A Larger Hope 2 Read online

  While it seems clear that Denck believed that God works to redeem sinners from hell, it is not clear whether or not Denck thought that sinners could, in theory, continue to resist God forever, and thus unclear whether or not he was a card-carrying universalist. He certainly never explicitly claims in his published works that all will be saved. According to William Klassen and Morwenna Ludlow, Denck probably was not a supporter of universal salvation, even though he was accused of being one on at least three occasions.15 However, his teaching on God’s saving love for all, Christ’s death for all, the divine spark in all, and his insistence on the therapeutic and purifying nature of punishments probably favored the accusations of universalism against him, and it is possible that his accusers were correct, at least in detecting the natural trajectory of his theology.

  However, Denck’s ideas, also spread by his follower Hans Hut, gained no favor in Anabaptist circles, despite the claims of their opponents, both Catholic and Protestant. Some other Radical Reformation theologians affirmed at least the possibility of universal salvation—Clement Ziegler, August Bader, and Anthony Pocquet, for instance, argued for the possibility of the salvation of the demons16—and future research may reveal other Reformation-period Christians with universalist sympathies.

  Universalism in Counter-Reformation Catholicism

  Beyond Protestantism, in the Catholic world, universalism was equally rare. Here the church kept a very tight grip on what could and what could not be taught, and universal salvation was considered a dangerous heresy that would undermine righteous living. So it is little surprise that we see but fleeting glimpses of a wider hope. However, there were a few interesting exceptions, such as Giorgio Rioli, nicknamed Siculo (ca. 1517–51), a Benedictine monk who was the founder of the Georgian movement. He wrote in Sicilian and was killed in prison as a result of a religious trial by the Inquisition. In his most important published work, his Letter (Epistla alli cittadini della riva Trento, Bologna 1550), he proclaimed the final restoration of all people, which in his view will be made possible by Christ. (This work elicited a rebuttal from John Calvin, the Protestant Reformer, in 1551.)17

  One Catholic thinker who warrants some more comment is a French mystic named Guillaume Postel. Postel is interesting not only for being a Catholic, but also for being a very clear example of a universalist theology deeply shaped by esotericism.

  Guillaume Postel (1510–81)

  Guillaume Postel—born in Normandy and educated in Paris—was a scholar of repute and a Catholic priest associated at various points with Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits, though he was never a Jesuit himself.18 Postel was a true “Renaissance man”—an accomplished linguist (able to work in Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, and Latin), an astronomer, a cartographer, and a diplomat, serving in the French embassy in Istanbul from 1535 to 1536/7, when Francis I sought an alliance with the Ottoman Turks. While there, and on a later trip around the Holy Land and Syria (1548–51), he collected Eastern manuscripts for the King of France’s royal library. When he returned to France he was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages at the Collège Royal. After some years, Postel resigned his post and traveled around Europe collecting Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic manuscripts and translating them.

  His first universalist publication was De orbis terrae Concordia (Concerning the Harmony of the Earth) in 1544. Here he argued that all the religions of the world shared a common core—the love of God, the worship of God, the love of humanity, and the importance of helping humanity. Christianity (the philosophia Christiana) was the best representation of this core, and the day was coming soon when all pagans, Jews, and Muslims would be convinced by this truth and convert to Christianity.

  His universalistic optimism was grounded in his belief that Christ dwells within all, whether or not they recognize him. Given that Christ indwells all people, there is within them an impulse toward the good and toward their eschatological unification with God, an impulse that they cannot resist forever. This idea allowed him to identify godly people who were not Christians, but whom he considered members of the ecclesia generalis. These people—who would come to be called “anonymous Christians” in the twentieth-century Catholic thought of Karl Rahner—fell into different categories (e.g., those who had not heard of Christ, those who had heard but did not understand Christ, etc.). When all people are united in mind and spirit they will participate in the unity of God himself. For all things proceed from and reach their destiny in the divine unity. (This notion of the unity of all things with each other in God pervaded his thinking.)

