A Larger Hope 2 Read online

  75. Sterry, Discourse, 171.

  76. Sterry, Rise, 52.

  77. Sterry, Rise, 101.

  78. Philip Almond considers this notion of ongoing transformation in the afterlife to be “perhaps the most significant development in conceptions of life after death in the seventeenth century” (Heaven and Hell, 76). However, we must remember that it was, in fact, a recovery of much earlier and quite widespread patristic notions.

  79. Sterry, Rise, 385.

  80. It seems that White had aspirations to marry one of Cromwell’s daughters. “White allowed his ambition to go so far as to aspire to the hand of Cromwell’s youngest daughter Frances. It is said that the lady did not look upon him with disfavour. The state of things came to Cromwell’s knowledge. With the help of a household spy he managed to surprise the two at a moment when his chaplain was on his knees before his daughter kissing her hand. ‘Jerry,’ who was never at a loss for something to say, explained that for some time past he had been paying his addresses to the lady’s waiting woman, but being unsuccessful in his endeavours, he had been driven to soliciting the Lady Frances’s interest on his behalf. The opportunity thus offered was not neglected by Cromwell. Reproaching the waiting woman with her slight of his friend, and gaining her consent to the match, he sent for another chaplain and had them married at once” (Porter, “White, Jeremiah (1629–1707)”).

  81. He preached occasionally at an Independent church in London. Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, 162.

  82. Even though its actual publication was not until the early eighteenth century.

  83. The claim that the editor and author of the preface is Roach is made by D. P. Walker in The Decline of Hell, 121n4.

  84. [Roach(?),] “Preface,” iv–v.

  85. The following in-text citations in this section on White are from The Restoration of All Things, unless otherwise stated.

  86. White, being a classical theist, is well aware of the need to understand such language in a manner appropriate to God.

  87. Like Rust—and like Origen, Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa, and other fathers—White too feared that the doctrine of universal salvation might encourage moral relaxation, at least among spiritually immature people. This is why his book includes a penultimate chapter entitled: “Being a Warning to Sinners” (225–38). Here it speaks in vivid terms of the burning wrath of God that his readers will face if they live sinful lives.

  88. Those who object with the Anselmian argument that sin against an infinite Majesty requires a punishment of infinite duration in hell do not impress White: “this strikes at the Sufficiency of Christ’s Satisfaction, in which God hath shewed there is a means of Satisfaction, without infinite Duration, and God is satisfied by that one Sacrifice for the Sin of the whole World, so that God wants not Satisfaction; besides that, if he did, he should by this Principle, be ever satisfying, but never Satisfied” (45). The irony is then that if divine justice requires everlasting torment in order to be satisfied, then justice will never be satisfied, ever, for that punishment will never be completed.

  89. The human being as microcosm dates from at least the fifth century BC and is a common theme in NeoPlatonic, kabbalistic (i.e., Jewish mystical), and alchemical thought.

  90. For instance, James Relly, John Murray, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth (to the extent to which one considers him a universalist), Jacques Ellul, Jürgen Moltmann, and Jan Bonda.

  4

  Mystic and Prophetess

  Jane Lead, Böhmist Universalist

  Jane Lead (1624–1704), who has been neglected in scholarship until recently,91 espoused a universalism strongly characterized by an esoteric and visionary element, but it also had clear echoes of philosophical and patristic theology as well. Even though scholarship has understandably focused on the former, we shall argue that Lead’s thought concerning universal restoration was also nourished—like that of the Cambridge Platonists—by ideas that resonate with patristic thought.

  Jane Lead was born and raised in Norfolk. She had a comfortable and conventional upbringing as an Anglican and led an unremarkable life until after the death of her husband in 1670, a merchant by trade, to whom she had been happily married for twenty-seven years.92 She was forty-six when he died, leaving her destitute.

