A Larger Hope 2

by Robin A Parry

  141. Johann Peterson has about 150 works attributed to him. His wife Johanna published fifteen. Johann’s most important Restorationist text was undoubtedly the Mysterion Apokatastaseos Panton. The most significant universalist text by Johanna is Die Ewige Evangelium Der Allgemeinen Wiederbringung Aller Creaturen (The Eternal Gospel of the Universal Return of All Creatures). This was published anonymously in 1698 and without a location or publisher listed, possibly because Philipp Spener had warned Johanna in 1695 against publishing such views. The tract went through three editions and stirred up a lot of responses, both pro and contra.

  142. Johann Petersen, Das Leben, 290, 292.

  143. There were also universalists among the Schwenkenfelders, yet another radical Reformation grouping that focused on inner spirituality over outward form, who similarly emigrated to America in the 1730s. The boundaries between radical groups were porous and influences ran between them. The works of Jane Lead and Johann Petersen were read by these groups too.

  144. It forms the basic theme of Heinz Renkewitz’s biography of Hochmann (Renkewwitz, Hochmann von Hochenau).

  145. The most significant of these, for our story, was that in Berleburg. Hochmann, a Swiss universalist Pietist called Samuel König (1671–1750), and Johann Reitz (1655–1720) founded the Philadelphian Society there in 1700, though Hochmann was banished by the Imperial Court at Wetzlar soon after, following reports of “charismatic” services held by Hochmann in the castle. However, the community remained and, after 1712, under the protection of pietistic Count Casimir, it became a thriving refuge for Philadelphians.

  From 1720 on the community became a major publishing center for Radical Pietist literature, with their crowning glory being the eight-volume Berleburg Bible. This was a new translation and interpretation of the Bible according to Restorationist Philadelphian theology. It drew on an eclectic range of inspirations and could be somewhat disorientating and incoherent in its interpretative comment. The new community of Berleburg Pietists later built significant links with the Radical Pietists in Pennsylvania—sending people, publications, and even the printing press upon which the Berleburg Bible had been printed. This press was then used by Christopher Sauer/Sower in Germantown to publish many universalist books and pamphlets in America.

  146. Most Radical Pietists retained the infant baptism of their Lutheran roots, but some, under Quaker influence, rejected all outward rituals, including baptism, while others, such as the Brethren, moved to believer’s baptism, influenced by Anabaptists. This indicates just how eclectic and diverse Radical Pietism was.

  147. Or perhaps it would be better to think of them as a sect with strong pietistic influences (especially via Hochmann). The community in Pennsylvania certainly had many links with Pietists and published many works by Pietists, but they were also quite distinctive.

  148. Translation by Charlotte Irwin.

  149. Mack, “Rights and Ordinances,” 113–15; Durnbaugh, European Origins of the Brethren, 398–400. Italics mine. My thanks to John Hopler for drawing my attention to this quotation. The passage can be found in context in Holsinger’s translation of the whole text in Mack, “Rights and Ordinances,” 115.

  150. The site still exists as a museum: http://www.ephratacloister.org/.

  151. Rush, Essays, 241.

  152. Durnbaugh, “Communication Networks,” 46.

  153. Thanks to Professor John Coffey for alerting me to universalism amongst the Moravians.

  154. Zinzendorf, Sixteen Discourses, 30. Italics mine.

  155. Wesley, Works of the Rev John Wesley, 106.

  156. Whitefield, George Whitefield’s Journals, 587.

  157. Bell, Life and Times, 32.

  158. De Benneville, True and Most Remarkable Account, 11–14.

  159. De Benneville, True and Most Remarkable Account, 15.

  160. The vision, which clearly had a big impact on de Benneville, is recounted in detail in de Benneville, True and Remarkable Account, 22–36. Quotations are from that section.

  161. De Benneville himself moved to the Oley Valley in 1742, where he married, and then to Bristol township just outside Philadelphia in 1757, and finally to Philadelphia in 1787.

  162. It is of interest to note that he was in correspondence with George Stonehouse (Bell, Life and Times, 59); see chapter 6.

  163. He had a high regard for Native American peoples and worked among them as both a doctor and a preacher. He apparently contextualized his preaching to them by using religious symbols and categories with which they were already familiar.

  164. The following in-text citations in this section on Siegvolck are from The Everlasting Gospel, unless otherwise stated.