  His universalist inclinations became central to his life and mission through a life-changing relationship he developed in 1547–49. While he was working on translating mystical Jewish Kabbalistic texts in Venice,19 Postel worked as a chaplain in the Hospital of Saints John and Paul, and became the confessor of a woman aged around fifty, an illiterate virgin named Johanna (1497–1549), who had given her life in service of the poor and sick at the hospital. She confessed to him that she had experienced visions, and he came to believe that she was a prophetess with global significance in the plans of God—a new Eve, Sophia, a Cosmic Mary, the “mother of the world,” indeed, a female messiah. She would usher in a new age of political and religious harmony. He came to see himself as her spiritual son, with a divine destiny as a prophet and priest to unite the religions of the world in the coming cosmic restoration.

  In Postel’s view, Jesus had redeemed the superior, “masculine” part of the soul (associated with intellect), but not the inferior, “female” part of the soul (associated with emotion). He believed that Johanna, filled with Christ’s spirit, had been sent to save the lower part of the soul, bringing to holistic completion God’s salvific work in humanity.

  When Johanna died in 1549, Postel went into a coma for several weeks and believed himself to be possessed by her spirit. He claimed that she had communicated to him a message of universal pardon, universal restoration, universal baptism.20 His function was to proclaim pardon and absolution to all people, thereby playing a pivotal role in the coming global restitution. In Postel’s universalist future, all humans would be united within a reformed Catholic Church under the rule of the French monarchy. This would be the true reformation of the world, unlike the pseudo-reformation of the Protestants.

  In 1553, Postel published two books based on his own visions, and this brought the Inquisition down on him, deeply concerned about his heterodoxy. Because of his longstanding connections with the Jesuits, who were conducting the Inquisition, he was not condemned as a heretic (a sentence that brought a death penalty), but was de-priested and declared insane, a verdict that was devastating to Postel. All his works, past and future, were put on the index of forbidden books in 1555, and he was confined to the papal prison in Rome and then the monastery of St. Martin des Champes in Paris. However, he continued to declare his idiosyncratic apocalyptic views—a blend of Christian theology, Jewish Kabbalah (mysticism), Islamic texts, and Mother Johanna’s visionary teachings—until his death in 1581.

  The Reformation opened a door to universalist speculations, but in both Protestantism and especially Catholicism these speculations only manifest themselves sporadically and at the fringes. None of the characters mentioned in this chapter—Denck, Rioli, and Postel—made any lasting impression on the theology of Christian universalism. They serve only to illustrate that here and there such matters were beginning to be considered. The seventeenth century was to witness some more overt manifestations of the wider hope in Protestantism, but as we shall see in the subsequent chapters, it was not until the eighteenth century that such ideas would really take root.

  5. Though they did come to reject purgatory, the relatively new kid on the eschatological block.

  6. Luther, “Letter to Hans von Rechenberg,” 51.

  7. Williams, Radical Reformation, 254.

  8. Denck, Was geredt sei, 115 (Hans Denck
Schriften, 46).

  9. Denck, Was geredt sei, 89 (Hans Denck Schriften, 33).

  10. Steenbuch, “Reconciling Conflicting Convictions,” para. 15.

  11. Denck, Bekenntnis, 61 (Hans Denck Schriften, 45).

  12. Denck, “Whether God Is the Cause of Evil,” 103.

  13. Denck, “Whether God Is the Cause of Evil,” 90.

  14. Denck, Ordnung Gotts, 219 (Hans Denck Schriften, 92).

  15. Ludlow, “Hans Denck,” 257–74; Klassen, “Hans Denck.”

  16. According to Williams, Radical Reformation, 832–45.

  17. Calvin, De aeterna Dei praedestinatione.

  18. On Postel, see Bouwsma, Career and Thought; Kuntz, Guillaume Postel; Petry, Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation; Blanchard, Will All Be Saved? 83–86; McClymond, Devil’s Redemption, 176–80.

