cox Hall, with which Winstanley corresponded.72 At St George’s Hill the ‘communists’ hung on for over a year, suffering beatings and persecutions, with their peasant huts burnt down and their agricultural tools cut or smashed into pieces. Eventually dispirited and broken, they dispersed into their old communities. Unlike the mainstream or ‘constitutional’ Levellers represented by Lilburne and having great press coverage during this same period, the Diggers attracted little contemporary attention and made even less lasting impact on the immediately succeeding generations. Not surprisingly, full-fledged socialist doctrine of a later age would find in their experiment a brave harbinger of much greater, and more successful, proletarian uprisings.73 Proceeding from similar premises, they differed widely from the general body of the Levellers in radically attacking the foundations of contemporary society. If one took holy scripture as a standard for life, as people almost universally did in the seventeenth century, but then applied the precepts discovered therein more literally than the established church found convenient, it was inevitable that the contradictions and inequities of a class-ridden society would be found unacceptable. The Diggers’ experiment on St George’s Hill would ‘lay the foundation of making the earth a common treasury for all, both rich and poor’. The equal sharing of the earth’s goodness would be a hymn of praise to the creator since the new community would resonate with ‘the reason that rules in creation’.74 Understandable though the attempt to rescue Winstanley from religious obsession for the cause of materialism may be, it seems to be neither necessary nor sustainable. It is variously argued that Winstanley masked a revolutionary design in biblical piety, that he employed biblical imagery to seduce an unsophisticated peasantry who would find Bible stories automatically persuasive, or, more generously, that he accepted a conventional form of argument to purvey unconventional ideas. Central to this case is the claim that Winstanley so far departed from orthodox Christianity as to deny it altogether; the orthodox biblical religion in this context is taken to be that of the established church.75 As Andrew Bradstock has pointed out, this argument is widely astray.76 The Western religious tradition is no single stream, but has many tributaries and branches with different, if nevertheless cogent, claims on authentic interpretations of scripture. 156

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Bradstock contends that Winstanley could be placed in a line of dissenting theology that takes the social implications of the gospel more seriously than has mainstream pietistic religion. He could claim the Lollards, Hussites and Anabaptists as forefathers, the Quakers and Ranters as confederates, and perhaps look forward not merely to secular Marxism or social democracy, but also to twentieth-century liberation theology. In Winstanley’s terms, both the established Church of England and Presbyterianism had used their religious heritage to entrench class domination. The God ‘out there’ who smote and punished and threatened eternal damnation had been captured by the idolators of a religion grown complacent and comfortable, and which, even without a king, continued to support a ‘kingly power’ by which the poor of the earth were mercilessly exploited. Far removed from the materialist outlook, Winstanley’s enterprise is scarcely to be understood at all without locating it within the prophetic religious stream. It is unwarranted to write off his repeated references to the prophet Micah, to the Apocalypse, to the Book of Daniel and to the triumph of the Lamb.77 Even if these were mere devices of rhetoric, it would be difficult to explain the Digger experiment in other than religious terms. Winstanley says as much when he is moved by prophetic visions and is spoken to in trances. He makes no attempt to establish a mass movement by political organization; rather, he goes to his appointed place at divine behest, the single prophet armed with nothing but ‘the Word’. He sees the sign of the approaching ‘last days’ and, in obedience to his maker, he is there preparing and ‘manuring’ the ground – a symbolic and religious act as well as a practical farming measure. PURITANISM IN AMERICA If democratic impulses were blunted and dissipated by entrenched economic and social structures in the Old World, this was hardly the case in the New. The Puritan emigrations to New England, even if overwhelmingly motivated by religious objectives, meant the transplantation of entire communities which then had to see to their own social and political arrangements. As de Tocqueville observed, they established a ‘democracy, more perfect than any which antiquity had dreamed of, started in full size and panoply from the midst of an ancient feudal society’.78 The ease with which they fashioned their institutions derived partly from their social and economic homogeneity as well as from their single-minded religious purpose.79 As the new communities began to expand and prosper, cracks would appear in their solidarity. Attempts to preserve original forms and objectives would lead to undemocratic practices; for many the memory of oppression overwhelms the good 157

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intentions and establishes a quite repellent reputation for the early Puritans. The imputation of democracy to them in any case rests only with those who are willing to make allowances for the persecutions and to talk in terms of direct, local democracy. Some of their own leaders explicitly shared the widespread aversion to democracy in the seventeenth century and disavowed the term.80 Paradoxically, the order of repression, with which the Puritans are often accused, stemmed from the same sources here claimed as the origins of modern democracy. The Puritans attempted to cultivate and maintain the homogeneous nature of the original communities; but the causes of faction were also there from the outset, and did not come from ‘heretical invaders from outside the colony’; they were set deep within the nature of Puritanism itself.81 We have noted the individualistic and potentially explosive nature of the Protestant doctrine that the saved soul has a direct link to the author and controller of the universe. During the Antinomian Controversy beginning in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, members of the congregations were adjured not to speak of the ‘person’ of the Holy Spirit or of their ‘real union’ with this ‘person’, who could not be discovered at all in scripture.82 At the centre of the controversy, Anne Hutchinson formed in Boston a conventicle of like-minded believers, who held, against any insistence on outward signs of grace through good works, that salvation was the free gift of God. That gift might implant in any saved soul the words that he or she might convey to others as the means of their own salvation. On such authority Hutchinson attacked the learning and scholarship of most of the New England clergy, with the notable exception of John Cotton, who had been influential in her own migration to America. Her position grew in strength when she was joined by Henry Vane, son of the king of England’s privy councillor and soon to be governor of Massachusetts. Vane professed his belief in ‘a personal union with the Holy Ghost’.83 Yet persisting in his own ‘antinomian’ beliefs, Vane would be deposed as governor, and Hutchinson condemned to banishment for undermining religious unanimity, social cohesion and, perhaps above all, the authority of the elevated clergy. Clearly ‘part of her offence was being a powerfully articulate woman in a patriarchal society’,84 but she directed her criticism at a society which had used obedience to religious doctrine as a means of social control.85 For Hutchinson a personal assurance of union with Christ, known through ‘the experience and the feeling’, rendered the outward trappings of conformity with the covenant, and the constant examination of conduct to see if it signified one of the elect, quite irrelevant. As Perry Miller observed, ‘the more experienced divines recognized at once that her version could be maintained only upon the supposition of a union of the believer with Christ so intimate and so perfect that the believer would

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be exempted from all considerations of conduct’; once established, such a claim could be used by the wicked ‘to escape all morality’.86 While the attempt to impose standards of morality was made in common with all political societies, the level of the lowest acceptable standard might be set much higher, and indeed more eccentrically, than would be tolerated in most societies. The Puritans were not ‘ordinary humans’, having left the Old World partly to insulate themselves from the contaminating influences of depraved ‘ordinary humans’. Beyond that, however, they were fostering a community explicitly designed to promote and protect modes of belief, and standards of behaviour, relevant only to their own community. Indeed, it was these beliefs and standards that formed and bonded the community. Alike with the democrats of ancient Greece, with whom some of them compared themselves, they recognized the purpose of society to uphold and promote certain ideals. The Athenians could ‘ostracize’, or otherwise condemn to banishment, someone who was found to spurn those ideals and so to undermine the foundation of the community. To the modern liberal mind the failure to accommodate diverse opinion was anything but ‘democratic’, yet the democracy of the Puritans (and here of course we argue that it was democracy in embryo) laid down one of the essentials of the sort of democracy we are examining: that the collective power of the community exists to promote ideals for the betterment of humankind. As the judicious John Cotton wrote in 1650, the community sought to keep a balance between social and religious control and individual freedom: We are far from arrogating infallibility of judgment to ourselves or affecting uniformity; uniformity God never required, infallibility He never granted us. We content ourselves with unity in the foundation of religion and of church order. Superstructures we suffer to vary . . . . Only we are loath to be blown up and down (like chaff) by every wind of new notions.87 In New England the fence-mending of the early communities often resulted in shameful excess; at times it seemed that they wished to nurture a culture of persecution. The ‘antinomians’ were exiled; Baptists were sentenced to fines and whippings for ‘re-baptizing’, ‘and thereby did necessarily deny the baptism that was before to be baptism, the churches no churches, and also all other ordinances, and ministers, as if all were a nullity’;88 Quakers, for their ‘blasphemies’, were sentenced to hard labour and transportation out of the colony. Dark premonitions were sounded in 1656 when an 11-year-old girl was imprisoned as a Quaker since ‘Satan is put to his shifts to make use of such a child’. Older Quakers had their ears cut off in prison before they went to the gallows.89 Three decades later Satan was of course again to blame when young girls gave ‘spectral evidence’ against ‘witches’, yet the judges were 159

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lent a hand in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials by a little intimidation of juries and a little use of racks and strappadoes to lubricate the confessions of the accused.90 The understandably harsh strictures of modern liberal democrats against the core of Puritan belief necessarily employ a different notion of citizenship from that understood by the Puritans. From the modern standpoint we condemn the narrow confines of Athenian active citizenship, restricted to adult males conscriptable to military service, as ‘undemocratic’; so, too, for the modern mind church membership is a quite unacceptable criterion for citizenship. Excusing both these examples as ‘direct democracy’ (and not ‘liberal democracy’) is insufficient, given that we here claim to be examining the roots of modern democracy, with whatever qualifier it is to be described. Secular democratic impulses, inexorably struggling through the confused purpose of a religious society, would some day loosen the bonds of enforced religious conformity and, thus set free, would permeate temporal society.91 The procedures of a Congregational church, when applied to purely ecclesiastical affairs, were irrefutably democratic. The Puritans, charged with fashioning a new society along with a new church, had understandably lost sight of the two-realms doctrine. They could be reminded in forceful terms by Roger Williams, but they were not yet ready to accommodate his generous vision. While the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay colony did not think ‘democracy’ a suitable form of government, there was no denying the democratic tendencies of the government that was established. Bringing with him to the New World a charter sealed with royal approval, John Winthrop saw that a new community would scarcely be successful without the approval and cooperation of the people concerned. Like Protestants elsewhere, ‘he held that God operated through popular agencies, not only in designating persons to govern, but in establishing government itself. This precept was not only expedient, however, but right in principle, since he shared with fellowPuritans and the emerging contractarians in Britain the view that a polity must be founded on the ‘consent of a certaine companie of people, to cohabite together, under one government for their mutual safety and welfare’.92 What could not be attempted in England the Puritan migrants did; by their act of migration, they gave overt consent to the establishment of a new community. Yet they left home as a church, and arrived as coterminous church and political community. While separate in both organization and purpose, church and state were established under the Word, and both were designed to serve God. It was scarcely surprising that church membership should be the binding cement of church and community alike. As so often in the Puritan tradition, they looked to the model of ancient Israel ‘while the Lord God was their governor’.93 Taking the ancient Jewish theocracy as guide, the Rhode Island townships of Portsmouth and Newport, uniting 160

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in 1641, explicitly declared themselves ‘a democracy or popular government; i.e. it is the power of the body of freemen orderly assembled, or the major part of them, to make or constitute just laws’.94 In 1647 the full constitution of Rhode Island proclaimed its form of government ‘democraticall’.95 In Connecticut the founders eschewed the term ‘democracy’, adopting instead a ‘republicanism’ based on popular sovereignty: the people on the Connecticut River ‘do therefore associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one public state or commonwealth’.96 In all the New England settlements, however, the feature of overwhelming importance was that, although the communities were founded by covenant or compact of the people, they were established for a purpose beyond the convenience of living together, with its expected benefits of peace, security and justice. These social benefits were means to a higher end. Winthrop’s famous speech aboard the Arbella, en route to New England, titled ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’, exhorted the settlers of New England to found a ‘Citty upon a Hill’, an example of love and justice, yet directed above all to glorifying God, in the eyes of the rest of the world.97 To effect God’s will as far as it is in human power to do so, the Puritan congregation in obedience establishes that form of government which opens the people, acting in fellowship, harmony and justice, to the will of God. This requires above all religious and, by implication, social freedom. The Calvinist view allows that any believing person, however lowly by the world’s standards, might be the vessel of God’s Word to his people. Since both church and political community are ‘under the word’, what is right for the congregation should also be right for the state. As Joshua Miller writes: The Puritans directly linked the citizen to the bodies politic of church and town, and to God, through covenants. Although their principles were essentially the same, there were actually two covenants, one for the church and one for the town.98 Being a subscriber to either covenant meant an active contribution to the life of the community – sacred or secular. In the public sphere, no less than in the spiritual, there was ‘a sense of purpose and mission that required the active support of its citizens’. The normal bounds and functions of the state, as protection of life and property, were entirely inadequate: for Puritans ‘civil and religious communities were formed to attain communal and personal redemption and to serve as models for others’.99 The tradition of the migrants, from their earlier days in England, had been to engage their communities in full participation in the collective quest for redemption. To a degree scarcely known before, the laity were as much involved as the ministers of the Word; indeed, the New England migrations perhaps took place more under pressure from laypeople than from the clergy.100 Patterns of settlement in the New World transplanted the English parochial system and elevated its methods of regulation to 161

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the status of government of a political community, but the commitment to local participation was reinforced by a theology that placed ‘extraordinary emphasis on voluntarism and cooperation’.101 New England was built on townships, where each new settlement grew around a ‘meeting-hall’ serving as both church and town hall. The physical lay-out of the town emphasized the centrality of the church congregation. The people met as a church to conduct ecclesiastical affairs such as admitting newcomers to membership, calling a minister, or electing elders. Indeed, their very coming into being as ‘gathering congregation’ and as town community involved a protracted democratic procedure; in the chronicled example of Dedham, New England, discussed by Theodore Bozeman, the settlers spent a year (1637–8) ‘in prepar[ation] for spiritual communion in a church society’. It involved weekly ‘disputes or conferences’ not only to establish agreement on principles of association, but also to let people get to know each other as fellow-communicants and citizens. Moreover, Bozeman notes ‘the exalted value assigned for the occasion to the harmonization of individual variances’. So often construed by the modern liberal mind as ideological conformity and social control, the process described by the first pastor of Dedham, John Allin, shows a care for regarding each member of the flock as a legitimate vessel of Christ’s truth, and therefore as a worthy contributor to the ‘sweet consent of judgment’.102 As far as the democratic polity was concerned, Osgood held: ‘The local church furnished a much better model than any Greek state.’103 The connection between congregation and town meeting was reinforced by the requirement that to be a citizen one must first be a church member. As Hutchinson explained in his seminal history: this constitution of church government was adapted to the constitution of civil government, both as popular as can well be conceived, and notwithstanding an acknowledgement or declaration from both, of separate and distinct rights, yet each was aiding and assisting the other. By the laws established in the colony, no man could have a share in the administration of civil government, or give his voice in any election, unless he was a member of one of the churches.104 Moreover, ‘no matters of great weight or moment, whether of a religious or civil nature’ were determined without first seeking the advice of the church elders and ministers.105 While the foundation of the congregation was democratic in that the ‘theocracy’ both of the ancient Jewish state and of the Reformation, when applied to human organization, took democratic forms, the concerns of the secular town meeting – establishing schools, regulating forests, allocating public fields, building roads – were dealt with naturally enough by democratic means. Whatever the predisposition of theocrats against theor etical democracy, ‘democracy seeped into New England, unwanted and unsuspected by the founding fathers’.106 162

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It is just the sort of consensus engendered by the procedures of the town meeting that Jane J. Mansbridge sees as the substratum of ‘unitary democracy’, that sense of cooperation and unanimity about the ends of a political society that make conflict unnecessary. Whereas the hegemonic modern historical view is that such consensus implies the control and ultimate absorption of dissent,107 the independent expression of opinion, and the cooperative exertion of constructive energies, resulting in consensus, can expand individual personality into the harmonious whole without any loss of individuality. The nineteenth-century legatee of the New England town democracy Emerson is called by Mansbridge to witness to the impact of cellular democracy: In a town-meeting, the great secret of political science was uncovered, and the problem solved, how to give every individual his fair weight in the government, without any disorder from numbers . . . . In this open democracy, every opinion had an utterance . . . . In these assemblies, the public weal, the call of interest, duty, religion were heard; and every local feeling, every private grudge, every suggestion of petulance and ignorance, were not less faithfully produced. Wrath and love came up to townmeeting in company.108 Sweet consensus was not the usual human experience, and the Puritan was well aware of the harshness and hostility of the world. Indeed, the original migrations from Europe had been motivated in part by a keen perception of the corruptions of most people; and even those on errand, setting a city upon a hill in a new land, could not escape from the world with all its failures. Their chief armour was their scriptural religion, but they knew that it could be interpreted in different ways, and even quoted by the devil for his own purposes. Since they were sent on a mission to hew a Christian civilization from the wilderness, they would need a measure of resourcefulness and subtlety, even flexibility, along with their implicit, ingenuous faith. Even when not explicitly a democrat, the Puritan believed deeply in the education of each person. As Perry suggested, the religion itself was an education, since recourse to the scriptures ‘taught the common man to conduct his own private search for truth, and to regulate his belief by the evidence presented to his own mind’.109 The habit of scriptural research was easily transferred to the practical and secular world, where again the Puritan must exercise wit and resourcefulness to see that God’s will be done. In the secular world, the Puritan would have to study the arts and sciences of medicine, the law and agriculture as well as theology; the devotion of early New England to education was announced by the Harvard College commencement programme:

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After God had carried us safe to New England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livli-hood, rear’d convenient places for Gods worship, and setled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity.110 While Harvard, founded in 1636 by the government of Massachusetts, might come to be the nurturing-ground for the elite, the proliferation of public high schools testified to the belief of the New England Puritan in the education of the common person, a parallel development between ‘puritan awakening and democratic enlightenment’.111 We have now long observed how the essence of Reformation theology, elevating all believers to the lofty but level plane of priesthood, tended towards social equality. Spiritual elevation, however, was to the Puritan no cause for social arrogance or political domination, since the saint was marked by humility and self-effacement. As John Robinson wrote to the Pilgrims after their landfall at Plymouth: wheras you are become a body politik, using amongst your selves civill governmente, and are not furnished with any persons of spetiall eminencie above the rest, to be chosen by you into office of government, let your wisdom and godlines appeare, not only in chusing such persons as doe entirely love and will promote the commone good, but also in yielding unto them all due honour and obedience in their lawful administrations; not behoulding in them the ordinariness of their persons, but Gods ordinance for your good . . . . But you know better things, and that the image of the Lords power and authoritie which the magistrate beareth, is honourable, in how meane persons soever.112 While Robinson’s pastoral exhortations could scarcely be taken as a statement of democratic theory, especially given his recognition of the ‘natural’ ordering of society into rich and poor,113 the underlying democratic impulse of the Reformation was never more irrepressibly evident than in the self-directing congregation forming itself into a ‘body politik’. Hardly any example more calls to mind the koinonia both of Greek democratic assembly and of the ecclesia of the early Christian church than the Puritan congregation, where the common good, soon to be translated into the public weal, was emphasized over and again. Perry reminded us that piety is communal in its very nature, that it connotes a demeanour and an activity that can only exist in relationships between people devoted to a common end.114 Yet there was something especially communal about the Puritan migrations, motivated as they were by the urgent necessity to tend to the will of God through ‘godly company’.115 If piety in the established church had at times lost its communal fervour, the ‘loure’ of the separated 164

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congregation was the spiritual security fostered by a ‘living, spiritual fellowship’.116 It was not merely that warm pious fellowship provided comfort in and security from a harsh and sinful world. Religious communities – in both their ecclesiastical and ‘secular’ aspects – were formed ‘to attain communal and personal redemption and to serve as models for others’.117 The converse of this teaching was the belief that promoting individual self-interest, at least in the material sense, was inherently sinful and likely yet to compound the error by disrupting the harmony of the community and diverting it from its purpose.118 The classic statement of Puritan communalism is, of course, John Winthrop’s shipboard address, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’, delivered to the settlers bound for Massachusetts in 1630. The image of avoiding moral shipwreck had an obvious appeal during a hazardous voyage, as Winthrop told his companions to follow the counsel of Micah to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God: for this end, wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekenes, gentlenes, patience and liberallity, wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne, reioyce together, mourne together, labour, and suffer together, alwayes haveing before our eyes our commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body, soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us.119 This was the way to erect a high beacon to all humankind. Like all the Calvinistic communities, it was grounded firmly on a covenant; but the secular political contract, while drawing on Calvinist tradition, was to fall short of the Puritan covenant in its conception of community. For this was no mere pooling of individual resources for mutual protection or edification. Here was the formation of a whole, new, sanctified, corporate person. Even more than Aristotle was able to imagine, the individual person, with selfish ‘superfluities’ abridged, was expanded into a larger self ready for mission and redemption. Yet this spiritual absorption of the self into a communal whole was far from annihilating or even denying the person, who retained infinite individual worth in the sight of God. Rather, community meant an investment in the well-being of one’s neighbours which was recognized as delighting in each other and rejoicing together. The reciprocity of such recognition meant reinvestment of dignity and spiritual worth in one’s own self, a genuine enhancement of individuality within the common whole.

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Inevitably, as the settlements spread on to a seemingly unending supply of cheap land, Protestant individualism asserted itself in land-ownership and business enterprise, despite the best efforts of church and town authorities to contain avarice, limit profiteering and divert attention from the desire for material prosperity.120 Later generations might construe such attempts to impose a spiritual conformity over material affairs as social control, and where religious considerations began to recede the mechanisms of compulsion – social and psychological as well as legal – might remain even though the spiritual foundations on which they had originally sat had been eroded away. Conclusions of this kind emerge from the work of Sacvan Bercovitch, who sees the social control of Puritanism in New England, characterized by the ‘Jeremiad’, as a species of hegemony that was eventually to embrace, and to stifle, all American culture.121 We have not the scope here to enter into the monumental controversies around the interpretations of Puritanism gathered round Perry Miller’s or Sacvan Bercovitch’s approaches. It is nevertheless partly to the dispute among New England Protestants that we owe the healthy attitude of toleration and, indeed, the essentially Protestant doctrine of the separation of church and state. Bercovitch acknowledges Roger Williams’s ‘baffled outrage’ at intolerance,122 but tends to construe his outbursts as impotent fury in the face of an all-consuming consensus ideology. Despite his contribution to a theory of toleration, it would be wrong to regard Williams as a liberal in the secular sense, or even a political democrat. His influence upon an emerging democratic theory is profound indeed, but it is born entirely of his concern for spiritual well-being and, above all, ‘soul liberty’ – the right to worship God as one is moved to do, without coercion or restriction. Forced worship, as practised through the attempt of the Massachusetts authorities to legislate the first four Old Testament commandments, was as unacceptable an offering to God as pagan idolatry or popery. Clashing with Winthrop and Cotton, with whom, indeed, he had so much in common, Williams removed to Rhode Island, where he hoped to find a haven for all worship unencumbered by the use of the law and secular force against any dissenter or even the non-believer. The coercive instruments of the state must be kept right away from all forms of religious observance.123 This doctrine was not of course Williams’s invention. It was a consistent workingout of Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms, and had been practised by Anabaptists on the continent and Seekers in America; Williams’s name was associated with both groups. Antinomians went so far as to refuse all public service. After her banishment from Massachusetts, Anne Hutchinson persuaded her husband ‘to lay down the office of Magistrate, as that which was unlawfull for Christians to bear’; Samuel Gorton insisted that there should be no such thing as a magistrate but that, if they were to be, they should have no concern with matters of the spirit.124 The Antinomian position 166

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was that no organized religion as practised at the time could press a claim to the truth; state support for any particular brand of religion would almost certainly be underwriting error. Not until Christ returned could true worship be established, and until then churches and state should be rigidly separated. In the tradition of Augustine and Luther, Roger Williams taught that the Christian person brought no better qualities to being a magistrate than did a pagan, since Christianity was a private matter and pertained to things of the spirit: ‘A Pagan or Antichristian Pilot may be as skillfull to carry the Ship to its desired Port, as any Christian Mariner or Pilot in the World, and may performe that worke with as much safety and speed.’125 There was therefore no warrant for insisting on Christian government, and certainly no reason for churchpeople, as such, to have any control over secular affairs. Conversely, the civil magistrate had no brief to determine the will of God, or, indeed, to enforce any law in his name. Roger Williams was concerned with saving souls; it was not to establish civil liberties that he railed against religious persecution, although cruelty to any creature was an abomination to the Lord. Much more than that, physical torture for the sake of people’s souls was a confusion of categories; forcing people to practise religion was worse than useless in producing a worship acceptable to God; it would stir resentment and disobedience; only a free soul could choose to make God a spontaneous offering of the heart – for it was the heart that God required. Forced worship did not save those so compelled, but helped them on their way to hell.126 True, ‘the Church helpeth forward the prosperity of the commonweal by spiritual means (Jer. 29.7). The prayers of God’s people procure the peace of the city where they abide.’127 Such prayerful action is left for its consequences to the mysteries of the spirit working in the temporal world; it is scarcely to be understood by human minds, and is utterly not to be assisted in any physical way by the pious intentions of well-meaning, but thoroughly mistaken, believers. Separation of spiritual from temporal sphere was never more stoutly defended than by Williams. The spiritual realm, and the salvation of truly pious souls, was his overriding concern. Nevertheless, along with Luther and Calvin, Williams remembered that the earth is the Lord’s, and so far as the spiritual world may instruct (but not coerce) the temporal, the civil government should be so disposed as best to promote peace and security. From God’s grant of authority Williams inferred that the sovereign original and foundation of civil power lies in the people, whom they must needs mean by the civil power distinct from the government set up. And if so, that a people may erect and establish what form of government seems to them most meet for their civil condition. It is evident that such governments as are by them erected and established, have no more power, nor

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for no longer time, than the civil power, or people consenting and agreeing, shall betrust them with. This is clear not only in reason, but in the experience of all commonweals where the people are not deprived of their natural freedom by the power of tyrants.128 Although the occasion of writing was his theological dispute with John Cotton, Williams’s book was penned and published in London, forty years, it is as well to remember, before Locke wrote his Two Treatises. The democratic impulses pounding through Williams’s work are unmistakable: as Woodhouse points out, his church, rigorously confined to the elect, is an aristocracy, but the use of this term in relation to the spiritual world is a category error. In any case, once the narrow base of the elect is taken into account, the church is a model of democracy, a ‘voluntary association of equals’; and Williams’s ‘state is a pure democracy’.129 Whatever direct influences New England Puritanism had on the inchoate democratic politics of the American colonies, we should appreciate the general impact of Puritanism on later American culture. The inherent direct democracy of the town meeting, the insistence on popular election to public office, a smoothed path to democratization through the separation of church and state, were all of foundational importance to understandings of democracy throughout transatlantic European civilization. One way or another – for democratic openness or for cultural conformity – Puritanism has been a decisive, if not the decisive, component of American life. It is remarkable that the New England Way, established nearly four centuries ago, should have overridden other powerful factors such as secular humanism in general, or the frontier and westward expansion, or the heterogeneous immigrations, in particular, which poured into the melting-pot of American culture. The question remains whether the long-term influence of Puritanism was repressive or liberating. After Puritanism ‘became the scapegoat of intellectuals’ it was fashionable to dissociate liberalism from its Protestant origins, especially when the Calvinist roots of the Lockean paradigm were wilfully ignored.130 To the extent that American liberalism became oppressive in the modern era, its illiberal nature resulted largely from the inability to translate a private conviction about liberty into national politics. The retreat into localism, where inchoate Puritan democracy first emerged, was noted by de Tocqueville and Henry Adams,131 and remains the refuge of modern democrats like Jane Mansbridge and Sheldon Wolin.132 Perhaps the institutions of a town-based democracy were no more transferable to the government of a continental nation than Montesquieu would have thought possible. In that case, the New England town meeting would be even less instructive than the

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ancient example of Athenian democracy, where at least one could theoretically equate the borders of the city with the political frontiers of a great nation. The example remains, nevertheless, to inform the sensibilities of modern democratic citizens. Much more important is the perpetual criticism that the Puritan conscience levels at the institutions of oppression themselves. Perry Miller once valued ‘an acceptance of melancholy and sadness as ways of seeing, almost as signs of grace’.133 At least Puritan teaching provides a kind of cerebral mirror for thinking ‘against ourselves’.134 Its leaders dramatized a radical indictment upon civilization as ‘the world’ understands it, and their local political institutions, remote and impractical as a ‘model’, stand like the City of God itself as a present measure by which the modern institutions of national government fall short. In democratic terms, they show us that what we have and do is never good enough, and that the democratic ideal binds us to a never-ending search for the causes of evil – or at least the political evils of cruelty and oppression against any of God’s creatures. The Puritans call to mind the restless, perpetual motion that democratic justice must engender. This contrast of the democratic ideal to the republican, federal reality that is American national government today reminds us of the dualism inherent in Protestantism and leads us back through Augustine and Paul to the ancient Jewish prophets. As Perry emphasizes, the Puritan approach was shot through with duality: the elect were contrasted to the damned, the gospel to the law, duty to inclination, higher goods to lower.135 A ‘dynamic antagonism’ had agitated Protestant thought from the start, and insisted on turning inherent criticism into active opposition to ruling norms wherever they might sanction injustice, cruelty and repression. For all that the Puritans might be guilty of these things themselves, their own doctrine laid it at the feet of frail human nature.

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MODERN DEMOCRACY From two kingdoms to dialectical politics

Wherever there is political conflict there is partisanship. The modern observer has long been able to adopt a convenient shorthand by referring to any group of politicians in conflict with others as a ‘party’.1 It was a great discovery of civic humanism to recognize in conflict the possibility of preserving freedom; one could move from the mixed constitution, with its supposed blending of governmental forms, to the more sophisticated argument that a balance of social forces, holding, as it were, the conflict of the orders in a permanent, creative tension, could be the true preserver of liberty.2 This is all very well if one views the whole picture, but mention ‘faction’ on its own and in most generations great passions are aroused; for faction connotes lust, greed, deceit and, worst of all, disloyalty to the point of treason.3 Not until the eighteenth century did the argument emerge that you could not have a creative conflict without partisanship, and that one could scarcely give expression to conflicting social forces without recognizing the place of faction within them. While we have now reviewed various sources of modern democracy, the influx of democratic ideas into the institutions of national government generally coincides with the realization that ‘party’ – faction integrated into the orderly procedures of government – is essential to political liberty and might even be the engine of reform. Democratic ideas were nurtured in and disseminated from the town assembly – whether we speak of the ‘national’ government of ancient Athens, or the ‘local’ government of the New England town. In neither case could the form of direct democracy be adapted to the government of a large, modern, territorial state, even if anyone had wanted so to adapt it. The transmission belt between the local manufacture of democratic ideas and the machinery of modern national government was the political party. Where it was possible within the scope of the town meeting (or church congregation) to garner the opinion of each individual and to promote faceto-face discussion, the party organized individual opinion into group positions and, however clumsily, encouraged policy discussion nation-wide.4 170

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PARTIES AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM The birth of party government, a modern, secular institution, was nevertheless attended by religious midwives who knew about the necessary juxtapositions in life, observed in the dualisms of the redeemed and the damned, the two cities, the two kingdoms, the church and the world, and so on.5 The observable division of the religious world into Catholic and Protestant had much to do with the political conflicts of the modern age, as in the Huguenot persecutions and the English revolutions. The political labels Whig and Tory became associated with the attempt in the reign of Charles II to exclude the succession of a Catholic to an officially nonCatholic throne. Even such famous tags, easily recognized as signifying real political conflict, have yet little to do with party government.6 This discussion does not have the scope to trace the details of the emergence of secular party systems. In some degree they could be seen, as in the British House of Commons, to be extensions of the necessity to reduce the business of the House to some rational order; in America, to be organized around the battle over the federal constitution. The eventual toleration of parties, however, as distinct from evil factions, emerged from the religious and philosophical background which made of government an inherently defective, and potentially dangerous, institution. If to Augustine the empire was a puff of smoke, and to Luther all princes were clowns and rascals, the radical Reformation had joined with the ancient martyrs in condemning all complicity with government as sin of the deepest dye. The Calvinists compounded this suspicion by declaring that all humans were sinners, except for the elect few, and who could say who were truly among that privileged band? That the power of government could not confidently be entrusted to any human hands was axiomatic. Governments could never be virtuous; their ‘partiality’ should be institutionally acknowledged with constitutional restraints, and by assigning the exercise of power to removable parties. Add to religious caution a Machiavellian cynicism about human nature, together with a practical experience of an arrogant government, and a trenchant Country ideology emerges, as in eighteenth-century Britain, to oppose the excesses of the court. Viscount Bolingbroke, in a protracted pamphlet war against Walpole’s ministry, set out to save the world from corrupt governments by reducing politics to ethics. Long before John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton he wrote about the ‘insatiable’ love of power which made government ‘a perpetual danger to liberty’.7 Constitutional checks and balances, soon to be made famous by Montesquieu after his contact with Bolingbroke, would be part of the solution.8 For Bolingbroke himself, if you could not unify the people through their devotion to a ‘patriot king’, then in dealing with factions it was a morally superior position to oppose a government.9 171

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The great foundational theorist of ‘connexion’, Edmund Burke, though at odds with much of Bolingbroke’s approach, also infused a moral superiority to parties in opposition since, unopposed, all governments are prone to tyranny.10 Parties, as Burke famously wrote, were politicians united around an agreed principle ‘for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest’;11 they were acquitted of the charge of factiousness by being connected with ‘the sentiments and opinion of the people’.12 The people in turn had to be rescued from degenerating into a rabble, as to Burke the French revolutionaries clearly had, through the edifying power of religion. Though not explicitly in the foreground, the two kingdoms cast a shadowy influence over Burke’s thought. While he sought, along with Aquinas, a single law of nature,13 the contract that formed ‘each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society . . . connecting the visible and the invisible world’.14 A native religiosity binds a community together;15 through religion a people empties itself ‘of all the lust of selfish will’.16 Providence instructs those with political power to act with restraint and nurtures in public people a sympathy for their fellows.17 The ‘rules of prudence’ followed in government ‘are formed upon the known march of the ordinary providence of God’.18 A CONSTITUTION AGAINST PARTIES Revolutionary America, with which Burke was genuinely sympathetic, was much slower to discard the idea of party as faction; the Revolution was so prolific of faction, and liberated colonial legislatures so intoxicated with the prospect of democratic progress that the Founders invented ‘a constitution against parties’.19 Again we have not the scope to trace the interaction between inchoate party and constitution, but we must note that no part of the majority opinion at the constitutional convention favoured democracy. Analyses of the theoretical and philosophical influences upon them are legion, but the backdrop to colonial politics was drenched in Calvinist hues. If democracy was to be recognized as a disease, the Calvinists could reduce political excess to the symptom of a deeper malaise within the body of the people. As empiricists of the first rank, the Founders were convinced of the universal ‘fact’ of human evil. Since another self-evident truth stared them in the face, they did not need Calvinist preachers, who on all sides taught the inevitability of human corruption as a biblically established dogma; yet that preaching endorsed throughout the land the wisdom of the Founders’ approach. Accordingly, the writers of the Constitution adopted the rhetoric and conceptual apparatus of Calvinist teaching to support their own undertaking. Equally self-evident was it that, since people were inherently fallible, power could not be entrusted to their hands. To this universal principle they could

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make no exception, even for such as themselves – the enlightened.20 The short-cut approach to the problem was to recognize power itself as an evil, and to remove it from the scope of politics. Accordingly, they absorbed the language of Bolingbroke and reflected upon Thomas Paine’s suggestion that government grew out of human evil.21 Madison the alchemist wrought subtle changes upon the substance of power: it was necessary to maintain security, yet nobody could be trusted to exercise it. Somehow power had to be objectified, located within institutions and the law, and yet placed out of reach of politicians and legislatures. It was as though Madison had anticipated modern discussions about positive and negative freedom: power also should have these polar characteristics – a negative for imposing security, and a dangerous positive used by unscrupulous politicians for changing the settled order, which should be neutralized at all costs. Along with this kind of reasoning went the assumption that, once the Founders had completed their miracle of construction, there would be little left for governments to do. The constitutional barriers to the exercise of positive power were formidable: separation of functions (and division of powers), checks and balances by which one branch of government could effectively neutralize the others; a rigid constitution deliberately made difficult to change; and the federal system, which, by assigning enumerated competences to each level of government, simultaneously imposed reciprocal disabilities on each level. In true Aristotelian fashion John Adams proudly refined and classified the obstacles to coherent political action, finding no fewer than eight levels.22 Behind the institutional paraphernalia, however, stood the subtlety of Madison’s scheme: the various branches of government, no longer strictly representing classes (as under the ancient conception of the mixed constitution) were nevertheless open to abuse as the instrument of one or another ‘faction’. Setting one branch of government against another was really setting factions at odds with each other, fooling them and frustrating their hopes of governing to their own purposes. The whole system aimed at neutralizing human evil, at least as far as, embodied in ‘faction’, it impinged upon political institutions. Religious example was instructive, and actually available for deployment, in this quest. The Reformation had unleashed proliferating sects – and ample opportunity for proliferated truthful insights or blatant errors – which demonstrated that no sect, or religious faction, should have dominance over the rest; far better that each should be restrained and chastened by all the rest. Evidently the political system should establish no religion, but should establish the freedom of religion and so, incidentally, the moral censorship role of each religion over the others. In this Madison was a soul-mate of Thomas Hobbes.23 If any concept can draw together variant strands of explanation for the founding it is the Puritan idea of vocation. Devotion to work, as a high calling infused with moral purpose, is evident on all sides in the colonial and constitutional literature, and is 173

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remarked as a feature of almost all modern explanations of American origins. Amongst the Founders, Benjamin Franklin was an indefatigable advocate of the goodness of work and the associated virtues of frugality, saving and investment as ‘moral obligations’.24 Conversely, luxury and idleness were execrable corruptions.25 Though not one of the Constitution writers, Jefferson nevertheless typified the sentiment of their class when he wrote continually of the virtue of constant employment, application to detail, and a frugal and temperate style of living.26 This term ‘virtue’ is the core and centre of the ideology underpinning the Constitution, and is advanced by Jefferson in his own quest to restore public morality to the conduct of federal politics after the initial rule of the federalists.27 A large part of American scholarship associates this term with Machiavellian republicanism as transmitted by the English Country ideology. So little of the language of American virtue, however, is consonant with the Machiavellian version properly understood, and those who wish to sever the Machiavellian connection as far as public morality is concerned are probably right to do so. The time-honoured rhetoric of republican virtue was nevertheless appropriated and adapted by the American Founders. Even the early Puritans knew their Machiavelli and were prepared to employ some realism in their dealings with a world infected with evil.28 They embraced a virtue, however, quite at odds with a political manifesto that had rejected the Christian religion because of its ‘weakness’ and because it taught people to make concessions to others.29 The kind of ‘communitybuilding’ virtue on which their original compacts had been based required a compassion and empathy – an investment of the self in the well-being of other people – with which the Machiavellian approach was scarcely compatible. As Sacvan Bercovitch has repeated with vigour, virtue to the first New England colonials meant devotion to calling. It was intrinsically of such appeal to the pilgrim, and was swept along so strongly by educational, cultural and economic tides, that it became the dominant theme of American life.30 What is called the republican tradition of American political thought could well be termed the secular application of dissenting Protestant thought. We met in the last chapter the Calvinist ideal of calling; add now to honest hard labour in whatever role God has assigned: frugality, temperance, investment in a common stock of value, a sense of community, and egalitarianism less tied to economic activity but more bound up with a devout person’s self-denial in favour of others. Some recent studies have seen in the similarity of language not merely a family resemblance but a direct continuity between Puritanism and what has been called secular republicanism.31 People taught to think in Calvinist modes were prepared to accept the severe doctrine of the Constitution. Their religion taught them to deny themselves in worldly affairs; the Constitution focused a similar denial upon the realm of politics; 174

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following the heady excesses of the Revolution, people were now being instructed to abstain from too high expectations of the political system. Yet even the great manifesto of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, had to be modified from its draft version so as to have its concepts recognizable by, and acceptable to, people schooled in the classrooms of Calvinism.32 Viewed in this light the Constitution, with all its avoidance of spiritual conceptions, and, with it, establishment of religious freedom, marks out the barrier between the two kingdoms. Yet it separated the realms too rigidly, and left few openings for the penetration of grace into human affairs. The Founders turned Locke’s precept, that the magistrate has no power to force people to believe, into a two-edged sword, and fought back the benevolence that grace might bring to political action. In this, they went far beyond Calvin, far beyond Locke; for both had a more benign view of what politics might achieve to improve the lot of humans in this life. Tocqueville was more subtle than we imagine, then, when he implied that Luther, rather than Calvin, was the ultimate founder of America.33 For many observers the era of American democracy arrived after the Constitution was well established. Further religious revivals spread the confidence of laypeople, schooling their oratory and offering them leadership training, while all the while fanning their ardour to act upon a social conscience.34 It is also suggested that ‘actual representation’ of the American people, by contrast to the ‘virtual representation’ of the English, dragged all manner and station of people, as political equals, into a constitutional system originally set up as the preserve of the enlightened.35 In the early nineteenth century a thirst for democracy was abroad, perhaps even more urgent than that during the Revolution; and in their desire most saw – and continue to this day to see – the mirage of democracy shimmering on a parched constitutional landscape.36 The way through the impasse was to redefine democracy and to remove it from the political system altogether. Gordon Wood does not go this far, but allows the genuine egalitarianism of people under the Constitution, and the participation of the people in the electoral procedures of the system, to be a substitute for the popular exercise of power.37 Joyce Appleby, on the other hand, applauds the drastic limitation of government power under the Constitution in favour of an expanded scope for democratic energies unleashed in the private sphere: ‘Democratic values were invoked not to enlarge the people’s power in government but rather to justify the abandonment of the authority traditionally exercised over them.’38 This ‘retreat from politics’ left people free to pursue individual goals.39 This is an extraordinary reversal indeed. Democracy is defined out of the political system, and has political implications only in so far as the power of politics is denied to everyone. The enterprise of government had been rendered ‘suspect’ by the activities of the Founders. Far from leaving democracy on the wayside as an incidental 175

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casualty of the assault on power, however, the Founders carefully bypassed democracy; there is some disingenuousness in restoring democracy to a constitutional order that excluded it, by redefining democracy as non-political activity. There are familiar terms a-plenty for private enterprise and individual creativity without making them ‘democratic’, although of course we are familiar with the use of ‘democracy’ for activities or associations which may be democratic by analogy. Appleby needs to explain why a term which was invented to describe a particular form of state organization – and subsequently discussed and analysed in relation to the mixture of government elements – should be removed from the political sphere altogether. More importantly, she needs to explain why people who can be trusted to form private economic and social associations, and to wield economic and social power within them, should not be trusted to form political associations aimed at exercising power for the general benefit. And if humans can be creative as individuals, why should not a government under their control also be creative? It is perhaps putting the case more starkly than she would like, but why should the democrat accept that political or government power is inherently bad, private or economic power inherently good?40 Yet the constitutional barriers to political power were raised so high in America partly because of the influence of Protestant Christianity.41 For generations since Knox and the Huguenots, since Milton and Locke – indeed, since Luther and Zwingli – the Protestant tradition had summoned down coals of fire upon the head of the tyrant. Locke had transformed the call into a closely reasoned – even ‘scientific’ – statement of the conditions under which a people sufficiently provoked might legitimately remove its government. The Constitution of the United States sought to remove the tyrant before he came into existence, and in so doing removed the people also from the exercise of a power legitimately theirs. The Founders mistook both the nature of the Calvinist tradition and the use of scientific reasoning with which some of them sought to replace it. They did not allow for the concern that Christianity had for the wellbeing of people in this life – which was an important aspect of Calvinism. They tried to make of reason a more reliable guide to political morality than either revelation or tradition. They may have convinced some respected modern observers that they were acting upon universal principles of government,42 but they left little room for the possibility of change: Calvinism taught the prevalence of sin, but also the salvation of the elect – a doctrine that was gradually modified to proffer hope of redemption to all; scientific observation inculcated the belief that humans were irretrievably self-centred, but a wider perspective might also have allowed that, given the right social or institutional circumstances, human attitudes might change; in any case, they foreclosed upon the 176

