In other words, God structured creation in such a way that the creature must know itself to be a creature utterly dependent on the Creator if it is to find true life. The temptation is to turn from God to our own fruit, our own self, for wisdom and life, but to do so is death. So “the ground of Adams fall, arises up first in Adams heart, as fruit growing up from a created Being” (4). Importantly, for Winstanley, the Serpent that guided humanity to sin was not a creature directly created by God, nor some eternal principle existing alongside God. Rather, the Serpent was the self-focused principle that arose within Adam himself, the inner corruption within humanity. In that sense, we originated it.30 For “every action, or dispensation of God, is called a Spirit, or an Angel, and every action, or aspiring principle that rises up in Adam, which led him to disobedience, it pleased God that it should have a Being, and likewise be called a Spirit, but it is a dead Being, and a Spirit of darknesses” (21).31 All this is the great “mystery of Iniquity.”
But the great mystery of salvation, which is really the mystery of divine self-manifestation, is that God will not allow his creation, humanity, to be forever ruined. If that were to happen, God himself would be dishonored, for his work would spoil in his hand and he would thus have failed to bring it to the fullness for which he intended it. “But the work of God shall be restored from this lost, dead, weedy, & enslaved condition, and the fruit of the created Being [i.e., the self-focused principle, the Serpent] shall utterly perish and be ashamed” (6). Thus God’s work in creation is aimed “to destroy this Serpent out of the flesh, and all Beings, that is enmity against him, and to swallow up his Creature Man into himself, that so there may bee but onely pure, endlesse, and infinite Being, even God himself all in all, dwelling and walking in this garden, Mankinde, in which he will plant pleasant fruit trees, and pluck up weeds” (6–7). Here is Winstanley’s expression of what other Christian traditions refer to as thēosis or deification—the profound eschatological union of God and humanity.32
In sum, Winstanley believed that God deliberately made creation in a fragile state, open to corruption if it curved in on itself, so that he might “destroy all the inventions and actings of the creature, that did spring up and arise from the creatures Being, as a creature, and not from God’s acting in the creature” (20). The end result of the long pedagogical process is that in the end “every thing that is in, or about the Creature, that is of God, shall stand; but every thing that is in, or from the creature, that is not of God, shall fall and perish” (21).
The seven dispensations of the mystery of God
Now the mystery of God—which brings about the deliverance of humanity—does not take place all at once, but in stages. The seven dispensations of the mystery of God are as follows:
(1) The giving of the law to Adam (i.e., do not eat of the tree). Humanity is delivered over to two murderers: the law and the flesh. God’s law—which is holy, just, and good—declares that there are two roads: God’s road to life and the self’s own road to death. But when combined with the flesh (i.e., our human aspiration to be as God and to be the source of our own life and being) the law becomes a killer, sentencing us to a state of death. In this condition, there can be no hope for us (apart from God).
(2) Immediately God steps in with a promise that encapsulates the core of the mystery: “And I will put enmity between thee [the Serpent] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen 3:15, KJV). In Winstanley’s interpretation, this means that the Serpent shall be uprooted from human nature, where it dwells, and be destroyed. And the one who will do this is the offspring of the woman—Jesus. So God makes clear from the start that he has no intention of destroying us, only the Serpent, to whom we have become enslaved. With his death comes our liberation.
(3) The promise of salvation becomes more specific in God’s promise to Abraham that in his offspring the nations would find blessing (Gen 12:3).
(4) The fourth dispensation of the mystery is the period from Moses to Jesus—a time of increasing revelation in the form of types and shadows, anticipating the fullness in Christ.
(5) The critical fifth period runs from the appearance of God-in-the-flesh in the person of Jesus (who takes away the sin of the world) to the day of Pentecost, when God was manifest in the flesh of the saints by his Spirit. In redemption, God appears as the God of love, manifest in the flesh of Jesus Christ. God indwells the humanity of Jesus fully, bodily, which is unlike his relationship to the humanity of Adam. God battled the Serpent and “cast him out of heaven” (i.e., out of human nature) in the humanity of Christ:
[F]or I beleeve that all temptations that Jesus Christ met withall, (for in all things he was tempted like unto us) they were but the strivings of the Serpent, as he did strive in Adam that fell, to maintain its being opposite to God; but Jesus Christ, or the anoynting in flesh, being not a created power, but the power of God in that created humanity, did not consent as the first Adam did, for he with strong hand resisted the whispering of the Serpent, and would acknowledge no other Being but God, and so prevailed, and cast the Serpent out of flesh, and hath obtained a legall power to quicken whom he will, or to cast the Serpent out of what man or woman he will. (25)
In Christ, God himself rules as King in humanity; in Jesus’ humanity, God’s wisdom becomes the wisdom of the creature; God’s power, the power of the creature; God’s joy, the joy of the creature; God’s love, the love of the creature.
Thus redemption is already complete, both in the sense that God has willed from all eternity and promised from ancient times to do it (Gen 3:15; 12:3) and in the sense that the union of God and humanity is already achieved in Jesus. However, it is not yet completed in the creation as a whole. Christ serves as a firstfruit and a pledge of what God will one day do for the whole.