  19. The mystical theology of Jewish Kabbalah played a major role in Postel’s own theology. His knowledge of it was extensive, and he was one of the first Christians to absorb it into his theology.

  20. Kuntz, Guillaume Postel, 80–81.

  2

  Seventeenth-Century Troublemaker

  Gerrard Winstanley

  The mid-seventeenth century was a time of great turmoil and increasing religious radicalism in England. As Andrew Bradstock notes, “the combined effect of three very bloody Civil Wars, the trial and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the king, and the abolition of institutions such as the monarchy, House of Lords, Star Chamber, bishops and church courts combined to create a breakdown of censorship which allowed ideas hitherto considered heretical and kept underground to surface in print and word.”21 Among the many radical sectarian religious groups that arose in those apocalyptic, world-changing days of horrors and hope were the likes of the Baptists, the Levellers, the Diggers, the Ranters, the Quakers, the Fifth Monarchists, and the (wonderfully named) Muggletonians. And among the “heretical” ideas that manifested themselves, albeit not prominent among them, was the hope that in the end all would be saved. The man who first declared this in print was Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the True Levellers, or—as others called them—the Diggers.

  Gerrard Winstanley (1609–76) and the Diggers

  The public ministry of Gerrard Winstanley was brief, a mere four years (1648–52).22 For a while it burned hopefully; indeed, he became a figure of much discussion and debate in the capital, but it ended in disappointment.

  Winstanley was born in Lancashire and moved to London, aged twenty-one, to work in the cloth trade, which he did until his business failed in 1643, perhaps as a result of the disruption caused by the English Civil War. He then moved near to Cobham in Surrey, where his father-in-law lived, to look after cattle. Here he fell upon hard times, especially following the harsh winter of 1647/48 and the failed harvest, which, combined with the huge increases in the levy demanded by the Army, drove Winstanley and many others into poverty.

  Winstanley had grown up in an English parish church, being a committed churchgoer, moving with the cultural flow, but that changed after a religious awakening, possibly provoked by his own experiences of hardship. This moved him to denounce the established clergy and to leave the parish church and associate with those the authorities considered “sectarians.”

  Early in 1648 he started writing and took his manuscript, the first of twenty publications over the next four years, to the printers in London. This book, The Mysterie of God, concerning the Whole Creation, Mankinde (1648) is very possibly the first English-language defense of universal salvation in print.23 It is all the more surprising given that it came out at a time when public declarations of universalism were being made illegal in the Blasphemy Law of May 1648.24 (The perceived need for the new law suggests that some were starting to teach universalism, or at least that the authorities feared that they were.) But Winstanley was not a man to be concerned about man-made laws if they went against what he considered the teachings of God.

  It was not long after this publication that Winstanley’s reconfigured faith was to take on a strong theo-political flavor in a theologically inspired form of proto-communism.

  The year 1649 began with the execution of King Charles I—a tyrant in Winstanley’s view—and a second catastrophic harvest failure, compounding the already-grim plight of the poor, with many starving. And Gerrard Winstanley had what he called a “trance” in which God spoke to him: “Worke together. Eat bread together.” He believed that the Lord made clear to him that in creation all humans are equal, with none to rule over others, and that the earth had been given to all as “a common treasury.” The landowners disenfranchised the poor by claiming the land as their private property, and the ancient rights of the people to use the land were gradually being eroded. So Winstanley and a handful of others felt led by God to engage in a prophetic act of land reclamation and community building. At the start of April, they set up a camp on (St.) George’s Hill, Surrey, which was on common land, and planted beans, carrots, and parsnips. Hence they became known as Diggers.

  Their intention was not to force any landowners off their land—indeed, Winstanley was consistently committed to non-violence throughout all his activity25—but to cultivate common, untilled land. His hope was that this act would inspire many more to join them and others to set up similar communities throughout the land. The plan was that, in the end, the landowners would find their supply of cheap labor drying up, as the poor now had land to cultivate on the commons and hills, and so landowners would be forced to reduce their holdings to a size they could tend themselves, eventually coming to see the truth that the land does not belong to them anyway.