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possibility that, even if individual human nature did not change, society itself might change with different composition or with institutional modification.43 In short, the Founders made no allowance for new discoveries in political ‘science’, or for the development of new forms of government beyond their own contrivance. They may have reflected that, if they could invent something, then others following them might also be inventive. Their creation was no doubt ‘modern’, but their modernism rearranged the musty furniture of ancient concepts and institutions, and barred the doors against the unfamiliar. Reason, they discovered, was not infallible. The rights of man were not self-evident, either to reason or to revelation.44 Their achievement was a rhetorical achievement, to create, as though with Plato, a new polity in the realm of discourse and public persuasion.45 The rights of man were a rhetorical claim, to be emblazoned upon the consciousness of people by the grandeur of the utterance; when pressed through the mould of the Constitution, such rights were isolated from the further ‘right’ – rhetorically claimed by the democrat – to exercise effective political power.46 Amid the almost universal approbation that the Constitution enjoys to this day, there remains a quiet unease that the claims for democracy made on its behalf do not bear close scrutiny. An articulate minority voice in American constitutional and democratic thought continues to regret the obstacles which the original Founding placed in the way of democratic change. We have already noticed the inertia of the Constitution against parties; the constitutional blockages have made the people ‘semisovereign’; have put democracy in ‘deadlock’; have safeguarded the community from some threats of tyranny while rendering the political system incapable of delivering much that is good.47 The point should not be pressed too far, of course. That ‘democracy’ is applied to private associations, and perhaps even individual economic activity by analogy, does not render the term any the less useful. In this sense ‘democratization’ continued apace during the early decades of the nineteenth century. All the vestiges of deference that characterized the Federalist approach to politics vanished, to be replaced by a public assertiveness on the part of individuals. In this transformation evangelical Christianity took a leading part. Under pressure from liberal Christianity as well as the deism of Enlightenment intellectuals, strict Calvinism was constrained to loosen the bonds of predestinarianism and to admit of the possibility of redemption for all.48 Such a new dispensation called forth preachers of all kinds, armed with little education outside ‘the Word’ itself, to proffer the hope of salvation to all who would hear. In preaching and in the new religious journalism they attacked ‘the genteel clergy as hirelings of the rich and [asserted] the right of the common people to read and judge the Bible for themselves without the intervention of educated ministers’.49 Methodists and Baptists were at the forefront of revival movements,50 but the tide 177

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swept over the older independent congregations as well. The newly articulate of all denominations were now ready to let their voices be heard on political and religious questions, while the very structures of the new denominations gave them opportunities to practise democratic procedure.51 THE DIALECTIC OF DEMOCRACY Since dualism permeated American religious and political life, it is ironic that the Constitution, embodying the doctrines of separation of powers, and of checks and balances, should have been allowed to cut across the interplay of dialectical forces. A frame of mind that so readily separated evil from good, temporal from spiritual, secular from sacred, easily embraced dualisms throughout all spheres of activity. The idea of unity through diversity was enhanced by what became known as the ‘adversary method’. American proto-liberals from Jefferson onwards recognized that ‘truth was the creation of many minds’52 brought into debate with each other. Purposeful conversation was best directed by organizing opinions into two groups: ‘Only where there were two sides could there be a reasonable outcome; only where contraries were aired could unity be anticipated.’53 In political terms the search for ‘truth’ through dialectical means only makes sense when effect can be given to the outcome of discovery by seeing that decisions are followed by action. A constitution which set out to neutralize power by all but isolating it from the end-process of democratic decision-making also tended to nullify the benefits of dialectical procedures taken for granted in other areas of American life. The irony of this situation was that a constitution ‘against parties’ also impeded access to the political arena for those opposing the exercise of political power. It kept the parties to the dialectical processes firmly apart, the constitutional ‘black-box’ intervening. While recognizing the centrality of opposition to democracy, American observers were reduced to discovering opposition not in the face-to-face debate of party confrontation, but in the dissipation of power through the drainpipes of the federal system.54 That power in the hands of the evil-doer was a lethal weapon was a lesson no more lost on the English than on the American Founders. Indeed, the American republican tradition had drawn upon British writers themselves forewarned by decades of French, Scottish and English suspicion of tyrants. In Britain the problem of dealing with the rising despot was addressed in a quite different way from that adopted by the Americans. Potential tyrants might well need to be forestalled by the concentrated exercise of power, while the custodes ipsi should be watched by opponents whose attentions were sharply focused upon the centre of power. The most ‘radical’ of the British Protestant dissenters, among them some who deeply influenced those who

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wrote, and those who ratified, the American Constitution, knew the dangers of unfettered power. The message was clear in Thomas Paine’s strange antithesis between government and society announced at the beginning of Common Sense (1776): ‘Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.’55 Given the power to punish us for our vices, government itself must be restrained through the people’s instrument, the documentary constitution. Writing in the same year as Common Sense appeared, Richard Price was equally convinced that power was dangerous and should be contained by constitutional checks. In these arguments the British proponents of reform learnt from Locke that government was a trust to be discharged on behalf of the people;56 power should be contained to hold governments to their obligations; where they exceeded their due responsibilities and betrayed their trust they could legitimately be dismissed. Further instructed by a century of determined Protestant dissent and, in many cases, by a growing experience with democratic procedures in the counsels of Protestant churches, radical political writing took on a new urgency. Government was a trust for the people, and yet most of the people were excluded from its processes; how did the needy of the land see their lot improved by such a remotely held trust? James Burgh, whose Political Disquisitions of 1774 inspired a generation of British and American radicals,57 and was drawn deeply upon in Common Sense, believed that the franchise should be extended to the industrious poor, so that the people could have more direct supervision of what was done on their behalf. Price would not take so great a risk, but his own work made a radical amendment in Locke’s conception of the relation between people and government; for him, ‘government is conceived to be an agency for executing the will of the people’.58 Moreover, far from privileging a particular form of constitution, and then fortifying it against the forces of change, a people should reserve to themselves the power of adopting whatever form of government suited them from time to time.59 Thomas Paine’s suspicion of government led him into passionate advocacy of the written Constitution; if Common Sense did not actually persuade the Founders to adopt a documentary constitution, since similar instruments were a strong part of the colonial experience, it certainly influenced thousands of Americans to believe that national political liberty would be impossible without one. He therefore assumes some responsibility for the American approach to government. Yet it is unlikely that Paine envisaged a constitution which, because of the difficulty of amending it, would become somehow unresponsive to popular pressures. When replying to Burke’s condemnation of the French revolutionaries’ ‘rationalism’, Paine insisted that a people should not be bound by the decisions of the past: Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing 179

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beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow . . . . Every generation is and must be competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living and not the dead that are to be accommodated.60 In some respects the Rights of Man is a defence and a restatement of Richard Price’s arguments, which Burke had attacked so heavily in his Reflections on the Revolution in France; Paine follows Price far beyond the bounds Locke set for dismissing a government: ‘a nation has at all times an inherent, indefeasible right to abolish any form of government it finds inconvenient, and establish such as accords with its interest, disposition, and happiness’.61 We may not know whether Paine would have approved the frequency with which the French were to rewrite their constitutions during the nineteenth century, but he seems to have been sensitive neither to the weight of the imposition the Americans had built for themselves, nor to the openness of the unwritten constitution that Burke had defended. Paine’s later radicalism reached beyond anything the American Founders would have countenanced. As sovereignty resided in all the people, all of them had a right to benefit from the exercise of government power. Where a society riddled with aristocratic distinctions allowed a few by accident of birth to sequester a disproportionate share of the communal wealth, the government had a duty to provide for the necessities of the poor, in health, education and shelter. He had come a long way from a belief that government proceeded from the need for errant people to be punished. Government was now a participant in the progress of humankind, and any faith that one generation could devise a constitution to defend future generations against themselves should be discarded: The best constitution that could now be devised, consistent with the condition of the present moment, may be far short of that excellence which a few years may afford. There is a morning of reason rising upon man, on the subject of government, that has not appeared before . . . . Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man.62 While Paine’s later deism drew him aside from any particular view of providence, Richard Price embraced with passion a faith in human progress as the interaction of human reason with the redemptive power of the Christian God. All the achievements of the Enlightenment, epitomized by the providential discoveries of Isaac Newton, were united with a growing liberality of religious worship and theological discussion; for Price ‘improvement in religious knowledge’, and the removal of prejudice, were

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the prerequisites of scientific and technological advance. Central to his approach, as it had been for his mentor, Locke, was the Calvinist doctrine of the calling, which required of the faithful an energetic response to the intimations of providence.63 As in Augustine, the workings of providence could be inscrutable, often ‘bringing good out of evil, and making use of human passions to accomplish purposes contrary to those at which they aimed’. More directly, however, the most common means which [Providence] employs are the investigations and active exertions of enlightened and honest men. These are aimed directly at the melioration of the world and without them it would soon degenerate . . . . Inactivity and sleep are fatal to improvement. It is only (as the Prophet Daniel speaks) by running to and fro, that is, by diligent enquiry, by free discussion and the collision of different sentiments, that knowledge can be increased, truth struck out, and the dignity of our species promoted. Every one of us ought to co-operate with his neighbours in this great work, and to contribute all he can to instruct and reform his fellow-creatures.64 Joseph Priestley, who perhaps better than anyone else epitomized the link between free religious enquiry and experimentation in ‘natural philosophy’, combined his religious ministry with intense scientific investigation. Prefiguring John Stuart Mill’s ‘principle of individuality’, he insisted upon the right of every enquiring individual to contribute to human knowledge in all fields, which meant that no system, including the political, should remain closed.65 Acknowledging along with his dissenting colleagues the dangers of unfettered government power, he rather differs from them in stating – what was most welcome to American ears – that government should interfere as little as possible in the lives of individual people, at least until it could be proved by successful political experimentation that benefit could accrue from government action.66 Given his trust in progress, which for him might as well have been induced by providence acting upon human intellect as by individual experimentation alone, Priestley could scarcely have approved the American Founders’ wish to safeguard the security of future generations by the durability of their handiwork: All civil societies, and the whole science of civil government, on which they are founded, are yet in their infancy. Like other arts and sciences, this is gradually improving; but it improves more slowly, because opportunities for making experiments are fewer . . . . Taking it for granted, therefore, that our constitution and laws have not escaped the imperfections which we see incident to every thing human; by all means, let the closest attention be given to them, let their excellencies and defects

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be thoroughly laid open, and let improvements of every kind be made; but not such as would prevent all farther improvements . . . . Were the best formed state in the world to be fixed in its present condition, I make no doubt but that, in a course of time, it would be the worst.67 Burgh and Price, Cartwright and Priestley were all driven by the urgency of their enlightened mission, as prescribed by the Protestant calling. For many the deepest frustration was to have the path to public service blocked by Test and Corporation legislation, which reserved this privilege to communicant members of the established English church. The system had retained the incompetent in positions of influence while excluding those energetic ones whose talents had been honed in the courts of Protestant dissent. The dissenters never ceased to execrate the sycophancy of parasites holding offices tainted by sloth and idleness. In this, their religious dissent set them also at odds with the political establishment, and it is little wonder that their writings, directed at a corrupt British system, and praising all those virtues of energy and discovery so esteemed across the Atlantic, should be congenial to the American revolutionaries. In Britain itself, repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts became a chief political goal. Their wish for economical reform of the parliamentary system put them at one with a major adversary, Edmund Burke. Concerned about the ‘dignity of the species’, however, the Protestant dissenters allowed their political dissatisfaction to range beyond their exclusion from public office and the inadequacies of the representative system (although reform to the political structures might open the path to correcting social ills). Urgent social problems pressed upon them on all sides. Their admiration for America notwithstanding, they found the trade in Black slaves the deepest shame of the human race. Amongst their own neighbours, alongside whom they knelt, touching shoulders, in regular worship, they shared in sympathy the constant ache of a gnawing poverty. On all sides they saw the sick, the widowed, the fatherless, for whom the state seemed to care little. The culmination of dissenter reform movements was the end of old political distinctions between Court and country, pointing the way to class politics – at its simplest, the political contest between the rich and the poor. Given the view of democracy adopted by this book, the confrontation of wealth by the poor carries us into the democratic era.68 The eventual result was not only the representation of all adults in parliament by members from any class, but also the possibility for the poor of the land to hope that the immense power of government might be used to improve their social and economic situation.

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THE METHODIST REVIVAL The road to this peak of democratic discovery was built by a most unlikely construction gang – the leaders of the Methodist revival. Of course the evangelical awakening was much wider than the circle of Methodist sects, embracing as it did Congregationalists and Presbyterians among others, and inspiring also the Christian socialists within the Church of England. We may concentrate upon the Methodist movement, however, since in some ways John Wesley set the paradigm for all evangelical leadership, as men and women in other churches looked to his example as a motivation in their own life and work. Moreover, there is a special affinity between Methodism and the democratic story through the overwhelming concentration in Wesley’s ministry upon the plight of the poor and the farreaching consequences this concern had for the emergence of universal political representation. Viewed from a political standpoint, nevertheless, the Methodist movement founded by the brothers John and Charles Wesley was pocked with contradiction. Passionately loyal to the Church of England – and a High Churchman at that – John Wesley did more to undermine its authority than any open dissenter. By disposition centralist and authoritarian, he fashioned a cellular structure for the Methodist society that became the school for democracy in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Throughout life a monarchist and Tory, Wesley launched an assault on the oppressive class system and on parliamentary corruption as stoutly as any of his ‘radical’ contemporaries. He introduced into British religious and political life a blend of individualism and collectivism that laid the slow-setting foundations of parliamentary socialism. And while in the nineteenth century the official Methodist Conference strove to exhibit its loyalism and political conservatism, in far-flung chapels throughout the land its adherents fomented a challenge to the governing and employing establishment. Methodism began with apparently no interest in political action whatever, yet its first emergence was irrevocably bound up with the politics of the day. The famous ‘Halévy thesis’ is usually remembered for the claim that Methodism saved Britain from a ‘French Revolution’ by offering an outlet for pent-up emotion while yet bending resentment inward to the personal search for salvation. Such an argument, which is historically neither supportable nor refutable, has been endlessly debated, amended, rejected, but Halévy’s insight about the origins of Methodism (leaving aside for the moment its effects) is worth recalling.69 The way to revival was paved by Protestant refugees from the continent, especially Huguenots and Moravians. Their worship, characterized by outbursts of emotion and enthusiasm, took quick root amongst working-class people. In the fourth decade of the eighteenth century the Walpole government, harried by the convulsions of a languishing economy, also came under moral pressure from 183

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religious activists for its own manifest relativism and scepticism; its tribulations could easily be linked to apparent signs of divine retribution. Expressions of public resentment were widespread amongst a populace which, in some regions, had been taught by religious enthusiasts to display their emotions. It was by historical accident, according to Halévy, that in 1738 Wesley’s conversion took place amidst a growing crisis of confidence in the economic and political order and that, one year later, two members of the Oxford ‘Holy Club’, Wesley and his early associate George Whitefield, should learn the techniques of enthusiasm from European exiles and emotional Welsh preachers. Increasingly denied pulpits in the church he loved, the itinerant Wesley, an Oxford theologian with no parish of his own, took to the open air. The phenomenon of the immense crowds that flocked to his preaching was, Halévy believed, somewhat less remarkable when set amongst a working class that had already taken to the streets in protest against working and living conditions: ‘The despair of the working class was the raw material to which Methodist doctrine and discipline gave shape.’70 Methodism was born in political and economic crisis and could not escape the implications of its rise.71 Nowadays we are rightly warned against glib assumptions about whether the Methodist revival made people more or less radical and whether or not it averted a revolution.72 Any claim one might make about the national impact of Methodism, and its patterns of growth, should be qualified and localized. Statistical probabilities are scarcely the point, however. As Wearmouth long ago showed, at separate locations across the country Methodist societies supplied the skilled leadership for political reform movements.73 Moreover, we encounter the nostalgic folk memory – resilient and persistent to this day – that British labour owes more to Methodism than to Marxism.74 John Wesley’s own reputation as a Tory and High Churchman, brought up to ‘the highest notions of passive obedience and non-resistance’,75 obscures his importance as a source of democratic inspiration. It is no surprise that Wesley features not at all in the genre of political thought. He himself abjured politics and carefully tended the Lutheran boundaries between the spiritual and temporal worlds. He was no democrat;76 yet his work had profound democratic implications. His seeming political naivety belied an immense learning. A true son of the Enlightenment, he was a voracious reader to his life’s end of all available literature – political as well as scientific and religious.77 Since he tried to infuse church structures with the spirit of the early Christian church, Wesley embraced the ancient Fathers with an earnestness so deep that he was sometimes accused of ‘Romanism’.78 His affinity to Luther was strengthened by a like-minded devotion to Augustine and Plato.79 Despite his Puritan intellectual heritage, Wesley was suspicious of those Calvinists who counted good 184

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works as worthless; he therefore espoused Arminianism, the Anglican reaction to Calvinist solafidianism. Amid all the influences – intellectual, spiritual, emotional – upon him, it was the message of Luther that impinged on Wesley at the time of his ‘conversion’. So directly is the conversion of Charles and John Wesley linked to Luther’s teaching that the Methodist movement was for some nothing less than the renewal in Britain of the Lutheran Reformation.80 The moment came when Charles and John Wesley had been reading Luther’s commentaries on Galatians and Romans at prayer meetings in London in May 1738. Faith came to them as an ‘energy in the heart’ and brought the sudden certainty of personal salvation.81 While the manner of his strange heart-warming was as intense and personal to Wesley as he believed similar experiences had been for Paul, Augustine and Luther, the Lutheran influence spread far beyond personal assurance. For in Methodism emerged a strong, practical expression of Lutheran individualism that was to have farreaching political implications. Intensely personal and individualistic as Wesley’s religion was, it was directed to the well-being of the whole person, and a person was only whole in association with others. For Wesley ‘Christianity is essentially a social religion’.82 It led him to a deep compassion for the conditions under which people lived and brought him, in spite of himself, into confrontation with the political system. That Wesley should have contributed so much to the transformation of Britain into a community seeking democracy proclaims his tenacious adherence to primitive Christianity, which began as a movement, and then a church, mainly of the poor. Surprisingly, given Wesley’s authoritarian demeanour, his faith teaching aimed a libertarian dart at the centre of church and political establishment. The 1747 Conference of Methodists was instructed by Wesley that, while the business of the society should proceed by collective judgment of the membership, each person remained responsible for his or her own judgments and actions. The sentiments of Luther’s Freedom of the Christian were evident: each member should submit to the judgment of the rest as far as conscience allowed. But

Q.6 Can a Christian submit any farther than this to any man or any number of men upon earth? A. It is undeniably plain he cannot: either to Pope, Council, Bishop, or Convocation. And this is that grand principle of every man’s right to private judgment in opposition to implicit faith in man on which Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon, and all the ancient Reformers both at home and abroad proceeded: ‘Every man must think for himself, since every man must be given an account for himself of God.’83

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Elsewhere Wesley wrote that heresy and schism were ‘sins that the Scripture knows nothing of; but were invented merely to deprive mankind of the benefit of private judgments and a liberty of conscience’.84 As the reference to a conference form of decision-making shows, however, individual consciences were schooled, and private judgments sharpened, in fellowship with other individual people seeking a similar path to the truth. From the outset there was a collectivist side to Methodist individuality. The individual found personhood in class meeting, which appeared to be a formalized version of the household prayer meeting.85 From his visit to the Moravian community in Herrnhut, Saxony, Wesley learnt how people might assist one another in Christian pilgrimage by making confession to one another and by studying the ways of holiness together.86 With hindsight the observer might be tempted to think that all the insistence on a community of holiness and a meticulous organization to enhance it had a mass movement as the end in view. John and Charles Wesley, however, were through and through concerned with saving souls – in particular souls lost to human society; their salvation could offer the minister no hope of earthly reward. Charles Wesley had been converted on his sick-bed, but as soon as he could rise he went directly to bring comfort and hope to several miscreants condemned to be hanged. He visited them daily until the appointed time, and then accompanied them to the foot of the gallows.87 Throughout his ministry John Wesley continued to visit prisons and to demand prison reform. There would be no profit to his organization in much of this work.88 British historiography has paid scant attention to Wesley’s systematic approach to improving conditions for prisoners, and to his importance as an agent of reform.89 By 1778 regular prison visitation had become mandatory for all Methodist preachers. Wesley’s public utterances, and the work of his organized prison-visitors, first smoothed the path for John Howard’s report on The State of Prisons in England and Wales.90 Aid to prisoners, the sick and the poor was, to the Methodists, simply a divine imperative. No less than their Calvinist contemporaries, they had a keen awareness of calling which more explicitly demanded service to the poor. In a hymn which has echoed through generations, Charles Wesley wrote: To serve the present age, My calling to fulfil, Oh may it all my powers engage To do my master’s will. If the prophetic command to serve the poor aroused distaste in some of the faithful, Wesley, himself suffering no such afflictions, proclaimed that he loved the poor: ‘in

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many of them I find pure genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly and affectation’.91 Though he sought their company, Wesley was outraged at the degradation he found amongst the poor. After a weekend visit to some of their homes he wrote: I found some in their cells underground, others in their garrets, half-starved both with cold and hunger, added to weakness and pain. But I found not one of them unemployed who was able to crawl about the room. So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, ‘They are poor only because they are idle.’ If you saw these things with your own eyes, could you lay out money in ornaments or superfluities?92 Despite the final address, these were private thoughts committed to his diary. His anger was less contained when he addressed the public on poverty: Why are thousands of people starving, perishing for want, in every part of the nation? The fact I know; I have seen it with my eyes, in every corner of the land . . . . I have known one in London . . . picking up from a dunghill stinking sprats, and carrying home for herself and her children. I have known another gathering the bones which the dogs had left in the streets, and making broth of them, to prolong a wretched life!93 The plight of the poor was Wesley’s lifelong preoccupation.94 Not to give money away was not simply to be uncharitable, but to rob the poor.95 Wesley set out systematically to combat the evils of poverty. Organized into their class-meeting groups, members of the society were taught, in the manner of the church of the Book of Acts, to gather the surplus goods they could muster and to redistribute them to those who had greater need. For those in worst distress he set up a lending-fund which returned no profits. Convinced that the root cause of poverty was unemployment, he set up buildingworks and cottage industries to provide at least some work.96 Wesley’s most lasting impact, however, was to challenge the conscience of a nation, demanding that the wealthy and powerful face their responsibility as economic and political leaders to treat the nation, rich and poor alike, as a whole. His Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (1773), though perhaps crude in its understanding of economics, began with his indignation at the extent and depth of poverty in the land, and signposted the gulf between rich and poor. He sought as a reasoning man to analyse a vicious cycle: people were poor because they had to pay too much for food; because there was no surplus to expend on other goods, manufacturers had no market; since they could not sell, they could not manufacture, and jobs dried up; and people became poorer for want of paid employment. For Wesley this situation was not the work of some malign invisible hand: the rich were entirely to blame; they consumed far too much in their idle luxury; they monopolized and enclosed the land of former 187

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humble farmers, diverting production from simple food; they bought up horses for their own amusement and comfort, which in turn consumed too much grain and drove up the prices of food cereal. Remedies were straightforward and simple: create employment by reducing the price of food so that people will have money to buy simple manufactures; prohibit distilling to reduce the price of wheat and barley; limit the number of horses people might have; promote the breeding of sheep and cattle; allow no one to own a farm bringing income of more than one hundred pounds a year; repress luxury, by legislation if necessary; reduce taxes by discharging the iniquitous National Debt; and abolish useless pensions ‘as fast as those who now enjoy them die’.97 Wesley’s trenchant criticism of pensions for government sinecures, of high taxation, public waste and private extravagance drew him into line with the advocates of economic and parliamentary reform. As spokesperson for the poor, he went beyond other radicals of his day. He was no doubt conscious that the poor would always be with him – their care and amelioration was a never-ending round exemplified in his own patient (though angry) attention to their cause up to his life’s end. Once its enormities had captured his full awareness, the issue which cut through Wesley’s consciousness like a blowtorch was that ‘execrable sum of all villainies’ the traffic in Black slaves.98 At first it had not occurred to him to attack politically a practice formally permitted by the law. During his time in Georgia slavery had been excluded, a policy he heartily approved. From the beginning of the Methodist societies in the other colonies, Black slaves were admitted to class meetings and congregations in an era when there were enormous social pressures, and an organized propaganda, to treat Africans as an inferior race.99 By the 1770s, however, Wesley had become convinced that the slave trade was contrary to God’s law and to nature. He began an unending public campaign denouncing the traffic in sermons and public writings. In some quarters his statements found a sympathetic audience. The Quakers had dissociated themselves from slavery a century beforehand, while some Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot and Rousseau, in promoting the law of nature by glorifying the natural, would have accorded the ‘noble savage’ of contemporary literature equitable treatment under European laws. Yet the torments of Africans far exceeded even the horrors suffered in the English prisons.100 Wesley’s chief statement on slavery came in his pamphlet Thoughts upon Slavery (1774), a masterpiece of polemic and a true document of the Enlightenment; a religious sanction hovers over the work, but it appeals to reasonable persons to reject a practice so evidently discordant with all that is natural in humanity.101 188

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Wesley’s anti-slavery pamphlet was reprinted many times and circulated widely. Finally recognizing that political action was necessary to redress legalized evil, he entered an energetic correspondence with those prepared to engage with the system. He wrote to Thomas Clarkson immediately upon the formation of the Abolition Committee in 1787 and continued to give both private and public encouragement, promising to keep his tract in circulation. The last of his nearly 900 extant letters was written, just four days before his death at the age of 87, to William Wilberforce, assuring him that God had raised him up to oppose ‘that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature’.102 Under Wesley’s guidance, the Methodist Conferences of Britain and America took decisive action against slavery. The British Conference petitioned Parliament, calling, in support of a Quaker proposal in 1783, for the abolition of slavery. The first conference in America, held in 1780, had declared slavery ‘contrary to the laws of God, of man, and of nature’, and four years later it required all members who had not already done so to free their slaves and to abstain from all contact with the slave trade.103 This, according to Siegfried Schulz, was the first institutional establishment of an anti-slavery movement in human history, though the protests of Hellenistic Stoics, and of the early Catholic church, and the pioneering work of the Quakers, were also to be acknowledged. In the action of the conference, however, Schulz found ‘nothing less than a world-transforming praxis of faith, and the ideologically generated dominion of the slaveholder was broken’.104 It took a civil war finally to abolish slavery in America nearly a century later; and in Britain itself, under a system more sensitive to parliamentary opposition, it still took until 1833 to defeat the economic and political might of those associated with slaving. Before the final victory the Methodists, led by their own Missionary Society, whose leading members had had immediate contact with the evils of slavery, had undertaken concerted political action, including mass petitioning of Parliament, requiring anti-slavery pledges from candidates and campaigning for those who did so pledge. In a concerted endeavour ‘the whole of evangelical nonconformity was mobilized against slavery’.105 Wesleyans also threw their energies into the Sunday Schools movement, which combined instruction in basic literacy with guidance in religious and civic morality.106 They are suspect in the eyes of some modern writers for having attempted an experiment in social control. Undoubtedly some supporters were wealthy philanthropists who approached education of the working class with condescension.107 However this may be, the results of education could be liberating as well as confining. As soon as working people grew accustomed to the value of education, the enterprise began to acquire its own ethos and impetus. It was often enough remarked how, once motivated, working people inclined to help each other from disinterested motives. Many of those with some basic education willingly gave 189

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their time to teach without payment in the schools. Once such a charitable system had become well established, the ‘control’ that people of higher status had over the schools was quickly loosened.108 To their literary diet of scripture and prayer-book working people began to add such radical fare as had been circulated, for example, by the London Corresponding Society, like the pamphlets of Tom Paine and Richard Price. There were many causes of a growing social and political awareness, not least a perhaps natural reaction to the evils of the factory system. Members of the Methodist class meetings, and Sunday School teachers, soon turned into catalysts and leaders of movements demanding social equality. Above all, the meetings themselves, modelled upon the ideal of community upheld in the early Christian church, established equality among members and practised the arts of democratic interchange. As early as 1806 a Welsh nobleman wrote to the prime minister in complaint and warning about the threat of Methodists: The evil is of great magnitude inasmuch as their principles have a strong republican democratic bias, and they are certainly undermining the Church Establishment with all the industry possible, preparatory to other objects of an equally dangerous tendency.109 Three decades later the Northern Star described Methodist chapels ‘as citadels from which attacks were mounted on the social and economic enemy’.110 It could only be a matter of time before such tendencies sought an outlet in political action. Wesley’s successors in the leadership of the Conference were more forthright about maintaining a loyalist, even Tory, stance in the new church’s official attitudes. The dominant figure after Wesley, Jabez Bunting, was conservative on political and social questions,111 and many of the paid preachers began to seem to their lay brothers and sisters more like clergy of the established church. Methodism was notoriously fissiparous in the early nineteenth century, as more outspoken lay members, nurtured in the mutually supportive atmosphere of their local class meetings, clashed with the official Conference, which, it will be remembered, they had been told by Wesley himself to disobey should its resolutions clash with their conscientious beliefs. Accordingly, when relations were too strained for survival, the central movement suffered major secessions to the New Connexion (or Kilhamites), the Bible Christians and, most significantly, the Primitive Methodists. All believed they were more faithful to Wesley’s example and to Christ’s teaching than was the official Wesleyan Connexion. Set adrift from the restraining hand of a conservative leadership, these new denominations continued a spiritually and socially liberating work among working-class communities. Even official Wesleyanism, when practised in remote areas such as the rural communities of Dorset, continued on a radical path. And within mainstream Wesleyanism there always remained, in Wesley’s Journal, and in 190

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his printed sermons and pamphlets, a silent call to social action which belied the politics of his own life.112 In the political activities of Methodists during the nineteenth century there were unmistakable reminiscences of the preaching and social activism of Wesley, however he might have recoiled from the methods they employed.113 Yet even Wesley himself would not condemn the riotous action of a mob duly provoked as when, in 1758, a crowd dealt with ‘the forestallers of the market, who had bought up all the corn far and near to starve the poor, and load a Dutch ship which lay at the quay’.114 More serious confrontations were to follow Wesley’s death. When in 1813 seventeen Luddites were hanged at York, six of them were identified as from Methodist families.115 Sometimes the old movement for parliamentary reform, which attracted more and more Methodists during the early decades of the nineteenth century, erupted into violent confrontation between the crowds and the authorities. Since the days of the old London Corresponding Society Methodist groups had been found reading Tom Paine along with their Bibles and religious tracts.116 When study and correspondence turned to open agitation, Methodists again were at the forefront. Their leaders had practised democracy within their own meetings, and now saw in this experience ‘the basis of a democratic society’ at large.117 Throughout the public disturbances of 1817–20 Methodists were prominent, as one official report after another echoed the declaration ‘that the greater part of the people called Methodists are united with the Radicals’.118 As Wearmouth suggests in an argument supported by a plethora of specific examples, ‘While Methodism remained the most successful example of a religious democracy, it was easy and natural for the movement to provide agents for the pioneer work of a political democracy.’119 They were present at the great demonstration for political reform in Manchester in 1819, when on the orders of the local magistrates troops arrested the speakers and fired upon the unarmed multitude, killing five people and wounding some hundreds. Throughout the north of England Methodists fell into conflict with the official connexion when they denounced the Manchester magistrates for their aggression at ‘Peterloo’.120 The links between Chartism and Methodism were demonstrably close. Once again reports were made to the government, and newspapers repeatedly informed the public, that the Chartists had adopted Methodist organizational tactics, from which they inferred that Methodism itself was a politically subversive sect. The association with Methodism was understandable: As a religious democracy, practically the whole of its technique was taken over by the political societies . . . . Its Connexionalism, its largescale finance and enterprise, its division into districts, circuits and societies, its propaganda methods of itinerant

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preaching and Sunday open-air meetings, its society class and weekly penny subscription were all copied at some time or other by the political reformers.121

It is one thing to have techniques copied from one organization to another, but in this case the connection was likely much more organic than that, as both religious body and political movement shared (admittedly overlapping with those of other persuasion) leadership, membership, meeting-places and biblical rhetoric as well as organizational methods. Wearmouth assembles an impressive array of Methodist ministers, preachers and lay-persons who were also leaders in the Chartist movement.122 What can be said for parliamentary reform and the Chartists can be repeated many times over for the trade-union movement and the emergence of labour political representation towards the end of the nineteenth century. While complex, the story is too well known to warrant detailed recounting here. Methodists and other evangelicals were prominent in both the industrial and the political wings of the labour movement. While only the best-known of many early industrial combinations, the ‘Tolpuddle martyrs’ remain the lodestar example: of the six transported to New South Wales, three were local preachers and two others Methodist laymen; the sixth was converted through his contact with the others in the penal colony.123 Halévy felt able to generalize that ‘the majority of the leaders of the great trade-union movement’ belonged to nonconformist sects. Many of them were local preachers and their ‘spiritual ancestors were the founders of Methodism’.124 This kind of participation sprang from the Wesleyan challenge to involvement in the world’s affairs: ‘my calling to fulfil’. Despite Weber’s view that Methodism had nothing new to add to the Puritan idea of calling, it was nevertheless central to all Wesleyan spiritual and social doctrine.125 Yet it pulled in two directions. It demanded of the faithful that they spend all their energies and material resources on the poor and the disadvantaged; but it was also addressed to the poor themselves, who should, forsaking idleness, drunkenness and wantonness, do all they could to destroy poverty for themselves and their families. It was a paradox Wesley himself never quite overcame. He protested against the idleness and insolence of the rich, but his own exhortations turned many of the poor into wealthy people, who might then lapse into ‘a general acquiescence in the conventional ethics’.126 Wesley’s famous Sermon on the Use of Money could be grossly distorted, by selective quotation, such as when Christopher Hill labelled it as support for ‘bourgeois virtues’.127 Wesley certainly matched his Puritan predecessors in the stringent demands of a daily calling: Gain all you can by honest industry. Use all possible diligence in your calling. Lose no time . . . . No putting off from day to day or from hour to hour! Never

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leave anything till to-morrow, which you can do today. And do it as well as possible. Do not sleep or yawn over it: Put your whole strength to the work.128 Frugality is of course recommended, but in a way scarcely conducive to a ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle. Wesley sought to curb luxurious expenditure to mitigate the incursion of the rich upon the well-being of the poor. In this sermon he told his members: ‘Despise delicacy and variety, and be content with what plain nature requires’; avoid ornaments and rich clothing or any conspicuous and vain consumption.129 The culmination, and whole point, of the sermon is the injunction to ‘give all you can’ – and he meant this literally. Any possessions or wealth are held only in stewardship for God; giving them to others is giving them back to God.130 Wesley acutely feared the consequences of faithful Methodists not observing the requirement to give away their goods: ‘wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion’. The industrious and frugal religious person will likely gain riches. ‘But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.’131 This was the last thing Wesley hoped for the methodical practitioners of religion, but the dilemma seemed inescapable. At least the evil of poverty was systematically attacked as poor people were taught selfimprovement in education and ‘life-skills’ as well as in material security. Throughout life, however, he continued to tell Methodists not to become rich: ‘Hoard nothing. Lay up no treasure on earth, but give all you can, that is, all you have.’132 EVANGELICALISM AND POLITICAL REFORM Through the intensiveness of its experience and the enveloping nature of its ethos, the Methodist revival serves as the paradigm case of evangelical social reform. Its influence spread throughout the reforming movements to other churches; its practice fashioned the structures of reform, regardless of specific sect or creed.133 Not all the labour leaders were Methodists, but a wider evangelical faith coiled the mainspring of the movement. Keir Hardie, though not raised a Christian, after his adult conversion was driven by faith as by a consuming passion; after founding the Scottish Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party, he became leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1906. Ramsay Macdonald, whose later career was no unmixed blessing for the labour cause, is nevertheless remembered as its first prime minister; his early motivations came from his Scottish Puritan heritage. Most saintly of all the labour leaders, George Lansbury stayed true throughout his life to a simple faith. It was to Wesley and Whitefield, nevertheless, that Macdonald attributed the growing pride and self-respect of the working person.134 193

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Some of the more radical expressions of Christian commitment to the labour cause sprang from the established church, where more secure livings freed rectors from the kind of dependence upon their increasingly prosperous congregations that nonconformist ministers experienced.135 Although the Church of England scarcely won a toehold among the working-class population, many of its clergy, particularly those in slum areas, devoted their ministry to the service of the poor. It was among Anglican clergy and laypeople that the Christian Socialist movement took root. Its leading exponents, among them Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice, J. M. F. Ludlow and Thomas Hughes, taught that a serious commitment to the gospel meant a spiritual concern for the whole person. The church could not witness to the world if it did not ‘strive for the elimination of social injustice’.136 The evangelical influence on social reform was not confined to labour circles; the reform movement was well in train before labour became any kind of force in politics, and the parliamentary system had, through the agency of both Liberal and Conservative parties, been able to accommodate reforms as far-reaching as those of Wilberforce on kidnapping and slavery, or of Shaftesbury on the earlier factory system. Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, who transformed the care of prisons and the sick respectively, were both evangelical converts. Animal liberation, first embodied in the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824 by Arthur Broome, a humble parson, was surely a product of the evangelical revival; and Wilberforce was there at its founding meeting. The Young Men’s Christian Association, formed in 1844 to foster the spiritual and personal growth of young apprentices in London, was the work, after his conversion in the Congregational church, of George Williams. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded in 1884 by the Reverend Benjamin Waugh, with Lord Shaftesbury in support. A further concrete expression of concern for the welfare of children was the orphanages founded from 1866 by Dr Thomas Barnardo, who, like so many of the reformers, had experienced a radical evangelical conversion. As Bready summarizes: The Awakening which abolished the slave trade, pioneered popular education, humanized the prison system, established a world missionary movement, emancipated England’s ‘industrial slaves’, and raised up valiant leadership both in Trade Unionism and the Parliamentary Labour Movement – that awakening inspired also the modern philanthropic and social-service movement.137 In the age of reform evangelical conversion meant in effect the transmission of instructions from the spiritual realm to the temporal. These orders were carried out on many fronts, all of which influenced the nature of Anglo-American democracy. Sometimes action was pressed upon the organs of state through the political parties; 194

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sometimes it remained in the realm of voluntary philanthropic associations. At both points democracy was enhanced. Democracy must surely be defined as a structure of state authority, but its substructure lies in the disposition of a whole people, as discerning commentators have always held. Long ago G. D. H. Cole pointed out that ‘the real democracy that does exist in Great Britain . . . is to be found for the most part . . . in small groups, formal or informal, in which men and women join together out of decent fellowship’.138 No doubt the roots of this disposition ran deep into the medieval village, but at the dawn of the era of modern democracy it was given new and explicit shape by the evangelical agents of reform. Many would evidently endorse Halévy’s judgment: ‘In the vast work of social organization which is one of the dominant characteristics of nineteenth-century England, it would be difficult to overestimate the part played by the Wesleyan revival.’139 In the end democracy must depend on how open and responsive to the wishes of the people are the structures which dispense the power of the state. The access of ordinary people to effective use of power was very limited before the full organization of labour representation in which the democratically organized Methodist movement played so formative a part. It would be naive in the extreme to equate the interplay of political forces set up between labour and capitalist representation with the dialectic between the spiritual and temporal realms. There remains a sense, however, in which the alternation of party government mirrors the constant interchange of temporal action and spiritual revision which the city of God implies. And the arrival of labour representation, quite apart from opening more effective ways of bringing radical criticism to bear on the conduct of government, at last embraces (with the final enfranchisement of women) all manner and classes of person in that enterprise. This was no less a democratic achievement than the formation of a representative system in the first place. Recording the evangelical hagiography of the reform and labour movements would have little bearing on the present argument if all we were to say was that some philanthropists and some politicians also went to church. Of course a politician could be a churchgoer and a politician just as she or he could be a flautist or a bowlsplayer and a politician. It is in this light that social historians such as E. P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm set out to defuse the various hypotheses about Methodists and radical political movements: radicals were there, and so were Methodists; sometimes the categories overlapped, but not much more was to be said. The mere presence of evangelicals amongst radical activists is scarcely more to the point than is the statistical probability that they existed in sufficient numbers to alter the political orientation of the populace. Evangelicalism is here viewed as the irresistible motivating force of many key radical reformers who adopted Wesley’s Christian Platonism (or Augustinianism or Lutheranism): the unexamined life is not 195

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worth living; a life not committed to the highest ideal beyond this life is simply a life lost; a person engages in political reform movements not because it is nice or useful or diverting to be both a Methodist and an activist, but because there is no alternative. Where an injustice is perceived, it must be addressed. Wesley quite consciously adopted Luther’s creed when he too wrote: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ Nor was there any other that his true followers could do. The humanist might or might not engage in social reform for its own sake; the evangelical will act – yes, because it is the counterpart of the grace that saves one’s own soul – but ultimately because it is God’s command and Christ’s example. Whatever may be said about the influence – which indeed could scarcely be circumscribed by libraries of dissertations on the subject – of evangelical Christianity on the practices and institutions of democracy, it remains a secular polity, open to all citizens in good legal standing, regardless of creed, race or social status. It will therefore be subject to all prevailing political influences, good and evil, radical and conservative, libertarian and authoritarian. One thing remains certain: unless people of good conscience (religious or otherwise) project a social and philosophical dialectic of democracy upon the institutions of party government, pressing upon them a weighty concern for the ideals of democracy – freedom, toleration, equality and justice – those institutions will not remain democratic for long. They have an example in other men of good conscience – Bentham and the Mills, for example. In the evangelical reformers of the last two centuries, however, they will discover a vitality and an urgency scarcely to be encompassed by the political realm on its own. CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING Influential though the Protestant evangelical tradition was in the modification of capitalism and the industrial system, and especially in the rise of labour representation, it clearly was not the only religious factor. Since it relied not at all upon a two-kingdoms doctrine, and indeed laid much social evil at the feet of Protestant secularization, post-Reformation Catholicism is in some respects at odds with the theme of this study in that it attempted to bring the City of God down to earth. Yet it had enormous effect in the establishment of trade-unions in countries like Britain, America and Australia, and influenced direct popular representation on the European continent, particularly through the Christian Democrat political parties. Cardinal Manning of Britain was an associate of the British tradeunion leaders Ben Tillet and Tom Mann, being regarded by them as a kind of patron of the labour movement.140 That the Catholic church wished to insist upon Catholic workers’ unions and Catholic political parties emphasizes their difference from the Protestant approach. 196