  Jane had been living in London for twenty-five years at the time of her husband’s death and a couple of months after that loss in 1670 she began having religious visions in which Lady Wisdom—a hypostasis of divine wisdom—appeared to her, disclosing various revelations: she saw “in the midst of a most bright Cloud, a Woman of a most Sweet and Majestick Countenance, her Face shining as the Sun, and her Vesture of Transparent Gold, who said, ‘Behold! I am God’s Eternal Virgin Wisdom.’”93 These visionary revelations of Sophia, God’s own Wisdom, continued for the rest of her life.94 She wrote them down and published them in at least fourteen books.

  In 1668 Lead had joined a small group of spiritually minded believers in London, followers of Jakob Böhme’s95 esoteric theology, who were led by an ex-Anglican minister and mystic called John Poradge (1607–81).96 Poradge distilled, simplified, and clarified Böhme’s difficult writings into a form more easy to digest, and became the key channel for Böhmist teaching in the English-speaking world.97 Poradge was a major influence on Lead, and Böhme’s theology clearly played an important role thereafter in shaping her thinking. (Indeed, the figure of Sophia, Divine Wisdom, played a role in Böhme’s thought, which Lead was already reading at the time of her first vision.) Lead, with all her prophetic revelations and visions, became a key member of the circle, which grew to over a hundred people, but when John Poradge died in 1681, the people slowly dispersed and the group faded away.

  In the years 1694–96, the situation took a turn for the better. Lead began to hold meetings that were to become the foundations of the English Philadelphian Society, which emerged in 1697. The Philadelphian Society (named after the church of brotherly love in Revelation 3:7–13) seems to have had many similarities to the Poradge circle, though its size is unknown. Jane Lead was the founder and leader of the group, though she encouraged others, men and women, to exercise leadership roles and charismatic gifts. (During the seventeenth century, women were not normally considered eligible to lead, but the pneumatic authority of a prophetess could circumvent such conventions.)

  The Philadelphians did not consider themselves a church, but a “society,” as all the members belonged to other churches. Indeed, while they did not have formalistic worship themselves, they had no objection to “externals or rituals of the Christian religion”98 and dreamed of the ecumenical unity of all true believers overcoming divisions in the body of Christ. The society sought connections with likeminded believers elsewhere—both in Europe and America. “Indeed, the Philadelphian Society believed in the gradual purification and unification of the Protestant churches through internal spiritual regeneration.”99 However, after her death in 1704 the society dwindled and faded away, part of it being absorbed by the French Prophet movement, some of whom arrived in London in 1706.100 It finally flickered out in 1730 after the death of Richard Roach, Lead’s successor.101 Lead’s legacy was not to be the legacy of a movement, but a legacy of ideas, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, while they had little impact in England, wielded much more influence in both Continental Europe and America.102

  Jane Lead was not always a universalist; she came to the belief later in life. We cannot be certain precisely when this was, but she first publically affirmed universal restoration in print in The Enochian Walks with God (1694),103 when she was seventy-one years old, and further expanded it in The Wonders of God’s Creation: Manifest in the Variety of Eight Worlds (1695) and A Revelation of the Everlasting Gospel Message (1697). When the vision first came to her she was skeptical, but was cautious not to dismiss it too quickl
y, and eventually found herself convinced, not least when she came to believe she found it taught in Scripture too. “For I myself was averse to the taking of this Universal Doctrine: But was always taught by Divine Wisdom, not to oppose, what I could not reach, or comprehend. So I did let it rest for some years after the Vision of it.”104 When she embraced it she did so with zeal and with more emphasis than the Cambridge Platonists, though, as she had expected, it brought her criticism (“some zealous angry flames”)105 and lost her some supporters.

  Her newfound universalism marked one way in which she departed from Jakob Böhme’s complex theology. Böhme had considered both light and darkness to have eternal roots in God, providing a metaphysical foundation for eternal hell. Lead came to reject this idea: “nothing of this evil could be said to be Everlastingly generated from God into the Angelical Principle.”106 Sin and evil began in time and will come to an end. Consequently, there can be no eternal dualism of light and darkness. Thus, she wrote in a letter, “I believe the torments of hell, and consequently all evil to be finite.”107 This too finds a striking resonance with the patristic belief in evil as a privation that will cease to exist when God prefects his creation.