(6) The sixth dispensation is the period from Pentecost until the elect are gathered up on resurrection day for final judgment. This penultimate dispensation in which we now live is one in which only the elect participate in the divine life, and it continues “til the whole number of the elect be taken up to God” (44). Throughout this dispensation, “God is pleased to doe his worke in length of time, by degrees, calling some at one houre, and some at another, out of the Serpents bondage, and the times and seasons God hath reserved to himself” (29).
Winstanley’s thinking seems to be akin to Calvinism here. The elect are those whom God chooses to call to salvation now, and when God calls they will come: “he will save under every dispensation whom he will, and bring them to Sion [a spiritual symbol for communal union with God]” (41); “Now for God to save some at one houre, and some at another, both when he will, and whom he will” (42). In Winstanley’s view, this sixth period was fast drawing to a close, ushering in the final dispensation, the day of judgment.
(7) The coming dispensation completes and perfects the manifestation of God, and it has three phases: first, resurrection of the dead for both believers and unbelievers; second, final judgment, followed by a verdict of eternal life for believers and eternal condemnation for unbelievers (i.e., to be cast into the fire prepared for the devil and his angels); third, the salvation of all creation, including all those people in the lake of fire.33
The “day” of judgment, according to Winstanley, is not a literal day, but a season of unspecified length that endures as long as the work of judgment lasts (only God knows how long that will be)—until all people are delivered from the second death.
The Serpent knows that he is destined to final destruction and nothing would make him happier than taking some of God’s creatures down with him, “but the Serpent only shall perish, and God will not lose a hair that he made, he will redeeme his whole creation from death. . . . Therefore in the third part of this great day of judgment, after the City work is finished, and the trial over, then does the tree of life, God himself that dwells in the City, and is the light, and life, and glory o
f it, send forth dispensations, or Angels, bringing love to heale the Nations, and bring their glory into the City” (47, italics added).
Then God, in Christ, will “take up all his Creation, Mankind, into himself, and will become, the only, endless, pure, absolute, and infinite being, even infinitely for ever all in all, in every one, and in the whole, that no flesh may glory in it self, but in the Lord only” (13). This, in his view, is what Paul spoke of when he spoke of the Son having all things submitted to him and then he himself in his humanity submitting to the Father so that God will “be all . . . in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Creatures will no longer look to themselves for their life-source, but to God, who will be their life. In creation, humans were made “in a Being distinct from God,” which is what made them susceptible to spiraling away from God, but, through Christ, in new creation humans will be “made spirituall, and swallowed up in life, or taken up into the Being of God” (18) such that the Serpent can never rear his head again.
Anticipating critics
To those who balk at the notion of being saved from hell, Winstanley argues that they already believe in it, for hell is the present condition of all those lost in sin. It seems that he saw the hell following the day of judgment as simply a climactic version of this same alienation. Thus, every elect person who is called by God to gospel-life in this age is someone delivered from hell. Those saved from the fire after the day of judgment are experiencing something of the same kind, albeit in an eschatologically enhanced form.
For those who say that if God will save all then they will eat, drink, and be merry, Winstanley warns, “thou shalt be cast into the everlasting fire . . . and while thou art in it, the worm of thy gnawing conscience shall never die, nor the fire of God’s wrath, or the sense of his anger upon thee, shall never goe out” (20).34 This, he insists, is not a theology for the morally lax.
For those who balk at the idea of their enemies being saved in the end, Winstanley comments,
It is much for the glory of God for him to redeeme, not part onely, but all mankinde from death, which his own hands made, it is his revealed will so to do, therefore let it be your joy that the will of your Father is, and shall be fulfilled; and do not thinke the Saints are made unhappy, and God dishonored, if he heale them that were lost, and that did not enter into the City, in the beginning of the great day of judgment, for as he is honored in saving you of the Citie that were lost: so he will be honored in redeeming these that lye under the power of the second death. (Preface)
On Reflection
Several features of Winstanley’s theological outlook warrant comment. His account of evil in creation is interesting in that he seeks to offer a story that does not present evil (or Satan) as God’s creation—that which God made was good and pure—while at the same time avoiding a Manichean dualism in which evil becomes an eternal principle alongside God. Evil and Satan have the potential to arise within humanity as a natural devolution of God’s good creation should certain conditions not be met. And while God did not ordain the fall, he foresaw it and planned to use it to teach his creatures that life is found by looking to their Creator, not themselves. God’s goal in creation was to indwell humanity, but this goal is not achieved until Jesus, who is an anticipation of the manifestation of God in the saints and ultimately in all creation.