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Despite the fluctuations in the struggles between church and various European states, the Catholic hierarchy insisted upon its role in temporal rule, a demand symbolized by the campaigns to restore temporal rule over the papal states in Italy.141 It is also significant that the pivotal figure of modern Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIII, was at the centre of a philosophical movement to revive the pre-eminence of Thomist philosophy, with its emphasis on the unity of religious and social matters.142 During the nineteenth century the church was indeed in contention with the new currents of post-Enlightenment thought, particularly the individualism and materialism seen to be constituents of the new political philosophy, liberalism. This posed a dilemma for progressive elements within the church, who held that Christianity must be associated with freedom. This necessity had exercised the Jansenists, devout followers of Augustine, who had been the counsel of moderation during the Counter-Reformation era.143 In post-revolutionary France Lammenais argued that, while democracy was to be welcomed, it was to be thoroughly Christianized. A passionate advocate of the rights of labour to organize, this priest identified himself as a ‘socialist’, although he rejected communism as ‘forced labour paid at the pleasure of the state’.144 An heroic attempt to reconcile Catholicism with the libertarian forces of postrevolutionary France emerged in Philippe Buchez’s multi-volume history of the French Revolution, where he distinguished between the separate movements of 1789 and 1793. The Girondist period was characterized by individualism taken to the excess of atomism, and by a jejune post-Protestant rationalism. The Jacobin phase, on the other hand, was ‘Catholic’ in that it was organicist, emphasizing the virtue that held an entire community together.145 Robespierre’s failure had been his deism, or his ‘neo-Arianism’, which had diverted him from absolute obedience to the gospel, since ‘honest habits, a devoted and energetic will, are powerless and incapable of good when they are not directed by an absolutely obligatory moral belief ’.146 However much the Catholic hierarchy was wedded to its organicist view of the community as ordered into ranks and stations, many pious Catholics could not come to terms with the degradation and poverty of the working population under the factory system. Frédéric Ozanam, best known as the founder of the charitable organization the St Vincent de Paul Society, advocated the independence of tradeunions and intervention by the state to improve the living and working conditions of the poor.147 In Germany, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, who became bishop of Mainz in 1850, taught how the Catholic church was advantaged over Protestantism in social questions since Protestantism had vested so much in the authority of the state in temporal affairs, leaving the churches in a less activist position. It was the narrow interpretation of property rights that had led to the distortions of communism; Aquinas, on the other hand, had taught that ‘man should never regard the fruits of 197

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his own stewardship of property as his exclusive possession, but rather as the common property of all’.148 During the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 some of the armed workers at the barricades carried religious slogans, and pictures of a Christ identifying with the poor. Seeing the plight of the defeated protesters, ‘massively and mindlessly suppressed’ in Paris, some Catholic aristocrats, like the comte Albert de Mun and René de la Tour de Pin, were moved to set up circles of workers’ clubs. If these were run on paternalistic lines, and ridiculed by the revolutionaries as ‘feudal socialism’, de Mun carried his concern for the poor into politics, where he advocated state intervention, attacking economic liberalism for a liberty that oppresses the workers.149 The confrontation with revolutionary socialism throughout Europe put the church in crisis. Witnessing the manifest failure of capitalism to provide for the lowliest members of the church’s flock, some Catholics, anticipating the liberation theologians of the late twentieth century, even turned to Marx to sharpen their criticism of capitalism. The Catholic hierarchy was desperate to defend the church against the atheistic, anti-clerical and revolutionary aspects of Marxism. The key definition of the church’s position appeared in 1891 in the landmark encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, translated into English by Cardinal Manning as ‘On the Condition of the Working Class’. Leo’s authors, who in the later stages of drafting included a heavily involved pope himself, were instructed largely by Bishop von Ketteler’s Thomist doctrine on property.150 In addition to being confronted by the class divisions in Europe, Leo was also pressed by Cardinal Manning in Britain and Cardinal Gibbons in the United States to give his blessing to labour organizations in those countries.151 Rerum novarum was occasioned by the exploitation of workers in the industrialized world.152 It begins with a denunciation of ‘immense wealth for a small number and deepest poverty for the multitude’.153 Yet it quickly launches into an attack on ‘the false remedy: socialism’, since owning private property is claimed as a natural right, and what is required is the dispersal of property ownership amongst all classes. Under common ownership ‘the dream of equality would become a reality of equal want and deprivation for all’.154 The true remedy is a society schooled in the benefits of concord by the church and imbued with Christian justice and charity. Although socialism is rejected, the state has a duty to intervene in the enhancement of the public good and to protect the conditions of the working class: ‘Because the wage-earners are numbered among the multitude of the poor, the state owes them a particular care and protection.’ This is a state acting under the tutelage of the church and, reciprocally, wielding the sword in protection of true religion.155 Unions are necessary for the advancement of workers’ interests, but often their ‘secret leaders’ are bent on barren schemes; it is best for Christian workers to form their own unions which ‘will make 198

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ample provision for the religious instruction of their members’.156 In the end, however, only Christian charity will improve social conditions. The fortieth anniversary of Rerum novarum was commemorated in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo anno of 1931, addressed to a world ravaged by the Great Depression. The dictators were on the rise in Europe.157 Pius ‘wanted to abandon the liberal economy based on the free market even more thoroughly than his predecessors did’.158 As the chief drafter of this encyclical, Oswald von Nell-Breuning, later commented, the pope had attacked ‘the erroneous belief that the market under competition regulates itself’.159 Socialism was still less the remedy than it had been in 1891; much better a corporatist (though not fascist) association between capital and labour, all under instruction from the church. A similar aversion to both individualism and materialism exercised Pope John XXIII. His Mater et magistra of 1961 advocated state intervention on a grand scale for addressing social problems, redistributing wealth, holding public property for the common good and dispensing aid to poor countries.160 In 1965 he went so far, in Gaudium et spes, as to urge the dispersal of large private estates for redistribution to the landless poor. John’s central encyclical, Pacem in terris, of 1963, gives a detailed account of human rights and duties, but culminates in a strong doctrine of the common good, which again reflects the theme of social improvement, since ‘public authorities must make a special point of seeing that the citizens enjoy social as well as economic progress’ by providing public services.161 A similar vein ran through Pope Paul VI’s Populorum progressio of 1967, which laid heavy responsibility upon the rich nations for poverty in the disadvantaged world. Both Paul and John Paul II continued the familiar criticism of capitalism, John Paul asserting, in Laborem exercens of 1981, the ‘priority of labour over capital’.162 Again, the materialism of revolutionary socialism is condemned by John Paul; his centennial celebration of Rerum novarum, the encyclical Centesimus annus of 1991, attributed the demise of European communism ‘to the spiritual void brought about by atheism’.163 The Thomist synthesis of Catholic social doctrine put the church in conflict with many of the currents of modern democracy, identified here as flowing from the Reformation. Much as the church sought direct involvement in temporal affairs, it constituted a huge internationally linked alternative to the secular power of authoritarian regimes, becoming a major constituent of twentieth-century democracy. The powerful and critical doctrine of liberation theology, while not altogether consonant with the mainstream social teachings of the church, and while in part moved by the Protestant theology of the cross, remains a substantially Catholic movement, and may yet have substantial offerings to make in the coming of democracy to much of the Third World.

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Taking the religious ‘moments’ of modern democracy as the focus, the foregoing account concluded by observing that Anglo-American democracy was structurally complete when it assimilated to itself organs of inherent self-criticism. The party system, while widening in Britain effectively to embrace people of all social and economic standing, symbolized in every other adversary system the tentative, limited nature of power leased to human institutions. Placing opposition at the centre of the structure further emphasized the human fallibility of powers that be, whether notionally from God or not. Although not the total explanation, religious influences contributed to the idea that democracy was concerned with freedom of self-expression (and worship), was suspicious of power exercised ‘in the name of God’ (or of any transcendent force or idea), and maintained an institutionally expressed openness to the needs of the otherwise excluded or marginalized: the poor, the infirm, and oppressed ‘minority’ groups, eventually including all people, regardless of race, class, sex or belief. The loudest champions of modern representative democracy, however, are those who have maintained their privilege under the system – people of wealth, power and social standing. To the extent that civilized religion reinforces an entrenched capitalism, they are prepared to tolerate or even to endorse it. When prophetic religion accuses the privileged in the name of the dispossessed, however, and reminds people of the progressive aspects of democracy in its ‘essence’, the powerful add their strident voice to the prevailing commentary that modern, representative democracy is ‘essentially’ secular and capitalist. This use of ‘secular’ implies an immunity to the infections of the religious and the conscientious; but a genuinely secular view requires the opposite interpretation. Secular, we have repeatedly observed, democracy must be; secular it is fashioned, and secular it is laid open to influences both progressive and conservative as they are sifted through the mill of popular approval or censure. Religion is still one of the chief sources of such influence. 200

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In the Introduction we heard the cheer squads of representative demo cracy exulting in its universal triumph as the political arm of the capitalist economic order. While forgetting the largely religious origins of ‘Western’ democracy, they attribute to the liberating processes of the market, and to the ascendancy of private capital, the final conquest, in 1989, of benighted planned economies. The oppressive nature of Eastern socialist regimes was obvious to all in the West. Perhaps not so obvious was it that the oppressed in Eastern Europe might be less seduced by the glow of Western advertising hoardings than impelled by an indwelling need to assert their human dignity and worth. As was the case in Western societies two hundred years ago, the process of mutual sustenance and collective self-assertion was inspired by a religion that taught people individually to deny themselves for the sake of others. As usual, there are two sides to the story. To survive, large central churches had to work out an uneasy accommodation with the socialist regimes. Sometimes they performed a major state function, as when social duties were assigned to them, or where they were expected to assist the regimes in their relations with the West. To survive with some freedom of action they had to help create the legitimacy of the regimes. At the same time, any attempt to demonstrate independence could be persecuted mercilessly. In particular, authoritarian governments sought to remove the appeal of religion to the young, typically banning religious instruction from schools and severely restricting, if not attempting to eliminate, the churches’ own youth work. Accommodations between church and regime were always a two-edged affair. However much church leadership might both display and encourage docility, the practice of a scriptural religion could not for ever suppress outbreaks of prophetic enthusiasm and independent thought. The existence of the church as a separate organization harboured that possibility. Even without overt defiance on the part of church leaders, the presence of an alternative structure to the state was always the point at which designs on totalitarian control were frustrated. As Leonard Schapiro pointed out for an earlier generation, ‘Mussolini never succeeded in neutralizing or subduing the Church’, which continued to be ‘a formidable guardian of the private conscience’ as well as a massive, complex organization largely independent of state control.1 This situation re-emerged in Poland, where, at the height of Cold War communist oppression, ‘the Catholic Church . . . survived as a separate and independent power, preaching unremittingly from some twelve thousand pulpits throughout the country a doctrine that is at the very least incompatible with the materialist foundations of Communism’.2 At the end of the Second World War the Catholic church in Poland claimed in its membership some 90 percent of the population. An organization of such strength was not going to melt away even under the most persistent efforts of the Communist 201

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regime to erode its foundations and to shake free its hold over the consciences of the people. It is not the strength and size of the church that is our present concern, however. It is rather the determination of those inspired by a scriptural religion who, in varying degrees, found that legitimating an oppressive regime was against the teaching of the Bible. The examples of independence included Cardinal Wyszynski, who, from the high dignity of his chair, was prepared to fight for the rights of ordinary people,3 a visiting expatriate – Pope John Paul II – who arrived in 1983 in time to give heart to the fiercely repressed Solidarity movement, and Fr Jerzy Popieluszko, who was murdered in the cause of freedom.4 The case of East Germany is shot through with ambiguity. There the Protestant church, once complicit in the worst excesses of German nationalism, was perhaps the crucial factor in the fall of the Communist regime. Hitherto in its homeland the doctrine of the ‘two kingdoms’ had worked against any intervention by the church in political affairs. Throughout the nineteenth century the Lutheran church, as the former protégé of territorial princes, had supported ‘the intrinsic value of the structures of German politics’, coming ‘via German pietism and romanticism’ to endorse the most conservative construction possible of a constitutional monarchy.5 As long as the monarchy itself, and the leading members of its ministry, were professedly of the right faith, the operations of politics could apparently be left to themselves. It is too complex for present purposes to go into the connection between Lutheranism and the rise of Hitler. Suffice it to say that outspoken Lutheran opponents of the regime were few, and its extravagant supporters many,6 though more Calvinistic theologians like Barth and Tillich had long been its exiles. Along with Niemöller and Dibelius, a remarkable exception was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose work had a profound influence upon the postwar East German church. Towards the end of the war Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis for his implication in the plot against Hitler.7 A theologian of intellectual power and originality, he had repudiated the idea that the ‘two kingdoms’ doctrine placed the life of the believer beyond this world’s concerns.8 In 1945 the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote prophetically that Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom and his faith ‘will have enabled people to learn to overcome the one disastrous mistake of German Protestantism: that is, the complete separation of faith from political life’.9 Among the most powerful of Bonhoeffer’s ideas that were to influence the East German church under the Communist regime was the ‘church for others’.10 In July 1944 in his prison cell he drafted the outline of a new book. The synopsis of the conclusion ran: The church is the church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the free202

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will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The church must share in the secular problems of human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others. In particular, our own church will have to take the field against the voices of hubris, power-worship, envy, and humbug as the roots of all evil.11 Rarely could a proposal for a book have had so much influence. Throughout the Communist era the East German churches took Bonhoeffer’s advice seriously. They gave of their substance to supplement the welfare measures of the state, funding hospitals, asylums, old people’s homes and childcare. Such activities were always in the commission of the church. Under the Communist regime, however, they raised problems for the ‘church within socialism’. Extending their care to the needy meant supplementing the work of a hostile, atheistic regime and relieving it of many responsibilities. There were affinities between the mission of the church and the socialist aspirations of the regime, but at base their ideologies were incompatible.12 Not only were the spiritual foundations of the church’s work repellent to the materialist assumptions of the government, but the church, quite ineradicable through the strength of its continuing support, was ‘class enemy’, being composed largely of bourgeoisie and farmers.13 Throughout the Cold War era it numbered up to 7 million adherents, or well over one-third of the population.14 For historical reasons the Evangelical (Lutheran) church, custodian of the ‘two kingdoms’ doctrine, was less hostile to the state than was the Catholic hierarchy, and so maintained its ambiguous position of simultaneous cohabitation and alienation – its ‘critical solidarity’ with the socialist community.15 Yet it remained the one large institution with some autonomy. With prayers for peace at the focus, the Evangelical church became the hearth and home for the spokespersons of all the causes against alienation in the modern world: ‘The church became a host institution for a number of single-issue causes, and sponsored numerous groups dedicated to discussions of human rights, ecology, women’s issues, the position of homosexuals and the problem of underdevelopment in Third World countries.’16 Protest against injustice could scarcely long avoid action against the specific injustices of the regime itself. Many inside the church could not abide the ambiguities of a ‘church within socialism’ and its ‘complicity in the lie’. Such sentiment gave birth, from the womb of the church, to dissident groups like Neues Forum, which forced the church ‘to accept its role as custodian of human rights against the brutal absurdities of the State’.17 Certain parishes, like the Gethsemane Church in Berlin and the St Nicholas Church in Leipzig, were special centres of political dissent. They encouraged the wider institutional church to be more outspoken in its opposition. In April 1988 the Berlin– 203

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Brandenburg synod incurred the wrath of the regime by calling for democratization in its political procedures. With a becoming poignancy, in June 1988 a pastor from Wittenberg, Friedrich Schorlemmer, went to a church conference at Halle and presented his ‘twenty theses’ for reform, ‘a courageous demand for democracy’.18 Religious dissent hardened into a massive protest movement throughout 1989, when the fraudulent nature of Communist elections was exposed and set against the Soviet reforms of Gorbachev.19 Emerging from a peace service in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig on 9 October, the congregation took to the streets in a peaceful demonstration which, though confronted by heavily armed troops and officially threatened with the fresh memory of Tienanmen Square, met with congregations from six other churches; when other dissidents joined, the crowd soon swelled to tens of thousands.20 That same month Honecker was overthrown, and in November the streets of Berlin saw the largest demonstration – about half a million people – in Germany’s history. Within a week the borders between East and West were open. At the 1990 elections pastors and church laity, all former dissidents, were conspicuous among the successful candidates. We may speak, then, of a genuine democratic movement in East Germany. Whether it was wholeheartedly committed to a capitalist democracy is far from clear. The case for a ‘spiritually motivated’ movement, resounding to echoes from the Wittenberg Reformation, is strong. As the bishop of Ely observed, with the transmission of the Christian Gospel, even in a flawed form by frail ambassadors, is preserved the potential of a humane alternative to totalitarianism. The love of God provides space to think otherwise about humanity than one is instructed to think, and the Church itself makes room (sometimes literally) for the meeting of persons and for dialogue.21 Although imported into South Africa almost from the outset in its imperialist guise,22 Christianity there also held open the spaces of dissent. Odd scraps of scripture had been invoked to justify racial discrimination and domination by the European over the native African. There was a nice incongruity in that the largest colonial powers were, at home, ‘Western’ democracies. Just as the colonizers could not strip their imperialist baggage of all liberal and democratic ideas, which were bound to be picked up by their porters, so also a selective and oppressive interpretation of the scripture could not remove its liberating message. In the then Rhodesia, the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, founder of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, claimed that whatever the colonial powers might say, the Bible affirms the infinite worth of the individual person: ‘The Bible-liberated African is now reasserting himself not only over tribal but also over colonial authority, since these two are fundamentally the same.’23 204

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Among the people of European extraction the consciousness-raising work of prophetic Christians like Alan Paton the novelist, Edgar Brookes the academic, and Trevor Huddleston the priest are well known. Even better known to the present generation are the Reverend Alan Boesak (unfortunately under suspicion in 1995 for financial irregularities) and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.24 And thus it was from the beginning. The African National Congress was virtually founded by Christian ministers: its first president was the Reverend John Dube, a Congregationalist minister; its second president, S. M. Makgatho, was a Methodist lay preacher; the third, the Reverend Z. K. Mahabane, a Methodist minister who held office 1936–9, also became president of the Interdenominational African Ministers’ Federation.25 The more radical, break-away movement, the Pan-Africanist Congress, was founded in 1958 by a Methodist preacher, Robert Sobukwe. The Black Consciousness Movement, founded by the late Steve Biko in 1968, grew directly out of the University Christian Movement.26 The current president of the Black Consciousness Movement is a Methodist minister, the Reverend Dr Itumeleng Mosala. Chris Hani, murdered in 1993, although secretary of the South African Communist Party, was also a devout practising Catholic. Throughout his imprisonment on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela took weekly communion under the Methodist dispensation. In his dialogue with student Christians, Steve Biko drew upon the Black theology of the American Dr James H. Cone to uncover the spiritual depth of Black Consciousness: Black Theology . . . seeks to relate God and Christ once more to the black man and his daily problems. It wants to describe Christ as a fighting God, not a passive God who allows a lie to rest unchallenged. It grapples with existentialist problems and does not claim to be a theology of absolutes. It seeks to bring God to the black man and to the truth and reality of his situation.27 The constant application of a biblical perspective, despite the continued violence against Black people, met with triumphant success. Mandela was freed from prison, Black organizations were unbanned, and in April 1994 free elections on a universal adult franchise returned a Black majority government with Mandela at the head. Yet there remains an unease, perhaps foreseen by Brookes years ago, that a change in the franchise and leadership will not have produced the thoroughgoing transformation of society and economy necessary to bring in a true equality. The elections were heralded by increasing inter-tribal and inter-racial conflict. This was the legacy of a minority regime that once enforced racial separation and domination with regular, systematic violence.28 Itumeleng Mosala taxes the church leadership with a vision foreshortened to near horizons. They have worked in the shadows of existing power-

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structures, advancing a populism ‘without any theoretical self-consciousness’ through which the ‘revolution has been betrayed’, as everyone who has lived in the neo-colonies of the Third World knows, freedom and justice will elude forever. The majority of Azanians will remain wallowing in the mire of poverty, weakness, and ignorance, while the minority whites, together with the parvenu black comprador class, monopolise the wealth of the country.29 As always, the preachers of a religion of peace are perplexed by the everpresent threat of violent reaction to their social and political engagement. The demand for equality can be nothing less than a call to political action. They might well argue about the practical implications of ‘revolution’.30 Long ago, though confining his weapons to ‘my mind, my tongue and my pen’, Huddleston charged the church with a political trust: ‘It is when the Church has so abdicated her position of political trust that the State, freed from any absolute higher than itself, has assumed a totalitarian shape and a dictatorial attitude.’ With no other force than the Word, the church must not ‘allow democracy to lose all Christian content or . . . refuse to fight for democratic rights in the interests of theology’.31 Although their theology was forced to come to terms with it, incurring violence was an incidental, if constant, hazard to the liberation theologians. They found themselves in a quite perturbing situation. Since the gospel was through and through a message for the whole person, it would be a stunted, if not hypocritical, version that could only offer the poor relief in an afterlife. The overwhelming fact of all life in Latin America was the mass exploitation of the poor. A gospel that announced good news to the poor could get nowhere – in fact was meaningless – if it did not confront the universal problem of poverty. For the Latin Americans, ‘Theology is not the articulation of a set of ideas worked out in isolation from the pressing realities which confront millions.’ On the contrary, it is ‘reflection on and action to change that reality of oppression and injustice which is the daily lot of millions’.32 Largely a Catholic movement, liberation theology emerged in 1971 as a selfconscious branch of theology with the first publication, in Spanish, of Gustavo Gutíerrez’s A Theology of Liberation (English version 1973),33 although there had been intimations of the new approach for a few years beforehand. The early writers drew inspiration from the Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann, whose Theology of Hope had appeared in English in 1967.34 Moltmann’s work forced a ‘paradigm shift’ in Christian interpretation by marking how Christianity interprets suffering. Human pain is ‘God’s own suffering’; through it God is reconciled to the world. For ‘the modern world is identified largely with suffering: economic exploitation, political oppression, cultural alienation through racism and sexism, emptiness in personal life, 206

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physical suffering, and environmental destruction’.35 In this context the mission of the church is to point to God’s open future as he identifies with the suffering of the world.36 A just society is never possible while poverty exists on the scale that it does in Latin America. It is never condoned in the Bible. Yet the Bible has little to say on the economic and structural causes of mass poverty. Adopting Marxist explanations with some enthusiasm obviously risked censure within the church, but those most ready to criticize were least prepared to come to terms with the fact of oppression through poverty. The liberation theologians have found not merely a similarity between biblical concerns and Marxism, but even a certain ‘congruence’. As Roelofs explains, the materialism in Marxism ‘is far more “prophetic” and “spiritual” – and Christianity’s “spiritualism”, especially in its Biblical mode, is . . . far more “materialistic” – than is often thought’.37 Perhaps the most elaborate reconciliation of Marxism to the Bible was undertaken by José Miranda, who noted not merely the familiarity of Marx with biblical terminology conducive to his own ideas, but also the Christian origins of Marx’s conviction ‘that a human being is an end in itself’.38 Espousing what most would continue to believe was a materialistic and therefore atheistic philosophy was obviously theologically risky, but even if one was not convinced by the attempt to turn the atheistic Marx into a crypto-Christian, one could still find in Marx ‘such a stimulus for theology that new methods and profound questions in present-day theology are an inheritance from him’.39 In any case, the theory of surplus value and its concomitant explanation of mass unemployment struck a chord with those confronted every day by mass poverty.40 If the liberation theologians are uniformly opposed to capitalism, they claim the right to propose an alternative to address the social and economic ills of Latin America; for most of them it is a non-communist version of socialism. Juan Luis Segundo saw socialism as ‘a political regime in which the ownership of the means of production is taken away from individuals and handed over to higher institutions whose main concern is the common good’.41 In this early article Segundo demanded of the church that it make a choice about the preferred political order, although he could not be pressed to describe the specific institutions of such a system. Subsequently, Segundo revised his approach to acknowledge the historical failure of existing socialist regimes. Some theologians, however, could recognize in Latin America the need for a socialism that had not yet been tried – an authentic ‘Latin American socialism’ that would introduce a process creative of ‘a new humanity’.42 José Míguez Bonino proposed a more pluralist polity emerging from the ‘“utopian” concern that inspires this liberation project’.43 Some theologians were impatient with the international church to which they belonged. It denied democracy within its own structures and was slow to criticize the 207

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material discomfiture of a dislocated and class-riven society by too readily slipping into the comforts of the spiritual world and the hope of the hereafter.44 Yet the church was a powerful organization, and the spirituality it taught did potentially put it at odds with the rampant materialism of the capitalist order. Liberation theologians saw its potential as ‘“an institution of social criticism” confronting injustice in the world’.45 Jon Sobrino called for the ‘resurrection’ of the church as it finds a new role as ‘the church of the poor’.46 He was joined by Juan Hernández Pico, who called for the ‘conversion’ of the churches, which will give ‘a “sign of intimate union with God” if their proclamation of the word, their community-building, and their worship make credible God’s enduring love for the poor’.47 The characteristic manifestation of the new ‘praxis’ lies in the Ecclesial Base Community Groups, which ‘express a new presence of the church among the poor’. These groups number in their tens of thousands across Latin America, and generally ‘embody the spirit of liberation theology’.48 Organized within the local neighbourhoods of the poor, they offer above all a spiritual home designed at once to impart to the individual person a sense of worth, felt in closeness to God, while at the same time building a community of mutual economic and social support. They empower the poor by making room for full participation, even drawing from them laypersons to preside over sacraments when priests are not available. Their social action has included, in the case of Brazilian groups, ‘resistance to landowners, protests against police brutality and agitation for improved bus service’.49 Social action that was grounded in a belief about the evils of capitalism sooner or later had to confront the problem of violence. Violence bears the seeds of an injustice threatening to replace ‘one situation of oppression with another’.50 Yet systems of oppression are themselves taut with a latent violence in which it could be complicity not to resist.51 Christian pacifism has grown less absolute through centuries of ‘just war’ theory elaborated by the greatest of theologians from Augustine to Aquinas and beyond; more recently, Bonhoeffer had justified the need, under intolerable oppression, for individual acts of violent rebellion. Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, one of the most famous victims of terrorism, analysed the categories of violence. He had the authority of Pope Paul VI behind his recognition of ‘insurrectional violence’ under ‘exceptional circumstances of an evident prolonged tyranny that seriously works against fundamental human rights’.52 Fr Ignacio Ellacuria, also of El Salvador, likened ‘good violence’ to ‘the elements of chastisement, punishment, and the rehabilitation of the order’. Ellacuria, having postulated that Latin American capitalism was a system of institutionalized violence, himself became one of the many priests and religious workers murdered for their cause.53 That a movement so critical of the institutional church should incur suspicion from within Christian circles is scarcely surprising. Quite apart from the taint of Marxism, 208

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liberation theology was accused of reducing all reality to the political, and of subordinating spiritual concerns to the economic.54 The early writings of the liberation theologians addressed the immediate fact of poverty before all else, simply to be true to the gospel. Not merely sensitive to the obvious criticisms, however, they were also aware from the beginning of the importance of the liberation of the whole person – body and soul together. Nevertheless, their later writings suggest a greater responsiveness to the need for spirituality. As they have somewhat withdrawn from an advocacy of cataclysmic revolution, and adopted ‘a more nuanced attitude toward Marxism’,55 so also have they given greater emphasis to the biblical sources of their arguments with all their theological implications.56 Although his account is generally sympathetic, Paul E. Sigmund’s final assessment is that liberation theology has been flawed by its concentration upon capitalism as the cause of economic distress and by its version of the gospel as the expression of God’s preference for the poor. There have been much harsher critics of the anti-capitalist thesis, who not surprisingly drew a hail of Third World fire upon the comfort of their middle-class abode and their safe remoteness from the ravages of a violently enforced poverty. It must be acknowledged that the liberation theologians are indeed in danger of committing the post hoc fallacy with regard to capitalism, and in any case their level of economic analysis scarcely equips them to supply definitive answers to mass poverty (if anyone can). The theological implications of their stand remain: the suffering of the poor is condemned in the Bible; what else is to be done but oppose regimes and orders, by whatever name, that do not set out to remedy the problem? Sigmund makes the point, apparently reasonable in a democratic context, that the poor have no monopoly on moral worth. The Christian position is that all have sinned, and the poor must have their share of the blame for the sum of total sin in the world. Sigmund is perfectly aware of the argument, but is prepared to give perhaps less than sufficient weight to the identification of God’s suffering with the suffering of the poor. The poor are innocent of the endemic evil in poverty-stricken lands – exploitation by the wealthy and powerful; and their own suffering brings them into a close affinity to the cross.57 A corollary of Sigmund’s position is that the gospel is for all people – even for the rich; all people are in need of the gospel, and none is beyond redemption. A parallel situation emerges when the original democracy of the ancient Athenians is drawn into focus. When that democracy was defined by Aristotle as government by the poor, the rich were accommodated quite happily. The system set out not to dispossess them wholesale, but to require of them a greater contribution to the welfare of all; for the most part, however, they had the means to look after themselves, and the democracy saw to it that they did not use their wealth for exploiting others. In the funeral speech, Pericles acknowledged that the only shame in poverty was the lack of will to eradicate 209

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it. So also the gospels are replete with warnings to the rich, who are certainly not beyond redemption once they have begun to bridge the gap between themselves and the poor. Condemnation pursues those who maintain a smug satisfaction in their privilege, however. In Roelofs’ provocative suggestion, if the gospel is good news for the poor, it is also bad news for the rich!58 Liberation theologians are not heedless of the ‘two kingdoms’ doctrine. Míguez Bonino, for example, acknowledges Luther’s belief that the secular world is under God’s sovereign love as is the spiritual, and that the spiritual world acts upon the secular through the vocation of spiritually motivated persons: ‘vocation’s work as divine love coming down to earth, the same love that was in Christ’.59 It is when the two-kingdoms doctrine is distorted to insulate the secular world from the spiritual, and to rationalize a political quiescence in the face of injustice, that the apparent dualism of Luther is rejected. So to confute the doctrine, however, and to deny the process of secularization, is to invite the opposite fallacy, an ever-present danger of ideological tyranny when the implements of coercive power are placed at the disposal of ‘the incalculable inspirations of grace’ – incalculable, unpredictable and often deluded. Even without the dangers of an ideologically inspired centralism the faith of many liberation theologians in a political – generally socialist – solution is touched with the illusory. Liberation from capitalism is not automatically followed by freedom, equality and justice, and the church itself has a role, ‘neglected by political and liberation theology’, of establishing itself ‘as a “society of friends”, the anticipation of a possible socialist community’.60 Political action does not cease with the abolition of capitalism or the advent of liberation. Freedom, equality and justice each remains ‘a contingent possibility’.61 Movement towards some acceptable realization of such ideals will always require the conscientious discharge of ‘vocation’ – the prophetic conveyance of intimations from the spiritual realm into the secular and political. The simple faith of liberation theology has long been characterized as the ‘soft utopian’ option, a line of criticism drawn from Reinhold Niebuhr’s ultimate rejection of a Christian socialism. Reinterpreting Niebuhr’s approach in the context of criticism of liberation theology, Thomas Sanders and Dennis McCann, for example, suggest that the socialist hope for a world without exploitation does not account for the reality of human sin. As McGovern interprets this criticism: ‘Christianity should be prophetic; it should have an ideal standard toward which it works. But it must also have a realistic sense of what is possible.’62 Even if there are no ‘capitalists’ left, there will always be people ready to exploit others and to destroy their freedom. The Christian realism – the recognition of the destructive force of sin in the world – that we have observed in Augustine, Luther and Niebuhr to no degree lessens the need for a spiritual vocation in the created world. If the liberation theologians 210

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uncovered the sin of being rich in the impoverished Third World, it was surely no less complicity in world-wide oppression to be among the rich majority of the developed world.63 Individual responsibility might be difficult to pin down, but the need for conscientious political action is still the urgent mission in capitalist societies. Even in the richest communities poverty remains the paradigm social evil that blights modern democracy. Blatantly tolerated poverty amidst the glittering theatres and galleries of London’s West End both shocks and challenges. In her Jewish dialogue with Christians, Julia Neuberger drew the graphic contrast: If you walk round the back of the Strand Palace Hotel, or round Temple Gardens, by Temple tube station, where the fat-cat lawyers operate by day, at night, in every doorway, in every ventilation outlet, you will find a curled up person sleeping in a cardboard box, ragged perhaps, if older and part of street life, but much more likely not to be, but to be part of that huge group, an estimated 20,000–50,000 people, the figures are unclear, who sleep rough in London every night.64 The people of the book, Jewish and Christian alike, who stand in the tradition of Micah and Isaiah, should scarcely avoid the political and social causes of inequality and injustice. Under the ancient Jewish law the basis of communal taxation was the redistribution of wealth to the poor. Against all the monetarist arguments decrying social welfare taxation, the origins of taxation in the liberal Western tradition lie in God’s ‘bias in favour of the poor’; the obligation to give reciprocally creates in the poor a ‘collateral right to receive’.65 Those words ‘bias to the poor’ are attributed to the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. At one time in his intellectual career this interpretation of the gospel translated into a faith in Christian socialism. Indeed, several of the great theologians of the century at one time or another viewed socialism as the necessary secular expression of the gospel. Paul Tillich believed that a religious socialism might emerge from ‘theonomy’ – ‘a form of culture’ blended from the divine demand within humans and the natural human desire for autonomy – ‘in which all concerns of life are informed by ultimate concern’.66 Karl Barth was an active socialist, though whether that political commitment was incidental to his theology or emerged directly from it remains controversial. Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt’s muchdisputed thesis suggests that Barth turned to theology to find a theoretical grounding for his socialist approach to the world.67 This view ran counter to the widely held estimation, especially after his famous break with liberalism, of Barth as ‘the patriarch of a neo-orthodoxy that severed all ties to culture and society’.68 The misunderstanding, if such it was, was pardonable: viewing God as the ‘Wholly Other’, Barth made as sharp a contrast between transcendence and immanence as Calvin himself; no human construct could 211

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approach the perfection of God’s designs. Barth held, with Augustine, Luther and Calvin, that all human order was inherently flawed. Yet, unlike the anarchists, with whom he was sometimes compared, the ‘radical standard of his critique was derived, not from history, but from the kingdom of God. “It is only in relation to God that the evil of the existing order is really evil.”’69 This view of God as Wholly Other was to incur the criticism of some impressive commentators. Barth might have ‘secured theology in the self-revelation of God but supplemented the God of the Bible with the Greek epiphany of eternal presence’.70 Niebuhr’s response was to discern in Barth’s a theology ‘too transcendent to offer any guidance for the discriminating choices that political responsibility challenges us to’.71 Yet to say that the uncompromising approach Barth takes towards the nature of God is an invitation to political complacency is not only to neglect the political engagement in Barth’s active life, but also to misread the lesson of Calvin’s separation of the spiritual and temporal realms precisely so that they might, without confusion, impinge more directly the one upon the other. Barth was a courageous and outspoken early opponent of Hitler. He was a committed activist, promoting socialism with his prolific pen, lecturing to workers’ educational groups, and organizing trade-unions. One of his most influential early books looked to the time ‘when the now dying embers of Marxist dogma will flare up anew as world truth, when the socialist church will rise from the dead in a world become socialist’.72 In any case the characterization of Barth as the bearer of a (pagan) Greek epiphany rather misrepresents his intellectual inheritance.73 Moltmann accused Barth of not reading the Bible long enough to discover the God of Abraham, Moses and David.74 Yet the tradition in which Barth stands – the tradition of Paul, Augustine, Luther and Calvin – precisely brings the two orders of thinking together. In taxing Barth with political compromise Niebuhr was paving a way for his own critics. He was in turn accused of thinking ‘that a sober pragmatism according to which the best among the children of this world handle their affairs is, after all, the best way in which to act’.75 Niebuhr seemed at length to have absorbed the constitutional disposition of the United States Constitution. Yet he was once a socialist, prepared to deploy the whole panoply of Marxist terminology.76 He had been early influenced by the ‘social gospel’ preaching of Walter Rauschenbusch, who, in the best liberal fashion, held out the example of Jesus’ pastoral work among the Galilean peasantry. There was also something of the Augustinian realist in Rauschenbusch that may well have informed Niebuhr’s strictures against the soft utopians: In asking for faith in the possibility of a new social order, we ask for no Utopian delusion. We know well that there is no perfection for man in this life: there is 212

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only growth toward perfection . . . . We make it a duty to seek what is unattainable. We have the same paradox in the perfectibility of society. We shall never have a perfect social life, but we must seek it with faith.77 Although in context his argument did not proceed from a two-kingdoms perspective, Niebuhr seems in his socialist phase to have embodied the doctrine, since religious certainties ‘absolve us of the responsibility of finding our religious security in the shifting forces of politics’.78 The experience of European totalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s was a tragic antidote for many Christian socialists, although Barth was accused of an unwarranted discrimination between Communist and Nazi versions of totalitarian rule. Niebuhr finally rejected Marxism as an example of the very utopianism it condemned. Continuing Christian Marxists, he said, ‘were blind to the non-utopian character of the Christian faith’.79 Niebuhr taxes Luther with a pessimistic ‘dualism’ which prepared the soil for political absolutism, but this criticism pays too little attention to Luther’s more optimistic view of the created world itself as being under God’s sway. Luther’s ‘dualism’ could have supplied Niebuhr with the solution to the dilemma that had perplexed him for many years;80 the individual is both private and communal: the community is at once the fulfilment and frustration of the individual. It is the fulfilment in so far as love is the law of life and no individual can fulfil himself within himself. He needs the community for his fulfilment. But the community is also the frustration of the individual. This is partly due to the fact that the individual transcends the community and envisages goals and ends which are not immediately relevant to the order of the community.81 Yet Luther’s ‘dualism’ supplies two communities that correspond to the separate needs in the individual person. The spiritual realm gives free rein to the inspirations of grace, encouraging in the individual goals that may transcend the collective possibilities of the community; the political realm, in its democratic form, though charged with curbing excessive individualism, nevertheless subjects the use of coercive implements to the control, and the constant revision, of the community itself. In his other role as political theorist Niebuhr was influential among the modern ‘classical democrats’. John Dewey and A. D. Lindsay, for example, responded to his claim that ‘no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human existence’.82 This view was Augustinian and Lutheran, and explicitly related to the doctrine of original sin; the secularization of politics removed from political consciousness a salutary lesson and ‘robbed bourgeois theory of real wisdom; for [original sin] emphasizes a fact which every page of human history attests’.83 Despite the charge that Niebuhr’s political realism in the end 213

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amounts to quietism, he does suggest that the defective nature of governments requires revision even of the ‘ultimate principles’ upon which a society is founded. He completes his democratic theory with the hope ‘that the divine power which bears history can complete what even the highest human striving must leave incomplete, and can purify the corruptions which appear in even the purest human aspirations’.84 A channel is hereby opened for the realm of the spirit to act upon the routines of the democratic polity. Secular politics scarcely remembers the continuing influence of Augustinian doctrine on the endless possibilities of the divine acting upon the human. It lies ultimately behind the challenge to American democracy of its greatest present theorists, such as Sheldon Wolin and James MacGregor Burns, who seek a democracy that acknowledges the past injustices of race, sex and class discrimination on the part of the community, and one that assumes a communal will – and the necessary public power and responsibility – to address present injustices.85 Preachers and theologians continue to bring their truths to the political world.86 A great American preacher of the last century, Lyman Beecher, understood well the position adopted by this book when he isolated the causes of social and economic injustice, such as land monopolization, and called for a stream of revolutions fed by ‘freshets of divine impulse’.87 Democracy in one country cannot be genuine unless it recognizes exploitation across national borders, and the contribution of one’s own government to global conditions of inequality, poverty and starvation. Marie Augusta Neal advocates conserving disposable resources and curbing the greed of those who have the means to consume more than they need. To commence the social action required to amend the injustice – ‘action more calculated to benefit others than oneself’ – demands a reappraisal of our collective attitudes and values. In this, Christianity retains an exemplary role: Christianity is founded on an ethic of sharing unto death . . . . While it affirms the quality of neighborliness and the value of sharing resources within the community, it extends the notion of community beyond the tribal limits to the whole human race.88 Brueggemann exhorts the preacher to challenge the present generation, to be ‘as dangerous as she possibly can be about reparations in the family, in Central America, in all the enslavements and exploitations we practice’.89 This apparently incidental, but nevertheless central, assertion of the preacher as ‘she’, linked here to the denunciation of injustice in Central America, draws attention to the ties between theology not only as emancipation of the poor, but also as liberation for human beings discriminated against through sex or race. There are aspects to being woman which, historically and sociologically, imply exploitation: ‘Women live an experi ence of oppression by the very fact of being women.’90 Sexism 214

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is the ‘fundamental oppression’, and all other forms of class or race exploitation reduplicate its weight upon the innocent victim. All that has been said earlier about the oppression of the poor in Latin America must acquire more gravity in relation to the lot of Third World women. If the subjugation of women is a fundamental category, it must be addressed in all situations, relative though the levels of misery or frustration may be from one cultural context to another. Feminist theologians expose the abiding flaw of a church that, almost from the beginning, has subordinated women to the control of men. Elaine Pagels discloses a manufactured ideology to superimpose an unscriptural patriarchy upon the liberating message of Jesus and the ‘authentic’ Paul.91 Other traditions which charged women with a duty equal to that of men in preaching, teaching, baptizing, and conducting sacraments were officially suppressed from the earliest times.92 If the church is the conservator and transmitter of the gospel of freedom and love, throughout its history it has been false to its own message: to deny the equal mission of women to preach and minister, subjecting them to an unwarranted obedience through the random incidence of female birth, is a negation of the gospel. Preachers of the Word seldom notice the illogicality of church structures. For this reason many women in the church, with no investment in its traditional roles and procedures, now explore a new, radical Christianity set free from the restrictions of the past. They seek a ‘new community in which those with power listen to those without power’. Such a movement has implications for the political and economic order: ‘Women want a community which is not obsessed with profit and economic growth but concerned with the basic needs of all human beings.’ They are well placed to claim this new community, for women have ‘first-hand experience of what it is like to be treated like children, to be in tutelage, without rights, to live life at second-hand (the husband’s or the man’s), to give life but to be allowed to fashion it only within a limited domestic circle and not in society as a whole’.93 Relating feminist criticism to radical politics, theology can take the extent to which women are liberated as ‘the index of the liberation of the society in general’.94 The church conveys a gospel of love and justice to the wider community; it is now adjured to address its most pervasive derangement – the universal test case of injustice – the subordination of women to men. Just as men have so often made life intolerable for women throughout the earth, so also the modes of their domination strew the refuse that everywhere confronts both theology and democratic politics. As long as prophetic religion heaves with a yearning for the welfare of humankind, it recognizes the urgent and imperative stand that must be taken against the destruction of the environment as habitat for a teeming and overpopulating humankind. Yet preserving the creation, which in Genesis God saw was good, is an end in itself; its fragile harmony must be the concern of a theology responding to God’s goodness manifest in the physical realm. Again Moltmann is to 215