  This whole vision was couched in biblical language in Winstanley’s many publications on it—it was, in his eyes, an eschatological recovery of creation, a liberation from oppressive political and economic tyranny. The Diggers were acting in the Spirit as part of the vanguard of new creation where the poor would feast on the fruit of the earth and none would hunger.

  The community at George’s Hill—and later on Cobham Heath, where it relocated—did grow (albeit at nothing like the rate Winstanley had hoped),26 but it experienced fierce and sustained opposition from those with vested interest in the status quo: the Diggers were threatened often, physically attacked on numerous occasions; their houses were dismantled or burned down several times; their seeds and crops were spoiled; their property was confiscated; they faced spells in prison, were taken to court, and even to parliament; and all sorts of misleading stories were spread about them. In the end, in April 1650, around fifty men led by the local parson forcibly routed them, and the experiment came to an end.

  Winstanley continued to write for two more years, seeking other routes to achieve the goal, but then he fell out of the public eye. We know little about his life after 1652. He associated briefly with the Quakers and then inherited his father-in-law’s estate around 1657, becoming a “gentleman” and falling back into his pre-sectarian ways as a member of the parish church, even serving as a churchwarden (a fact that has flummoxed some historians). After his wife’s death, his father-in-law took away the estate again. He remarried and eventually became a Quaker.27

  We do not know exactly when or how Winstanley came to affirm the final restoration. The preface to the Mysterie of God says that when he first encountered the idea he found it very strange and objectionable, but that God revealed its truth to him and he now sees great beauty in it. Beyond this we can only guess. He was certainly scathing about theological learning that came through books by “experts,” and he claims that his own teachings came from two sources only—Scripture and his own inner experiences with God.28 In his Watch-word to the City of London and the Armie, he writes that, after years of suffering, “my heart was filled with sweet thoughts, and many things were revealed to me which I have never read in books, nor heard from the mouth of the flesh.” One
of those revelations was that “the earth shall be made a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons.” Was universalism one of the others? That may well be the case. His universalism certainly has its own idiosyncratic feel, and there are no obvious direct sources from which he would have learned it.

  Winstanley’s Universalism

  The big picture: The telos of humanity as the dwelling place of God

  The Mysterie of God, concerning the Whole Creation, Mankinde, while not erudite, is full of theological interest. The book offers a short overview of what Winstanley perceives to be the story of God and creation from Genesis to Revelation. God’s ultimate aim in creation was to fully indwell the humanity of Adam, but in the beginning God deliberately refrained from this. Adam was created pure and good, but God did not bodily indwell his humanity. In Winstanley’s view, Adam himself was the Garden of Eden that God had made for his own delight, to inhabit and walk in. The lovely plants that grew in Eden were the holy virtues of love, joy, peace, humility, and the like. (He also thought that humanity was created as the biblical heaven, the dwelling place of God.) However, the very ontological “distance,” as we might phrase it, between Creator and creation meant that without God’s in-filling, when left to itself, creation would inevitably degenerate and fall away from goodness into self-love:

  But all these created qualities, and a Being distinct from the Being of God; God knew and saw, that there would spring up as a weed, and the first fruits of it likewise, an inclinable principle, or spirit of self-love aspiring up in the midst of this created, living Garden, and in the midst of every plant therein, which is indeed, aspiring to be as God, or to be a Being of it selfe, equall to, yet distinct from God. . . . [A]s the purest water being let stand, does in time putrifie, so I say, God knew that the first fruit that this created Being would bring forth, would be an aspiring desire to be equall, or like God himself, which if the creature delighted in, and so ate, or satisfied himself in his own fruit, he should die; but if he forsook his own invention, and stuck close to God, acknowledging his [i.e., God’s] Being to be his [i.e., Adam’s] life, and all in all, then he should live. (2–3)29