Winstanley’s focus on God’s indwelling humanity as the telos of creation governs everything. It makes the incarnation central to his redemption narrative. What is striking and unusual is the lack of emphasis on the death of Jesus—he never spells out a theological role for this event in his universalist “system.” One wonders whether he thought that the incarnation alone and the anointing of the Spirit are enough. Winstanley does mention Christ’s death in his works, and believed that it happened, but he has little interest in either Christ’s death or resurrection as past events. What was most important about the resurrection, in his view, was its contemporary embodied meaning as an ongoing experience in the lives of individuals and the true community that they form (Christ rising and being present within them). The community was the body of Christ and Christ ought not to be thought of as “distant” or “apart from” his body. Thus, Winstanley’s focus was on the community inhabited by the risen Lord. In them Christ was risen and in them the second coming was gradually manifesting in creation. But this is only the sixth dispensation; the time is coming when the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Hab 2:14). In some ways, he was a seventeenth-century precursor to Rudolph Bultmann’s twentieth-century program of demythologizing theological language.
Indeed, in his last publication, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, addressed to Oliver Cromwell, he seems to take this “demythologizing” to the limit by claiming that it is beyond human knowledge to try to talk about what God is in himself, apart from and beyond creation, or to speak about what happens to the human soul after death. We have no access to such knowledge and it is fruitless to try to figure such things out.
And if a man should go to imagine what God is beyond the creation, or what he will be in a spiritual demonstration after a man is dead, he doth (as the proverb saith) build castles in the air, or tells us of a world beyond the moon and beyond the sun, merely to blind the reason of man.
I’ll appeal to your self in this question, what other knowledge have you of God but what you have within the circle of the creation?
For if the creation in all its dimensions be the fulness of him that fills all with himself, and if you yourself be part of this creation, where can you find God but in that line or station wherein you stand?35
This could indeed suggest that, in his mature thought at least, he had moved to understand talk of both hell and universal salvation as bringing out the spiritual dimension of this-worldly realities. He did not deny a further application to a heaven and hell after death, but he refused to speculate on it.
His “spiritual” and “internal” reading of various aspects of biblical theology (Eden and heaven interpreted as human nature—God’s dwelling place, the devil as human selfishness, hell as the experience of captivity to our own selfish and self-destructive desires, angels as divine actions/dispensations, etc.) is interesting and resonated with others in the period whose religion was focused on God within, rather than “outward religion.” But while Winstanley was what we might call a demythologizer, it would be a mistake to see him as a seventeenth-century anti-realist, one who saw God as merely the symbol of the “divine” aspect of humanity (i.e., Reason).36 Winstanley’s theology is more nuanced than that, indeed looking to one’s self as God is for him the very essence of sin. He certainly did emphasize the immanence of God and the centrality of experiential knowledge of God within (in understandable reaction against what he saw as a common view of God as distant and remote), but even in his later thought he does not abandon divine transcendence, and retains a distinction between Creator and creature, even in the final end-time union.37 While it is true that he sees God as Reason, this association seems very similar to classical Christian Logos theology, grounded in John’s Gospel (1:1–18) and developed by theologians since the second century. It is precisely a theology that holds in tension the transcendence and immanence of God—the Logos/Reason that cannot be reduced to human rationality, but which human rationality participates in. That his focus was on the presence of God/Reason within is not an indication that God was merely a religious symbol for an aspect of human nature. But it did mean that God could only be known as experienced in, by, and through creation. In his view, we need the humility not to try to press beyond that.
However, it was not universalism for which Winstanley is best remembered, but his theologically funded, proto-communist political activity. His musings on the wider hope do not appear to have made many waves, though later English universalists did look back to him as a precursor.
21. Bradstock, Radical Religion, xiii.
22. On Winstanley, see Bradstock, Winstanley and the Diggers; Bradstock, Radical Religion, ch. 3; Boulton, Gerrard Winstanley; Gurney, Brave Community; McClymond, Devil’s Redemption, 494–97.
23. Setting aside the implicit universalism in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Winstanley’s book was followed only a year later by Richard Coppin’s Divine Teachings (1649) and The Exaltation of All Things in Christ (1649). Coppin’s universalism did get him into trouble with the law and he was put on trial in Worcester for alleging “that all men whatsoever shall be saved, and there shall be no general day of judgment.” The Jury found him guilty of blasphemy, but the judge demurred. This story was repeated again at his second trial in Oxford in 1652. He continued to preach and get in trouble over the issue of universalism in the years that followed. Other universalist publications soon followed, two anonymous works: God’s Light Declared in Mysteries (1653) and Of the Torments of Hell: The Foundation and Pillars Thereof Discovered, Searched, Shaken, and Removed (1660); the latter is often attributed to Samuel Richardson (fl. 1643–58), seeming to deny any hell in the afterlife.
24. “Be it further Ordained by the Authority aforesaid, That all and every person or persons that shall publish or maintain as aforesaid any of the several errours hereafter ensuing, viz. That all men shall be saved. . . . The party so convicted shall be ordered by the said Justices to renounce his said Errors in the publique Congregation of the same Parish from whence the complaint doth come, or where the offence was committed, and in case he refuseth or neglecteth to perform the same, at or upon the day, time, and place appointed by the said Justices then he shall be committed to prison by the said Justices until he shall finde two sufficient Sureties before two Justices of Peace for the said place or County (whereof one shall be of the Quorum) that he shall not publish or maintain the said errour or errours any more” (italics added).
A Larger Hope 2 Page 4