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the fore; environmental destruction is characterized in the language of rape. Disfigurement and humiliation of women are paralleled in the scars that humans leave on the landscape. Yet if a covenant religion vests human rights in persons, the presence of God in creation vests rights in nature which are also to be honoured.95 Matthew Fox dramatized this theological concern with the image of a ‘cosmic Christ’ laid in the lap of a ‘mother earth’ dying through an unending series of irremediable ecological disasters. Through the crucifixion Jesus takes on the persona of the dying mother earth. It is a metaphor by which Jesus ‘symbolizes earth because . . . he is made of earth’. In the tradition of Catholic mysticism, Fox suggests how this image doubly divinizes the earth, already a divine creation, in that it ‘provided the body by which the Son of God was made human flesh’.96 Creation and incarnation are brought together to sanctify a natural environment which it has now become sacrilege to violate. If any doubt were to remain whether prophetic religion is engaged with the politics of the environment, the connection can be made quite explicit. Thomas Berry, for example, attacks economics as an intellectual mode not equipped to deal with global ecology.97 All its premises assume the resources of the world to be inexhaustible; yet the insatiable drive for profits pillages the harvests of soil, water, vegetation and air while invading their purity with waste products. If the diversity in nature represents manifestations of divine goodness, to violate the ‘sacred character’ of the natural world must be blasphemy.98 Apparently novel concerns of prophetic religion are no more than the application of the gospel to a world in which new forms of liberation are necessary. The old political associations no longer help. A ‘Christian socialism’ was never adequate to recognize the fundamental oppression of women or racial groups within oppressed classes, and in any case stemmed from a church which, partially blinded by the beam of sexual discrimination in its own eye, failed to see the full implication of the gospel. Recognition of past shortcomings frees the spiritual realm for new exhortations upon the political. A liberated church calls its members to the political vocation of action against prejudice and discrimination in all its forms, and against the wilful degradation of the physical environment. Yet the poor and the abandoned – especially the poor woman and the homeless child (‘the widow and the fatherless’) – are still the central concern of a gospel true to itself, just as they are to a democracy true to the name. Since theology now addresses itself more than ever before to universal causes, the capacity of individual democracies to respond to its global demands is obviously limited. The futility of much political action in small states against the power of transnational business corporations, for example, is widely debated. Democratic authors like Held urge the internationaliz ation of democracy, and of course there are 216

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opportunities for international democratic behaviour in treaty organizations, intergovernmental agreements and trade arrangements, in pan-federalist movements like the European Union and in the United Nations Organization. If transnational corporations are necessarily the enemies of democratic states (which may be far from always the case), the democracies have their potential allies in transnational organizations of world religions, of Christian denominations and the World Council of Churches. Liberation theology, if not a mainstream activity of the world-wide Catholic church, is strengthened in both doctrine and ‘praxis’ by its transnational catholicity. Inhering so much in the self-determination of peoples, democracy remains primarily an affair of individual states: international democracy mainly reflects an intersubjective agreement among states to act democratically. If self-determination is to be respected among ‘dependent’ or ‘emerging’ nations, it is no less to be accorded to the communities of the developed world. Unfortunately, the self-determination of the rich nations is unlikely by spontaneous altruism to produce the kind of economic and social activity which will extend justice either to the poor among them or to the destitute and oppressed in debtor nations. It is at this point that the ‘spiritual’ work of the religious-minded and of persons of ethical conscience is most urgently needed. They are collectively the conscience of their nations. They represent the City of God to a secular age which needs it more than ever before. In his magisterial Theology and Social Theory John Milbank demonstrates how Augustine achieves ‘a kind of immanent critique, or deconstruction’ of political society. Though focused on the classical polity, Augustine’s criticism has universal application to every imperial state. ‘He tries to show that, by its own standards, its virtue is not virtue, its community not community, its justice not justice.’99 The exemplary contrast is between ‘ontological peace’ and the violence by which all earthly regimes are tainted. In an earlier chapter I argued that Augustine’s peace may be extended to embody the prototypes of the political virtues modern democracies embrace but never realize fully in their own institutions. The prophetic character of the City of God, fashioned in the mind of a creator who has unfathomed stores of riches to reveal to his people, implies that any improvement in the condition of humans will be followed by newer, expanded conceptions of their welfare. It is of the nature of democracy to participate, on the secular plane, in this hope. The City of God is transfigured community. It may not be called ‘democracy’, a term pertinent only to political organization in the temporal realm. That it grows from a doctrine of faith in and obedience to God makes it understandable that some should associate the heavenly city with authoritarian rule. Throughout his vast output, both as philosopher/theologian and working bishop, Augustine had endless occasions on which to exhort and command. Some of his particular doctrines were 217

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repellent. Feminist theologians examining the contributions of the church ‘Fathers’ find in Augustine an uncomely assertion of patriarchal authority.100 One reading of the City of God could justify an imperial church and a sacralized empire rolled into one, although this interpretation Augustine himself denied. A recent postmodernist study by William Connolly, while acknowledging Augustine as the foil for Nietzsche’s ressentiment, finds in the ‘Augustinian Imperative’ the substructure of ‘an intrinsic moral order’.101 Yet the decision to obey God’s Word is consequent upon the free choice to love the God who is love. The voluntary constituent of the City of God, which gets scant attention in Connolly’s work, is love, and its spiritual fruit is peace. As a transcendent community, it deconstructs human imperatives and depreciates all forms of earthly dominion. If its society cannot appropriately be called ‘democratic’, its example sets the definitional prototype of all actual democracies. It places all institutions under perpetual revision, admonishing them with an ‘order’ of society which can never fully be realized in human communities but which challenges them to ever better approximations. As Milbank again explains, in the City of God the life of the saints is inherently social, because it is the opposite of a life of sin, which is the life of self-love. Through his new definition of a populus and his denial that the political, coercive community truly realizes a res publica, Augustine allows us to see the many forms of ‘the social’ beyond the political, and also implies that the political is necessarily imperfectly social, because it contains elements of compulsion and of mere compromise. True society implies absolute consensus, agreement in desire, and entire harmony amongst its members, and this is exactly (as Augustine reiterates again and again) what the Church provides, and that in which salvation, the restoration of being, consists.102 Democracy itself still cannot escape postmodernist criticism. It is, after all, a political order, and one contingent upon an underlying, if basic and low-level, moral order. Yet the conception of democracy that emerges under the scrutiny of the prophetic tradition is a form of government in constant reformation, a conception of human rule that perpetually deconstructs (and refashions) itself. Just as the Christian congregation helped shape the institutions of democracy, so also prophetic religion put them under surveillance. Behind the institutions themselves, and perhaps within them, stand the ideals of democracy: liberty, equality, community, justice. The democratic political life, a dynamic process, emerges through the constant interplay between ideal and institution, and through procedure under idealist scrutiny. We have before us the essentials of a democratic polity as it can best be understood to the present time. Yet our whole story has been a narrative 218

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of injustices, inequalities, alienations and exploitations yet to be remedied. We have conceived the outlines of a democratic polity, and yet nowhere could a truly democratic society be said to exist. For democracy, ever subject to radical criticism, has much more work to do. By its nature, however, as a form of government held beneath the norms of its community, the democratic polity will not spontaneously produce the fruits of the ideals to which it bears witness. It follows that the representatives of the spiritual realm and the realm of ethical conscience should constitute the collective conscience of the democracy. Their vocation is to work within society to give practical expression to democratic ideals on two fronts: to persuade members of the wider community to take up responsibility, as ‘sovereign’ voters, for a public policy that will produce just – even righteous – outcomes; and to engage the political system with their own direct action. Their aim is an equality that not merely reacts to overt signs of poverty but seeks it out from the hidden corners; liberty that confronts the coercive domination of some human beings over others, by whatever illegitimate rationalization; community that combats all forms of alienation of one person from another; and justice, not conceived of as mere conformity to a settled order, but as a dynamic elevation of all to a higher plane of fellowship and personhood. The poor we will always have with us; and the subordinated, the exploited, the dispossessed, the alienated. This is not a counsel of undue pessimism. It is to face the reality of human nature, with its boundless capacity to love and to cooperate, and its equal capacity to destroy and to dominate. The spiritual realm is there to exhort to altruism – indeed to perfection. The temporal order is there to encourage a relative goodness and to curb the excess of destructive urges. The spiritual realm yields comfort and support to the spirits of the weak and the abandoned; but its representatives will have failed their calling dismally if they do not act upon the democratic processes, which the spiritual realm has indeed so vitally helped fashion, to bring liberation and justice to the whole person – spiritual and physical being. For democracy, as Augustine might have it, is the gift of the spiritual realm to the temporal, set free to exercise its autonomous reign in the secular world. But it bears within it the seeds of its spiritual origins: whether they come to fruit in the impulse to human freedom, equality, fellowship, justice and, ultimately, goodness, depends on how well the guest workers from the spiritual realm tend their crop.

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INTRODUCTION 1 See E. A. Judge, ‘Athens and Jerusalem’, in Robert Sinclair (ed.), Past, Present and Future, Sydney, Australian Society for Classical Studies, 1990, pp. 90–8; Leo Strauss, Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections, New York, The City College, 1967; James V. Schall, ‘Jerusalem, Athens, Rome’, in Reason, Revelation and the Foundation of Political Philosophy, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1987. 2 For a survey and review, see the collection of articles edited by Bernard Grofman: ‘The 2500th Anniversary of Democracy: Lessons of Athenian Democracy’, PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 26, no. 3 (1993), pp. 471–90. 3 Irving M. Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism: Biblical Criticism from Max Weber to the Present, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984, p. 102; cf. Frank E. Mamel, ‘Christendom’s Rediscovery of Judaism’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 40 (1991), pp. 15–32, at pp. 23–4. 4 Norman K. Gottwald, ‘Social Class as an Analytic and Hermeneutical Category in Biblical Studies’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 112, no. 1 (1993), pp. 3–22. 5 Arlene W. Saxonhouse, ‘Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists’, PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 26, no. 3 (1993), pp. 486–90. 6 As discussed in Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited, 2 vols, Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, 1987, vol. 2, pp. 284–6; cf. Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1964, pp. 56–73. 7 Quentin Skinner, ‘The State’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and R. L. Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 90–131; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, vol. 1, p. 65; vol. 2, p. 17; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 185–94; Steven B. Smith, ‘Leo Strauss: Between Athens and Jerusalem’, Review of Politics, vol. 53, no. 1 (1991), pp. 75–99. 8 Aaron Wildavsky, The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader, University Park, University of Alabama Press, 1984, pp. 27–8. 9 For a modern example of Augustine’s reforming influence, see Edgar H. Brookes and Amry Vandenbosch, The City of God and the City of Man in Africa, Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1964; cf. Graham Walker, Moral Foundations of Constitutional Thought, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990. 10 George Kateb, ‘The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy’, Ethics, vol. 91 (1981), pp. 357–74.

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11 Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th edn, London, Macmillan, 1923, pp. 177–87. 12 M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 139. 13 John Dunn, in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508BC to AD1993, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 264–5. 14 Richard McKeon (ed.), Democracy in a World of Tensions, Paris, UNESCO, 1951, as quoted in Russel L. Hanson, ‘Democracy’, in Ball, Farr and Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, pp. 68–89, at p. 68. 15 Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory, New York, Praeger, 1965, p. 54. Sartori was somewhat sceptical about the UNESCO report referred to in the previous note: see Democratic Theory, pp. 8–9. 16 Robert C. Johansen, ‘Military Policies and the State System as Impediments to Democracy’, in David Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992 (Political Studies, vol. 40, special issue) pp. 99–115, at p. 99. Johansen is also sceptical about the democratic nature of cultures dominated by military policies; cf. Geoffrey Brennan and Loren E. Lomasky, ‘Introduction’ in Geoffrey Brennan and Loren E. Lomasky (eds), Politics and Process: New Essays in Democratic Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; see also Kenneth Minogue (discussing Francis Fukuyama), ‘Ideology after the Collapse of Communism’, Political Studies, vol. 51 (1993), pp. 4–20, at pp. 4–5. We have not the scope here to examine the libraries of argument about the meaning of democracy, but could note one resigned comment: ‘Discussions about democracy . . . are intellectually worthless because we do not know what we are talking about’ (Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du pouvoir, Geneva, 1947, p. 338, as quoted in translation in Sartori, Democratic Theory, p. 9). Cf. the published translation, Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (trans. J. F. Huntington), Boston, Mass., Beacon Press, 1962, p. 276: ‘All discussions of democracy, all arguments whether for it or against it, are stricken with intellectual futility, because the thing itself is indefinite.’ Cf. W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 56 (1955–6), pp. 183–7; cf. his Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, New York, Schocken Books, 1964. For some more recent discussions, see Paul Hirst, Representative Democracy and its Limits, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990; Paul Hirst, The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G. D. H. Cole, J. N. Figgis and H. J. Laski, London, Routledge, 1989; Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985; Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985; David Held, ‘Democracy: From City-States to a Cosmopolitan Order?’, in David Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy, pp. 10–39; Barry Hindess, ‘Democratic Theory’, Political Theory Newsletter (Canberra), vol. 5 (1993), pp. 126–39. 17 Pastoral letter, quoted in Arthur F. McGovern, Liberation Theology and its Critics: Towards an Assessment, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1989, pp. 138–9. 18 On the ‘irresponsibility’ of romantic democrats, see Hirst, Representative Democracy, pp. 135–7; cf. Hindess, ‘Democratic Theory’. 19 ‘Conclusion’, in Dunn (ed.), Unfinished Journey, pp. 249–50. 20 Ibid., p. 266. 21 Cf. Anthony Arblaster, Democracy, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1987, pp. 26– 37.

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22 See James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 197–8. 23 John Milton, Areopagitica (1644), New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951, p. 44. 24 Anon, ‘Liberty of Conscience’, in A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, London, Dent, 1974, p. 247. 25 The foundational ‘revisionist’ democratic theorist Joseph A. Schumpeter laid the demand for equality at the feet of Christianity; see his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 4th edn, London, Allen and Unwin, 1954, pp. 265–6. Cf. David Sheppard, Bias to the Poor, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1983; Conrad Boerma, Rich Man, Poor Man – and the Bible (trans. John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1979; Walter E. Pilgrim, Good News to the Poor, Minneapolis, Minn., Augsburg Publishing, 1981; Donal Dorr, Option for the Poor, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1992; Marie Augusta Neal, The Just Demands of the Poor, New York, Paulist Press, 1987. 26 John Dewey, ‘Democracy and Educational Administration’, as quoted in Henry S. Kariel (ed.), Frontiers of Democratic Theory, New York, Random House, 1970, p. 13; cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York, Scribner’s, 1960, p. 133: ‘no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human existence’. 27 Calvin, quoted in Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics, New York, Atheneum, 1968, p. 60; on Calvin’s ‘hostility to hierarchy, to human rule according to the purposes of human reason’, see Ralph C. Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 166. 28 Fred D’Agostino, ‘Ethical Pluralism and the Role of Opposition in Democratic Politics’, The Monist, vol. 73, no. 3 (1990), pp. 437–63. 29 Cf. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, New York, Anchor Books, 1994, pp. 37–8. 30 Shirley Robin Letwin, ‘John Locke: Liberalism and Natural Law’, in Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Traditions of Liberalism, Sydney, Centre for Independent Studies, 1988, pp. 3–29, at p. 15; cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 234–47. 31 Wildavsky, The Nursing Father, p. 203, on ‘the impenetrable divide between Man and God. No one, not even Moses, can cross that divide’; Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations, p. 61: ‘transcendence has become so utterly mysterious or remote from human powers as to nullify its political relevance as transcendent; that is, it is no longer relevant to human choice.’ Cf. Aram Vartanian, ‘Democracy, Religion and the Enlightenment’, The Humanist, vol. 51 (1991), pp. 9–14. 32 John Stuart Mill, Representative Government (1861), in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government, London, Dent, 1910, p. 183. 33 Martin Luther, as quoted in Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought (trans. R. A. Wilson), Glasgow, Collins, 1972, p. 174. 34 Niebuhr, Children of Darkness, Children of Light, p. 82. 35 See Zdravko Planinc, Plato’s Political Philosophy: Prudence in the ‘Republic’ and the ‘Laws’, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1991, pp. 75–85. 36 Perry Miller (ed.), Roger Williams: His Contributions to the American Tradition, New York, Atheneum, 1974, p. 35.

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37 John Cotton (in 1650), quoted in Alden T. Vaughan (ed.), The Puritan Tradition in America 1620–1730, New York, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 204. 38 S. A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’: The Power of Mind over Matter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 39 Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics, p. 192. 40 Ibid., p. 20. 41 Cf. J. Davis McCaughy, ‘Living in Two Worlds’, Pacifica, vol. 7 (1994), pp. 1–12. 42 Cf. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion, Glasgow, Collins, 1982, p. 226: ‘The entire intellectual history of Christianity . . . teems with recurring attempts to restore the pristine calling of Christianity from its adulteration, or simply its domination, by secular aims.’ 43 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christianity in a Secularized World (trans. John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1988. 44 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) (trans. Talcott Parsons), London, Unwin Paperbacks, 1985, pp. 182–3. 45 A. G. Dickens and John Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, p. 268. 46 M. J. Kitch, Capitalism and the Reformation, London, Longman, 1967, pp. xviii–xix. 47 Dickens and Tonkin, Reformation in Historical Thought, pp. 272–3. 48 R. H. Tawney, ‘Christianity and the Social Revolution’, in his The Attack and Other Papers (1953), new edn, Nottingham, Spokesman, 1981, p. 158; on the association between Tawney, Beveridge and the originator of the concept ‘welfare state’, Archbishop William Temple, see David Nicholls, Deity and Domination: Images of God and the State in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, Routledge, 1994, pp. 44–52. 49 Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1938, p. 273. 50 Cf. Kolakowski, Religion, p. 226: ‘the secular city which absorbs religious values within its goals (as in the young Hegel), makes them “immanent”, and consequently deprives them of properly religious meaning’. 51 Tawney, The Attack, p. 165; cf. Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and his Times: Socialism as Fellowship, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 246–9. 52 Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 280. 53 Cf. Ronald H. Preston, Religion and the Persistence of Capitalism, London, SCM Press, 1979, pp. 92–7. 54 John Dunn, The Politics of Socialism: An Essay in Political Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984; cf. Alex Callinicos, ‘Premature Obituaries’, Political Studies, vol. 51 (1993), pp. 56–65. 55 See J. D. G. Dunn, ‘The Justice of God: A Renewed Perspective on Justification by Faith’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. vol. 43, part 1 (1992), pp. 1–22. 56 Carter, The Culture of Disbelief, pp. 86–90. 57 Claes G. Ryn, Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1978, p. 85. 58 Richard Kraut, ‘The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic’, in Richard Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 311–37, at pp. 329–30. 59 Strauss, Jerusalem and Athens, pp. 27–8.

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1 ANCIENT ISRAEL: THE PROPHETIC CHALLENGE 1 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1978, pp. 11–27. 2 Aaron Wildavsky, The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader, University Park, University of Alabama Press, 1984, p. 203. 3 Martin Buber, Kingship of God (trans. Richard Scheimann), 3rd edn, London, Allen and Unwin, 1967, p. 93. 4 George E. Mendenhall, ‘Ancient Israel’s Hyphenated History’, in David Noel Freedman and David Frank Graf (eds), Palestine in Transition: The Emergence of Ancient Israel, Sheffield, Almond Press, 1983, p. 101; and, much earlier, Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (trans. H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale), Glencoe, Ill, The Free Press, 1952, p. 4. 5 Irving M. Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism: Biblical Criticism from Max Weber to the Present, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984, p. 78; cf. Wildavsky, Nursing Father, p. 93. 6 Elias Auerbach, Moses (trans. I. O. Lehman and R. A. Barclay), Detroit, Mich., Wayne State University Press, 1975, pp. 64–5; Siegfried Herrmann, Israel in Egypt (trans. Margaret Kohl), London, SCM Press, 1973, p. 57; Martin Buber, On the Bible (ed. Nahum Glatzer), New York, Schocken Books, 1982, p. 66. 7 Marvin L. Chaney, ‘Ancient Palestinian Peasant Movements and the Formation of Premonarchic Israel’, in Freedman and Graf (eds), Palestine in Transition, p. 51. 8 George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition, Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, p. 22. Recent archaeological evidence for ‘nomadization’ and ‘sedentarization’ do not confront the statistical problem of Israel’s rise; cf. Israel Finkelstein and Avi Perevolotsky, ‘Process of Sedenterization and Nomadization in the History of Sinai and the Negev’, Bulletin for the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 279 (1990), pp. 67–88. 9 Norman K. Gottwald, ‘Early Israel and the Canaanite Socio-economic System’, in Freedman and Graf (eds), Palestine in Transition, p. 28. 10 See Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1957, p. 214. 11 Gottwald, ‘Early Israel and the Canaanite System’, p. 29. 12 John Bright, A History of Israel, rev. edn, London, SCM Press, 1972, p. 116. 13 John M. Halligan, ‘The Role of the Peasant in the Amarna Period’, in Freedman and Graf (eds), Palestine in Transition, pp. 18–19. 14 Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250– 1050 B.C.E., London, SCM Press, 1979, p. 408. 15 George E. Mendenhall, ‘The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’, in Edward F. Campbell and David Noel Freedman (eds), The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 3, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1970, p. 107. The ‘revolt model’ is treated with some caution by J. D. Martin, who believes that the evidence justifies a conclusion scarcely stronger than that Israel ‘emerged’ in Canaan. See J. D. Martin, ‘Israel as a Tribal Society’, in R. E. Clements (ed.), The World of Ancient Israel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 95–118. 16 Gottwald, ‘Early Israel and the Canaanite System’, p. 33. 17 Chaney, ‘Palestinian Peasant Movements’, pp. 67–72. 18 Mendenhall, ‘Hebrew Conquest of Palestine’, p. 111. On the origins of the covenant theology, see Lothar Perlitt, Bundestheologie im Alten Testament, Wissenschaftlichen

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29

30

31

32

33 34

35

Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament 36, Neukirchen, 1969, as discussed in Eryl W. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics: Isaiah and the Ethical Traditions of Israel, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement 16, Sheffield, 1981, p. 20; but cf. R. E. Clements, Prophecy and Covenant, London, SCM Press, 1965, p. 19; and George E. Mendenhall, ‘Covenant Forms in Israelite Tradition’, in Campbell and Freedman (eds), Biblical Archaeologist 3, pp. 25–53; Ernest W. Nicholson, God and His People, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 109–17. Mendenhall, Tenth Generation, p. 29. Buber, Kingship of God, pp. 99–106. Ibid., p. 160. Wildavsky, Nursing Father, p. 168. Cf. Buber, On the Bible, p. 78; S. Dean McBride Jr, ‘Transcendent Authority: The Rôle of Moses in Old Testament Traditions’, Interpretation, vol. 41 (1987), pp. 229–44. Buber, Kingship of God, p. 84. Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (trans. John Baker), London, SCM Press, 1961, vol. 1, p. 308. For the view that judges may have prefigured the transition to full-scale monarchy, see Martin, ‘Israel as a Tribal Society’, pp. 111–12. Buber, Kingship of God, p. 149; for the function the Song of Deborah serves in showing the relationship between God and people, see Buber, The Prophetic Faith, New York, Collier Books, 1949, pp. 8–12. Buber, Kingship of God, p. 71. Ibid., pp. 75–6. C. H. J. de Geus, ‘De richteren van Israël’, Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift, vol. 20 (1965– 6), p. 90, quoted and translated in his The Tribes of Israel, Amsterdam, Van Gorcum, 1976, p. 206. For an analysis of prefigurements of democracy in tribal Israel, see C. Umhau Wolf, ‘Traces of Primitive Democracy in Ancient Israel’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 6 (1974), p. 99. Frank S. Frick, ‘Religion and Sociopolitical Structure in Early Israel: An EthnoArchaeological Approach’, in Seminar Papers, Missoula, Society of Biblical Literature, 1979, pp. 240–1. George E. Mendenhall, ‘The Conflict Between Value Systems and Social Control’, in Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (eds), Unity and Diversity, Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975, pp. 172–3. George E. Mendenhall, ‘The Relation of the Individual to Political Society in Ancient Israel’, in J. M. Myers, O. Reimherr and H. N. Bream (eds), Biblical Studies in Memory of H. C. Alleman, Locust Valley, J. J. Augustin, 1960, p. 106. Wildavsky, Nursing Father, p. 203. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, New York, Basic Books, 1985, p. 26, and citing Gustavo Gutíerrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1973, p. 156. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, p. 27, and citing The Code of Maimonides, Book Twelve: The Book of Acquisition (trans. Isaac Klein), New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1951, p. 247 (5. 1. 6); and quoting ‘Junius Brutus’, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos: A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, London, 1689, p. 124.

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36 Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, pp. 394–400; cf. his ‘Early Israel and the Canaanite SocioEconomic System’, pp. 25–9. Manfred Bietak, ‘Egypt and Canaan during the Middle Bronze Age’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 281 (1991), pp. 27–72. 37 Mendenhall, Tenth Generation, p. 222. 38 W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity, Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957, p. 285. 39 Halligan, ‘Role of the Peasant’, pp. 18–20; cf. I. Mendelssohn, ‘The Canaanite Term for “Free Proletarian”’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 83 (October, 1941), pp. 36–9. 40 Buber, Kingship of God, pp. 69–77. 41 Ibid., p. 70. 42 Ibid., p. 75. 43 Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism, p. xii. 44 Weber, Ancient Judaism, p. 4. 45 Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism, pp. 1–6. 46 W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, London, Athlone Press, 1968, p. 157. 47 See Bright, History of Israel, pp. 116–17; for a shift in emphasis from Anat as a ‘fertility’ goddess to Anat the hunter, see Peggy L. Day, ‘Anat: Ugarit’s “mistress of the animals”’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 51, no. 3 (1992), pp. 181–90. 48 In the Baal epic, Anat is shown killing Death (Mot), ‘winnowing’ his body with the sieve. Albright, Stone Age to Christianity, p. 232: ‘In no ancient mythology do we find such explicit identification of the body of a god with the grain, which is successively reaped and threshed, winnowed, baked as bread, and ground to meal . . . and finally sowed as grain in the field.’ 49 Bright, History of Israel, p. 39. 50 Walter Brueggemann, ‘Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of Ancient Israel’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 98 (1979), pp. 161–83, and reprinted in Norman K. Gottwald (ed.), The Bible and Liberation: Political and Social Hermeneutics, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1983, p. 313. 51 James Plastaras, The God of the Exodus Narratives, Milwaukee, Wis., Bruce, 1966, p. 9; cf. Duncan Black MacDonald, The Hebrew Philosophical Genius: A Vindication, New York, Russell and Russell, 1965, pp. 12–28. 52 Auerbach, Moses, p. 205; cf. Edmund Leach, ‘Why Did Moses have a Sister?’, in Edmund Leach and D. A. Aycock, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 33–66. 53 Wildavsky, Nursing Father, p. 203. 54 If the tribal period is indeed a product of Deuteronomistic redaction, then the monarchy may have been there all along, but the archaeological researches of the American school of Albright and Mendenhall would seem to confirm a genuine interregnum up to the anointing of an Israelite king, what Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century called the second fall of Adam. For discussions of the institution of monarchy, see Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, 2nd edn, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1965, p. 72; Norman K. Gottwald, ‘Social History of the United Monarchy: An Application of H. A. Landsberger’s Framework for the Analysis of Peasant Movements to the Participation of Free Agrarians in the Introduction of Monarchy to Ancient Israel’, paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature, 1983; David Polish,

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Give Us a King: Legal-Religious Sources of Jewish Sovereignty, Hoboken, NJ, KTAV Publishing, 1989, pp. 14–32. Gottwald, Tribes of Yahweh, pp. 410–14, explores the possibility that Philistine military rulers governed alongside indigenous Canaanite vassal kings. For the antiquity of the Philistine occupation, see Avner Raban, ‘The Philistines in the Western Jezreel Valley’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 284 (1991), pp. 17– 27; cf. Albrecht Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (trans. G. W. Anderson), Oxford, Blackwell, 1966, p. 212; Robert B. Coote and Mary P. Coote, Power, Politics and the Making of the Bible, Minneapolis, Minn., Fortress, 1990, pp. 25–31; James W. Flanagan, David’s Social Drama: A Hologram of Israel’s Early Iron Age, Sheffield, Almond Press, 1988, and ‘The Relocation of the Davidic Capital’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 47, no. 2, p. 239; Mendenhall, ‘The Monarchy’, Interpretation, vol. 29, no. 2 (1975), pp. 170–1; Frank M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973; James W. Flanagan, ‘Social Transformation and Ritual in 2 Samuel 6’, in Carol Meyers and Michael P. O’Connell (eds), The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth, Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 1983, p. 366; Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel: From its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile (trans. and abridged Moshe Greenberg), Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1960, p. 145; Walter Brueggemann, Power, Providence and Personality: Biblical Insight into Life and Ministry, Louisville, Ky, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990, pp. 86–115; Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan; John Bright, The Kingdom of God, Nashville, Tenn., and Abingdon, 1953; Volkmar Fritz, ‘Die Bedeutung des Königtums für die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung in Israel und Juda’, paper presented to the seminar on the Sociology of the Monarchy in Ancient Israel, Society for Biblical Literature (US), 1983. For desert fortresses as places of political refuge from the time of David, and so as possible prototype centres for Israelite monarchy, see Günter Garbrecht and Yehuda Peleg, ‘The Water Supply of the Desert Fortresses in the Jordan Valley’, Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 57, no. 3 (Sept. 1994), pp. 161–70; Abraham Malamat, ‘The Kingdom of David and Solomon in its Contact with Egypt and Aran Naharaim’, The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 21, no. 4 (1958), pp. 96–102; C. Hauer Jr, ‘The Economics of National Security in Solomonic Israel’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, vol. 18 (1980), pp. 63–73; on the biblical accounts of Solomon’s splendour, J. Maxwell Miller, ‘Solomon: International Potentate or Local King?’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly (Jan.–June, 1991), pp. 28–31; for the controversies surrounding the origins of wisdom literature, see R. N. Whybray, ‘The Social World of the Wisdom Writers’, in R. E. Clements (ed.), The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 227–50; cf. Paul E. Dion, ‘YHWH as Storm-God and Sun-God: The Double Legacy of Egypt and Canaan as Reflected in Psalm 104’, Zeitschrift für die Altestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 103, no. 1 (1991), pp. 43–71; for an interpretation of Solomon’s great temple as a symbol of state power, see Carol L. Meyers, ‘Jachin and Boaz in Religious and Political Perspective’, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 2 (1983), pp. 172–3. 55 Buber, On the Bible, p. 157; cf. R. E. Clements, The Conscience of the Nation: A Study of Early Israelite Prophecy, London, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 8. 56 Brueggemann, ‘Trajectories’, p. 315. 57 Cf. George E. Mendenhall, ‘The Relation of the Individual to Political Society in Ancient Israel’, in J. M. Myers, O. Reimherr and H. N. Bream (eds), Biblical Studies in Memory of H.

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58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71

72

C. Alleman, Locust Valley, J. J. Augustin, 1960, pp. 101–2: ‘Yahweh becomes more transcendent, and Yahwism becomes less relevant to the life of each individual.’ Cf. K. W. Whitelam, ‘Israelite Kingship: The Royal Ideology and its Opponents’, in Clements (ed.), World of Ancient Israel, pp. 119–39. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament 1, p. 441. James W. Flanagan, ‘Chiefs in Israel’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, vol. 20 (1981), p. 66. De Vaux, Ancient Israel, pp. 229–30; cf W. J. Dumbrell, Covenant and Creation: An Old Testament Covenantal Theology, Exeter, Paternoster Press, 1984, pp. 127–63. R. E. Clements, Prophecy and Covenant, Studies in Biblical Theology 43, London, SCM Press, 1965, pp. 36–7. Cf. Rex Mason, ‘The Prophets of the Restoration’, in Richard Coggins, Anthony Phillips and Michael Knibb (eds), Israel’s Prophetic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Ackroyd, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 142; cf. Robert P. Carroll, ‘Prophecy and Society’, in Clements (ed.), World of Ancient Israel, pp. 203–25. Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, 2 vols, New York, Harper Colophon Books, 1969–75, vol. 1, p. x. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel, p. 113. Walter Dietrich, ‘JHWH, Israel und die Völker beim Propheten Amos’, Theologische Zeitschrift, vol. 48, nos 3–4 (1992), pp. 315–28; Clements, Conscience of the Nation, pp. 59– 64; Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1, p. xiii. For the view that the prophets are doom-laden, see Michael E. W. Thompson, ‘Amos – A Prophet of Hope?’, The Expository Times, vol. 104, no. 3 (1992), pp. 71–6. Walther Zimmerli, ‘Visionary Experience in Jeremiah’, in Coggins, Phillips and Knibb (eds), Israel’s Prophetic Tradition, pp. 97–8; Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel, pp. 194–5. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel, p. 186. Jeremiah (20. 7–9) suffers under the compulsion of his call. ‘His preaching is scoffed at. His hearers find his denunciation tiresome. Nobody will take his words in earnest. After all his activity in the service of Yahweh he has only reaped ignominy and scorn. Now he protests to Yahweh, reminding him of the fact that he has not chosen this calling of his own free will; it has been forced upon him by Yahweh himself’ (Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel, p. 195). Cf. John L. McKenzie, Authority in the Church, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1966, p. 158: ‘If one wants to be a prophet, one must think of oneself as expendable.’ William L. Holladay, ‘The Background of Jeremiah’s Self-Understanding: Moses, Samuel and Psalm 22’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 83 (1964), pp. 153–64. M. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons), New York, The Free Press, 1964, p. 358; cf. M. Weber, The Sociology of Religion (trans. Ephraim Fischof), London, Methuen, 1965, pp. 46–7, and Ancient Judaism (trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale), Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1952, p. 299; Dorothy Emmet, ‘Prophets and their Societies’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 86 (1956), p. 14; Carl J. Friedrich, ‘Political Leadership and Charismatic Power’, Journal of Politics, vol. 23 (1961), p. 15; Peter L. Berger, ‘Charisma and Religious Innovation’, American Sociological Review, vol. 28 (1963), pp. 949–50. Clements, Prophecy and Tradition, p. 88.

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73 Such as Wellhausen, Duhm and more recently Perlitt and Nicholson. See Clements, Prophecy and Covenant, p. 15, and Prophecy and Tradition, pp. 41, 43; Nicholson, God and his People, pp. 191–217. 74 W. Zimmerli, ‘Prophetic Proclamation and Reinterpretation’, in Douglas A. Knight (ed.), Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1977, pp. 98–9; Nicholson, God and his People, pp. 216–17. 75 W. Zimmerli, ‘Prophetic Proclamation’, pp. 86–7; cf. Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism, p. 227: ‘In Isaiah the term “people” becomes more than ever a synonym for “the poor”.’ 76 Weber, Ancient Judaism, p. 278. 77 Lang, Monotheism and Prophetic Minority, p. 63. 78 Ibid., p. 20; cf. William G. Dever, ‘Material Remains and the Cult in Ancient Israel: An Essay in Archeological Systematics’, in Meyers and O’Connell (eds), The Word of the Lord, pp. 571–87. 79 E. W. Heaton, The Old Testament Prophets, rev. edn, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977, p. 94. 80 Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1, p. 212. 81 Curt Kuhl, The Prophets of Israel (trans. Rudolf J. Ehrlich and J. P. Smith), Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1960, pp. 46–7. 82 Brueggemann, ‘Trajectories’, p. 316. 83 Simon B. Parker, ‘Revolutions in Northern Israel’, mimeographed paper. 84 Theodore H. Robinson, Prophecy and the Prophets in Ancient Israel, London, Duckworth, 1923, p. 72. 85 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, p. 51. 86 J. Kegler, ‘Prophetisches Reden und politische Praxis Jeremias’, quoted in translation in Lang, Monotheism and Prophetic Minority, p. 87. 87 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, p. 53. 88 Ibid., pp. 60–1. 89 Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1, p. 3. 90 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 9. 91 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 4. 92 Weber, Ancient Judaism, pp. 56–7. 93 Lang, Monotheism and Prophetic Minority, p. 124. 94 Ibid., pp. 125–6. 95 Cf. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics, p. 19; Léon Epzstein, Social Justice in the Ancient Near East and the People of the Bible (trans. John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1968. 96 Otto Kaiser, Isaiah 1–12 (trans. John Bowden), 2nd edn, London, SCM Press, 1983, p. 227; cf. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics, pp. 82–3. 97 G. Ernest Wright, ‘The Lawsuit of God: A Form-Critical Study of Deuteronomy 32’, in B. W. Anderson and W. Harrelson (eds), Israel’s Prophetic Heritage, London, 1962, pp. 26–67, as cited in Clements, Prophecy and Tradition, pp. 17–18; on customary and ‘constitutional’ law in the Old Testament, see Henry S. Gehman, ‘Natural Law in the Old Testament’, in Meyers, Reimherr and Bream (eds), Biblical Studies, pp. 109–22. 98 Bernhard W. Anderson, ‘Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah and Prophetic Tradition’, in Frank Moore Cross, Werner E. Lemke and Patrick D. Miller Jr (eds), Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1976, p. 351; cf. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics, pp. 53–8.

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99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107

108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121

Cf. Plato, The Statesman 293. Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1, p. 215 (emphasis added). Epzstein, Social Justice, p. 47. Ibid. André Neher, L’Essence du prophétisme, Paris, 1955, p. 10, as quoted and translated in Epzstein, Social Justice, p. 48. Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1, p. 201. Cf. A. D. Lindsay, ‘Goodness and Justice’, in A. D. Lindsay, J. H. Muirhead, et al., Christianity and the Present Moral Unrest, London, Allen and Unwin, 1926, p. 100. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics, pp. 25–6; cf. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel, p. 347; Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (trans. D. M. G. Stalker), 2 vols, London, SCM Press, 1975. See, e.g., Amos 7.10–13, where King Jeroboam is told that ‘Amos is conspiring against you in Israel’. For the suggestion that Jeremiah was leading an ‘opposition faction’, see Lang, Monotheism and Prophetic Minority, p. 87. R. N. Whybray, ‘Prophecy and Wisdom’, in Coggins, Phillips and Knibbs (eds), Israel’s Prophetic Tradition, p. 187. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics, p. 35. Phillips, ‘Prophecy and Law’, in Coggins, Phillips and Knibbs (eds), Israel’s Prophetic Tradition, pp. 220–1. Ibid. Phillips, ‘Prophecy and Law’, p. 224. Cf. Davies, Prophecy and Ethics, p. 26; on justice as ‘a bias in favor of the poor’, see R. Niebuhr, Pious and Secular America, New York, Scribner, 1958, p. 92, quoted in Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 1, p. 201. Bright, History of Israel, p. 282. Gerhard von Rad, Deuteronomy (trans. Dorothea Barton), London, SCM Press, 1966, p. 26; cf. Phillips, ‘Prophecy and Law’, p. 218. Hölscher, cited in von Rad, Deuteronomy, p. 27. Von Rad, Deuteronomy, p. 119; see Deuteronomy 17.14–20. Anderson, ‘Exodus and Covenant’, pp. 342–4. Ibid., p. 348. Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 71–2; cf. Walter Brueggemann, ‘At the Mercy of Babylon: A Subversive Rereading of the Empire’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 110, no. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 3–22. A. Gelston, ‘Universalism in Second Isaiah’, The Journal of Theological Studies, n.s, vol. 43, pt 2 (1992), pp. 377–97. 2 EARLY CHRISTIANITY: A KINGDOM NOT OF THIS WORLD

1 Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According to Mark (trans. Donald H. Madvig), Atlanta, Ga, John Knox Press, 1976, p. 45. On the dramatic presentation of Mark, see Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark (trans. John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1985, pp. 34–7. 2 C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, rev. edn, Glasgow, Fontana Books, 1961, pp. 30– 45.