  Lead continued to regard Böhme’s revelations as inspired, but as incomplete: “I must own that Jacob Behmen did open a deep Foundation of the Eternal Principles, and was a worthy Instrument in his Day. But it [i.e., the revelation of universal restoration] was not given to him, neither was it Time for the unsealing of this Deep.”108 Lead believed she was chosen by God to make known this fresh insight—present in Scripture, but previously “a mystery from the ages sealed up”—to the church for the fast-approaching last days.109

  Her first relevant work on the issue of comprehensive salvation is The Enochian Walks with God (1694),110 a book about making the difficult inner journey of mystical ascent into the presence of God and of some of the things she learned in that presence.111 In the very subtitle, the restoration of the whole of creation is announced and grounded in the “Immense and Infinite Latitude of GOD’s Love.” Lead’s work, she declares, will reveal the mechanism of universal restoration of all rational creatures to God, including those who have apostatized. The work uses a “biblical” style, with poetic insertions, but also echoes the kinds of arguments used by Origen and other patristic philosophers in support of universal salvation.

  The premises of universal salvation, in Jane Lead, as in Origen and others, are God’s infinite redemptive love, God’s being the absolute Good, and a concept of otherworldly suffering as purifying and healing, rather than retributive. Her message is intended to “vindicate the Royal, and Generous Goodness, and Love of the Holy Trinity.”112

  Lead begins with announcing a message of “Glad-tidings to the whole creation, from the beginning of Time, to the final End and extension thereof,” because—she avers—“God’s bounteous Grace will thereto reach.” God’s love expresses itself by saving human beings, by means of Christ’s sacrifice, both from the eternal punishment they deserved for their transgression, but also by manifesting in the soul the likeness to God, of which Genesis 1:26 speaks. The focus of her teaching is on this transformative journey of “inward redemption” and deification. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, too, thought that the final restoration would be a work of God’s grace, depending on Christ’s sacrifice. The very notion of the achievement of the likeness to God in the end (while the image of God is an initial datum) was typical of Origen, and Lead adopts it in several passages.

  Soon after, Lead puts forward another notion that was dear to Origen and Gregory of Nyssa: the holistic idea of the resurrection. Not only the body is resurrected, but also the soul, whose faculties are restored to their original integrity.113 Jane Lead precisely echoes this conception of the restoration of the faculties of the soul; she speaks of a spiritual reintegration and restoration as a complete renovation of every part of the soul. Furthermore, her references to the role of the Holy Spirit in this process of restoration correspond to the function that Origen ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the process of apokatastasis.

  Like Origen, Lead also links the phrase “eternal gospel”—which, according to Revelation 14:6, will be proclaimed in the end times—with the restoration. She proclaims that the eternal gospel will reach both the free and the captives, be they in their bodies or out of them. This gospel will extend beyond the limits of time. Origen thought that the relationship that exists between the Old and the New Testament is the same that exists between the New Testament and the “eternal gospel” (more precisely, “gospel of the aeon,” which will be revealed in the future aeon). In On First Principles 3.6.3 and 6.7 Origen links the “eternal gospel” to the acquisition of the likeness to God, the same connection that Lead draws in The Enochian Walks with God. Lead relates the “eternal gospel” to the eventual restoration in two further passages, making it possible, though undemonstrable, that Origen’s work was one source that inspired her.114

  Moreover, just like Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and other early supporters of apokatastasis (including Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia), Lead wants to ground her doctrine of universal salvation in Scripture. She cites Christ’s descent to hell in 1 Peter 3:19–21, which she, like many of the fathers, deems a salvific descent, and 1 Corinthians 3:14–15, concerning those who will be saved immediately and those who will be “saved through fire.” She interprets this fire as purifying and can thus reconcile Christ’s just judgment, based on each one’s deeds, and the salvation of all. Lead also refers to Romans 5:14–16, to show that the healing provided by Christ is more abundant than the wound caused by sin: “for it is not to be the least doubted but the Efficacy of Christ, the second Adam, by the merit of his Blood-shed, and his Spirit given therein which will make all good again, which the first Adam had made evil.”115