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3 Michael Welker, ‘The Reign of God’, Theology Today, vol. 49, no. 4 (Jan. 1993), pp. 500–15. 4 Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom, pp. 115–30; cf. James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, London, SCM Press, 1977, pp. 13–16. 5 John Bright, The Kingdom of God, Nashville, Tenn., and Abingdon, 1953, p. 220; cf. W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, ‘Reflections on the Sermon on the Mount’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 44, no. 3 (1992), pp. 283–309. 6 Cf. John Riches, Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980, pp. 101–6. An especially dramatic instance of the reversal of values in Jesus’ kingdom occurs in Mark’s account (ch. 11) of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Mark uses the passage of Zechariah 14 (a prophet to whom Jesus seems to have had a special affinity), but ‘teases his readers with what seem to be triumphal allusions but never satisfies their expectations . . . Mark subverts those triumphal allusions’ (Paul Brooks Duff, ‘The March of the Divine Warrior and the Advent of the Greco-Roman King: Mark’s Account of Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 3, no. 1 (1992), pp. 55–71). 7 Norman Perrin, The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus, London, SCM Press, 1963, p. 187. 8 F. F. Bruce, New Testament History, rev. edn, London, Oliphants, 1971, p. 162. 9 Riches, Transformation of Judaism, pp. 87–9. 10 Albert van den Heuvel, These Rebellious Powers, London, SCM Press, 1966, p. 9; cf. F. F. Bruce, New Testament Development of Old Testament Themes, Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1969, pp. 48–9. 11 Bruce, Development of Old Testament Themes. 12 W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology, 4th edn, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1980, p. 146. 13 Cf. the prophecy in Jeremiah (31. 31–4) with which the Christian community identified itself: ‘The time is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with Israel and Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand and led them out of Egypt. Although they broke my covenant, I was patient with them, says the Lord; I will set my law within them and write it on their hearts; I will become their God and they shall become my people. No longer need they teach one another to know the Lord; all of them, high and low alike, shall know me, says the Lord, for I will forgive their wrongdoing and remember their sin no more.’ 14 John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1972, p. 114. Yoder’s work in general emphasizes Jesus’ ‘solidarity with humanity that is demonstrated by his incarnation, death and resurrection’; see Joel Zimbelman, ‘The Contribution of John Howard Yoder to Recent Discussions in Christian Social Ethics’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 45, no. 3 (1992), pp. 367–99, at p. 369. 15 Cf. Robert Banks, Jesus and the Law in the Synoptic Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 5. 16 Riches, Transformation of Judaism, p. 153. 17 André Dumas, Political Theology and the Life of the Church (trans. John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1978, p. 57; Christopher Rowlands, Radical Christianity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988, pp. 46–65. 18 In the caption of Origen, writing a commentary on Matthew early in the third century of the Christian era, Jesus was the ‘autobasileia’, the kingdom in person. See Bruce, New

231

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19 20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

Testament History, p. 164. Cf. C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel According to Saint Mark, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 66. Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology (trans. John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1971, pp. 36, 61–7. James Barr, ‘Abba Isn’t “Daddy”’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 39, no. 1 (Apr. 1988), pp. 28–47, and ‘“Abba, Father”’, Theology, vol. 91, no. 741 (May 1988), pp. 173–9. The term may have had some currency as a title for teachers in Galilee; see Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (trans. F. H. and C. H. Cave), rev. 3rd edn, London, SCM Press, 1967, p. 244. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1974, p. 147. Cf. Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus, London, SCM Press, 1967, pp. 66–81. John 1.14: eskenosen en hemin – ‘dwelt in a tent among us’ or ‘pitched his tent among us’. On the long history of logos as a Greek concept, see Walther Kranz, ‘Der Logos Heraklits und der Logos Johannes’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, vol. 93 (1950), pp. 81–95; cf. T. W. Manson, On Paul and John, London, SCM Press, 1963, pp. 136–59. For the view that egeneto should be translated ‘was born flesh’, see J. C. O’Neill, ‘The Word Did Not “Become” Flesh’, Zeitschrift für Neuetestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 82, nos 1–2 (1991), pp. 125–7. Floyd V. Filson, A New Testament History, London, SCM Press, 1965, p. 95. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (trans. W. Montgomerey), 3rd edn, London, A. and C. Black, 1954. Cf. Adolf Holl, Jesus in Bad Company (trans. Simon King), New York, Avon Books, 1972, pp. 17–18: ‘Jesus’s mistake’. Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers (trans. R. Manheim), London, Hart-Davis, 1962, 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 90, cited by Holl, Jesus in Bad Company, p. 180. William R. Herzog, ‘The Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Discovery of the Apocalyptic Jesus’, Pacific Theological Review, vol. 19, no. 1 (Fall, 1985), p. 36, and following John Dominic Crossan, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, New York, Harper and Row, 1973, p. 26. Cf. Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (trans. S. H. Hooke), London, SCM Press, 1954, pp. 154–7, and W. G. Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems (trans. S. Gilmour and Howard C. Kee), London, SCM Press, 1973, p. 384. Cf. Eric Osborne, ‘Christology and Pietism’, Australian Biblical Review, vol. 32 (Oct. 1984), pp. 1–17; cf. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, p. 109. Dumas, Political Theology, p. 7. J. H. Charlesworth, ‘Jesus Research: A Paradigm Shift For New Testament Scholars’, Australian Biblical Review, vol. 38 (1990), pp. 18–32; Ferdinand Hahn, ‘The Quest of the Historical Jesus and the Special Character of the Sources Available to Us’, in Ferdinand Hahn, Wenzel Lohff and Günther Bornkamm, What Can We Know About Jesus? Essays on the New Quest (trans. Grover Foley), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1969, pp. 20–2; Paul Winter, ‘Josephus on Jesus’, Journal of Historical Studies, vol. 1 (1968), pp. 289–302; Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator: A Critical Christology for Our Time (trans. Patrick Hughes), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1978; John Ziesler, The Jesus Question, Guildford, Lutterworth Press, 1980, pp. 8–9; A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963; D. C. Parker, ‘Scripture is Tradition’,

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Theology, vol. 94, no. 757 (1991), pp. 11–17; Henry J. Cadbury, The Making of Luke– Acts, London, SPCK, 1958; Robert Maddox, The Purpose of Luke–Acts, Göttingen, Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 1982; Paul W. Walaszay, ‘And So We Came to Rome’: The Political Perspective of St Luke, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983; Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Gifford Lectures, 1955, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1957; Hahn, Historical Investigation and New Testament Faith (trans. Robert Maddox), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1983; F. G. Downing, ‘Quite Like Q: A Genre for “Q”. The “Lives” of Cynic Philosophers’, Biblica, vol. 69, no. 2 (1988), pp. 196–225; cf. F. G. Downing, ‘Compositional Conventions and the Synoptic Problem’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 107, no. 1 (Mar. 1988), pp. 69–85; Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, San Francisco, Calif., Harper, 1993; A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History: The Bampton Lectures, 1980, London, Duckworth, 1982, and Jesus on Trial: A Study of the Fourth Gospel, London, SPCK, 1976; Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew, London, SCM Press, 1983. On the question of Jesus’ Jewishness, see Hans Dieter Betz, ‘Wellhausen’s Dictum “Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew” in Light of Present Scholarship’, Studia, theologica, vol. 45 (1991), pp. 83–110; Sean Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1988, pp. 163–7. For the view that understanding the person of Jesus is not ‘an exclusively Christian concern’, see Edward Hulmes, ‘“The People of the Book” and the Question of Jesus’, Theology, vol. 95, no. 762 (1992), pp. 334–43; E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, London, SCM Press, 1985; Marta Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire (trans. A. Bedini), London, Croom Helm, 1983; Gustavo Gutíerrez, The Power of the Poor in History (trans. Robert R. Barr), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1983, p. 13. Max Rieser, The True Founder of Christianity and the Hellenistic Philosophy, Amsterdam, Graduate Press, 1979, believes that the origins of Christianity lay in Greek perversions of Jewish doctrine through a syncretism of the ancient Greek logos philosophy with Greek theogony and Jewish biblical traditions. The unwilling founder of Christianity was therefore Philo of Alexandria, who, writing at about the time attributed to the life of Christ, reinterpreted the Old Testament in the light of Greek philosophy. For the Greek writer of the Gospel of John, the doctrine that ‘the word became flesh’ was sufficient for him to reconstruct a ‘life’ of someone who had not existed. So the Greeks invented a messiah whom they called ‘Christos’. The pictorial symbol of the name, the , was enough to suggest the image of a man on a cross, and so the whole fantastic legend of Jesus, his fabricated trial, and his execution – identifying him with the slaves of the Roman empire – was manufactured; cf. Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 7–32, where the Bible is regarded as myth from start to finish; cf. the powerful review of Leach and Aycock by Denis Nineham, in Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 37, pt 2 (October 1986), p. 441. 31 It must be acknowledged that the ‘general trend of Judaism at that time, in most of its more lively focal points and conscious groupings, was to go for the formation of “sects”, in conformity with the “holy remnant” concept of the Daniel literature’ (Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (trans. Herbert Hoskins), London, Collins, 1983, p. 144). For Jesus as a renewer of local communities, see Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, San Francisco, Calif., Harper and Row, 1987. 32 Cf. J. J. Kilgallen, ‘Jesus, Savior, the Glory of Your People Israel’, Biblica, vol. 75, no. 3 (1994), pp. 305–28.

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33 Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 146. 34 Bruce, Development of Old Testatement Themes, p. 54. 35 See W. G. Kümmel, The Theology of the New Testament (trans. John E. Steely), London, SCM Press, 1974, p. 219; cf. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, pp. 227–8; T. W. Manson, On Paul and John: Some Selected Theological Themes (ed. Matthew Black), London, SCM Press, 1963, p. 71. That Paul’s doctrine of grace is communal rather than individualist has recently been argued in a magisterial article: James D. G. Dunn, ‘The Justice of God: A Renewed Perspective on Justification by Faith’, The Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 43, pt 1 (1992), pp. 1–22; see also Christopher M. Tuckett, ‘Paul, Tradition and Freedom’, Theologische Zeitschrift, vol. 47, no. 4 (1991), pp. 307–25; Julian V. Hills, ‘“Christ Was the Goal of the Law” (Romans 10:4)’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 44, pt 2 (Oct. 1993), pp. 585–92; In-Gyu Hong, ‘Does Paul Misrepresent the Jewish Law? Law and Covenant in Gal. 3.1–14’, Novum Testamentum, vol. 36, no. 2 (1994), pp. 164–82. 36 Matthew 19.28; Luke 22.30. See Bruce, Old Testament Themes, p. 62; cf. W. Horbury, ‘The Twelve and the Phylarchs’, New Testament Studies, vol. 32 (1986), p. 525: ‘Jesus’ distinctive purposes in choosing the twelve, so far as they can be approached, are perhaps best sought in the evidence for an emphasis on sending in the authorization of the twelve, for a reserve on national restoration and messianism, and for a strongly theocentric kingdom teaching. These data suit a work which can be called new, the urgent preparation of contemporary Israel for the kingdom of God.’ 37 Dumas, Political Theology, p. 95. 38 Cf. Howard Clark Kee, Community of the New Age: Studies in Mark’s Gospel, Philadelphia, Pa, Westminster Press, 1977, pp. 107–16; cf. Stephen C. Barton, ‘The Communal Dimension of Earliest Christianity’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 43, pt 2 (1992), pp. 399–427. 39 Dumas, Political Theology, p. 27; cf. Moltmann, The Power of the Powerless, (trans. Margaret Kohl), London, SCM Press, pp. 110–12. 40 Cf. Perrin, Kingdom of God, p. 202. 41 Luke 14.26; Matthew 10.39. See Daniel L. Migliore, Called to Freedom: Liberation Theology and the Future of Christian Doctrine, Philadelphia, Pa, Westminster Press, 1980, p. 51. 42 Bright, Kingdom of God, p. 221, and citing Matthew 25.31–46. 43 Migliore, Called to Freedom, p. 74; cf. Yoder, Politics of Jesus, p. 108. 44 See Robert Banks, Paul’s Idea of Community, Homebush West, NSW, ANZEA Publishers, 1979, pp. 128–47; cf. Donald Coggan, Paul: Portrait of a Revolutionary, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1984, pp. 193–217. 45 Robert Maddox, Witnesses to the Ends of the Earth, Enfield, NSW, United Theological College Publications, 1980, pp. 46–9. 46 Cf. Walaszay, ‘And So We Came to Rome’, pp. 2–3; Paul J. Achtemeier, The Quest for Unity in the New Testament Church, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1987; Jon Sobrino and Juan Hernandez Pico, Theology of Christian Solidarity (trans. Phillip Berryman), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1985, pp. 72–98. 47 Martin Hengel, Christ and Power (trans. Everett R. Kalin), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1977, p. 27; cf. Riches, Transformation of Judaism, p. 108. 48 Mary Ann Beavis, ‘“Expecting Nothing in Return”: Luke’s Picture of the Marginalized’, Interpretation, vol. 48, no. 4 (Oct. 1994), pp. 357–68.

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49 Walter E. Pilgrim, Good News to the Poor: Wealth and Poverty in Luke–Acts, Minneapolis, Minn., Augsburg Publishing House, 1981, pp. 19–38. 50 Gutíerrez, Poor in History, p. 13. 51 Cf. Donald Juel, Luke–Acts: The Promise of History, Atlanta, Ga, John Knox Press, 1983, pp. 16–22. 52 Conrad Boerma, Rich Man, Poor Man – and the Bible (trans. John Bowden), London, SCM Press, 1979, p. 20. 53 Yoder, Politics of Jesus, p. 41. 54 Ibid., p. 67, following André Trocmé, Jesus-Christ et la révolution non-violente, Geneva, Labor et Fides, 1961. 55 W. G. Kümmel, Introduction to the New Testament (trans. Howard Clark Kee), London, SCM Press, 1975, p. 139. 56 David Sheppard, Bias to the Poor, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1983, p. 12. 57 Vermes, Jesus the Jew, p. 21. 58 Halvor Moxnes, ‘The Social Context of Luke’s Community’, Interpretation, vol. 48, no. 4 (Oct. 1994), pp. 379–89; cf. Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (trans. Irene and Fraser McLuskey with James M. Robinson), London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1973, pp. 80–1; on the koinonia of the New Testament, see Justo L. Gonzalez, Faith and Wealth, San Francisco, Calif., Harper and Row, 1990, pp. 71–91. 59 Donal Dorr, Spirituality and Justice, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1984, p. 94. See Luke 5.30, 7.38; John 4.9, 27. 60 Luise Schottroff and Wolfgang Stegemann, Jesus and the Hope of the Poor (trans. Matthew J. O’Connell), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1986, p. 16. 61 Pilgrim, Good News to the Poor, p. 50. 62 For the influence of Jewish apocalyptic on gospel teachings about the poor, see C. C. Rowland, ‘Apocalyptic, the Poor, and the Gospel of Matthew’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 45, pt 2 (Oct. 1994), pp. 504–18; cf. Stephen H. Smith, ‘Mark 3.1–6: Form, Redaction and Community Function’, Biblica, vol. 75, no. 2 (1994), pp. 153–74. 63 Cf. Richard J. Cassidy, Jesus, Politics and Society: A Study of Luke’s Gospel, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1978, pp. 21–4. 64 The parable of Lazarus is probably of pre-Christian origin but accords well with the sayings of the Sermons on the Mount and the Plain. See Ernst Bammel, review of David L. Mealand, Poverty and Expectation in the Gospels, in Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 35, pt 2 (Oct. 1984), p. 511. 65 Schottroff and Stegemann, Jesus and the Hope of the Poor, pp. 25–8. 66 Luke 18.24–7. For a detailed discussion of the passages cited in this paragraph, see Pilgrim, Good News to the Poor, pp. 103–22; cf. Martin Hengel, Property and Riches in the Early Church (trans. John Bowden), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1974, pp. 23–30. 67 F. G. Downing, ‘The Social Contexts of Jesus the Teacher’, New Testament Studies, vol. 33 (1987), p. 448, where it is explained that Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, was only six kilometres from Sepphoris, a thriving centre of Hellenistic culture. Downing answers his critics in his Cynics and Christian Origins, Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark, 1992, pp. 143–68. 68 Schottroff and Stegemann, Jesus and the Hope of the Poor, pp. 38–66. 69 F. G. Downing, Jesus and the Threat of Freedom, London, SCM Press, 1987, p. 136. For a detailed comparison of gospel sayings about the poor with close parallels in Cynic literature, see pp. 51–125; cf. Mack, The Lost Gospel, pp. 114–20. For the possible influence

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70 71 72

73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82

83

84 85 86

87 88 89

of the Pythagorean revival on the gospels, see Johan C. Thom, ‘“Don’t Walk on the Highways”: The Pythagorean Akousmata and Early Christian Literature’, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 113, no. 1 (1994), pp. 93–112. Mack, Lost Gospel, p. 141; cf. Schottroff and Stegemann, pp. 80–6. Pedrito U. Maynard-Reid, Poverty and Wealth in James, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1987, pp. 10–11. On parallels between this passage and parts of the first Isaiah, see Maynard-Reid, Poverty and Wealth in James, pp. 81–2; for Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians ‘to express their solidarity with the poor of Jerusalem’ (Migliore, Called to Freedom, p. 93), see 2 Corinthians 8.9. For the interpretation of this directive as a jubilary redistribution, see Yoder, Politics of Jesus, pp. 74–7. Josephus, The Jewish War 2.17.6; see Cassidy, Jesus, Politics and Society, pp. 123–4. Deuteronomy 26.5–9; see Bruce, Development of Old Testament Themes, pp. 36–7. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1978, p. 83, and citing Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1959, pp. 238–9. Schillebeeckx, Jesus, p. 141; see also G. N. Stanton, ‘The Communities of Matthew’, Interpretation, vol. 46, no. 4 (Apr. 1993), pp. 140–51. See Hengel, Christ and Power, pp. 11–13; cf. Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (trans. John Bowden), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1981, pp. 289–90. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.24, as quoted in Edward Lohse, The New Testament Environment (trans. John E. Steely), London, SCM Press, 1976, p. 83. Lohse, New Testament Environment. A. R. C. Leaney, The Jewish and Christian World. 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 98. Luke 23.5: ‘“His teaching is causing disaffection among the people all through Judaea”’. See, e.g., S. G. F. Brandon, The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth, London, Paladin, 1977, pp. 128–66; cf. Ernst Bammel, ‘The Revolution Theory from Reimarus to Brandon’, in Ernst Bammel and C. F. D. Moule (eds), Jesus and the Politics of His Day, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 11–68; cf. Luke 23.5. The arguments are summarized in Martin Hengel, Was Jesus a Revolutionist? (trans. William Klassen), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1971, pp. 7–15; cf. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence; James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity, London, SCM Press, 1991, pp. 47–9. Cf. Matthew 10. 34: ‘You must not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History, p. 47. Oscar Cullmann, The State in the New Testament, London, SCM Press, 1957, pp. 15–23: Judas Iscariot’s surname sounds like a transcription of the Latin sicarius, or ‘bandit’, and Simon Peter’s surname, ‘Barjona’ may have meant ‘terrorist’. The sons of Zebedee may have acquired the nickname ‘sons of thunder’ because of Zealot tendencies. See Hengel, Was Jesus a Revolutionist?, p. 17. Ibid., pp. 18–25. On the founding of the Zealot movement in AD 6 by Judas the Galilean, see, e.g., Vermes, Jesus the Jew, pp. 46–50. P. Hoffmann, quoted in Hengel, Was Jesus a Revolutionist?, p. 26.

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90 G. N. Stanton, review of Bammel and Moule (eds), Jesus and the Politics of his Day, in Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 37, pt 2 (Oct. 1986), p. 517; cf. G. B. Caird, review of John Riches, Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism, in Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., vol. 33, pt 1 (Apr. 1982), p. 253. 91 Hans-Ruedi Weber, The Cross: Tradition and Interpretation (trans. Elke Jessett), London, SPCK, 1979, p. 26. 92 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (trans. James W. Leitch), New York, Harper and Row, 1967, p. 21, quoted in Migliore, Called to Freedom, p. 32. 93 See Jürgen Moltmann, Der Gekreuzigte Gott, Munich, 1972, translated as The Crucified God (see n. 21 above). 94 Yoder, Politics of Jesus, p. 132; Downing, ‘“Quite like Q”’. 95 Weber, The Cross, pp. 51–5. 96 Moltmann, The Crucified God, p. 146; Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 193–200. 97 H. Gollwitzer, Krummes Holz-aufrechter Gang: zur Frage nach dem Sinn des Lebens, 1970, p. 278, as quoted in the English translation of Moltmann, The Crucified God, p. 159; cf. the much different emphasis of Johann Baptist Metz, ‘Suffering from God: Theology as Theodicy’, Pacifica, vol. 5, no. 3 (1992), pp. 274–87. 98 Migliore, Called to Freedom, pp. 68–72. Migliore suggests that the theology of the Trinity ‘constitutes a revolution in our understanding of God’ since it presents God as ‘not the will-to-power but the will-to-fellowship’; cf. Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark, 1991, pp. 16–30. 99 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, New York, Macmillan, 1941, p. 187, as quoted in Migliore, Called to Freedom, p. 69; cf. Helmut Koester, ‘Jesus the Victim, Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 3, no. 1 (1992), pp. 3–15. 100 Dumas, Political Theology, p. 45. 101 Ibid., p. 85. 102 Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (trans. D. M. G. Stalker), 2 vols, London, SCM Press, 1975, vol. 2, pp. 273–7. 103 R. T. France, Jesus and the Old Testament: His Application of Old Testament Passages to Himself and his Mission, London, Tyndale Press, 1971, p. 115. 104 Cf. Matthew 20.28; France, Jesus and the Old Testament, pp. 116–23. 105 Yoder, Politics of Jesus, p. 243. 106 Van den Heuvel, These Rebellious Powers, p. 52. 107 See Günther Bornkamm, ‘On Understanding the Christ-hymn’, in his Early Christian Experience (trans. Paul L. Hammer), London, SCM Press, 1969, p. 121: ‘God meets the man who wants to be as God by wanting to be nothing other than a man . . . humiliation and obedience are henceforth the kingly way of faith’, and Günther Bornkamm, Paul (trans. D. M. G. Stalker), London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971, pp. 210–16; for an analysis of the antique sources of the Jesus hymn, see Kenneth Grayston, The Letters of Paul to the Philippians and to the Thessalonians, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 20– 30; Ralph P. Martin, Philippians, rev. edn, Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1987, pp. 99– 114. 108 Hengel, Christ and Power, p. 15.

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109 John A. T. Robinson, ‘“His Witness Is True”: A Test of the Johannine Claim’, in Bammel and Moule (eds), Jesus and the Politics of his Day, p. 468, and citing Theo Preiss, ‘Justification in Johannine Thought’, in his essays Life in Christ, London, SCM Press, 1954, pp. 9–31. 110 Hengel, Christ and Power, p. 31, where it is made clear that Matthew 23.8–12 is directly applied to those who would seek dignity, and deference to themselves, within the Christian church. 111 Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator: A Christology for Our Time (trans. Patrick Hughes), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1978, p. 92: ‘Jesus Never Used the Word “Obedience”’. 112 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 80–95. 113 Hengel, Christ and Power, p. 35; cf. C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, London, Fontana Books, 1959, p. 211: ‘The Christian order of society rests on a different and higher principle . . . . The Christian takes no part in the administration of a retributive system; but, in so far as it serves moral ends, he must submit to it. He himself lives by a higher principle, and he obeys the Government’; cf. Bruce, Romans: An Introduction and Commentary, London, Tyndale Press, 1963, pp. 231–9. 114 Cullmann, State in the New Testament, p. 36; emphasis in original. 115 Cf. Sophocles, Antigone 450–70; Plato, Apology 29a. 116 Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society (trans. David Smith), New York, Seabury Press, 1980, p. 108, as quoted in Rebecca S. Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1986, p. 74. 117 Chopp, Praxis of Suffering, p. 75. 118 Ibid., p. 76. 119 On the worship of the Lamb, see Dunn, Partings of the Ways, pp. 215–20; cf. Rowland, Radical Christianity, pp. 75–82. 3 THE TWO CITIES: SOJOURNERS IN THE WORLD 1 Plato, Theaetetus 174a (trans. F. M. Cornford), in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 879. 2 Aristotle, Politics 1259a 6 (trans. Carnes Lord), Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 51; emphasis added. 3 Werner Jaeger, ‘On the Origin and Cycle of the Philosophic Ideal of Life’, Appendix II of his Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Development (trans. Richard Robinson), 2nd edn, London, Oxford University Press, 1962, p. 428. 4 Plato, Theaetetus 173d-e (Collected Dialogues, p. 879; emphasis added). 5 Plato, Republic 591c-592b. 6 Lucretius, De rerum natura 2.7–13. 7 Cicero, De officiis 1.153. 8 Seneca, De otio 4.1. 9 Ibid., 4.2. 10 As the Christians’ identity came to be more firmly established, they were sometimes referred to as ‘the third race’. See R. A. Markus, Christianity in the Roman World, London, Thames and Hudson, 1974, pp. 24–47. 11 Livy, Ab urbe condita 39.8–15.

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12 Marta Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire (trans. Annabel Bedini), London, Croom Helm, 1983, p. 197. 13 Tacitus, Annals 15.45. For the view that the Christian message was ‘drenched in revolution and anarchy’, see John Bishop, Nero: The Man and the Legend, London, Robert Hale, 1964, p. 83; cf. G. B. Caird, The Apostolic Age, rev. edn, London, Duckworth, 1975, pp. 163–5; Christopher Rowlands, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism, London, SPCK, 1985, pp. 297–9. 14 On the possible earlier dating of Revelation to the ‘year of the four emperors’ (AD 69), see R. B. Moberly, ‘New Testament Chronology: Some Current Ideas’, Theology, vol. 97, no. 777 (May/June 1994), pp. 170–9. 15 For detailed discussions of the persecutions, see, e.g., W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus, Oxford, Blackwell, 1965; A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman Law Again’, Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 3 (1952), pp. 199–213, and ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? An Amendment’, Past and Present, vol. 27 (1964), repr. in M. I. Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 250–5; G. E. M. de Ste Croix, ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?’, Past and Present, vol. 26 (1963), pp. 28–33, repr. in Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society, pp. 210–49, and ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? A Rejoinder’, Past and Present, vol. 27 (1964), in Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society, pp. 256–62; cf. G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient World, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1981, pp. 435–9; Colin Wells, The Roman Empire, Glasgow, Fontana, 1984, pp. 128–9; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984, and ‘The Failure of the Persecutions in the Roman Empire’, Past and Present, no. 16 (1959), pp. 10–30, repr. in Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society, pp. 263–87; Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, New York, Dorset Press, 1986; T. Griffin, Nero: The End of a Dynasty, London, Batsford, 1984; for a special example of Stoics’ criticism of empire, and their association with the Christians in persecution, see Seneca (?), Octavia 836–43, as in Chester G. Starr, Civilization and the Caesars: The Intellectual Revolution in the Roman Empire, New York, Norton, 1965, pp. 117–18; Daniel Wm O’Connor, Peter in Rome: The Literary, Liturgical and Archaeological Evidence, New York, Columbia University Press, 1969, pp. 14–18; Martin Hengel, Christ and Power (trans. Everett R. Kalin), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1977, p. 42; Oscar Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament (trans. Shirley C. Guthrie and Charles A. M. Hall), 2nd edn, London, SCM Press, 1963, and The State in the New Testament, London, SCM Press, 1957; T. D. Barnes, ‘Legislation against the Christians’, Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 53 (1968), pp. 36–7; Michael Gough, The Early Christians, London, Thames and Hudson, 1961; Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1984, pp. 1–30; John Wacher, The Roman Empire, London, Dent, 1987; Anthony Birley, Marcus Aurelius: A Biography, rev. edn, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 55–7; Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 141–2; Frederick C. Klawiter, ‘The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity: A Case Study of Montanism’, Church History, vol. 49, no. 3 (Sept. 1980), pp. 251–61; The Epistle of the Gallican Churches, recorded by Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.1, as translated in Henry Bettenson (ed.), Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd edn, London, Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 12; Elaine Pagels, ‘Christian Apologists and “The Fall of the

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18 19

20 21

22

23 24

25 26

27 28 29

Angels”: An Attack on Roman Imperial Power?’, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 78, nos 3–4 (1985), pp. 301–25; P. A. Brunt, ‘Marcus Aurelius and the Christians’, in Carl Deroux (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History, Brussels, Collections Latomus, 1979–83, 1; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A, D. 100–400), New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1984, p. 13; Christopher J. Haas, ‘Imperial Religious Policy and Valerian’s Persecution of the Church, A. D. 257–60’, Church History, vol. 52, no. 2 (June 1983), pp. 133–4; A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, London, The English Universities Press, 1948, pp. 68–70. Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery, London, Batsford, 1985, p. 165. Jean Daniélou and Henri Marrou, The First Six Hundred Years (trans. Vincent Cronin), vol. 1 of The Christian Centuries, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1964, p. 115; cf. W. H. C. Frend, ‘Prelude to the Great Persecution: The Propaganda War’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 38, no. 1 (January, 1987), pp. 1–18, at p. 2: by 300 the ‘imperial authorities had no longer to deal with individuals belonging to an illegal religious sect, but with a vast, well-organised body and a potentially deadly rival to the authority of the “immortal gods” that watched over the empire’. Williams, Diocletian, and citing Tertullian, Apologeticum 50. Melito of Sardis, Apology, fragment recorded in Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 4.26, as quoted in Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, p. 287. Cf. Chadwick, Early Church, p. 71; Markus, Christianity in the Roman World, p. 29: Melito’s ‘approach provided the basis for an interpretation of Christianity as the imperial religion; it could be represented as replacing the multitude of cults of the warring cities and nations by the universal cult of the one, universal empire’. Origen, Contra Celsum 2.30 (trans. Henry Chadwick), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1953, p. 92. See Chadwick, ‘Philo’, chapter 8 of A. H. Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 137–57. Samuel Angus, The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World: A Study in the Historical Background of Early Christianity, London, Murray, 1929, p. 63; Angus quotes the Cambridge Platonist, Whichcote: ‘I oppose not rational to spiritual, for spiritual is most natural.’ Angus, Religious Quests, p. 67. A. H. Armstrong, ‘Greek Philosophy and Christianity’, in M. I. Finley (ed.), The Legacy of Greece, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 366, referring to Origen’s treatise, On First Principles; cf. Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press, 1961, pp. 129–30. Chadwick, Early Church, p. 75. Ibid., pp. 75–6; see Justin, 1 Apology 46; cf. W. H. C. Frend, Saints and Sinners in the Early Church, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, p. 61; Arthur J. Droge, ‘Justin Martyr and the Restoration of Philosophy’, Church History, vol. 56, no. 3 (Sept. 1987), pp. 303–19. Titus Flavius Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromateis 1.5, as translated in Henry Bettenson, The Early Christian Fathers, London, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 168. Armstrong, ‘Greek Philosophy and Christianity’, pp. 368–73. Cf. Ignatius of Antioch, who, awaiting a violent end as early as 107, ‘exalts the glories of the martyr’s death with a lyrical rapture’ (Maxwell Staniforth, Early Christian Writings: The

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36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

Apostolic Fathers, New York, Dorset Press, 1968, p. 102); and Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 4: ‘When there is no trace of my body left for the world to see, then I shall truly be Jesus Christ’s disciple. So intercede with Him for me, that by their instrumentality I may be made a sacrifice to God’ (trans. ibid., p. 104). Possibly in a prosecution speech. Fronto in Minucius Felix, Octavius 9.8, quoted in Birley, Marcus Aurelius, p. 112. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 100. Celsus in Origen, Contra Celsum 8.2 (trans. Chadwick, p. 454). Celsus in Origen, Contra Celsum 3.5 (trans. Chadwick, p. 131), emphasis added; cf. Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, pp. 94–125. Williams, Diocletian, pp. 153–4. On the proscriptions against it by Constantine and Theodosius, see Frend, ‘Prelude to the Great Persecution’, p. 11. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, p. 485 (my emphasis); cf. Frend, ‘Prelude to the Great Persecution’, pp. 9–12: in his later work Porphyry treated the person of Christ with respect, but from the outset ‘a wedge was being driven’ between Christ and his mistaken, superstitious followers; cf. Wilken, Christ as the Romans Saw Them, pp. 126–63. So Tertullian’s Apologeticum 30.1.4 invokes the aid of God for the emperors’ safety; cf. Tertullian, De idololatria 15: ‘we follow the apostolic injunction to submit to magistracies, principalities, and powers, but only within the limits of discipline; that is, so long as we keep ourselves clear of idolatry’, as quoted in C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, London, Oxford University Press, 1957, p. 228. Chadwick, Early Church, p. 91. Tertullian, Apologeticum 35.1, text edited by Jean-Pierre Waltzing with the collaboration of Albert Severyns, Paris, Société d’Edition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, pp. 74–5. Tertullian, Apologeticum 38.3: ‘nec ulla magis res aliena quam publica. Unam omnium rempublicam agnoscimus, mundum.’ Tertullian’s rejection of pagan culture can scarcely conceal his affinity to Stoic universalism. Cf. T. D. Barnes, ‘Tertullian the Antiquarian’, Studia patristica, 14 (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 117), Berlin, 1976, pp. 3–20, reproduced in Barnes, Early Christianity and the Roman Empire, London, Variorúm Reprints, 1984. Origen, Contra Celsum 3.30 (trans. Chadwick, p. 147). Origen, Contra Celsum 8.74 (trans. Chadwick, pp. 509–10); cf. the ‘parable of the pounds’, Luke 19.12–27. Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom 39 (trans. J. E. L. Oulton and H. Chadwick, Alexandrian Christianity (The Library of Christian Classics 2), London, SCM Press, 1954, p. 421). Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom 41 (trans. Oulton and Chadwick, pp. 422–3). Maurice Bévenot, ‘Introduction’ to Cyprian, De lapsis and De ecclesiae catholicae unitate, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, p. ix. Chadwick, Early Church, pp. 118–19. Cyprian, De lapsis 1; on his own flight, ‘not for his own justification but for the general peace of the brethren’, see Michael M. Sage, Cyprian, Cambridge, Mass., The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation (Patristic Monograph Series 1), 1975, p. 193, discussing Cyprian, Epistles 20. Sage, Cyprian, p. 235, on Cyprian, De lapsis 10–12.

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48 Cyprian, De lapsis 5 (trans. Bévenot, p. 9; emphasis in original). Cyprian’s final sentence in this passage has sometimes led to the belief that the persecution ‘was more humiliating than bloody, even if there were undoubtedly more martyrs than some modern historians like to admit’ (Sordi, Christians and the Roman Empire, p. 105); cf. Sage, Cyprian, pp. 184–5. 49 On the ‘charismatic’ nature of the Montanist schism, see an anonymous author in Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.16. 6.7 as quoted in Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, p. 290; cf. Klawiter, ‘The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution’. Tertullian became the Montanists’ most impressive convert. 50 Chadwick, Early Church, pp. 220–1. 51 W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952, pp. 316–18. 52 Tyconius in Beatus 507.15–33, as quoted and translated in Frend, Donatist Church, p. 317. 53 For the case that Constantine was not suddenly ‘converted’, but grew in Christianity, see Thomas G. Elliott, ‘Constantine’s Early Religious Development’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 15, no. 3 (1989), pp. 283–91. 54 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 10.9; Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 48.2–6. 55 MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, p. 49, and quoting Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 10.6.1–2. The ‘fiscus’ was soon greatly increased by confiscations of precious metal artefacts from the pagan temples. 56 Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, Oxford, Blackwell, 1987, p. 38. For a time the emperors continued to be deified, or at least called ‘divine’ (divus) after death. 57 Ibid.; Eusebius records how Constantine once called himself a ‘bishop’ – episcopos or ‘overseer’ – of those outside the church (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 4.24). See Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, p. 270. 58 Eusebius, Vita Costantini 3.15.2, as quoted in G. W. Bowersock, ‘From Emperor to Bishop’, Classical Philology, vol. 81 (1986), p. 301: ‘It felt as if we were imagining a picture of the Kingdom of Christ and that what was happening was no reality but a dream.’ As Bowersock suggests, ‘A Christological mythology had replaced the pagan one, but its function was, at this stage, essentially the same.’ Cf. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, pp. 208–23. 59 Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, p. 236. 60 Augustine, City of God 5.26. 61 Hengel, Christ and Power, p. 58. 62 Codex Theodosianus 7.18.2, cited in Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, pp. 319–20. 63 Codex Theodosianus 16.1.2, cited in Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 327; cf. Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, London, Methuen, 1974, pp. 9–10. 64 Cf. Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 4th edn, London, Methuen, 1978, pp. 136–7. 65 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, pp. 336–7. 66 Wilhelm Ensslin, Die Religionspolitik des Kaisers Theodosius d. Gr., Munich, Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1953, p. 72: ‘Ambrosius . . . erkannte seine Gottesfurcht und seinen Glaubenseifer an.’ 67 Sozomen, Historica ecclesiastica 5.25, cited in Ensslin, Religionspolitik, p. 68. 68 Frend, Rise of Christianity, p. 625; cf. Ensslin, Religionspolitik, p. 74: ‘Theodosius, der in jedem Falle seine Christenpflicht ernst zu nehmen gewillt war und sich an Gottes Gebot

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71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81

82 83 84

85 86

gebunden fühlte, unterwarf sich dem Bischof, dem die Vollgewalt der christlichen Satzungen anvertraut war.’ Ambrose, Epistles 51.13 (trans. S. L. Greenslade), Early Latin Theology, London, SCM Press, 1956, p. 257. Ambrose, De obitu Theodosii 27, later wrote that Theodosius, by following Christ’s example of humility, had attained to the peace of Christ. See Ensslin, Religionspolitik, p. 74. Pope Gelasius, epistle 26, recalled how Ambrose ‘had forced the royal power to penitence’: ‘beatae memoriae Ambrosius maiorem Theodosium imperatorem a communione publice palamque suspendit atque ad poenitentiam redegit regiam potestatem’; quoted in Ensslin, Religionspolitik, p. 75. Theodosius’ submission was followed by a succession of anti-pagan laws, promulgated under Ambrose’s politico-religious influence. Bowersock, ‘From Emperor to Bishop’, p. 306. Augustine, City of God 4.5. Summed up in the Codex Theodosianus 16.2. For samples of the range of anti-pagan legislation, see, e.g., Brian Croke and Jill Harries, Religious Conflict in Fourth-Century Rome: A Documentary Study, Sydney, Sydney University Press, 1982, pp. 16–27. See Frend, Donatist Church, pp. 325–8. Tyconius, quoted in Frend, Donatist Church, p. 326; cf. Frend, Saints and Sinners in the Early Church, p. 106; Christopher Kirwan, Augustine, London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 209–18. Danielou and Marrou, First Six Hundred Years, p. 271. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 344; cf. St Jerome’s attack on family life in his Letter to Heliodorus (letter 14). H. Daniel-Rops, The Church in the Dark Ages (trans. Audrey Butler), London, Dent, 1959, p. 136. Chadwick, Early Church, p. 188. For one of the most celebrated controversies during Augustine’s lifetime (in 382), when, under the influence of Augustine’s own mentor, Ambrose, the emperor Gratian removed the Altar of Victory from the Roman senate house, see Croke and Harries, Religious Conflict in Fourth-Century Rome, pp. 28–51. At the time, however, Augustine, not yet a Christian, was the protégé of Ambrose’s opponent in the controversy, Symmachus. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippoi London, Faber and Faber, 1967, p. 304; cf. Ernest L. Fortin, ‘Augustine and Roman Civil Religion: Some Critical Reflections’, Revue des études augustiniennes, vol. 26 (1980), pp. 238–56. Avihu Zakai and Anya Mali, ‘Time, History and Eschatology: Ecclesiastical History from Eusebius to Augustine’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 17, no. 4 (Dec. 1993), pp. 393–417. See especially H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4th edn, Paris, E. de Boccard, 1958. James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 10–12; Augustine, City of God 8.5; De vera religione 7: ‘If these men could have had this life over again with us . . . They would have become Christians’, in Bettenson, City of God, p. 304, n. 10. Porphyry, of course, was an explicit critic of Christianity; cf. Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, pp. 151–4. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, pp. 424–5. Ibid., pp. 428–36; cf. Colin Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 43, no. 1 (1990), pp. 33–58, where it is suggested that Augustine really failed to understand the ‘interpersonality’ of the Trinity (at p. 56);

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87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97

98 99 100

101

102 103

cf. Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark, 1991, pp. 31–57; Todd H. Speidell, ‘A Trinitarian Ontology of Persons in Society’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 47, no. 3 (1994), pp. 283–300; Gerard Loughlin, ‘Writing the Trinity’, Theology, vol. 97, no. 776 (Mar./Apr. 1994), pp. 82–9; but see also Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, pp. 41–3. Cf. Henry Chadwick, Augustine, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 4–11. For Augustine’s early Platonism, see F. Edward Cranz, ‘The Development of Augustine’s Ideas on Society before the Donatist Controversy’, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 47 (1954), pp. 255–316. So Origen, Eusebius, Prudentius, Orosius. See R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 157–62. Augustine, City of God 2.21 (trans. Bettenson, p. 72); cf. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, pp. 311– 12. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, pp. 460–8. Ibid., p. 473. Augustine, City of God 12.18 (trans. Bettenson, p. 494). Augustine, City of God 12.14. Cf. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (trans J. E. Anderson), New York, Herder and Herder, 1972. John Neville Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s ‘City of God’, London, Longman, Green, 1921, pp. 34–5. The spirit of the Christian interpretation of history may be traced to Ephesians 3.10–11. See, e.g., Francis Foulkes, The Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians: An Introduction and Commentary, Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, and Leicester, Inter-Varsity Press, 1988, pp. 98–9; C. H. Dodd, The Meaning of Paul for To-Day, London, Allen and Unwin, 1920, pp. 30–41. Augustine, City of God 11.6. Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 124; cf. John Baillie, The Belief in Progress, London, Oxford University Press, 1950, pp. 74–83; Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History, London, Collins, 1957, pp. 9–18; Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History, London, Nisbet, 1949, p. 74; Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (trans. L. E. M. Lynch), New York, Octagon Books, 1988, pp. 175–6. Aristotle, Politics 5.11 (1313a18–1315b10). Augustine, Epistolae 138.1.5, as translated in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, pp. 317–18. A. D. Lindsay, Religion, Science and Society in the Modern World, London, Oxford University Press, 1943, p. 12. Yet Augustine set his face firmly against a ‘Christian idea of progress’ conceived of as material improvement. See Theodore E. Mommsen, ‘St Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 12 (1951), pp. 346–74. Markus, Saeculum, p. 167; cf. p. 100; Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 324: ‘So the City of God, far from being a book about flight from the world, is a book whose recurrent theme is “our business within this common mortal life” (City of God, 15.21.15); it is a book about being other-worldly in the world.’ On the influence of the Stoics as ‘master strategists in the struggle to maintain the uneasy alliance between beatitude and temporal commitments’, see Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue, pp. 46–9. Augustine, City of God 18.1.3. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 323, uses the analogy of Augustine’s own stay in Milan, where he was so nearly ‘absorbed’ by the distractions of an attractive secular world. Cf.

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104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120

121

122

123

124 125 126 127 128

Augustine, City of God 19.14: ‘Sed in domo iusti viventis ex fide et adhuc ab illa caelesti civitate peregrinantis etiam qui imperant serviunt eis quibus videntur imperare’ (‘In the home of the just person who lives by faith as a resident alien from the city of heaven, even those in command serve those whom they appear to rule’). Augustine, City of God 19.14. Cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 11.15.20, as cited in Markus, Saeculum, p. 60. Augustine, Confessions 10.29–41. Augustine, Contra Julianum 5.7.26, as translated in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 327. Norman H. Baynes, The Political Ideas of St Augustine’s ‘De Civitate Dei’, rev. edn, London, The Historical Association, 1968 (Pamphlet no. 104 First Series), p. 6. Figgis, Political Aspects, p. 30; cf. Markus, Saeculum, p. 105. Augustine, City of God 19.11 (trans. Bettenson, p. 866). Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1 (trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin), Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1961, p. 21. Augustine, City of God 19.13 (trans. Bettenson, p. 870); cf. Markus, Saeculum, pp. 82–3. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 486; cf. James H. Toner, The Sword and the Cross: Reflections on Command and Conscience, New York, Praeger, 1992, pp. 66–8. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus 19.31 (trans. Markus, Saeculum, p. 45). Ibid.; cf. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 306. Cf. Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 16–17; cf. E. J. Hundert, ‘Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self’, Political Theory, vol. 20, no. 1 (1992), pp. 86–104. Augustine, Confessions 10.8 (trans. Pine-Coffin, p. 216). Peter Brown, ‘Saint Augustine’, in Beryl Smalley (ed.), Trends in Medieval Political Thought, Oxford, Blackwell, 1965, p. 4. Augustine, Confessions 10.32 (trans. Pine-Coffin, p. 237). Against the widespread view, popularized largely by C. H. McIlwain and George H. Sabine, that Augustine advocated a ‘Christian commonwealth’, see especially Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St Augustine, New York, Columbia University Press, 1963, pp. 120–38. Augustine, City of God 4.4; cf. Elaine Pagels, ‘The Politics of Paradise: Augustine’s Exegesis of Genesis 1–3 versus that of John Chrysostom’, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 78, nos. 1–2 (1985), pp. 67–99. Cicero, De re publica 1.39: ‘Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus.’ Augustine, City of God 2.21 (trans. Bettenson, p. 75), and quoting Psalm 87.5; cf. Anthony J. Parel, ‘Justice and Love in the Political Thought of St Augustine’, in H. A. Meynell (ed.), Grace, Politics and Desire: Essays on Augustine, Calgary, Alberta, University of Calgary Press, 1990, pp. 71–84. Romans 13.1–5; cf. John 19.11. Deane, Political and Social Ideas, p. 144. Augustine, City of God 19.24: ‘Populus est coetus multitudinis rationalis, rerum quae diligit concordi communione sociatus.’ Figgis, Political Aspects, p. 61; Kirwan, Augustine, pp. 218–20. Augustine, City of God 1, ‘Preface’ (trans. Bettenson, p. 5).

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129 Markus, Saeculum, p. 45, quoting Augustine, De vera religione 27.50. 130 Augustine explains (City of God 15.17) that Cain’s ‘original’ sin was the arousal of his carnal desire. The tension between the material and the spiritual is evident. 131 Augustine, City of God 15.5. 132 Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus 19.31, quoted in Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 488. 133 Augustine, City of God 1.35 (trans. Bettenson, p. 46). 134 Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 319. 135 Augustine, City of God 10.12; cf. Gilson, Christian Philosophy of Augustine, pp. 171–84. 136 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 512. 137 Augustine, City of God 19.17 (trans. Bettenson, p. 878; emphasis added); cf. Fortin, ‘The Political Implications of Augustine’s Theory of Conscience’, Augustinian Studies, vol. 1 (1970), pp. 133–52, on the universality that human life acquires from the recognition of conscience. 138 Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture. 139 Figgis, Political Aspects, p. 38; City of God 19 has been viewed as ‘a general theory of society’. See Oliver O’Donovan, ‘Augustine’s City of God XIX and Western Political Thought’, Dionysius, vol. 11 (1987), pp. 89–110. 140 Markus, Saeculum, pp. 166–77. 141 Ibid., p. 168. 142 Cf. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 319: ‘“Prophetic” history, as Augustine had known it, could skip the centuries, by concentrating on the few oases of significance; the “unfolding course” of the two cities, by contrast, ran through every age.’ 143 Markus, Saeculum, p. 171; cf. Ernest Fortin, ‘Is Liberal Democracy Really Christian?’, Free Enquiry, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 32–6. 144 Markus, Saeculum, p. 172. 4 THE TWO KINGDOMS: REFORMATION SEPARATISM 1 Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne 24; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Excellent Empire: The Fall of Rome and the Triumph of the Church, San Francisco, Calif., Harper and Row, 1987, p. 103; cf. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The Via Regia of the Carolingian Age’, in Beryl Smalley (ed.), Trends in Medieval Political Thought, Oxford, Blackwell, 1965, pp. 22–41. 2 Augustine, City of God 5.24–6. 3 James Bryce, quoted in J. N. Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s ‘City of God’, London, Longman Green, 1921, p. 84; cf. Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages (trans. S. B. Chrimes), Oxford, Blackwell, 1948, p. 53. 4 Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 102–3. 5 Leo, Epistle 162, speaking of the solidity of the rock on which the City of God is built: ‘a solidate illius petrae supra quam civitas Dei aedificatur’, quoted in Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, London, Methuen, 1955, p. 12. Ullmann cites a further direct quotation of Augustine by Leo. 6 Ullmann, Papal Government, p. 41. 7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, 1, qu. 21, art. 1; see Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 4th edn, London, Methuen, 1978, pp. 246–7; cf. Philippe de

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8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

Mazières (?), Somnium Viridarii (1376?) 2, c. 116: ‘Deus duas iurisdictiones distinxit, duos populos, duas vitas, duo genera militum’, quoted in Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age (trans. F. W. Maitland), Boston, Mass., Beacon Press, 1958, p. 119. On the resemblances between Augustine and Aquinas, see Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Augustine (trans. L. E. M. Lynch), New York, Octagon, 1988. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, pp. 16–18; on the Platonic impetus for the search for universals, see Michael Haren, Medieval Thought: The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the 13th Century, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 90–4. J. B. Morrall, The Medieval Imprint, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1970, p. 72; cf. J. B. Morrall, Political Thought of the Middle Ages, 3rd edn, London, Hutchinson, 1971, p. 21. Augustine, City of God 20.9 (trans. Henry Bettenson), Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1972, p. 915. Herrin, Formation of Christendom, p. 480. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London, Verso, 1978, p. 131. Herrin, Formation of Christendom, p. 105. Walter Ullmann, ‘The Bible and Principles of Government in the Middle Ages’, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’ alto medioevo 10 (Spoleto, 1963), repr. in The Church and the Law in the Earlier Middle Ages, London, Variorum Reprints; A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, London, Methuen, 1972; ‘The Papacy as an Institution of Government in the Middle Ages’, Studies in Church History 2, London, 1965, repr. in his The Papacy and Political Ideas in the Middle Ages, London, Variorum Reprints, 1976, pp. 78– 101; A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, rev. edn, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1970; The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship, London, Methuen, 1969; Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975. Sidney Painter, Feudalism and Liberty: Articles and Addresses (ed. Fred A. Cazel Jr), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961, pp. 267–72. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Via Regis’, p. 26; in the previous century St Isidore of Seville had distinguished Christian kingship as that characterized by moderation, justice and clemency. See, e.g., Herrin, Formation of Christendom, p. 237. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, London, Macmillan, 1981; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West, 3rd edn, London, Hutchinson, 1967. Ibid., emphasis added; cf. Ullmann, Law and Politics, pp. 196–7. Aquinas, De regimine principum 1.6 (trans. J. G. Dawson) in A. P. D’Entrèves (ed.), Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, Oxford, Blackwell, 1970, p. 33. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, p. 141, n. 123. Aquinas, De regimine principum 1.14. William of Ockham, Octo quaestiones 3.8, cited in A. S. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 115. Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, qu. 17, art. 5, cited in Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966, p. 126. Wallace-Hadrill, Barbarian West, pp. 104–5. F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism (trans. Philip Grierson), 3rd edn, London, Longman, 1964, pp. 32–6.

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26 Herrin, Formation of Christendom, p. 477; cf. the notion of the ‘peace and truce of God’, Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (trans. L. A. Manyon), 2nd edn, 2 vols, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, vol. 2, pp. 412–20. 27 Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1, p. 86; emphasis added. 28 Cf. McGrade, Ockham, pp. 85–96. 29 Brian Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150–1650, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 14. Cf. Alan Harding, ‘Political Liberty in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, vol. 55, no.3 (1980), pp. 423–43. 30 Huguccio, Summa ad C, 24.9.1.c.9, as quoted and translated in Tierney, Religion, Law and Constitutional Thought, p. 15. 31 Tierney, Religion, Law and Constitutional Thought, p. 42, quoting Bonaventure, De perfectione evangelica 4.3. 32 Azo, Summa codicis 8.53.6, quoted in R. W. and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Thought in the West, 6 vols, London, 1903–36, vol. 2, p. 64. 33 John of Paris, De potestate regia et papali 7, as cited in Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics, p. 265; Janet Coleman, ‘The Dominican Political Theory of John of Paris in its Context’, in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and Sovereignty c. 590–1918, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, pp. 187–224, esp. pp. 206–19. 34 Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the later Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963, p. 484, quoting John of Paris, De potestate regia et papali 24–5. 35 Tierney, Religion, Law and Constitutional Thought, p. 69; cf. Brian Tierney, ‘“Divided Sovereignty” at Constance: A Problem of Medieval and Early Modern Political Theory’, in his Church Law and Constitutional Thought in the Middle Ages, London, Variorum Reprints, 1979; Coleman, ‘Dominican Political Theory of John of Paris’. 36 J. N. Figgis, Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625, New York, Harper, 1960 (1907), pp. 65–7. 37 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, vol. 2, p. 41; cf. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1957, pp. 197–206. 38 Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, p. 47; cf. Tierney, Religion, Law and Constitutional Thought, p. 66. 39 For the religious conceptual apparatus of Rousseau’s contract, evidently influenced by Luther and Calvin, see Joshua Mitchell, ‘The Equality of All under the One in Luther and Rousseau: Thoughts on Christianity and Political Theory’, Journal of Religion, vol. 72, no. 3 (1992), pp. 351–65, at pp. 361–3. 40 See, e.g., Harvey C. Mansfield Jr, ‘Modern and Medieval Representation’, in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds), Representation (Nomos X), New York, Atherton Press, 1968, pp. 229–56, at p. 80: ‘according to the modern conception, the people are a whole having no ruling part. Everyone belongs to the people. The people themselves are not a ruling part, and they cannot be divided into ruling and ruled parts.’ 41 See Tierney, Religion, Law and Constitutional Thought, pp. 26, 91. 42 Justinian, Corpus iuris civilis 5.59.5.2. See Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1964, pp. 165–80. 43 Tierney, Religion, Law and Constitutional Thought, p. 70.

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44 Bartolus de Sassoferato, Commentarii ad digest 1.4.1. See Walter Ullmann, ‘De Bartoli Sententia: Concilium Repraesentat Mentem Populi’, in his The Papacy and Political Ideas in the Middle Ages, London, Variorum Reprints, 1976. 45 Ullmann, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, p. 110. 46 Marsilius (Marsiglio) of Padua, The Defender of Peace 2.4.4 (trans. Alan Gewirth), New York, Harper and Row, 1967, p. 115. 47 Marsilius, Defender of Peace 2.4.5–6 (trans. Gewirth, pp. 115–17). 48 Marsilius, Defender of Peace 2.4.7 (trans. Gewirth, pp. 117–18). 49 Marsilius, Defender of Peace 2.5.4. 50 Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, p. 19. 51 J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings, New York, Harper and Row, 1965 (1896); for the special antipathy between Germany and Rome, see Barraclough, Origins of Modern Germany, p. 259; Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1964, pp. 63–73; Roland H. Bainton, The Age of the Reformation, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1956, pp. 20–3. During the conciliar period Nicholas of Cusa had emphasized the virtues of the German people, and subsequent authors like Jacob Wimpfeling compiled the epitome of Germany’s great cultural attainments; see A. G. Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther, Glasgow, Collins, 1976, pp. 6–29; cf. Norman Sykes, The Crisis of the Reformation, New York, Norton, 1967, pp. 9–26. 52 Gerhard Ritter, ‘Why the Reformation Occurred in Germany’ (trans. G. H. Nadel), Church History, vol. 27 (1958), pp. 99–106. 53 Bainton, Age of Reformation, pp. 20–1. 54 Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought (trans. R. A. Wilson), Glasgow, Collins, 1972, p. 39. 55 Works of Luther (Weimarer Ausgabe), vol. 54, from pp. 179–87, as quoted in translation in Gordon Rupp, Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms, New York, Harper and Row, 1964, p. 33. For Luther’s preoccupation with St Augustine’s conversion, see Erik H. Erickson, Young Man Luther, New York, Norton, 1958, pp. 203–4. 56 Sykes, Crisis of Reformation, p. 29. On the anti-Pelagian assertion of grace in Augustine, so influential on the Wittenberg Reformation, see Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, Oxford, Blackwell, 1987, pp. 171–81. 57 J. W. Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1928, pp. 15–30. 58 Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, pp. 80–1; Figgis’s view is vehemently denied in Allen, Political Thought, p. 29: ‘Luther connects no more with Bodin than he does with Machiavelli.’ 59 Luther, ‘Marriage’, from The Pagan Servitude of the Church, in Bertram Lee Woolf (ed.), Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, 2 vols, London, Lutterworth, 1952, vol. 1, p. 298. 60 Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God: Luther Studies, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1953, p. 289; cf. Allen, Political Thought, p. 28. 61 Skinner, Foundations of Political Thought, vol. 2, p. 7; Peter Matheson, ‘Humanism and Reform Movements’, in Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay (eds), The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, London, Longman, 1990, pp. 35–9. 62 Ebeling, Luther, p. 62; cf. Matheson, ‘Humanism and Reform Movements’, p. 23. 63 Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (trans. Charles M. Jacobs), in Luther’s Works, vol. 44 (ed. James Atkinson), Philadelphia, Pa, 1966, p. 200, as quoted in Skinner, Foundations of Political Thought, vol. 2, p. 16.

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64 Rupert E. Davies, The Problem of Authority in the Continental Reformers, London, Epworth Press, 1946, p. 18. 65 Cf. Ebeling, Luther, p. 259. 66 Ockham, III Dialogues II, 2, 4, fol. 248va, as quoted and translated in McGrade, Political Thought of Ockham, p. 134. 67 W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, The Political Thought of Martin Luther, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1984, p. 43. 68 Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, p. 32. 69 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, pp. 63, 67–8. 70 Luther, Postil for Epiphany, on Isaiah 60, 1–6, as quoted in B. A. Gerrish, ‘Luther’s Belief in Reason’, pp. 10–27 in his Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, repr. in H. G. Koenigsberger (ed.), Luther: A Profile, London, Macmillan, 1973, p. 198. 71 Rupp, Righteousness of God, p. 296. 72 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, pp. 97–8. On Luther’s advice to princes, and on the contrast between him and Machiavelli, see H. G. Haile, Luther: An Experiment in Biography, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 93–105. 73 As quoted and translated in Rupp, Righteousness of God, p. 297. 74 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, pp. 114–15. 75 Ibid., p. 21. 76 Quoted and translated in Rupp, Righteousness of God, p. 292. 77 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, p. 49. 78 Ibid., p. 47. 79 Ibid., p. 78. 80 As quoted and translated in Ebeling, Luther (trans. Wilson), p. 177. 81 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, p. 49. 82 Ibid., p. 47; James Arne Nestingen, ‘Challenges and Responses in the Reformation’, Interpretation, vol. 46, no. 3 (July 1992), pp. 250–60, where Luther is characterized as having drunk beer while the Word reformed the church. Nestingen cites Robin Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalyptic in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 4. 83 Ibid., p. 78. 84 Rupp, Luther’s Progress to Worms, pp. 51–2. 85 The bull Unigenitus of Clement IV, quoted ibid. 86 H. Daniel-Rops, The Protestant Reformation (trans. Audrey Butler), London, Dent, 1961, pp. 276–7; cf. Rupp, Luther’s Progress to Worms. 87 ‘The Ninety-five Theses, October, 1517’, translated in Gordon Rupp and Benjamin Drewery (eds), Martin Luther (Documents of Modern History), London, Edward Arnold, 1970, pp. 19–25. 88 Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 145. 89 Luther, ‘The Lord’s Supper’, from The Pagan Servitude of the Church, in Woolf (ed.), Reformation Writings of Martin Luther, vol. 1, pp. 223–4. 90 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, p. 123. 91 Luther, ‘On the Councils and the Churches’, quoted in William A. Mueller, Church and State in Luther and Calvin, Nashville, Tenn., Broadman Press, 1954, pp. 12–13.

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92 Luther had eventually to concede the necessity of some kind of church law for the new Protestant churches. See Gerhard Ritter, ‘The Founder of the Evangelical Churches’, from his Luther: His Life and Work (trans. John Riches), London, Collins, 1963, repr. in Koenigsberger, Luther: A Profile, pp. 78–82. 93 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, p. 135; cf. Randall C. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1993. 94 At times Luther consciously associated himself with the conciliar movement and appealed to the authority of church councils at crucial moments at the beginning of the Reformation. See Skinner, Foundations of Political Thought, vol. 2, p. 47. 95 Luther, quoted in Ebeling, Luther (trans. Wilson), pp. 175–6. 96 Luther, quoted and translated in Mueller, Church and State, p. 24. 97 Ebeling, Luther, p. 174. 98 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (trans. Talcott Parsons), London, Allen and Unwin, 1985, pp. 105–6. 99 Carl J. Friedrich, Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1963, pp. 114–15; emphasis in original. 100 Steven Lukes, Individualism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1973, p. 46; cf. G. R. Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 216–19. For the influence of Lutheran individualism on literature, see, e.g., Alan Sandison, George Orwell: After 1984, Dover, Longwood Academic, 1986, pp. 1–7. 101 Herman Finer, The Theory and Practice of Modern Government, 4th edn, London, Methuen, 1961, p. 71. For the immeasurable political consequences of this outlook, see especially Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 3rd edn, London, Hutchinson, 1966, pp. 20–31. 102 Cf. Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984, p. 112. 103 Louis Blanc, Histoire de la Révolution français (1826), as quoted and translated in Lukes, Individualism, p. 11. 104 R. N. Berki, On Political Realism, London, Dent, 1981, pp. 65–6. 105 Finer, Theory and Practice of Modern Government. 106 Luther, Appeal to the Ruling Class, in Woolf (ed.), Reformation Writings, vol. 1, p. 110. 107 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, p. 13. 108 Luther, Christian Liberty (or The Freedom of a Christian) (trans. W. A. Lambert), in Harold J. Grimm (ed.), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1982, p. 7. 109 Luther, On Governmental Authority (1523), as translated and quoted in Hans J. Hillerbrand (ed.) The Protestant Reformation, New York, Harper and Row, 1968, p. 47. 110 Harold J. Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism, London, Allen and Unwin, 1936, p. 24. 111 Waring was long ago insistent that Luther placed limitations on the authority of the secular state; see Luther Hess Waring, The Political Theories of Martin Luther, New York, Putnam’s Sons, 1910, pp. 232–61. 112 Luther, in Rupp, Righteousness of God, pp. 304–5. 113 Cargill Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, pp. 88–9. 114 Cf. Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 21, 30. 115 Luther, On Governmental Authority, as quoted and translated in Rupp, Righteousness of God, p. 304. 116 Rupp, Righteousness of God.

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117 Laski, Rise of European Liberalism, p. 23; and as Hegel famously wrote: ‘This is the essence of the Reformation: Man is in his very nature destined to be free’ (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (trans. J. Sibree), New York, Dover Publications, 1956, p. 417). 118 See especially the study of Luther’s contemporary Andrew Karlstadt as ‘the champion of St Augustine’, in Gordon Rupp, Patterns of Reformation, London, Epworth Press, 1969, pp. 55–63. 119 Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1975, pp. 31–6. 120 Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work (trans. Robert C. Schultz), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1986, pp. 193–8. 121 Ebeling, Luther, p. 99; emphasis added. 122 Laski, Rise of European Liberalism, pp. 44–6. 123 Arblaster, Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism, p. 110. 124 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, pp. 166–7. 125 Luther, in Ebeling, Luther, p. 67; cf. C. Trinkaus, ‘The Religious Foundations of Luther’s Social Views’, in The Scope of Renaissance Humanism, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1983, pp. 302–16. 126 Ebeling, Luther, p. 67. 127 Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, p. 47. 128 Ebeling, Luther, p. 176; cf. Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 153, who sees the church society as the dialectical antithesis of coercive temporal government. 5 CALVINISM AND DEMOCRACY: THE GROWTH OF OPPOSITIONAL POLITICS 1 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.19.15 (trans. Ford Lewis Battles from the 1559 Latin text but with reference to earlier editions) (Library of Christian Classics 20), London, SCM Press, 1961, vol. 1, p. 847. For an appreciation of the ‘cataclysmic’ nature of the French Reformation, issuing in an ‘upside-down’ world, see Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 13–26. 2 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Boston, Mass., Little Brown, 1960, pp. 167–8. 3 J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1957, pp. 68–9. 4 John T. McNeill, ‘The Democratic Element in Calvin’s Thought’, Church History, vol. 18 (1949), pp. 153–71. 5 Calvin was strengthened in his anti-monarchic stance by the work of Bucer in Strasbourg. See Hans Baron, ‘Calvinist Republicanism and its Historical Roots’, Church History, vol. 8 (1939), pp. 30–42. 6 For the extent of Calvin’s doctrinal debts to Augustine, see, e.g., François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of his Religious Thought (trans. Philip Mairet), London, Collins, 1963, pp. 124–5; cf. G. R. Potter, ‘Zwingli and Calvin’, in Joel Hurstfield (ed.), The Reformation Crisis, London, Edward Arnold, 1965: ‘After the Bible, Calvin relied on the

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7 8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

writings of St Augustine, especially his controversial works against the Pelagians.’ Cf. McNeill, ‘Introduction’ to Calvin’s Institutes, pp. lvii–lix. There are, in fact, over seventeen hundred references to Augustine in Calvin. See, e.g., Irena Backus, ‘Calvin’s Judgment of Eusebius of Caesarea’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 22, no. 3 (1991), p. 423. Calvin, Institutes, Preface (trans. Battles, p. 12). A. Dakin, Calvinism, London, Duckworth, 1949, pp. 29–43; in that magistrates are constituted by a ‘divine authority’ and are charged with providing ‘a public manifestation of religion’, government may in some sense be seen as noble. See Ralph C. Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989, pp. 29–32; and see Calvin, Institutes 4.20.3–4. A. D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State, London, Oxford University Press, 1943, pp. 87–9; cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History, London, Nisbet, 1949, pp. 231–4; Hancock, Calvin and Modern Politics, p. 27. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics, New York, Atheneum, 1968, pp. 27–8. Calvin shares with Aquinas an admiration for Aristotle’s mixed polity; see, e.g., John C. Bennett, Christians and the State, New York, Scribner’s, 1958, pp. 146–7. Calvin, Institutes 2.2.13. Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 168. Wolin cites P. Imbart de la Tour on the ‘liquidation of the Reformation’ (Les Origines de la Réformation, 4 vols, Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1906–35, vol. 4, p. 53). At the same time, Calvin insists on a radical disjunction between the temporal and spiritual world which ‘implies not extreme otherworldliness but on the contrary, the rejection of otherworldliness in favour of a spiritual commitment to this world’ (Hancock, Calvin and Modern Politics, p. 20). William A. Mueller, Church and State in Luther and Calvin, Nashville, Tenn., Broadman Press, 1954, p. 76. Mueller, Church and State, p. 142. Calvin, Institutes 4.20.3 (trans. Battles, p. 1488). Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, pp. 30–1. Calvin, Institutes 4.20.8 (trans. Battles, pp. 1494–5). Mueller, Church and State, p. 133. Calvin, Institues 4.20.1 (trans. Battles, p. 1485). Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, vol. 2, p. 193. Allen, History of Political Thought, pp. 67–9. Wolin, Politics and Vision, pp. 176–7. Calvin, Institutes 4.20.16 (trans. Battles, p. 1504); cf. Calvin, Commentary on Psalms 119.52: ‘The written law is just an attestation of the law of nature, through means of which God recalls to our memory that which he has previously engraved on our hearts’, as quoted in Winthrop Hudson, ‘Democratic Freedom and Religious Faith in the Reformed Tradition’, Church History, vol. 15 (1946), pp. 177–94, at p. 182. Dakin, Calvinism, p. 221; Carl Friedrich, Constitutional Reasons of State: The Survival of the Constitutional Order, Providence, RI, Brown University Press, 1957, pp. 57–8. Mueller, Church and State, p. 129. Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, pp. 59–60. Mueller, Church and State, p. 154.

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29 Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present, London, Methuen, 1984, pp. 132–8, and quoting, at p. 133, Althusius, Politica methodice digesta 15–16. 30 Friedrich, Constitutional Reasons of State, pp. 68–73; cf. Carl Friedrich, Transcendent Justice: The Religious Dimension of Constitutionalism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1964, p. 60, where the Decalogue is seen to be more influential in Calvinism than in Aquinian Catholicism. 31 Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, pp. 60–3. 32 Hudson, ‘Democratic Freedom and Religious Faith’, p. 178. Hudson concludes that ‘this fact scarcely makes the Reformers the spiritual parents of modern democracy’ but that the formation of religious minorities ‘prepared the way for democracy’ (ibid.). Hudson was writing in a tradition of democratic theory which had apparently not yet appreciated the centrality of opposition to democracy. 33 Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, p. 64. 34 McNeill, ‘The Democratic Element in Calvin’s Thought’, p. 162. 35 Calvin, Institutes 4.20.31 (trans. Battles, p. 1519). Quentin Skinner is prepared to interpret Calvin as here investing the lesser magistrates with authority derived from the people as their representatives (Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, pp. 231–3). 36 Calvin, Commentary on Daniel (1561), lecture 30, on Daniel 6.22, as quoted by McNeill in Calvin’s Institutes (trans. Battles, p. 1519 n. 54). 37 Norman Sykes, The Crisis of the Reformation, New York, Norton, 1967, pp. 49–51; Ulrich Gäbler, Huldrych Zwingli: His Life and Work (trans. Ruth C. L. Gritsch), Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1986. See Potter, ‘Zwingli and Calvin’, pp. 35–6; Zwingli’s writings in Zwingli and Bullinger (Library of Christian Classics 24), London, SCM Press, 1953, pp. 186–7; cf. W. P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to his Thought, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 76–84.. 38 H. Daniel-Rops, The Protestant Reformation (trans. Audrey Butler), London, Dent, 1961, pp. 334–5: ‘every believer was able to invent his own theology’. 39 Gäbler, Huldrych Zwingli, pp. 49–52. 40 Ibid., pp. 86–7; Stephens, Zwingli, pp. 120–2. 41 J. Wayne Baker, ‘Church, State and Dissent: The Crisis of the Swiss Reformation 1531– 1536’, Church History, vol. 57, no. 2 (June 1988), pp. 135–52, at p. 137; Bullinger, ‘Of the Holy Catholic Church’, in Zwingli and Bullinger, pp. 321–5; cf. Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition, Louisville, Ky, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991; David A. Weir, The Origins of the Federal Theology in Sixteenth-Century Reformation Thought, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990; Stephen Strehle, Calvin, Federalism and Scholasticism: A Study of the Reformed Doctrine of the Covenant, Bern, Peter Lang, 1988, pp. 134–56. 42 Hans Baron, ‘Calvinist Republicanism’, pp. 36–8; cf. Amy Nelson Burnett, ‘Church Discipline and Moral Reformation in the Thought of Martin Bucer’, Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 22, no. 3 (1991), pp. 439–56; Wilhelm Pauck, From Luther to Tillich, San Francisco, Calif., Harper and Row, 1984, pp. 11–20; Lorna Jane Albray, The People’s Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy and Commons in Strasbourg 1500–1598, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, pp. 186–227 passim; Martin Bucer, ‘Poor Relief’, in De regno Christi (1550), in Wilhelm Pauck (ed.), Melanchthon and Bucer, London, SCM Press, 1959, pp. 306–15; Peter Newman Brooks, ‘Martin Bucer: Oecuméniste and Forgotten Reformer’, Expository Times,

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46

47

48

49

50

51 52 53 54

55 56

57

vol. 103, no. 8 (May 1992), pp. 231–5; Patrick Collinson, ‘The Reformer and the Archbishop: Martin Bucer and an English Bucerian’, in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism, London, The Hambledon Press, 1983, pp. 19–44. Roland H. Bainton, The Age of the Reformation, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1956, p. 173. Knox, A Comfortable Epistle to the Afflicted Churches of Christ (1554), quoted in Ridley, Knox, p. 183. J. D. Mackie, John Knox, London, The Historical Association (General Series Pamphlet 20), 1951, pp. 10–11, at p. 11. For the standard biography, see Jasper Ridley, John Knox, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968. John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), New York, Da Capo Press, 1972, pp. 9–10: ‘where that I affirme the empire of a woman be a thing repugnant to nature, I mean . . . that God by the order of his creation hath spoiled woman of authoritie and dominion’. Skinner, Foundations of Political Thought, vol. 2, p. 235, quoting passages from Ponet’s Shorte Treatise, as reprinted in Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?-1556), Chicago, Ill, University of Chicago Press, 1942; J. H. Burns, ‘John Knox and Revolution, 1558’, History Today, vol. 8, no. 8 (1958), pp. 563–73, at p. 568. Allen, Political Thought, pp. 116–18, where the close similarity between Knox’s and Goodman’s thought is considered. For Goodman’s discussion of obedience and the primacy of Acts 5, see How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd of Their Subjects, Geneva, John Crispin, 1558 (facsimile edn New York, Da Capo Press, 1972), pp. 106–11. Knox, The Appellation from the Sentence pronounced by the Bishops and Clergy to the Nobility and Estates of Scotland, quoted in Ridley, Knox, p. 275. Michael Walzer (Revolution of the Saints, p. 106) notes that the case for the traditional view that obedience to the monarch’s commands absolves the one who carries them out from guilt is stated by Shakespeare in King Henry V, act 4, scene 1: ‘for we know enough if we know we are the King’s soldiers. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us.’ The punishment of idolatry devolves on ‘the whole body of the people, and to every member of the same’ (Knox, Appellation, as quoted in Burns, ‘Knox and Revolution’, p. 572). Kyle, ‘Church–State Patterns in the Thought of John Knox’, Journal of Church and State, vol. 30 (1988), p. 80. Knox, Appellation, as quoted in Burns, ‘Knox and Revolution’, p. 571; cf. Goodman, Superior Powers, pp. 144–5. Knox, First Blast, pp. 52–4. To say nothing of the profits to be earned from the confiscations of Catholic property. See, e.g., Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, rev. edn, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 34–6. Allen, History of Political Thought, pp. 308–9. So, e.g., the ‘sacrosanct council under the Carolingian kings’ (François Hotman, Francogallia, ch. 15, in Julian H. Franklin (ed.), Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century, New York, Pegasus, 1969, pp. 77–80); cf. Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, p. 78: the Protestant nobles are ‘divinely appointed’ to resist the power of the monarch. Theodore de Beza, Right of Magistrates, 10 (Du droit des magistrats sur leurs subiets), quoted and translated in Franklin (ed.), Constitutionalism and Resistance, p. 133.

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58 Beza, Right of Magistrates 1 (trans. Franklin, p. 101). 59 Beza, Right of Magistrates 6 (trans. Franklin, p. 112). That sovereignty is exercised jointly by king and magistrates is also insisted upon by the author of The Awakener (Le Reveille-Matin des François de leur voisins) (1574). See Skinner, Foundations of Political Thought, vol. 2, pp. 315–16. 60 Beza, Right of Magistrates 6 (trans. Franklin, pp. 116–18). 61 Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Covenant or Leviathan? Political Theology for Modern Times’ (trans. N. E. Bedford), Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 47 (1994), pp. 19–41, at pp. 21–3. 62 Beza, Right of Magistrates 9 (trans. Franklin, p. 135). 63 On the importance of local, regional and national assemblies in Huguenot thought, see Arthur L. Herman, ‘Protestant Churches in a Catholic Kingdom: Political Assemblies in the Thought of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay’, Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 21, no. 4 (1990), pp. 543–57. On the conciliarist influence in the Vindiciae, see A. J. Black, Monarchy and Community, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 50–1. 64 Allen, History of Political Thought, p. 330; cf. Kelley, Beginnings of Ideology, pp. 308–14. 65 Franklin, Introduction to Constitutionalism and Resistance, p. 43. 66 Vindiciae contra tyrannos, 2nd question (trans. Franklin, p. 156). 67 Ibid. 68 It was perhaps this very idea of a shared sovereignty (or majesty) that called forth Jean Bodin’s formulation of sovereignty as ‘indivisible and perpetual’; see Kelley, Beginning of Ideology, p. 309. 69 Cf. Bernice Hamilton, Political Thought in Sixteenth Century Spain, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963, pp. 9–10, 31–2. 70 Allen, History of Political Thought, pp. 338–42. 71 Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis institutione, Toledo, 1599, p. 76, as quoted and translated in Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, p. 346; cf. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, rex (1644), quoted in A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, 2nd edn, London, Dent, 1974, p. 200: ‘Reformation of Religion is a personal act that belongeth to all, even to any one private person according to his place.’ 72 Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, p. 347. 73 The arguments on the status and context of classic texts are rehearsed in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, Cambridge and Oxford, Polity Press in association with Blackwell, 1988. 74 For the social ‘causes’ of rebellion, see, e.g., Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, pp. 127–39; cf. the summary in Francis D. Wormuth, The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1949, pp. 44–5: extra-parliamentary taxation, arbitrary arrests and the procedures of the Star Chamber, Archbishop Laud’s administration of the Church of England. 75 Gilbert Burnet, The History of My Own Times (1705?), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1823, 6 vols, vol. 1, pp. 71–2, emphasis added. 76 Cromwell, Letter to Hammond, 25 Nov. 1648, as quoted in G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edn with supplement, New York, Harper and Row, 1959, pp. 194–5. 77 Cromwell is regarded as untroubled by too much theory, being ever ready to seek practical and compromise solutions to actual problems; see, e.g., Gooch, English Democratic Ideas, pp. 192–204; Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English

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79

80

81 82

83

84 85

86 87

88 89

90

Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972, p. 195: ‘Few politicians can have been so innocent of political theory as Oliver Cromwell.’ See, e.g., Andrew Sharpe (ed.), Political Ideas of the English Civil Wars 1641–1649, London, Longman, 1983; Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty; George F. Sensabaugh, That Grand Whig Milton, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1952, p. 133. William Herrigan, The Prophetic Milton, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1974, p. 11. On Milton’s Augustinianism, see Charles R. Geisst, The Political Thought of John Milton, London, Macmillan, 1984, pp. 6–19; Peter A. Fiore, Milton and Augustine, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981; on the Protestant ‘cultural revolution’, see Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England, London, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 94–126. John Milton, ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ (1649), in Martin Dzelzainis (ed.), Milton, Political Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 20; also in Stuart E. Prall (ed.), The Puritan Revolution: A Documentary History, New York, Doubleday, 1968, p. 38; on the background to ‘The Tenure’, directed mainly against Presbyterian royalists who had grown jealous of the Independents’ power, see, e.g., Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, London, Cohen and West, 1963, pp. 208–31. Milton, Areopagitica (1644), New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951, p. 44. Ibid., pp. 44–5. On the influence of the Areopagitica, see Sensabaugh, Grand Whig Milton, pp. 58–65; and on his easy accommodation of ‘the passion of the Hebrew prophet, the Protestant sense of the immediacy of God, and the free intelligence of classical antiquity’, see George H. Sabine, ‘Introduction’ to Areopagitica, p. x. In the Behemoth Hobbes wrote that ‘if it be lawful . . . for subjects . . . to be the judge of the meaning of Scripture, it is impossible that the life of any king, or the peace of any Christian Kingdom, can be long secure’. As quoted by Mark Whitaker, ‘Hobbes’s View of the Reformation’, History of Political Thought, vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring, 1988), p. 50. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) 2.29, London, Dent, 1914, p. 172. Hobbes, Leviathan 2.17 (Dent edn, pp. 88–9), and cited in Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 2–3. Cf. Whitaker, ‘Hobbes’s View of the Reformation’, p. 56: ‘The 1640s . . . have shown the ability of a selfdetermined spiritual elite to appropriate for their own ends the emerging, and secular, desire of ordinary people to be recognized as socially responsible and economically capable.’ Wolin, Politics and Vision, p. 262. See, e.g., David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969; but see also R. E. Ewin, Virtues and Rights: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Boulder, Colo., Westview Press, 1991. D. D. Raphael, Hobbes: Morals and Politics, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1977, p. 14. Hobbes, Leviathan 1.12, 2.20, 3.35, 3.40; cf. De cive 16; all as noted in J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in the thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in his Politics, Language and Time, New York, Atheneum, 1973, p. 171; cf. A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 286–96. Hobbes repeatedly quotes the familiar Pauline and Petrine texts that command obedience to the powers that be; see, e.g., De cive 11.6; Leviathan 2.20, 3.41.

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91 Mark Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 197–222, at p. 201; cf. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes: An Interpretation of Leviathan, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 5: ‘Hobbes’s conception of religion was thoroughly political; but he was here adhering, not to a pagan secularization of religion, but to a Christian sanctification of politics’; also Hancock, Calvin and Modern Politics, p. 190. 92 Hobbes, De cive (the English version entitled Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society (1651), 14.21) (ed. Howard Warrender), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 181; cf. Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957, pp. 147–50; Martinich, Two Gods of Leviathan, pp. 136–60. 93 Whitaker, ‘Hobbes’s View of the Reformation’, p. 57; cf. p. 54: ‘It is vital to recognize that the “power of darkness” that Hobbes analyses in Part IV of Leviathan, and which he defines as having been exercised by both Papal and Presbyterian clerics, is a power that has served to extinguish in men “the light both of nature and of the Gospel”, and its effect has been to “disprepare (men) for the Kingdom of God to come”’ (emphasis added by Whitaker). That Hobbes was not, as once often supposed, totally out of step with general political thinking of his age, see Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, The Historical Journal, vol. 13, no. 3 (1966), pp. 286–317. 94 ‘The Putney Debates’, in Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, p. 27. 95 Hobbes, Leviathan 2.29. 96 Pocock suggests that Hobbes sees in Israel’s reversion to the monarchy of Saul, David and Solomon a disjunction in human affairs as serious as Adam’s transgression – in short, it is humankind’s ‘second Fall’; see Politics, Language and Time, p. 173. Cf. Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 40 (1990), pp. 121–51, at pp. 145–6: political obligation is entered only as ‘an act of free consent’. In the Calvinist sense, of course, the powers that be got there because God placed them there, by whatever means. Their rule is consented to because it is God’s will. 97 Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 187. 98 Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory, p. 72. 99 Hobbes, Leviathan 3.43 (Dent edn, pp. 319–20). 100 Hobbes, Leviathan 2.30 (Dent edn, p. 178). 101 Hobbes, Leviathan 2.22 (Dent edn, p. 116); cf. A. D. Lindsay, ‘Introduction’ to Dent edn, p. xxi. 102 Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘Review and Conclusion’ (Dent edn, pp. 391–2). 103 Goldie, ‘Civil Religion of Harrington’, p. 209. 104 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) (ed. J. G. A. Pocock), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 25–8. 105 Goldie, ‘Civil Religion’, p. 217. 106 Ibid., p. 207. 107 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 399. 108 John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 98. 109 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration: Latin and English Texts (1689) (ed. Mario Montuori), The Hague, Martinus Nijhof, 1963, pp. 73–5.

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110 Dunn, Locke, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 31. 111 Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’ to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, rev. edn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963, pp. 37–79. 112 J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959, pp. 131–8. For Locke’s personal connections with French Protestants and exiled Huguenots, see Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 85–6; McCoy and Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism, pp. 91–2. 113 Dunn, Political Thought of Locke, p. 182. 114 Laslett, ‘Introduction’ to Locke, Two Treatises of Government; cf. Dunn, Political Thought of Locke, pp. 47–76. 115 G. J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought, Oxford, Blackwell, 1975. 116 Joshua Mitchell, ‘John Locke and the Theological Foundation of Liberal Toleration: A Christian Dialectic of History’, Review of Politics, vol. 52, no. 1 (1990), pp. 64–83, at p. 67. 117 Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (ed. Montuori, pp. 7–15). 118 Geraint Parry, John Locke, London, Allen and Unwin, 1978, pp. 77–83. 119 Locke, Two Treatises 2.2.6 (ed. Laslett, p. 311). 120 Dunn, Political Thought of Locke, pp. 245–6. 121 Ibid., pp. 103–12; on Locke’s respect for the labouring poor, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 268–70. 122 Locke, Two Treatises 2.2.4 (ed. Laslett, p. 309). Locke goes on to acknowledge his debt to Richard Hooker, whose Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (books I–V published 1593–7) follows Aristotle on the natural sociability of humans. See Ecclesiastical Polity 1.8 (introd. C. Morris), London, Dent, 1954, pp. 174–85; cf. C. J. Friedrich, Transcendent Justice, pp. 49– 56. While Locke was undoubtedly influenced by Hooker, Laslett points out that he used him to lend respectability to his own arguments and ‘to turn the flank of his opponents, especially the good churchmen amongst them’ (Laslett, in Two Treatises, commentary at 2.2.5, p. 310). 123 Locke, Two Treatises 2.2.13 (ed. Laslett, p. 316); cf. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 215– 21. 124 Dunn, Political Thought of Locke, p. 153. 125 Ibid., p. 182. 126 See, e.g., Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p. 29; on the greater influence of Milton, Marvell, Sidney ‘and the rest’ over that of Locke in the period of the first two Georges, see Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 144. 127 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 424; cf. Richard A. Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 7–18; Leslie Armour, ‘John Locke and American Constitutionalism’, in Alan S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Constitutionalism: The Philosophical Dimension, New York, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 9–30. 128 Isaac Kramnick, ‘Republican Revisionism Revisited’, American Historical Review, vol. 87 (1982), pp. 629–64, at pp. 637–9. 129 Ibid.

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130 See, e.g., Stuart Prall, The Bloodless Revolution: England, 1688, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1972, pp. 254–6; Martyn P. Thompson, ‘The Reception of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government 1690–1705’, Political Studies, vol. 24, no. 2 (1976), pp. 184–91. 131 See, e.g., Milton Cantor, ‘The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution’, in J. Barton Starr (ed.), The United States Constitution: Its Birth, Growth and Influence in Asia, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 1988, pp. 37–54; John Dunn, ‘The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century’, in John W. Yolton (ed.), John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 45–80; Michael Kammen (ed.), The Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History, New York, Viking Penguin, 1986, p. xvii; Cecilia M. Kenyon, ‘Constitutionalism in Revolutionary America’, in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds), Constitutionalism (Nomos XX), New York, New York University Press, 1979, pp. 84–121, at p. 89; M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967, pp. 53–97. 132 Locke, Two Treatises 2.19.243 (ed. Laslett, p. 477). 133 Whitaker, ‘Hobbes’s View of the Reformation’, pp. 49–51. 6 PURITAN DEMOCRACY: THE RISE OF POPULAR CONSCIOUSNESS 1 Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 4th edn, London, Methuen, 1978, pp. 215–30. 2 Christopher Brooke, The Structure of Medieval Society, London, Thames and Hudson, 1971, pp. 80–1. 3 M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975, pp. 130– 1; cf. F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (ed. H. A. L. Fisher), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1908, pp. 47–52; H. E. Hallam, Rural England 1066–1348, Glasgow, Collins, 1981, pp. 10–16; S. J. Stoljar, Groups and Entities, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1973, pp. 10–24. 4 Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present, London, Methuen, 1984, p. 143, and citing K. Bader, Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte des Mittelalterlichen Dorfes, Weimar, H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1957; Stoljar, Groups and Entities, pp. 25–37. 5 Peter Blickle, ‘Communal Reformation and Peasant Piety: The Peasant Reformation and Its Late Medieval Origins’, Central European History, vol. 20 (1989), pp. 216–28, at p. 271, and citing his Gemeindereformation: die Menschen des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil, Munich, R. Oldenbourg, 1985; Peter Blickle, Hans-Christoph Rublack and Winfried Schulze, Religion, Politics and Social Protest: Three Studies on Early Modern Germany (ed. K. von Greyerz), London, Allen and Unwin and The German Historical Institute, 1984. 6 Blickle, ‘Communal Reformation’, p. 222. For the view that village communities were less free than their urban counterparts, see Heinz Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society, Leiden, Brill, 1992, pp. 189–201; cf. Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in his Elizabethan Essays, London, The Hambledon Press, 1994, pp. 31–57. 7 Blickle, ‘Communal Reformation’, p. 225, and citing the researches of Hans von Rütte and Rosi Fuhrmann on village churches.