  By stressing the universally salvific effect of Christ’s cross, and specifically of his shed blood, Lead comes again close to Origen, who founded upon it one of his most important Christological arguments for universal salvation.116 More generally, in many passages Lead, like Origen and Gregory Nyssen, bases universal salvation on Christ. For instance, she declares that Christ, out of love, wanted redemption for all, and this is why he manifested himself in flesh in order to destroy sin and purify sinners. She insists that, thanks to Christ’s redeeming blood, sin is cancelled; Christ is the physician of souls, who restores them to health. This motif of Christ as physician was one of the main pillars in support of universal salvation in Clement of Alexandria and then Origen. For, as Origen says, “no being is incurable for the One who created it” (Princ. 3:6:5).

  Lead, like the patristic supporters of apokatastasis, had to explain those biblical passages that might be interpreted as contradicting universal salvation. Therefore, she explains that “eternal punishment” in Scripture means a punishment that takes place beyond the temporal limits of the present world and can extend for several periods—Origen’s aeons and Gregory of Nyssa’s “periods”—but not beyond the end, when Christ will hand over the kingdom to the Father (1 Cor 15:28). The gospel is not for this age only, with death as a cut-off point for grace, but “will so far extend, beyond the Limits of time, to Creatures in ages yet confined.”117

  In Lead’s scheme, human souls pass upon death out of this world into different “worlds,” that are suited to their level of purity. These worlds are places in which God works for their purification and their advancement toward union with himself. Some of the worlds were places of fire and torment, though aimed at the ultimate good of those suffering. Thus, each creature journeys step-by-step back to God.

  Be it known there are provided several-Mansions, and Regions, by the wise foreseeing Gracious God, that knew how it would be, as to This matter, with the greater Number of His own Created brings; tho’ he had proclaimed, a Love-Redemption, to All by Christ manifested in Flesh, to destroy, and purge Sin out of Flesh, which we see is very rarely done in the time of this life; where O
ne reacheth to This mark, a Thousand do miss it; Therefore for such as were begotten by the Eternal Word, and are going on, in all Good willingness in their spiritual progress; (dying short of finishing it). They will be allowed to be in a Paradisiacal Region, to Exercise their Spiritual Faculties, for the effecting what they were prevented . . . and so go on to perfect That State of Perfection, that shall make them meet, to make the Higher removes, to reach the Mount-Sion-State, which is yet more Glorious. . . . For all Souls must pass through the Refining, and Calcining Regions, so prepared for their Purifying; and according to the measures, and degrees they do attain to Here in this Life: Of this kind; the less they will have to do in the Life to come, which will be much more easy.118

  The Wonders of God’s Creation elaborates on the eight worlds that were revealed to her. Beyond those eight worlds is “the innermost Place of Purity, which bears the Title of the Still Eternity; for that nothing but Everlasting Rest, Stillness, and Silence is to be perceived here.” That is the final resting places of all humans, once they have “a Deified nature” through mystical transformation and are united with God.119

  Both Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, moreover, proclaimed the eventual salvation not only of all human beings, but also of all rational creatures. This is what Jane Lead, too, states in several passages, again claiming that what she announces was revealed to her. Indeed, the title page of A Revelation of the Everlasting Gospel Message makes the controversial notion very prominent: “Christ’s Eternal Judgment shall come” for the “Restoration of the Whole Lapsed Creation, Whether Human or Angelical.” She starts from the royal and generous goodness of the Holy Trinity and declares that its end is the reconciliation and restoration to itself of all rational creatures of every kind that are now dispersed and separate from it. This “universal redemption” will take place at the end of time, when all creatures will love, praise, and adore God. In another passage, Lead proclaims God’s “infinite and unsearchable love” for the fallen angels. Their deceitful activity against humanity will come to an end when all, including them, will be restored to their original condition. Lead refers to Ephesians 1:10, about the eventual universal recapitulation in Christ, and identifies it with this eventual universal restoration.120