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8 Heinrich R. Schmidt, ‘Die Häritisierung des Zwinglianismus im Reich seit 1525’, in Blickle (ed.), Zugänge zur bäuerlichen Reformation, Zurich, 1987, and quoted in translation in Blickle, ‘Communal Reformation’, p. 227; cf. Schilling, Religion, Political Culture, pp. 198–200. 9 Black, Guilds and Civil Society, pp. 110–11. 10 Ibid. 11 R. Po-Chia Hsia, ‘The Myth of the Commune: Recent Historiography on City and Reformation in Germany’, Central European History, vol. 20 (1989), pp. 203–15, at p. 207. 12 Thomas Müntzer, ‘A Highly Provoked Defense’ (1524), in Michael G. Baylor (ed. and trans.), The Radical Reformation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 74–94; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, London, Granada, 1970, p. 242; on Müntzer, see now Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Thomas Müntzer: Apocalyptic Mystic and Revolutionary (trans. Jocelyn Jacquiery), Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1993. 13 Susan Karant-Nunn, Zwickau in Transition, 1500–1547: The Reformation as an Agent of Change, Columbus, Ohio, 1987, as cited in Po-Chia Hsia, ‘Myth of the Commune’. The term ‘radical’ is obviously an anachronism, but perhaps less so than the much-used ‘Puritans of the Left’, which is avoided in this chapter. At least ‘radical’ has a general application. Cf. Conal Condren, ‘Rad icals, Conservatives, and Moderates in Modern Political Thought: A Case of Sandwich Islands Syndrome?’, History of Political Thought, vol. 10, no. 3 (1989), pp. 525–42. 14 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, vol. 2, p. 77. 15 A. G. Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther, Glasgow, Collins, 1976, p. 126. Cf. Gordon Rupp, Patterns of Reformation, London, Epworth Press, 1969, pp. 298–302. 16 Paul P. Kuenning, ‘Luther and Müntzer: Contrasting Theologies in Regard to Secular Authority within the Context of the German Peasant Revolt’, Journal of Church and State, vol. 29, no. 2 (1987), pp. 305–21, at pp. 317–18; see also Müntzer, ‘Sermon to the Princes’ (1524), in Baylor (ed.), Radical Reformation, pp. 29–32. 17 Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 244–7. 18 H. Daniel-Rops, The Protestant Reformation (trans. Audrey Butler), London, Dent, 1961, pp. 321–3. For the grievances of the south German peasants, in a document probably influenced by the Anabaptist Hubmaier, see ‘The Twelve Articles of the Peasants’ (20 Mar. 1525), in William R. Estep (ed.), Anabaptist Beginnings (1523–1533), Nieuwkoop, de Graaf, 1976, pp. 59–63. 19 G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe 1517–1559, Glasgow, Collins, 1963, pp. 57–60; for sympathetic discussion of Müntzer’s work, see Christopher Rowland, Radical Christianity, Oxford, Polity, 1988, pp. 89–102; Peter Matheson, ‘Christianity as Insurrection’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 44 (1991), pp. 311–24. 20 For the excesses of the biblical terrorists of Münster, see Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 256–80. 21 Kenneth R. Davis, ‘The Origins of Anabaptism: Ascetic and Charismatic Elements Exemplifying Continuity and Discontinuity’, in Marc Lienhard (ed.), The Origins and Characteristics of Anabaptism, The Hague, Martinus Nijhof, 1977. pp. 27–41; James M. Stayer, Werner O. Packull and Klaus Deppermann, ‘From Monogenesis to Polygenesis: The Historical Discussion of Anabaptist Origins’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, vol. 49 (1975), pp. 83–121.

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22 Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1528–1618, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1972, p. 4. On the controversy over infant baptism and the origins of Anabaptism, see, e.g., Harold S. Bender, Conrad Grebel c. 1498–1526: The Founder of the Swiss Brethren sometimes called Anabaptists, Goshen, Ind., Mennonite Historical Society, 1950, pp. 89–135; W. P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to his Thought, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 23–6; Franklin Hamlin Littell, The Anabaptist View of the Church: A Study in the Origins of Sectarian Protestantism, 2nd edn, Beacon Hill and Boston, Mass., Starr King Press, 1958, p. 14. 23 Littell, Anabaptist View, pp. 95–8. 24 See especially Balthasar Hübmaier, ‘On the Sword’ (1527), in Baylor (ed.), Radical Reformation, pp. 181–209; Davis, ‘Origins of Anabaptism’, p. 39; cf. Torsten Bergsten, Balthasar Hübmaier: Anabaptist Theologian and Martyr (trans. I. J. Barnes and W. R. Estep), Valley Forge, Judson Press, 1978. 25 Clasen, Anabaptism, pp. 172–83. 26 Cf. George Woodcock, Anarchism, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1963, pp. 39–490; James Joll, The Anarchists, London, Methuen, 1969, pp. 22–4; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, pp. 190–7; Rupp, Patterns of Reformation, pp. 247–50, 302. 27 Estep, ‘Introduction’ to Anabaptist Beginnings, p. 5; emphasis in the original. 28 Littell, Anabaptist View, p. 41, and quoting Cornelius Krahn, Menno Simons (1496–1561), Karlsruhe, Heinrich Schneider, 1936, pp. 104–5. 29 On the origins of the Baptists and the early association with the Mennonites, see, e.g., James R. Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation: English Separatism, Mennonite Influence and the Elect Nation, Waterloo, Ont., Herald Press, 1991; Coggins, ‘The Theological Positions of John Smyth’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 30 (1984), pp. 247–64; B. R. White, ‘The English Separatists and John Smyth Revisited’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 30 (1984), pp. 344–7; B. R. White, The Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers, London, Oxford University Press, 1971; Stephen Brachlow, ‘Puritan Theology and General Baptist Origins’, Baptist Quarterly, vol. 31 (1985), pp. 228–54. 30 M. H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages: A Political History, London, Methuen, 1973, pp. 236–42. 31 For the accusation that Ball was a ‘Wycliffite’, which may have been ‘made by the orthodox to discredit Wycliffe’, see Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381, London, Methuen, 1977, pp. 277–8. 32 Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages, p. 236; cf. B. Wilkinson, The Later Middle Ages in England, 1216–1485, London, Longman, 1969, pp. 214–15; Gordon Leff, ‘Wyclif and the Augustinian Tradition’, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., vol. 1 (1970), pp. 29–39. 33 Cf. Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism, London, The Hambledon Press, 1983, pp. 400–2. 34 On the connections between the continental reformers and English church leaders, see, e.g., Gordon Rupp, ‘Matthew Parker’, in his Just Men, London, Epworth Press, 1977, pp. 71–92. 35 Jane Dawson, ‘Revolutionary Conclusions: The Case of the Marian Exiles’, History of Political Thought, vol. 11, no. 2 (1990), pp. 257–72, at pp. 268–9. 36 Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyd, Geneva, John Crispin, 1558, p. 185.

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37 Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan Separatist Ecclesiology 1570– 1625, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 203–9; White, English Separatist Tradition, pp. 1–19. 38 Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954, p. 41. 39 See, e.g., Leslie Lipson, The Democratic Civilization, London, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 50, 58; J. Roland Pennock, Democratic Political Theory, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 4, 192, 371; S. I. Benn and R. S. Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State, London, Allen and Unwin, 1959, pp. 96, 114, 345–6; Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, 1987, p. 377; David Held, Models of Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, p. 72. 40 See, e.g., William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606), facsimile, New York, Da Capo, 1972; William Ames, Conscience – With the Power and the Cases Thereof (1639), facsimile, New York, Da Capo, 1975; cf. Robert A. Greene, ‘Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 52, no. 2 (1991), pp. 197–9. 41 See the sermon of John Robinson to the departing Pilgrims in 1621, cited in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, London, Dent, 1974, Introduction, p. 45; A. D. Lindsay, Religion, Science and Society, London, Oxford University Press, 1943; Stephen Brachlow, ‘More Light on John Robinson and the Separatist Tradition’, Fides et historia, vol. 12 (1980), pp. 6–22. 42 See, e.g., John Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637–1641’, The Historical Journal, vol. 31, no. 4 (1988), pp. 769–88. 43 The Ancient Bounds, or Liberty of Conscience, Tenderly Stated, Modestly Asserted, and Mildly Vindicated, London, 1645, as quoted in Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, p. 247. 44 Ibid., pp. 258–9; cf. Zagorin’s paraphrase of the Leveller William Walwyn’s pamphlet on The vanitie of the present churches: ‘Let (the people) study the Scriptures and perfect their knowledge in small meetings by mutual discussion, without sermons.’ Zagorin, Political Thought in the English Revolution, p. 26. 45 ‘The Putney Debates’, in Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, p. 42. 46 Ibid., pp. 84–5. 47 Ibid., pp. 31–2; on Cromwell’s tolerance, see G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, Oxford, Blackwell, 1946, pp. 115–17, and quoting John Buchan’s biography: ‘he was in essence a mystic, and . . . the core of his religion was a mystical experience continually renewed . . . . His religion, being based not on fear but on love, for fear had little place in his heart, made him infinitely compassionate towards others.’ 48 A. D. Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy, 2nd edn, London, Oxford University Press, 1935, p. 34; for the importance of a ‘covenanted militia’ to the development of community’, see T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 25–45. 49 John Robinson expressed his vision of discovery through his impatience with Lutherans and Calvinists who were unable to progress beyond the strict teachings of their founders when they should be ‘ready and willing to embrace further light’ (Robinson, Works, vol. 1, p. xlv, as quoted in Nuttall, Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith, p. 113). 50 Brachlow, Communion of Saints, pp. 225–9.

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51 H. G. Alexander, Religion in England 1558–1662, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1968, pp. 85–6. 52 Robert Browne, True and Short Declaration of the Gathering and Joining Together of Certain Persons, quoted in Woodhouse, ‘Introduction’ to Puritanism and Liberty from Champlin Burrage, Church Covenant Idea, Philadelphia, Pa, American Baptist Publishing Society, 1904; White, English Separatist Tradition, pp. 44–66. 53 Richard Mather, An Apology for Church Covenant (1643) in Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 299–300. 54 Rupp, Religion in England 1688–1791, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 118. 55 Ibid. 56 Lindsay, Modern Democratic State, pp. 119–21; on the theory of association that so influenced Lindsay, see, e.g., Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, 4th edn, London, Macmillan, 1923, pp. 145–66; and on the limits of state action, pp. 167–217. 57 William Bartlet, Model of the Primitive Congregational Way (1647), as quoted in Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660, Oxford, Blackwell, 1957, p. 72. For the discussion in this paragraph, see the whole of Nuttall’s chapter ‘Unto One Another: The Principle of Fellowship’ (pp. 70–100); cf. the notion of voluntary religion in the previous century in Patrick Collinson, The Religion of the Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, pp. 242–83. 58 Nuttall, Visible Saints, pp. 76–7. 59 Julian H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 69. 60 George Lawson, An Examination of the Political Part of Mr Hobbs his Leviathan (1657), p. 22, as quoted in Nuttall, Visible Saints, p. 77. 61 John Lilburne, The legal fundamental liberties of the people of England, as quoted in Zagorin, Political Thought in the English Revolution, p. 14, and reference to the Agreement, p. 13. 62 Zagorin, Political Thought, p. 15. 63 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 64 See David Wootton, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, English Historical Review, vol. 105 (1990), pp. 654–69, and at p. 658: ‘Lilburne’s argument provoked William Walwyn to publish England’s Lamentable Slavery, in which he rejected Magna Carta as a contemptible inheritance, a mess of pottage, and argued that Lilburne should appeal, not to his historical rights as an Englishman, but to universal principles of equity and justice which were binding on Parliament as on any legal authority.’ 65 Woodhouse, ‘Introduction’, Puritanism and Liberty, p. 76. 66 Thomas Rainborough, ‘Putney Debates’, in Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, p. 53. 67 Englands Troublers Troubled: or, The Just Resolutions of the Plaine-men of England, Against the Rich and Mightie (1648), as quoted in Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978, p. 301. 68 William Walwyn, The Power of Love, London, 1643, as quoted in Manning, English People, p. 301. 69 A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), in Manning, English People; cf. John Wildman’s role in championing the poor, Zagorin, Political Thought of the English Revolution, pp. 30–1.

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70 Brian Manning, 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution, London, Bookmarks, 1992, pp. 100–2. 71 Cf. the ‘physical force’ Levellers Major White and Captain William Bray, discussed in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1975, pp. 64–9. 72 See, e.g., Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution, London, Cohen and West, 1941, pp. 311–24. 73 Winstanley was ‘a socialist ahead of his age’: Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution (trans. H. J. Stenning) (1930), Nottingham, Spokesman, 1980, p. 131. 74 Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced (1649), as transcribed in Christopher Hill (ed.), The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973, pp. 83–4. 75 See, e.g., Zagorin, Political Thought in the English Revolution, p. 57; Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley, Oxford, Past and Present Supplement 5, 1978, p. 57; Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism, p. 107. 76 Andrew Bradstock, ‘Sowing in Hope: The Relevance of Theory to Gerrard Winstanley’s Political Programme’, The Seventeenth Century, vol. 6, no. 2 (1991), pp. 189–204; cf. Lotte Mulligan, John K. Graham and Judith Richards, ‘Winstanley: A Case for the Man as He Said He Was’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 28 (1977), pp. 57–75; Rowland, Radical Christianity, pp. 102–14. 77 Similar references recur many times in Winstanley’s greatest work, The Law of Freedom in a Platform: or, True Magistracy Restored (1652), making it seem unlikely that he withdrew from an earlier apocalypticism after the failure of the Digger experiment; more likely was ‘a retreat into pietism’, consistent with scriptural instruction. See Rowland, Radical Christianity, p. 104.; see also J. D. Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: Religion and Respectability’, Historical Journal, vol. 28 (1985), pp. 705–9. 78 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835) (trans. Henry Reeve), London, Oxford University Press, 1946, p. 36. 79 Joshua Miller, ‘Direct Democracy and the Puritan Theory of Membership’, Journal of Politics, vol. 53, no. 1 (1991), pp. 57–74, at p. 62. 80 John Cotton: ‘Democracy I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government, either for church or commonwealth’, in Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, Boston, Mass., 1764, vol. 1, p. 497; John Winthrop: ‘the meanest and the worst of all forms of government’, speech before the General Court, 1642; both cited in Herbert L. Osgood, ‘The Political Ideas of the Puritans’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 1 (1891), pp. 1–28, at pp. 19–20; see also Merrill Jensen (ed.), English Historical Documents: American Colonial Documents to 1776, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955, pp. 169–70, 226; cf. Ernest Barker, Church, State and Society, Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1974, pp. 124–7. 81 Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England 1620–1660, Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1984, p. 239; cf. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers, pp. 43–5. 82 Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988, p. 138. 83 Gura, Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, p. 247.

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84 A. J. Beitzinger, A History of American Political Thought, New York, Harper and Row, 1972, pp. 52–3. 85 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 92–3. 86 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 390. 87 John Cotton to Richard Saltonstall, in Hutchinson Papers, Albany, NY, 1865, vol. 2, pp. 127–34, as quoted in Alden T. Vaughan (ed.), The Puritan Tradition in America 1620–1730, New York, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 204. 88 The sentence of John Clarke of Rhode Island 31 May 1651, in Vaughan (ed.), Puritan Tradition in America, p. 229. 89 Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay (1764) (ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo), Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1936, pp. 167–71; the Quaker Mary Fisher had been to Adrianople to preach the word of God ‘to the great Turk . . . . She fared better among the Turks than among the Christians’ (p. 167n.). 90 Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991, pp. 254–64. 91 Osgood, ‘Political Ideas of the Puritans’, p. 17; cf. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, 3 vols, New York, Harcourt Brace and World, 1927, vol. 1, p. 17. 92 Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, New York, Norton, 1988, p. 126, and quoting John Winthrop, ‘A Declaration in Defense of an Order of Court Made in May, 1637’; for the foundation of Massachusetts on popular sovereignty, see Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988, pp. 11–12. 93 John Davenport, Discourse About Civil Government in a New Plantation whose Design is Religion, Cambridge, Mass., 1663, as quoted in Osgood, ‘Political Ideas of the Puritans’, p. 24 n. 1; cf. Virginia Anderson, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 48 (1991), Hackett Fischer Forum, p. 236: ‘When Bay colonists came to write a code of laws in 1641, they . . . turned to the Old Testament for guidance.’ 94 Rhode Island Records, I, 52, as quoted in Osgood, ‘Political Ideas of the Puritans – Part 2’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2 (June 1981), pp. 201–31, at p. 204. 95 Rhode Island Records, as quoted in Russell L. Hanson, ‘Democracy’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 72–3. 96 ‘The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut’ (14 Jan. 1639) in Jensen (ed.), American Colonial Documents, p. 222. 97 John Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’ (1630), in Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (eds), The Puritans, rev. edn, 2 vols, New York, Harper and Row, 1963, vol. 1, pp. 195–9; cf. David S. Lovejoy, ‘Plain Englishmen at Plymouth’, New England Quarterly, vol. 63 (1990), pp. 232–48, at p. 246: ‘[Winthrop’s] exhortation to Christian love and subjection, Edward Morgan has shown, made use of a conventional appeal ship captains often delivered to their crews and passengers during long and trying sea voyages in this hazardous age of discovery and colonization. All agree, of course, that Winthrop in midocean magnificently transcended the traditional plea for love and good order and wrapped it in a mantle of Christian charity which he made fundamental to the success of his people’s mission in the New World.’ See Edmund S. Morgan, ‘John Winthrop’s

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107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

“Modell of Christian Charity” in a Wider Context’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 50 (Spring 1987), pp. 145–51. Miller, ‘Direct Democracy and the Puritan Theory of Membership’, p. 64, and citing Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1988, p. 25. Miller, ‘Direct Democracy and the Puritan Theory of Membership’, p. 70. Avihu Zakai, ‘The Gospel of Reformation: The Origins of the Great Puritan Migration’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 37, no. 4 (Oct. 1986), pp. 584–602, at p. 593. Anderson, Hackett Fischer Forum, p. 236; even in Massachusetts, where the early leadership was avowedly anti-democratic, the influence of spiritism soon unleashed democratical attitudes, so that the influential British patron of the colony, Lord Saye and Sele, was moved to withdraw his support to a place less destabilized by popular influences. See Gura, Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, p. 79. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, pp. 131–5, and quoting the contemporaneous account by John Allin from Don Gleason Hill (ed.), The Record of Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths, and Admissions to the Church and Dismissals Therefrom . . . in the Town of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1638–1845, Dedham, Mass., 1888; cf. Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, New York, Basic Books, 1980, pp. 126–35. Osgood, ‘Political Ideas of the Puritans – Part 2’, p. 230. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay, pp. 356–8; cf. F. Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England 1509–1640, New York, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 191. Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts-Bay, p. 358, emphasis added; Solt, Church and State, p. 192. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, 2 vols, New York, Oxford University Press, 1962, vol. 1, p. 63; cf. John E. Pomfret, with Floyd M. Shumway, Founding the American Colonies 1583–1660, New York, Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 149–77. See, e.g., Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self, p. 134: ‘[The Puritans] had devised their rhetoric . . . as as a means of social control.’ Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy, p. 126, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Historical Discourse at Concord’ (1835). Emerson himself was, of course, a willing legatee of the New England Puritan tradition. Ralph Barton Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, New York, Vanguard Press, 1944, p. 192. Quoted in Perry Miller, New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, p. 75. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, p. 192. William Bradford, Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation 1606–1646 (begun 1630) (ed. William T. Davis), New York, Barnes and Noble, 1946, pp. 85–6. Lovejoy, ‘Plain Englishmen at Plymouth’, p. 244. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, p. 332. Zakai, ‘Gospel of Reformation’, p. 586. Stephen Brachlow, ‘John Robinson and the Lure of Separatism’, Church History, vol. 50 (1981), p. 295. Miller, ‘Direct Democracy’, p. 70. Cf. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, pp. 281–2: responding to ‘the cohesive ideals of Puritan social teaching, on the whole, the first towns promoted the common good, discouraged selfish individualism, minimized conflict, and resisted change’.

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119 John Winthrop, ‘Modell of Christian Charity’, in Miller and Johnson (eds), The Puritans, p. 198; Lovejoy (’Plain Englishmen at Plymouth’) demonstrates how much Winthrop was able to draw on a similar exhortation to the Pilgrims, given nine years earlier in Robert Cushman’s Sermon Preached at Plimmouth in New England (9 Dec. 1621). There were other, almost contemporary, statements very similar in tone to Winthrop’s. See Francis J. Bremer, Puritan Crisis: New England and the English Civil Wars, New York, Garland, 1989, pp. 51–96; cf. Francis J. Bremer, ‘To Live Exemplary Lives: Puritans and Puritan Communities as Lofty Lights’, The Seventeenth Century, vol. 7, no. 1 (1992), p. 27. 120 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1938, pp. 135–8; cf. Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, pp. 224–9. 121 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 122 Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self, p. 110. 123 This paragraph follows Alan Simpson, Puritanism in Old and New England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1955, pp. 46–58; see also Roger Williams in Perry Miller (ed.), Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition, New York, Atheneum, 1974, pp. 145–56. 124 Gura, Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, pp. 74–8, and (at p. 76) quoting Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, the True Fountaine of Independency (1647); cf. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives, pp. 156–7. 125 Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution (1644), as quoted in Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, p. 350; emphasis in original. 126 Williams, Bloody Tenent of Persecution, in Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 281– 2. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid., p. 283; cf. Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State, New York, Harvester, 1967, pp. 87–99: ‘A Covenant Without God’. 129 Woodhouse, ‘Introduction’, in Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 85–6. 130 John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism, New York, Basic Books, 1984, pp. 7–8. 131 Diggins, Lost Soul of American Politics, pp. 150–3; Sanford Kessler, ‘Tocqueville’s Puritans: Christianity and the American Founding’, Journal of Politics, vol. 54 (1992), pp. 776–81. 132 Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy; Sheldon Wolin, e.g. ‘Contract and Birthright’, in Fred Krinsky (ed.), Crisis and Innovation, New York, Blackwell, 1988, pp. 12–30; see also the general files of the journal Democracy. 133 David Harlan, ‘A People Blinded from Birth: American History according to Sacvan Bercovitch’, Journal of American History, vol. 78, no. 3 (1991), pp. 949–71, at p. 970. 134 Harlan, ‘People Blinded from Birth’, p. 971. 135 Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, pp. 245–7. 7 MODERN DEMOCRACY: FROM TWO KINGDOMS TO DIALECTICAL POLITICS 1 See, e.g., Lily Ross Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1971. Having discussed the nature of partisanship with specialists of the eighteenth century, Professor Taylor was deliberate in using the anachronism to dramatize the immediacy and relevance of classical scholarship.

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2 Polybius, The Histories 6.16–18; Cicero, De re publica 1.69; Machiavelli, Discourses 1.2; Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734); Edward Spelman, Preface to his translation of Polybius (1743). 3 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, no. 8; James Madison, The Federalist Papers, no. 10; J. A. W. Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to Party Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England, London, Frank Cass, 1972. 4 Party emerges early from the operations of parliament. See, e.g., Mark Kishlansky, ‘The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 49, no. 4 (1977), pp. 617–40. 5 How far this view of the world could affect political opinion is demonstrated by the private (and therefore not tendentious) reflections of a Puritan diarist: see John Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637– 1641’, The Historical Journal, vol. 31, no. 4 (1988), pp. 769–88, at pp. 771, 778–9. 6 Harvey C. Mansfield Jr, Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke, Chicago, Ill., Chicago University Press, 1965, pp. 4–6. 7 Bolingbroke, ‘Remarks on the History of England’, in Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols (Bohn, 1844), repr. London, Frank Cass, 1967, vol. 1, p. 296; cf. Kurt Kluxen, Das Problem der politischen Opposition: Entwicklung u. Wesen d. engl. Zweiparteienpolitik im 18 Jh., Freiburg and Munich, Alber, 1956, pp. 143–5. 8 M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, London, Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 72–3; Melvin Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 15; Henry J. Merry, Montesquieu’s System of Natural Government, West Lafayette, Ind., Purdue University Studies, 1970, pp. 344–5. 9 Kluxen, Problem der Opposition, p. 145: ‘Die Opposition ist immer im Recht, die Regierung im Unrecht.’ 10 Burke, ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’ (1770), The Works of Edmund Burke, 6 vols, London, George Bell and Son, 1889, vol. 1, p. 370. Richard Pares, King George III and the Politicians, London, Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 84. 11 Burke, ‘Present Discontents’, Works, vol. 1, p. 375. 12 Ibid., p. 311. 13 Burke, Impeachment Speech in Reply, quoted in Frederick A. Dreyer, Burke’s Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy, Waterloo, Ont., Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1979, p. 77. 14 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) (ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien), Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 194–5. 15 Burke, Reflections, p. 187. 16 Ibid., pp. 191–2. 17 Ibid., p. 190; Dreyer, Burke’s Politics, pp. 27–8; cf. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character and Community, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 214. 18 Burke, ‘Letters on a Regicide Peace’ (1796), Works, vol. 5, p. 236; Ernest Barker, Essays on Government, 2nd edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1951, p. 221. 19 Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1969, pp. 40– 73. 20 For Madison’s suspicion of rulers, see The Federalist, nos 51, 63, 78; cf. Martin Diamond, ‘Ethics and Politics: The American Way’, in Robert H. Horwitz (ed.), The Moral

269

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Foundations of the American Republic, 3rd edn, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1986, p. 88. Bolingbroke, ‘Spirit of Patriotism’; Paine, Common Sense, in Thomas Paine, Political Writings (ed. Bruce Kuklick), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 24. John Adams, cited in C. E. Merriam, A History of American Political Theories, New York, Macmillan, 1903, pp. 139–40. Walter Berns, ‘Religion and the Founding Principle’, in Horwitz (ed.), Moral Foundations, pp. 215–18. Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke, Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 17. Robert E. Shalhope, ‘Republicanism and Early American Historiography’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 39 (1982), pp. 334–56, at p. 335. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1978, pp. 60–4. Jean V. Matthews, Towards a New Society: American Thought and Culture 1800–1830, Boston, Mass., Twayne, 1991, pp. 5–20. George L. Mosse, ‘Puritanism and Reason of State in Old and New England’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1 (1952), pp. 67–80. See Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 2.2. Sacvan Bercovitch, ‘New England’s Errand Reappraised’, in J. Higham and P. K. Conkin (eds), New Directions in American Intellectual History, Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, pp. 85–115. Dorothy Ross, ‘The Liberal Tradition Revisited and the Republican Tradition Addressed’, in Higham and Conkin (eds), New Directions, pp. 120–3; Shalhope, ‘Republicanism and American Historiography’, pp. 335–9; Isaac Kramnick, ‘Republican Revisionism Revisited’, American Historical Review, vol. 87 (1982), pp. 629–64, at pp. 658–9. Wilson Carey McWilliams, ‘On Equality as the Moral Foundation for Community’, in Horwitz (ed.), Moral Foundations, pp. 282–306. Sanford Kessler, ‘Tocqueville’s Puritans: Christianity and the American Founding’, Journal of Politics, vol. 54, no. 3 (1992), pp. 776–92; cf. the view that Tocqueville mistakenly relied upon colonial approaches to politics to the detriment of his understanding of the principles of the federal constitution, on which see Thomas G. West, ‘Misunderstanding the American Founding’, in Ken Masugi (ed.), Interpreting Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’, Savage, Md, Rowman and Littlefield, 1991, pp. 155–77. Matthews, Towards a New Society, p. 26. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, New York, Knopf, 1992, p. 245. Cf. Robert A. Dahl, ‘On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States’, in Horwitz (ed.), Moral Foundations, pp. 230–50. Wood, ‘The Democratization of the American Revolution’, in Horwitz (ed.), Moral Foundations, pp. 130–5. Joyce Appleby, ‘Republicanism in Old and New Contexts’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 43 (1986), pp. 20–34, at p. 25. Ibid., p. 33; for a more ‘communal’ view of a similar argument, see Diamond, ‘Ethics and Politics’, pp. 106–7. Joseph Cropsey, ‘The United States as Regime and the Sources of the American Way of Life’, in Horwitz (ed.), Moral Foundations, p. 174.

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41 Lance Banning, ‘Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 43 (1986), pp. 3–19, at p. 15; John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundations of Liberalism, New York, Basic Books, 1984, p. 28; Matthews, Towards a New Society, p. 26. 42 Christopher Bruell, ‘A Return to Classical Political Philosophy and the Understanding of the American Founding’, Review of Politics, vol. 53, no. 1 (1991), pp. 173–86. 43 Cropsey, ‘United States as Regime’, p. 179. 44 B. Honig, ‘Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic’, American Political Science Review, vol. 85, no. 1 (1991), pp. 97–113; Jean Yarborough, ‘Race and the Moral Foundation of the American Republic: Another Look at the Declaration and the Notes on Virginia’, Journal of Politics, vol. 53, no. 1 (1991), pp. 90–105. 45 White, When Words Lose Their Meaning, pp. 231–40. 46 Walter Berns, ‘Religion and the Founding Principle’, in Horwitz (ed.), Moral Foundations, pp. 215–18. 47 See, e.g., E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, who offered a ‘realist’ interpretation of democracy as more concerned with public opinion than with participation; Henry S. Kariel, The Decline of American Pluralism, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1961; James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1963; Hadley Arkes, Beyond the Constitution, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990; Sheldon Wolin, ‘The People’s Two Bodies’, Democracy, vol. 1, no. 1 (1981), pp. 9–24. 48 K. R. Morris, ‘The Puritan Roots of American Universalism’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 44, no. 4 (1991), pp. 457–87. 49 Matthews, Towards a New Society, pp. 31–2; cf. A. Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 12–14; cf. Frank Lambert, ’Pedlar in Divinity’: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 170–97. 50 Cf. Nathan O. Hatch, ‘The Puzzle of American Methodism’, Church History, vol. 63. no. 2 (June 1994), pp. 175–89. 51 Richard Carwardine, ‘Methodist Ministers and the Second Party System’, in Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe and Jean Miller Schmidt (eds), Perspectives on American Methodism: Interpretive Essays, Nashville, Tenn., Kingswood Books, 1993, pp. 159–77. 52 Wood, ‘Democratization of the American Revolution’, p. 130. 53 Benjamin R. Barber, ‘The Compromised Republic: Public Purposelessness in America’, in Horwitz (ed.), Moral Foundations, pp. 49–50; cf. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, Chicago, Ill., Phoenix Books, 1958. 54 C. J. Friedrich, ‘Federalism and Opposition’, Government and Opposition, vol. 1 (1966), pp. 287–8; cf. Friedrich, Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice, New York, Praeger, 1958. 55 Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Political Writings (ed. Kuklick), p. 3. 56 Kramnick, ‘Republican Revisionism Revisited’, pp. 637–47. 57 Ibid. 58 D. O. Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Price, Political Writings (ed. D. O. Thomas), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. xx; emphasis added. For the extent of radical preaching, see, e.g., James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism:

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59 60 61 62 63

64 65

66 67 68 69

70 71

72

73

74

Non-conformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 127–42; on Price and Priestley, see also Michael Watts, The Dissenters, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978, pp. 471–90. Price, Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America and the Debts and Finances of the Kingdom (1778) , in Political Writings (ed. Thomas), p. 29. Paine, Rights of Man (1791), in Political Writings (ed. Kuklick), p. 55. Ibid., p. 140; emphasis added. Ibid, p. 193. For Price there was ‘an eternal and immutable moral truth inherent in the very nature of things, independent of the divine will, that constitutes its own obligation’; his stringent Platonism made him a critic of Locke’s epistemology of morals. Martha K. Zebrowski, ‘Richard Price: British Platonist of the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 55, no. 1 (1994), pp. 17–35, at pp. 28–9. Price, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind (1787), in Political Writings (ed. Kuklick), pp. 163–4. Peter N. Miller, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph Priestley, Political Writings (ed. Peter N. Miller), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. xx; cf. John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man, New York, Scribner’s, 1970, pp. 209–10. Priestley, Of the First Principles of Government and the different kinds of liberty (1771), in Political Writings (ed. Miller), pp. 31–2. Ibid., pp. 108–9. Kramnick, ‘Republican Revisionism Revisited’, p. 635. Elie Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England (trans. B. Semmel), Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1971; cf. Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in 1815 (trans. E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker), London, Benn, 1912, pp. 359–74. Halévy, Birth of Methodism, p. 70; cf. John Walsh, ‘Elie Halévy and the Birth of Methodism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 25 (1975), pp. 1–20. Norman McCord, British History 1815–1906, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 122–4; cf. R. B. Walker, ‘The Growth of Wesleyan Methodism in Victorian England and Wales’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 24, no. 3 (1973), pp. 267–84. The arguments are reviewed in David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750–1850, London, Hutchinson, 1984, pp. 11–19; cf. E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Methodism and the Threat of Revolution in Britain’, in his Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, pp. 23–33. See, e.g., Robert F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Working Class Movements of England 1800–1850, London, Epworth Press, 1937, and Methodism and the Common People of England, London, Epworth Press, 1945; James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976; Hempton, Methodism and Politics; Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics, London, Batsford, 1975; David M. Thompson, Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972; Robert Moore, Pit-Men, Preachers and Politics: The Effects of Methodism in a Durham Mining Community, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974. For a recent restatement, see, e.g., Paul Boateng, ‘The Hope of Things to Come’, in John Smith et al., Reclaiming the Ground: Christianity and Socialism (ed. Christopher Bryant), London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1993, p. 53. The phrase was first attributed to Morgan

272

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75 76

77

78

79

80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91

Phillips; see Rupert Davies, A. Raymond George and Gordon Rupp (eds), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, 4 vols, London, Epworth Press, 1983, vol. 3, p. 358. Wesley (in his seventies), quoted in Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England, London, Epworth Press, 1970, p. 15. Cf. his censure of John Wilkes: Wesley, Thoughts Upon Liberty (1772), in The Works of John Wesley (ed. T. Jackson), rept of 1872 edn, 14 vols, Grand Rapids, Mich., Zondervan Publishing House, vol. 11, pp. 34–46; cf. Henry Bett, The Spirit of Methodism, London, Epworth Press, 1937, pp. 202–4. Wesley took issue with Richard Price on the interpretation of Romans 13; if power came from God, it could hardly come from the people; see Wesley, Thoughts Concerning the Origin of Power (1772), in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 11, pp. 46–53. Baker, Wesley and the Church of England, p. 15; Ted. A. Campbell, ‘Christian Tradition, John Wesley, and Evangelicalism’, Anglican Theological Review, vol. 74, no. 1 (1992), pp. 54–67, at p. 63; Robert C. Monk, John Wesley: His Puritan Heritage, London, Epworth Press, 1966. Campbell, ‘Christian Tradition, Wesley and Evangelicalism’, p. 61; Leon O. Hynson, To Reform the Nation: Theological Foundations of Wesley’s Ethics, Grand Rapids, Mich., Francis Asbury Press, 1984, pp. 93–106. Colin Williams, John Wesley’s Theology Today, London, Epworth Press, 1960, pp. 172–9. His chief source of inspiration on Plato was probably Locke’s contemporary John Norris, in whose work Wesley found a reason which transcended reason and reconciled revelation through faith with the individual person’s responsibility to exercise the independent power of the intellect; John C. English, ‘John Wesley’s Indebtedness to John Norris’, Church History, vol. 60, no. 1 (1991), pp. 55–69; cf. Baker, Wesley and the Church of England, p. 25. Franz Hildebrandt, From Luther to Wesley, London, Lutterworth Press, 1951, pp. 110–57; cf. Hynson, To Reform the Nation, pp. 101–5. Henry Carter, The Methodist Heritage, London, Epworth Press, 1951, pp. 34–45; Bett, Spirit of Methodism, p. 56. Wesley, quoted in Monk, John Wesley: His Puritan Heritage, p. 231; cf. Working Group Paper, ‘The Individual and the Social’, in M. Douglas Meeks (ed.), The Future of Methodist Theological Traditions, Nashville, Tenn., Abingdon Press, 1985, pp. 88–90. Baker, Wesley and the Church, pp. 112–13. Wesley, as quoted in Baker, Wesley and the Church, p. 367 n. 22. In the Epworth rectory Wesley had seen his mother open up family prayers to all who would come, at times crowding the kitchen with up to two hundred people. Charles Wallace Jr, ’ “Some Stated Employment of Your Mind”: Reading, Writing and Religion in the Life of Susanna Wesley’, Church History, vol. 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1989), pp. 354–66, at p. 360; Baker, Wesley and the Church, p. 9. Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution, New York, Basic Books, 1973, p. 33. Carter, Methodist Heritage, pp. 31–3. Wesley’s Journal (15 Oct. 1759), in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 2 (Journal), pp. 516–17. Manfred Marquardt, John Wesley’s Social Ethics: Praxis and Principles (trans. J. E. Steely and W. S. Gunter), Nashville, Tenn., Abingdon Press, 1992, p. 80. Marquardt, Wesley’s Social Ethics, pp. 82–4. Wesley, in Semmel, Methodist Revolution, p. 72; cf. Wesley, Letter 270 (7 Feb. 1776), in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 12 (Letters), p. 301; on Wesley’s determination to imitate Christ’s example in the manner of Thomas à Kempis, see Passmore, Perfectibility of Man, pp. 137–8.

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92 Wesley, Journal (8 Feb. 1753), in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 2 (Journal), pp. 279–80. 93 Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions, in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 11 (Thoughts, Addresses, Prayers, Letters), pp. 53–4. 94 Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (1820), London, Oxford University Press, 1925, 2 vols., vol. 2, p. 307; Wesley, Journal, 4 January, 1875, Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 4, p. 295. 95 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 232–3. Cf. Wesley’s letter to Sir James Lowther (28 Oct. 1754), The Works of John Wesley (ed. W. R. Ward and R. P. Heitzenrater), Nashville, Tenn., Abingdon Press, 1991, vol. 20 (Journal and Diaries), III, p. 495: ‘You are only a steward of what another trusts you with, to be laid out not according to your will but his.’ 96 Marquardt, Wesley’s Social Ethics, pp. 28–9. 97 Wesley, Thoughts Upon the Present Scarcity of Provisions, in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 11, pp. 46–59. 98 Wesley, Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 5, pp. 445–6. 99 Marquardt, Wesley’s Social Ethics, pp. 70–2. 100 Ibid. 101 Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (1774), in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 11 (Thoughts, Addresses, Prayers, Letters), pp. 59–79, at pp. 62–5. 102 Wesley, Letter 899, to William Wilberforce (26 Feb. 1791), in Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 12 (Letters), p. 153. On the activities of Wilberforce and his colleagues, see, e.g., Ernest Marshall House, Saints in Politics: The ‘Clapham Sect’ and the Growth of Freedom, London, Allen and Unwin, 1953. 103 Marquardt, Wesley’s Social Ethics, p. 72. 104 S. Schulz, Gott ist kein Sklavenhalter: die Geschichte einer verspäteten Revolution, Hamburg and Zurich, 1972, as quoted and translated in Marquardt, Wesley’s Social Ethics. 105 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 208–10. 106 David Lowes Watson, The Early Methodist Class Meeting: Its Origins and Significance, Nashville, Tenn., Discipleship Resources, 1985, p. 139. 107 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, p. 88. 108 Robert J. Hind, ‘Working People and Sunday Schools: England 1780–1850’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 15, no. 2 (Dec. 1988), pp. 199–218, at pp. 205–6; cf. Wesley’s Journal, passim; cf. David M. Thompson, Denominationalism and Dissent, 1795–1835: A Question of Identity, London, Dr Williams’s Trust, 1985. 109 Lord Buckley to Lord Grenville (1 Oct. 1806), as quoted in Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 225–6. 110 Northern Star, 27 Jan. 1838, as quoted in Hind, ‘Working People and Sunday Schools’, p. 217. 111 Bunting was said to claim that Methodism was ‘as opposed to democracy as it is to sin’; quoted in Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act, London, Hutchinson, 1973, p. 40. 112 Cf. Elsa Tamez, ‘Wesley as Read by the Poor’, in Meeks (ed.), Future of the Methodist Theological Traditions, pp. 67–84. 113 It would be as illogical to separate the unintended political consequences of Wesley’s work as it would to detach unintended religious developments from his name. Robert Wearmouth points out that Wesley never intended ‘to establish a system of local preachers’, still less ‘to form a separate Church’ (Wearmouth, Methodism and the Working Class Movements, p. 196).

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114 Hempton, Methodism and Politics, quoting from W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution, London, 1930. 115 W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England 1790–1850, London, Batsford, 1972, pp. 85–7. 116 Wearmouth, Methodism and Working Class Movements, pp. 204–5: Methodists of the New Connexion and the Primitive Methodists adopted the language of rights in their official statements. 117 Wearmouth, Methodism and Working Class Movements, p. 196; for the influence of the Methodist class meeting on the growth of radical political clubs, see, e.g., Herbert Butterfield, ‘Reflections on Religion and Modern Individualism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 22 (1961), pp. 33–46, as repr. in Sidney A. Burrell (ed.), The Role of Religion in Modern European History, New York, Macmillan, 1964, pp. 141–2; Richard Cameron, ‘Wesley the Reformer’, in Gerald Wayne Olsen (ed.), Religion and Revolution in EarlyIndustrial England: The Halévy Thesis and its Critics, Lanham, Md, University Press of America, 1990, pp. 49–55. 118 Home Office reports 1818–19, as cited and quoted in Wearmouth, Methodism and Working Class Movements, pp. 210–11. 119 Ibid., p. 213. 120 In Manchester Wesleyan conservatives expelled hundreds of members for their political radicalism. See Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 105–7. 121 Wearmouth, Methodism and Working Class Movements, p. 216; cf. Asa Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies, London, Macmillan, 1959, pp. 80–1, 129, 132. 122 Wearmouth, Methodism and Working Class Movements, pp. 213–18. 123 J. Wesley Bready, This Freedom – Whence?, New York, American Tract Society, 1944, pp. 269– 70; cf. Joyce Marlow, The Tolpuddle Martyrs, London, Deutsch, 1971. 124 Halévy, England in 1815, p. 372. 125 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5) (trans. Talcott Parsons), London, Unwin Paperbacks, 1985, p. 143. 126 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1938, p. 194. 127 Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 276–7. 128 Wesley, The Use of Money, Works (ed. Jackson), vol. 6, p. 130. 129 Ibid., pp. 131–2. 130 Ibid., pp. 133–6. 131 Wesley, as quoted in Southey, Life of Wesley, vol. 2, pp. 305–6. 132 Hilary Armstrong, ‘The Logic of Community’, in Smith et al., Reclaiming the Ground, pp. 94–5; for the Wesley quotation, see Southey, Life of Wesley, vol. 2, p. 307. 133 Cf. C. R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective, London, Victor Gollancz, 1937, pp. 27–8. 134 Ramsay Macdonald, ‘Foreword’ to Belden, George Whitefield, as quoted in Bready, This Freedom, p. 279. 135 Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party, 2nd edn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965, pp. 125–32. 136 John A. Moses, Trade Union Theory from Marx to Walesa, New York, Berg, 1990, pp. 166–70; Pelling, Origins of Labour Party, pp. 125–8, on Stewart Headlam and the Guild of St Matthew; cf. Brenda Colloms, Victorian Visionaries, London, Constable, 1982. 137 Bready, This Freedom, pp. 286–7. My preceding paragraph follows idem., pp. 285–303.

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138 G. D. H. Cole, British Working Class Politics 1832–1919, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1941, p. 162. 139 Halévy, England in 1815, p. 372. 140 Bruce Duncan, The Church’s Social Teaching: From ‘Rerum Novarum’ to 1931, Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1991, p. 128. 141 David Thomson, Democracy in France since 1870, 4th edn, London, Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 139. 142 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990, p. 72. 143 Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981, pp. 279–84, 392–402. 144 John C. Cort, Christian Socialism: An Informal History, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1988, pp. 102–10, and at p. 102 quoting Jean Bruhat. 145 Jacques Droz, ‘Religious Aspects of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe’ (ed. Frances S. Childs), in Evelyn M. Acomb and Marvin L. Brown, Jr (eds), French Society and Culture since the Old Regime, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, pp. 133–49, at p. 136. 146 Cort, Christian Socialism, p. 120, and quoting Buchez from Barbara Petri (trans.), The Historical Thought of P.-J.-B. Buchez, Washington, DC, Catholic University, 1958, pp. 73–4; emphasis as reported; cf. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1932, pp. 42–4. 147 Duncan, Church’s Social Theory, p. 20. 148 Cort, Christian Socialism, p. 189, and quoting Wilhelm von Ketteler, The Social Teachings of Wilhelm von Ketteler (trans. Rupert J. Ederer), Washington, DC, University Press, 1981, pp. 11–15. 149 John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914 , London, SPCK, 1972, pp. 81–6. 150 Lillian Parker Wallace, Leo XIII and the Rise of Socialism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1966, pp. 182–6. 151 Richard L. Camp, The Papal Ideology of Social Reform: A Study in Historical Development 1878– 1967, Leiden, Brill, 1969, pp. l–4. 152 Peter J. Henriot, Edward P. De Berry and Michael J. Schultheis, Our Best Kept Secret: The Rich Heritage of Catholic Social Teaching, Washington, DC, The Center of Concern, 1985. 153 Pope Leo XIII, encyclical letter Rerum novarum (trans. Joseph Kirwan), London, Catholic Truth Society, 1983, p. 1. 154 Rerum novarum, p. 8; cf. Wallace, Leo XIII, pp. 168–76. 155 Rerum novarum, pp. 20–1. 156 Ibid., pp. 29–31. 157 Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York, The Free Press, 1993, pp. 69–77; cf. Donal Dorr, The Social Justice Agenda: Justice, Ecology, Power and the Church, Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1991, pp. 46–9; John N. Molony, The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy: Partito Popolare 1919–1926, London, Croom Helm, 1977. 158 Camp, Papal Ideology and Social Reform, p. 97. 159 Novak, Catholic Ethic, p. 76. Novak is arguing for a version of ‘capitalism rightly understood’ (p. xiv). 160 Joseph Gremillion, The Gospel of Peace and Justice: Catholic Social Teaching since Pope John XXIII, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1976, pp. 143–200.

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161 Pope John XXIII, encyclical letter Pacem in terris (trans. Henry Waterhouse), London, Catholic Truth Society, 1980, p. 22. 162 Michael Walsh and Brian Davies (eds), Proclaiming Justice and Peace: Papal Documents from ‘Rerum Novarum’ through ‘Centesimus Annus’, Mystic, Conn., Twenty-Third Press, 1991, p. 10; cf. Arthur Jones, Capitalism and Christians: Tough Gospel Challenges in a Troubled World Economy, Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1993. 163 Walsh and Davies (eds), Proclaiming Justice, p. 12; cf. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (trans. Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee), London, Random House, 1994, p. 132: ‘it would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the Fall of Communism . . . . It fell as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses.’ CONCLUSION 1 Leonard Schapiro, Totalitarianism, London, Macmillan, 1972, p. 37. 2 Ibid., p. 114. 3 Owen Chadwick, The Christian Church in the Cold War, London, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 102–6. 4 Karol H. Borowski, ‘Religion and Politics in Post-World War II Poland’, in Jeffrey K. Haddon and Anson Slope, Prophetic Religions and Politics: Religion and the Political Order, New York, Paragon House, 1986, pp. 221–32. 5 Fritz Fischer, ‘German Protestantism and Politics in the Nineteenth Century’, address at the 20th Conference of German Historians, 14 Sept. 1949, mimeo (translator not known), p. 2. 6 See, e.g., the ‘Sports Palace’ address by Dr Krause, leader of the Berlin German Christians, as in Peter Matheson (ed.), The Third Reich and the Christian Churches, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1981, pp. 39–40. 7 Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer: An Illustrated Introduction (trans. Rosaleen Ockenden), London, Collins, 1979, pp. 92–140; Chadwick, Church in the Cold War, pp. 8–9. 8 Ibid., pp. 157–8; for Bonhoeffer’s association with George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, and his posthumous influence on the emergent World Council of Churches, see Andrew Chandler, ‘The Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 45, no. 3 (1994), pp. 448–59. 9 Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted in Bethge, Bonhoeffer, p. 185; cf. Wolf-Dieter Zimmerman and Ronald Gregor Smith (eds), I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer (trans. Käthe Gregor Smith), London, Collins, 1973, p. 165. In earlier work Bonhoeffer had already suggested that the Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith alone had turned out under recent misinterpretations by the church to imply ‘cheap grace’: ‘The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.’ True grace, on the other hand, is ‘costly grace’, which is ‘the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock’. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937) (trans. R. H. Fuller), rev. edn, London, SCM Press, 1964, pp. 35, 37. 10 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (trans. Fuller, Clarke, Bowden et al.), enlarged edn, London, SCM Press, 1971, p. 300. 11 Ibid., pp. 582–3.

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12 Robert F. Goeckel, The Lutheran Church and the East German State: Political Conflict and Change under Ulbricht and Honecker, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 58–63. 13 John A. Moses, ‘The Church’s Role in the Collapse of Communism in East Germany 1989–90’, Colloquium, vol. 23, no. 3 (1991), pp. 122–34, at p. 125. 14 Cf. John P. Burgess, ‘Church-State Relations in East Germany: The Church as a “Religious” and “Political” Force’, Journal of Church and State, vol. 32, no. 1 (1990), pp. 17– 35, who reports the declining membership of the church through the socialist era and comments on its somewhat secularist orientation. 15 Richard V. Pierard, ‘Religion and the East German Revolution’, Journal of Church and State, vol. 32, no. 3 (1990), pp. 487–509; Goeckel, Lutheran Church and East German State, pp. 220– 46. 16 John S. Conway, ‘How to Serve God in a Post-Marxist Land? East German Protestantism’s Contribution to a Peaceful Revolution’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 16, no. 2 (1990), pp. 126–39, at p. 130; cf. Burgess, ‘Church-State Relations’, for the church as the representative of non-members who wished to register political dissent. 17 Moses, ‘Church’s Role’, p. 129, and with reference to Rolf Henrich, Der vormundschaftliche Staat: vom Versagen des realen existierenden Sozialismus, Reinbeck, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989. 18 Moses, ‘Church’s Role’, p. 130. 19 On Gorbachev’s influence on church activities throughout Eastern Europe, see Chadwick, Church in the Cold War, pp. 200–18. 20 Conway, ‘Peaceful Revolution’, p. 133; Pierard, ‘East German Revolution’, pp. 503–4. 21 Moses, ‘Church’s Role’, p. 132, and on p. 122 quoting Stephen Sykes, ‘The Truth has Set Eastern Europe Free’, Independent (London), 28 Dec. 1989; the concept of ‘free space’ provided by the church was prominent in the literature of the time – see, e.g., Ruediger Rosenthal, ‘Grössere Freiräume für Basisgruppen’, Kirche im Sozialismus, vol. 13 (1987), p. 189, as cited in Burgess, ‘Church-State Relations’, p. 29. 22 Sam M. Kobia, ‘The Christian Mission and the African Peoples in the 19th Century’, in Julio de Santa Ana (ed.), Separation without Hope?, Geneva, World Council of Churches, 1978, pp. 155–70. 23 Ndabaningi Sithole, quoted in Edgar H. Brookes and Amry Vandenbosch, The City of God and the City of Man in Africa, Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1964, p. 17. 24 Adelaide Tambo, Preparing for Power: Oliver Tambo Speaks, New York, George Braziller, 1988, pp. 180–93. 25 Ibid., p. 186. 26 Millard Arnold (ed.), The Testimony of Steve Biko, London, Maurice Temple Smith, 1978, pp. 8–9. 27 Steve Biko, ‘Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity’, in his I Write What I Like (ed. Aelred Stubbs), London, Heinemann, 1978, p. 94; see also ‘The Church as Seen by a Young Layman’, ibid., pp. 54–60; in a book published in memory of Steve Biko, the Reverend Alan Boesak elaborated that Black theology ‘is the black people’s attempt to come to terms theologically with their black situation . . . . It seeks to take seriously the biblical emphasis on the wholeness of life, which has always had its counterpart in the African heritage, trying to transform the departmentalized theology blacks have inherited from the western world into a biblical, holistic theology.’ See Alan Boesak, Black Theology, Black Power, London, Mowbray, 1976, p. 13; and Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation

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28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46

and the Calvinist Tradition (ed. Leonard Sweetman), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1984, pp. 70–8. Boesak, Black and Reformed, pp. 43–7. Itumeleng Mosala, ‘Church, Politics and Class’, mimeo, Cambridge, 1993; cf. his Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa, Grand Rapids, Mich., Eerdmans, 1989. Albert Nolan, God in South Africa: The Challenge of the Gospel, Cape Town, David Philip, 1988, pp. 172–3. Trevor Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort, London, Collins, 1957, pp. 171–2; cf. Alan Boesak, If This Is Treason, I Am Guilty, London, Collins, 1988. Christopher Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988, p. 127; H. Mark Roelofs, ‘Liberation Theology: The Recovery of Biblical Radicalism’, American Political Science Review, vol. 82, no. 2 (1988), pp. 549–66, at pp. 562– 3. Gustavo Gutíerrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (trans. Carridad Inda and John Eagleson), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1973. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (trans. James W. Leitch), New York, Harper and Row, 1967. Rebecca S. Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1986, p. 102. Ibid., pp. 112–13, and citing Moltmann, Theology of Hope, pp. 204, 304–25; Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, Salvation and Liberation (trans. Robert R. Barr), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1984, pp. 14–19; Gutíerrez, The Power of the Poor in History (trans. Robert R. Barr), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1983, pp. 60–1; as quoted in Rowland, Radical Christianity, pp. 126–7. Roelofs, ‘Liberation Theology’, p. 550. José P. Miranda, Marx against the Marxists: The Christian Humanism of Karl Marx (trans. John Drury), London, SCM Press, 1980, pp. 197–8. Segundo, The Liberation of Theology, p. 18, as quoted in Sigmund, At the Crossroads, p. 60. Arthur F. McGovern, Liberation Theology and its Critics: Toward an Assessment, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1989, pp. 121–2. Juan Luis Segundo, ‘Capitalism versus Socialism: Crux Theologica’, in Rosino Gibellini (ed.), Frontiers of Theology in Latin America (trans. John Drury), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1979, p. 249, as quoted in Chopp, Praxis of Suffering, p. 19. McGovern, Liberation Theology, p. 147. José Míguez Bonino, Toward a Christian Political Ethics, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1983, p. 77; on the Chilean movement, Christians for Socialism, see, e.g., Paul E. Sigmund, Liberation Theology at the Crossroads: Democracy or Revolution?, New York, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 46–7, and quoting the Final Document of the Christians for Socialism Conference of 1972; cf. McGovern, Liberation Theology, pp. 12–13. Leonardo Boff, Church, Charism and Power, New York, Crossroad, 1985, p. 112, as cited in Sigmund, At the Crossroads, p. 9. McGovern, Liberation Theology, p. 6. Ibid., p. 218. Although liberation theology had influence around the world, it was often an almost instinctive reaction to poverty that got priests into trouble with the authorities. An Australian priest, Fr Brian Gore, was imprisoned in the Philippines for alleged subversive activity among the peasants and put on trial for his life. See Alfred W. McCoy,

279

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47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63

Priests on Trial, Ringwood, Vic., Penguin, 1984, pp. 108–9: ‘Fr Gore found it difficult to go on burying the sugar workers’ infants during the week and absolving the planters of their sins on Sunday. “I would look down from the pulpit during the Eucharist as I was talking of Christian love”, says Gore with an intense look, “and see the planters on one side and the workers on the other. And I knew the one was raping the other. By the time I got to the sermon I was ropable with anger. After the mass, the planters would wait outside the church to argue with me.”’ Juan Hernández Pico, ‘Solidarity with the Poor and the Unity of the Church’, in Sobrino and Hernández Pico, Theology of Christian Solidarity (trans. Philip Berryman), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1985, p. 87; Clodovis Boff, Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations (trans. Robert R. Barr), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1987, and quoting J. E. Kuhn: ‘The Church, not scripture, is the spouse of Christ.’ McGovern, Liberation Theology, pp. 198–9. Sigmund, At the Crossroads, p. 84, and citing Clodovis Boff, Ecclesial Base Communities and the Practices of Liberation (1980). Chopp, Praxis of Suffering, p. 96. Míguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press, 1975, p. 128, as quoted in Chopp, Praxis of Suffering, p. 96. Oscar Romero, Voice of the Voiceless, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1985, as cited in Sigmund, At The Crossroads, p. 113. Sigmund, At the Crossroads, pp. 110–12, and citing Ignacio Ellacuria, Freedom made Flesh, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1976, p. 196. The collapse of socialist governments in Eastern Europe has led to a lively debate over the continuing relevance of Marxist conceptions to theological investigations; some have noted the affinity between the concerns of theology and those of Marxism irrespective of their association with particular governments; see, e.g., Duncan B. Forrester, ‘Can Liberation Theology Survive 1989?’, Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 47, no. 2 (1994), pp. 245–53; Frei Betto, ‘Did Liberation Theology Collapse with the Berlin Wall?’, Theology Digest, vol. 41, no. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 109–12. Sigmund, At the Crossroads, pp. 177–82. McGovern, Liberation Theology, p. 133. Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 16–19. Roelofs, ‘Liberation Theology’, p. 556; cf. Chrysostom’s dictum ‘To grow rich without injustice is impossible’, quoted in Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, New York, Scribner’s, 1960, p. 91 n. 1. Míguez Bonino, Christian Political Ethics, pp. 24–5, and quoting Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, Philadelphia, Pa, Fortress Press 1957, p. 30. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990, p. 244. Ibid. McGovern, Liberation Theology, pp. 55–6, and citing Thomas G. Sanders, ‘The Theology of Liberation: Christian Utopianism’, Christianity and Crisis, vol. 33, no. 15 (1973), pp. 167– 73; Dennis P. McCann, Christian Realism and Liberation Theology, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1981. David Sheppard, Bias to the Poor, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1983, pp. 155–8.

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64 Julia Neuberger, ‘The Prophetic Tradition and Human Rights – An Essay on Religion and Politics’, in Dan Cohn-Sherbok and David McLellan (eds), Religion in Public Life, London, Macmillan, 1992, pp. 64–73, at p. 65. 65 Ibid., p. 70; cf. Marc H. Ellis, Towards a Jewish Theology of Liberation, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Books, 1987, pp. 48–53. 66 Walter Leibrecht, ‘Paul Tillich’, in Dean S. Perlmann and Martin E. Marty (eds), A Handbook of Christian Theologians, Cleveland, Ohio, World Publishing Co., 1965, pp. 492– 3. 67 Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Theologie und Sozialismus: das Beispiel Karl Barths, Munich, Chr. Kaiser 1972; see the convenient translated summary, ‘Socialism in the Theory of Karl Barth’, in George Hunsinger (trans. and ed.), Karl Barth and Radical Politics, Philadelphia, Pa, Westminster Press, 1976, pp. 47–76. 68 Ibid., p. 69. 69 George Hunsinger, ‘Toward a Radical Barth’, in George Hunsinger (ed.), Barth and Radical Politics, pp. 181–233, at p. 186. 70 Chopp, Praxis of Suffering, p. 101, reporting Jürgen Moltmann’s criticism of Barth as in Theology of Hope, pp. 50–8. 71 Reinhold Niebuhr, Essays in Applied Christianity, Cleveland and New York, Meridian Books, 1959, as quoted in Hunsinger, ‘Toward a Radical Barth’, p. 182. 72 Clifford Green, ‘Introduction: Karl Barth’s Life and Theology’, in Clifford Green (ed.), Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom, London, Collins, 1989, p. 14, and quoting Barth, Römerbrief (1919), p. 332 (trans. in Hunsinger, Barth and Radical Politics, p. 119). 73 Cf. Willis B. Glover, ‘God and Thomas Hobbes’, in K. Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies, Oxford, Blackwell, 1965, p. 163, as quoted in Roelofs, ‘Liberation Theology’, p. 550; cf. Roelofs, ‘Hebraic–Biblical Political Thinking’, Polity, vol. 20, no. 4 (1988), pp. 572–97. 74 Chopp, Praxis of Suffering, p. 101. 75 Leibrecht, ‘Paul Tillich’, p. 499. 76 Paul Merkley, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Account, Montreal, McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1975, pp. 93–103. 77 Walter Rauschenbusch, ‘The New Apostolate’, in Paul H. Boase (ed.), The Rhetoric of Christian Socialism, New York, Random House, 1969, p. 111. 78 Niebuhr, ‘Socialists and Communists’, editorial in Radical Religion, vol. 3, no. 3 (Summer 1937), as quoted in Merkley, Niebuhr, p. 103. 79 Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘Biblical Faith and Socialism: A Critical Appraisal’, in Walter Leibrecht (ed.), Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich, London, SCM Press, 1958, pp. 44–57, at p. 49. 80 The doctrine, however, is not ‘dualist’. Cf. Karl Barth, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, in Church Dogmatics (trans. J. W. Edwards, O. Bussey and Harold Knight), 4 vols, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1958, vol. 3, pt 1, p. 383. 81 Ibid. 82 Niebuhr, Children of Light, p. 133. 83 Ibid., p. 16. 84 Ibid., p. 189. 85 See, e.g., their brilliant respective contributions to the collection Fred Krinsky (ed.), Crisis and Innovation: Constitutional Democracy in America, New York, Blackwell, 1988: Sheldon Wolin, ‘Contract and Birthright’, pp. 12–30; James MacGregor Burns, ‘The Presidency

281

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86

87

88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97 98

99 100 101 102

and the Party System’, pp. 64–87. For the theological view of similar concern, see Walter Brueggemann, Abiding Astonishment: Psalms, Modernity and the Making of History, Louisville, Ky, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991, pp. 40–1. Cf. David Martin, ‘Religious Vision and Political Reality’, in Dan Cohn-Sherbok (ed.), The Canterbury Papers: Essays on Religion and Society, London, Bellew Publishing, 1990, pp. 33– 50. Lyman Beecher, Sermons delivered on Various Occasions, Boston, Mass., Marvin, 1828, p. 359, as quoted in Sidney E. Mead, The Old Religion in the Brave New World: Reflections on the Relation between Christendom and the Republic, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977, p. 126. Marie Augusta Neal, The Just Demands of the Poor: Essays in Socio-Theology, New York, Paulist Press, 1987, pp. 27–8; cf. Barbara Rogers, Race: No Peace without Justice, Geneva, World Council of Churches, 1980; and Jürgen Moltmann’s ‘revolutionary love of our enemies’, in The Power of the Powerless (trans. Margaret Kohl), London, SCM Press, 1983, pp. 55–63. Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation, Minneapolis, Minn., Fortress Press, 1989, p. 39. Carmen Lora, in Carmen Lora et al., Woman: Victim of Oppression, Bearer of Liberation, as translated and quoted in McGovern, Liberation Theology, p. 93. Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, London, Penguin, 1988, pp. 3–31. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, London, Penguin, 1979, pp. 71–88; cf. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel and Jürgen Moltmann, Humanity in God, London, SCM Press, 1983. Moltmann-Wendel and Moltmann, Humanity in God, p. 111. Rosemary Radford Reuther, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope, New York, Paulist Press, 1970, p. 69, discussing the socialism of Charles Fourier. Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Reconciliation with Nature’, Pacifica, vol. 5, no. 3 (1992), pp. 301–13; see also especially Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus: Christology in Messianic Dimensions (trans. Margaret Kohl), London, SCM Press, 1990, and God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (trans. Margaret Kohl), London, SCM Press, 1985; see also Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Christianity in the Third Millennium”, Theology Today, vol. 51, no. 1 (Apr. 1994), pp. 75–89. Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Melbourne, Collins Dove, 1988, pp. 144–9; cf. John McCarthy, ‘The Cosmic Christ and Ecology’, Theology Digest, vol. 41, no. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 123–8. Cf. Wynne Godley, ‘The Sensibility of Contemporary Institutions’, Theology, vol. 91, no. 7 (1988), p. 92. Thomas Berry, ‘Economics: Its Effects on the Life Systems of the World’, in Anne Lonergan and Caroline Richards (eds), Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology, Mystic, Conn., Twenty-Third Publications, 1988, pp. 5–26. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 389. See, e.g., Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, pp. 113–14. William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality, Newbury Park, Calif., Sage, 1993, p. 35. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 402; emphasis in original.

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290

INDEX

Aaron 25 Abimelech 28 Abraham 55, 74, 212 Academy, Plato’s 1 Acton, Lord 171 Adam 139 Adams, John 173 Adams, Henry 168 Adoni-bezek 28 African National Congress 205 Agreement of the People 6, 154 Ahab 36 Alaric 82 Allen, J. W. 102 Allin, John 162 Althusius, Johannes 125–6, 153 Amarna 23, 27 Ambrose, St 80 American Founders 3, 4, 172–9, 181 Amos 19, 32–9 passim, 40, 43, 45, 52 Anabaptism 9, 124, 146–7, 157, 166 animal liberation 194 Antinomians 13, 158, 159, 166–7 anti-Semitism 17 Antony, St 81 Appleby, Joyce 175–6 Apuleius 83 Aquinas, St Thomas 92–3, 95, 99, 103, 105, 106, 123, 131, 172, 197–8, 208 Arian, heresy 79 Aristotle 70, 74, 84, 88, 95, 99, 103, 104, 125, 153, 165, 209 Athanasius 79 Arminianism 185 Athens 1–3, 7; see also democracy: Athenian Augustine, St 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 78, 79, 80–91, 92– 4, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 113, 115, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 131, 135, 138, 146, 148, 167, 169, 171, 181, 184, 185, 195, 197, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217–18, 219 Augustus 73 Azo 97

Baal 32 Babylon 37, 44, 45, 58, 88 Ball, John 148 Baptists 159, 177 Barak 28 Barnardo, Thomas 194 Barth, Karl 202, 211–13 Bartolus of Sassoferato 99 Basil, St 81 Beatitudes, the 56 Beecher, Lyman 214 Bellarmine, Robert 131 Bentham, Jeremy 13, 196 Bercovitch, Sacvan 166, 174 Bernard of Clairvaux 102 Berry, Thomas 216 Beza, Theodore de 126, 128–9, 130 Bible Christians 190 Biel, Gabriel 103 Biko, Steve 19, 205 Black Consciousness Movement 205 Bloch, Marc 96 Boesak, Alan 205 Bolingbroke, Viscount Henry St John 171–2, 173 Bonaventure, St 97 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 19, 91, 202, 203, 208 Boniface VIII 131 Bonino, Jose Míguez 207, 210 Bosanquet, Bernard 5 Bozeman, Theodore 162 Bradstock, Andrew 156–7 Bready, J. Wesley 194 Brookes, Edgar H. 205 Broome, Arthur 194 Brown, Peter 87 Browne, Robert 152 Brueggemann, Walter 30, 36, 39, 214 Bryce, James 92 Buber, Martin 26, 28 Bucer, Martin 126, 127 Buchanan, George 11, 131–2 Buchez, Philippe 197 Bullinger, Heinrich 126–7

291

Bunting, Jabez 190 Burgh, James 179, 182 Burns, James MacGregor 214 Burke, Edmund 12, 171, 179, 180, 182 Burnet, Gilbert 132–3

INDEX Constitution of the United States, the 172–8, 212 constitutionalism 4, 10–11, 14, 20, 94, 95, 124–5, 128–9, 130–1, 132–3, 141, 154–5 contract 10, 131, 134–43, 153–1, 160, 172 Cotton, John 158, 159, 166, 168 corporatism 199 Council of Basle 98, 99 Council of Constance 98 Council of Nicea 79 Council of Paris and Worms 95 covenant 9, 10, 33, 45, 47, 127, 130, 134–43, 152, 161, 165 Critias 19 Cromwell, Oliver 9, 132–3, 135, 149, 151, 156 cross, the 17, 61–4, 114, 115 Cushan-rishathaim 28 Cynic philosophy 56, 69 Cyprian of Carthage 77, 78

Cain and Abel 89 calling 106, 123, 125, 126, 137–8, 140, 143, 173–4, 186–92, 210, 216, 219 Calvin, John 17, 121–43 passim, 167, 175, 185, 212 Calvinism 3, 10, 11–12, 13–16, 98, 121–143, 171, 172–3, 174–5, 176–7, 185 Canaan 2, 23–45 passim, 49 capitalism 4–7, 15–16, 196, 200, 201, 207, 209, 211 Cartwright, Thomas 182 Catholic Church 6, 11, 78, 80, 81, 92–120 passim, 124, 128, 131, 148, 189, 196–9, 201, 206–11, 217 Celsus 75 Centesimus annus 199 Charlemagne 92 Chaney, Marvin 24 charisma 25, 31, 33, 112–13, 131 Charles I 132-3 Charles II 171 Chartism 9, 191–92 Christian democracy 197 Christianity 8, 9, 10, 16, 20, 31, 42, 45, 46–68 et passim Christian socialism 16, 183, 194, 210, 211, 216 Church of England 147–52, 156, 157, 182, 183, 185, 194 Cicero 71, 82, 83, 87, 88, 105 citizenship 159–60 et passim ‘City of God, the’ 4–7, 9, 12, 14, 20, 76, 82–91, 92–3, 122, 195, 196, 217, 218 Clement of Alexandria 74 Clarkson, Thomas 189 Cleisthenes of Athens 1 Cochrane, C. N. 82 Cole, G. D. H. 195 Cole, Thomas 153 Communal Reformation 144–7 Communism 6, 156, 197, 199 community 9–10, 18, 46–7, 49–51, 67–8, 81, 88–90, 96, 97–100, 143, 144–7, 153, 156, 159, 160, 161–2, 165, 174, 190–1, 208, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219 conciliarism 9, 97–100, 124 Cone, James H. 205 Congregationalist church 152, 160, 183 Connecticut 161 Connolly, William 218 conscience 16–19, 18–20 consent 10, 154, 155, 160, 163, 168 Constant, Benjamin 3 Constantine 78–9 Constantinople 79

Daniel 58–9, 157, 181 David 30–2, 36, 45, 48, 61, 212 Dawson, Jane 148–9 Deborah 25–6, 28, 127 Decius 77 Declaration of Independence, the 175 Declaration of the Rights of Man 6 Democracy: American 174–6; Athenian 1–3, 12, 51, 91, 94, 97, 111, 137, 150, 159, 160, 162, 168, 170, 209–210; and the Bible 94; ‘classical’ 14; and the City of God 89–91; communal 144–7, 195; and conciliarism 97–100; ideals 218–19; international 216–18; and Knox 128; and Levellers 149, 155–7; liberal 3, 5–6, 12; and Locke 142–3; and Luther 107, 110–20; and Methodism 190, 191, 196; ‘moral distinctiveness of’ 4; in New England 160–9; and prophecy 38–45; Puritan 147–69, 157–8; South African 205–6; and de Tocqueville 157; town democracy 11–12 Deuteronomy 40, 43–5, 94–5 Dewey, John 213 Dibelius, Bishop Martin 202 Diderot, Denis 188 Diggers 155–6 Diocletian 72–3, 75, 77–8 Diogenes the Cynic 71 divine right of kings 100, 131, 135, 139 Domitian 72 Donatist Church 78, 81 Dube, John 205 Dunn, John 5, 6–7, 17, 138, 141 Ebeling, Gerhard 112, 117, 119 Ecclesial Base Community Groups 208 Edict of Thessalonica 80 Edward VI 128, 148 Eglon 28 Ellacuria, Ignacio 208 Egypt 2, 22–4, 27, 45

292

Ehud 28 Elijah 36 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 163 Emser, Hieronymus 110 environmental theology 215–16 Epicureanism 10 Epicurus 71 equality 2, 5, 8, 111, 113, 119, 140, 150, 174, 175, 190, 198, 205, 219 Eusebius of Caesarea 79 exodus, the 10, 17, 22, 27, 45, 47, 50, 75 Ezekiel 62, 95 Fairfax, Thomas 156 federalism 125–6, 154–5, 173, 178 feminist theology 215–16, 218 feudalism 95–6, 125, 144–5 Figgis, J. N. 102 Filmer, Robert 139 forgiveness 50, 58, 62 Fortuna 84 Fox, Matthew 216 Franklin, Benjamin 174 Fry, Elizabeth 194 Frederick the Wise 109 freedom 2, 8, 113–15, 119, 122, 123, 124, 133–4, 140, 150–1, 158–9, 161, 170, 185, 186, 197, 200, 219 Fronto 75 Gaudium et spes 199 Geneva 121, 124, 128 Gerson, Jean 98 Gibbons, Cardinal 198 Gideon 26, 28 Gierke, Otto von 98 Glorious Revolution 138 God’s preference for the poor 8, 52, 209, 211 Goffe, William 151 Goodman, Christopher 127, 128, 149 goodness 17–18, 41–2, 46–9, 60 Gorbachev, Mikhail 204 Gordon, Samuel 166–7 Gottwald, Norman K. 23, 24 Gracchi, Tiberius and Caius 43 Gratian 97 Grebel, Conrad 147 Gregory the Great 92 Grote, George 3 Gutíerrez, Gustavo 206 Halévy, Elie 183–4, 192, 195 Halligan, John M. 23 Hani, Chris 205 Hardie, Keir 193 Harrington, James 126, 136–7 Harvard College 163–4 Held, David 216 Hengel, Martin 60, 64 Henry VIII 148 Herodotus 83

INDEX Herrnhut 186 Heschel, Abraham J. 38, 42 Hezekiah 43 history, philosophy of 83–4 Hitler, Adolph 17, 202, 212 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 5, 10, 13–14, 115, 126, 134–7, 140, 142, 173 Hobsbawm, E. J. 195 Holocaust, the 17 Honecker, Erich 204 Horus 29 Hosea 33–4, 36, 39–40, 41, 44, 45, 52, 95 Hotman, François, 128, 129 Howard, John 186 Huguccio 97 Hübmaier, Balthazar 147 Huddleston, Trevor 205, 206 Hughes, Thomas 194 Huguenots 11, 128–32, 135, 139, 176, 183 Hus, Jan 19 Hussites 157 Hutchinson, Anne 158, 166 Hutchinson, Thomas 162 Hütterites 147 individualism 7–8, 9, 84, 112–13, 116–17, 118, 119, 121, 133–5, 139–40, 151, 158, 159, 165, 166, 185, 186, 197 Isaiah 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 52, 211 Isaiah (Second Isaiah) 45, 52, 62 Isaiah (Third Isaiah) 51–2 isonomia 5 Israel 2, 9, 21–45, 65, 122 Israelite monarchy 10, 27–32, 36, 44, 122, 129, 133, 135 Jabin 28 James 56–7 James II 138 Jansenists 197 Jefferson, Thomas 174, 178 Jephthah 26, 28 Jeremiah 19, 32, 33–7, 41, 45, 47, 50, 52 Jeroboam II 33, 36 Jerusalem 1–3, 37, 67 Jesus 18, 19, 20, 45, 46–68, 69, 93–4, 100, 107, 114, 129, 133, 136, 138, 145, 155, 162, 167, 190, 198, 205, 210, 212, 215, 216 Jesus Hymn 63–4 Jezebel 36 Job 61 John XXIII 199 John Chrysostom 81 John of Paris 97, 98 John Paul II 199, 202 Joshua 22, 129 Josiah 37, 43–4, 94 Jotham 28–9 Judaism 2–3, 8, 9, 10, 20, 73, 75 et passim Judas 78 judges (ancient Jewish) 10, 24–7, 122, 127, 129

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INDEX justice 2, 5, 12, 13, 29, 34–45, 49, 60, 87, 93, 106, Manasseh 37 118–20, 123, 128, 144, 161, 169, 198, 215, 217, Mandela, Nelson 205 Manicheanism 86 219 Mann, Tom 196 Justin Martyr 74 Manning, Cardinal Henry 196, 198 Ketteler, Wilhelm Emmanuel von 197, 198 Mansbridge, Jane J. 163, 168 Kilhamites 190 Marcus Aurelius 73, 75, 77 King, Martin Luther 19 Mariana, Juan de 131–3 kingdom/kingship of God 4, 21–2, 24–7, 45, Markus, R. A. 90, 91 46–9, 51, 55, 57, 58, 61–2, 64–8, 89, 122–6, Marquardt, Friedrich-Wilhelm 211 128, 130, 136, 137, 138, 160–1, 162, 212 Marsilius (Marsiglio) of Padua 99–100, 104 Kingsley, Charles 194 Martin, V. 98 Knox, John 11, 127–8, 176 martyrs 72–3, 75, 76–8, 114, 115, 171 Kramnick, Isaac 142 Marxism 3, 89, 157, 184, 198, 207, 209 Mary I 127, 128, 148 Laborem exercens 199 Mary Queen of Scots 149 labour electoral leagues 9 Massachusetts Bay Colony 158, 160, 166 Labour Party 193 Mater et magistra 199 Lammenais, Félicité 197 Mather, Richard 152 Lang, Bernhard 34 Maurice, F. D. 194 Lansbury, George 193 Melanchthon, Philip 105, 185 Laski, Harold J. 118 Melito 73 Lawson, George 153 Mendenhall, George E. 23–4, 27 Lazarus 55 Mesopotamia 23 Leo I 92, 105 Methodists 177, 183–93, 195–6; see also Leo XIII 197, 198 Kilhamites, Bible Christians, Primitive Letwin, Shirley Robin 12 Methodists Levellers 6, 8, 9, 149–51, 154–7 Metz, Johann Baptist 67 liberalism 12, 143, 159, 162, 168, 178, 197, Micah 40, 43, 52, 157, 165, 211 Milbank, John 217–18 198, 211 Mill, John Stuart 3, 8, 13, 133, 150, 171, 181, liberation theology 6, 9, 157, 198, 199, 196 206–11, 217 Miller, Joshua 161 liberty see freedom Miller, Perry 158–9, 166, 169 life of contemplation 70–3 Milton, John 8, 126, 133, 176 limited government 10 Miranda, José 207 Lilburne, John 154–5 Miriam 25, 26 Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop 5, 151, 153, 213 Moltmann, Jürgen, 206, 212, 216 Liutprand 95 Montanist schism 77–8 Locke, John 3, 8, 10, 12, 133, 137–43, 153, Montesquieu, Charles-Louis Secondat, Baron 168, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181 de 13, 141, 168, 171 Lollards 148, 157 Moravians 183, 186 Louis XIV 102 Mosala, Itumeleng 205–6 Louis the Fat 96 Moses 10, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21–2, 24–6, 29, 30, love 9, 45, 49, 50, 51, 85, 88–9, 106, 145, 153, 33, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 62, 74, 128, 130, 137, 161, 164, 165, 215, 218 138, 212 Lucretius 71 de Mun, Albert 198 Luddites 191 Müntzer, Thomas 146–7 Ludlow, J. M. F. 194 Mussolini, Benito 201 Luther, Martin 13, 17, 19, 100–20, 121, 122, 123, 135, 138, 145, 146, 166, 167, 171, 175, NSPCC 194 176, 184, 185, 195, 196, 210, 212, 213 Naboth 36 Lutheran Church 202, 203 Nathan 19, 32, 36 natural law 116, 125, 129–30, 135, 136, 140, McCann, Dennis 210 172 Macdonald, Ramsay 193 Neal, Marie Augusta 214 McGovern, Arthur F. 210 Nehemiah 44–5 Machiavelli, Niccolo 106, 117, 137, 141, 174 Neher, André 42 Madison, James 173 Nell-Bruening, Oswald von 199 Magna Carta 155 neoplatonism 74–5 Makgatho, Z. K. 205 Nero 72 Malachi 44

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INDEX Neuberger, Julia 211 Neues Forum 203 New England Way, the 168 Newton, Isaac 180 Nicholas of Cusa 98, 99 Niebuhr, Reinhold 13, 202, 210, 213, 214 Niemöller, Martin 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 218 Nightingale, Florence 194 office 106, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131 opposition, political 11, 32–4, 40–3, 49, 57–61, 64–8, 116, 119, 125, 126–34, 140, 143, 169, 171–2, 178, 200 Origen 73, 74, 75, 76 original sin 85–7 Osgood, Herbert L. 162 ostracism 159 Othniel 28 ‘outside direction’/‘divine imperative’ 12–13, 195–6, 218–19 Overton, Richard 154 Owen, John 153 Ozanam, Frédéric 197 Pacem in terris 199 pagan religion 2, 29, 34, 75, 76 Pagels, Elaine 215 Paine, Thomas 173, 179–80, 190, 191 parties, political 170–8, 200 Passover 27 Paton, Alan 205 patriarchy 139–40, 158, 215, 218 peace 86, 88–90, 123 Paul, St 17, 19, 47, 48, 50, 57–8, 63–4, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 74, 75, 88, 102, 109, 115, 116, 121, 127, 136, 169, 185, 212, 215 Paul VI 199, 208 Pericles of Athens 209–10 Perry, Ralph Barton 163, 169 persecutions 72–3, 75, 76–8, 159–60, 167 Peter, St 19, 66, 67, 78, 92, 96 ‘Peterloo’ 191 pharaoh 20, 21–2, 27, 28 Philistines 29, 31 Philo of Alexandria 73 Pico, Juan Hernández 208 Pilate 64, 67, 93, 100 Pilgrims 6, 17 Pius XI 199 Plato 4, 10, 13, 18, 41, 60, 63, 69, 70–1, 74, 82, 83, 85, 87, 102, 103, 105, 106, 122, 177, 184, 195–6 Plessis-Mornay, Philippe du 126, 129–30 Plotinus 74–5, 82, 83 Pocock, J. G. A. 136, 141 political justice 42–3 Polybius 84 Ponet, John 127 poor, the 33, 38–45, 51–7, 118, 146, 154–7,

179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186–8, 189– 90, 192, 198, 206–12, 216–17, 218–19 Popieluszko, Jerzy 202 Populorum progressio 199 Porphyry of Tyre 75, 82, 83 postmodernism 218 Presbyterianism 157, 183 Price, Richard 179, 180, 182, 190 Primitive Methodists 190 ‘priesthood of all believers, the’ 7, 111, 113, 122–3, 125 Priestley, Joseph 181–2 prison reform 186 progress 117–18, 151, 169, 180–2, 199, 213 prophets (ancient Jewish) 11, 12, 30, 32–45, 47, 57, 60, 66, 74, 90, 95, 120, 133, 157, 169 ‘Protestant ethic’ 15 Puritans 9, 148–65, 184, 192 Putney debates 135, 150–1, 155–6 Pythagoreanism 74 Q document (the Sayings-source) 56 Quadragesimo anno 199 Quakers 157, 159, 188, 189 RSPCA 194 Rainborough, Thomas 155 Rauschenbush, Walter 212 Ranters 157 Rawls, John 13 Reformation, the 4, 9, 11, 16, 18, 20, 92–120, 123, 126, 134, 137, 142, 144, 148, 162, 164, 173, 185, 199, 204 reformism 11–12, 90–1, 119–20, 169, 170, 191, 193–6, 217, 218–19 regicide 131–4 republicanism 161, 169, 174, Rerum novarum 198 Rhode Island 166–7 Riches, John 46 Ritter, Gerhard 101 Robinson, John 164 Robinson, John (Bishop) 64 Roelofs, H. Mark 207, 210 Rome 1, 7, 10, 53, 58–61, 67, 70, 72–80, 82, 83, 88, 97; conversion of, 78–80 Romero, Oscar 19, 208 Romulus and Remus 89 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 10, 98, 188 Rothari 95 Rump Parliament 132–3 Rutherford, Samuel 11 St Bartholemew’s Day massacre 128 Sallust 83 St Vincent de Paul Society 197 Samuel 10, 31–2, 122, 129 Sanders, Thomas 210 Sartori, Giovanni 6 Saul 31–2, 122, 136 Schapiro, Leonard 201

295

Schulz, Siegfried 189 Schorlemmer, Friedrich 204 Schweitzer, Albert 48 secularization 3–4, 12, 13–14, 90, 135, 171, 196, 200, 210, 212–14 Seekers 166 Segundo, Juan Luis 207 Seneca 71 separation of church and state 20, 21, 30, 66, 167 Sermon on the Mount 48, 54, 107 Sermon on the Plain 54–5 Servetus 17 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of 138 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of 194 Sigmund, Paul E. 209 Simon the Zealot 59 Simons, Menno 147 Sisera 26 Sithole, Ndabaningi 204 Skinner, Quentin 100 slavery 22, 114, 182–9 Sobrino, John 208 Sobukwe, Robert 205 socialism 153, 156, 183, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 207, 211–12 Society of Jesus 131 Socrates 19, 74 Solidarity 202 Solomon 31, 94 Solon of Athens 43 Song of Mary (Magnificat) 8, 52, 56, 133, 146 Song of the Sea of Reeds 22, 45 Staupitz, Johann von 103 Stephen, St 19, 66, 67 Stoic philosophy 69, 74, 82, 189 Strasbourg 127 Strauss, Leo 19 Sunday Schools movement 189–90

INDEX Tutu, Desmond 205 two cities, the 78, 80–91, 93 two-kingdoms doctrine 4, 13–14, 66, 100–20, 138–43, 146, 160, 166, 167, 172, 202, 203, 210, 213 Tyconius 78 Tyrrell, James 139

Tawney, R. H. 15–16 Ten Commandments (Decalogue) 40, 124, 126 temple, the 35–6 Tertullian, 1 75–6, 147 Thales of Miletus 70 Theodosius 79–80, 81 Thompson, E. P. 195 Thucydides 83 Tienanmen Square 204 Tierney, Brian 96 Tillett, Ben 196 Tillich, Paul 202, 211 Tocqueville, Alexis de 157, 168, 175 toleration 138–9 Tolpuddle Martyrs 192 de la Tour de Pin, René 198 town meeting 162–3, 168, 170 trade unionism 9, 192–4, 196, 198–9 Trinity, the 4, 74, 79, 80, 87–8

Ullmann, Walter 93, 94, 144 Uriah 36 Uzziah 36 Valentinian 80 Vane, Henry 158 Varro 83 Vermes, Geza 53 Virgil 83 virtue 174 Walpole, Robert 171, 183–4 Walwyn, William 155 Waugh, Benjamin 194 Wearmouth, Robert 184, 191, 192 Weber, Max 15–16, 33, 38, 112, 192 Wesley, Charles 183, 185, 186 Wesley, John/Wesleyanism, 11, 13, 183–93, 196 Westminster model 12 Whitefield, George 184, 193 Wilberforce, William 189, 194 Wildavsky, Aaron 21, 25 Wildman, William 135 William of Ockham 98, 103, 104 Williams, Roger 3, 8, 13, 160, 166–8 Williams, George 194 Winstanley, Gerrard 155–6 Winthrop, John 9, 160, 161, 165, 166 Wolin, Sheldon 168, 214 women 75, 214–16, 218 Woodhouse, A. S. P. 168 World Council of Churches 217 Wyclif, John 147–8 Wood, Gordon 175 Wyszynski, Cardinal 202 Xenophon 19 YMCA 194 Yahweh 22–45 passim, 47, 48, 49, 57, 62, 65, 143 Yoder, John 53 Zagorin, Perez 154 Zealots, the 57, 59 Zechariah 50, 60, 64 Zedekiah 37 Zeitlin, Irving M. 29 Zurich 126, 145 Zwickau 146 Zwingli, Huldrych 17, 126, 145, 147, 176

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