  165. What Siegvolck calls “silent eternity” or “still eternity” is a phrase use by John Porradge and Jane Lead, adopted from Jakob Böhme. It manifests something of Böhme’s and Lead’s influence in Johann Petersen’s circles. But see the appendix for qualifications on the nature and extent of this influence. The notion of the final stage of creation being beyond the end of all the ages is rooted in the church fathers (see esp. Ilaria Ramelli’s first volume in A Larger Hope?).

  6

  Pietist Universalism in Britain and America

  Law, Stonehouse, and Winchester

  In Britain, universalism never attained the status of a movement, with the brief exception of the small group of Philadelphians led by Jane Lead. Individuals such as Gerrard Winstanley, George Rust, Ann Conway, Peter Sterry, and Jeremiah White found their own ways into some version of universal restorationism. And while they took some actions aimed at passing along their new ideas—especially publishing them in books—there was no universalist denomination, or even a para-church movement, though the Philadelphians represented the embryo of one. This situation continued into the eighteenth century. Two somewhat different Christian believers will serve to illustrate this.

  The Mystical Universalism of William Law (1686–1761)

  Life

  William Law was, like Peter Sterry, a graduate of Emmanuel College in Cambridge.166 He was ordained a deacon, but when he refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Hannoverian monarchy in 1716—for his sympathies lay with the deposed Stuart monarchy—his ecclesiastical career came to an end. He became chaplain to the family of Edward Gibbon in Putney, London. There he wrote the two books that made him famous, both practical guides to Christian holiness and a critique of nominal Christianity.167

  Sometime between 1733–37 Law was introduced to the work of Jakob Böhme, the sixteenth-century Teutonic mystical Lutheran, and after a little wrestling with Böhme’s difficult texts, Law’s own theology was transformed.168 One can divide Law’s books into pre- and post-exposure to Böhme. Needless to say, many who admired the pre-Böhme Law were unimpressed by the post-Böhme Law, among them John Wesley.169 However, while the focus of the two periods is different—the former offers practical guidance while the latter offers speculative theology—they are not inconsistent with each other, and Law saw the later mystical theology as providing the theological frame within which to interpret the earlier practical advice. While Law was not influenced directly by Pietism, he shared with them (and Jane Lead and the Philadelphians) the influence of Jakob Böhme, which led to a certain degree of theological convergence. That is why he has been included in this chapter.

  In 1740 Law returned to the town of his birth—King’s Cliffe in Northamptonshire—and set up a “holy household” with Hester Gibbon and Mrs. Hutchinson, a widow. Here they sought to live holy and generous lives, giving away about nine tenths of their income to endow local schools, almshouses, and a library, as well as caring for the sick and needy in their parish. He also devoted much time to study and writing. Universalist sympathies do not become overtly
manifest until his later publications.170

  While conducting an audit of two schools in 1761, Law caught a cold, which developed into a kidney infection and led to his death.

  Theology

  Law’s post-Böhme theological system is complex and here we offer a very basic sketch.171 In essence, Law presents a sophisticated, albeit speculative, story of creation, fall, and restoration, which is grounded in a vision of God as love. God is:

  [A]n Infinity of mere Love, an unbeginning, never-ceasing, and forever overflowing Ocean of Meekness, Sweetness, Delight, Blessing, Goodness, Patience, and Mercy, and all this as so many blessed Streams breaking out of the Abyss of universal Love, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, a Triune Infinity of Love and Goodness, for ever and ever giving forth nothing but the same Gifts of Light and Love, of Blessing and Joy, whether before or after the Fall, either of Angels or Men.172

  Law will permit absolutely nothing into his theology that is seen in any way to compromise this divine love. God “can be nothing else but all Goodness toward it [i.e., creation], because he can be nothing toward the Creature but that which he is, and was, and ever shall be in himself.”173

  This has implications for the controversial way in which Law came to think of wrath. Wrath is a passion that intends the harm of the other and so God cannot be wrathful toward creatures. When we speak of the wrath of God we speak about how a sinner experiences the self-destructive consequences of resisting God. It feels like experiencing divine anger. However, God is not inflicting those consequences—they are the inevitable outcome of turning away from the source of our being and happiness.

  Now God is love in Godself—within the Trinity—and as such God does not need to create a world in order to have an object to love, which is to say that God does not need to create in order to be God. Consequently, creation is contingent, and has the nature of a gift. However, the act of creation is not arbitrary and unmotivated; rather, it is a natural outflow and opening out of the divine being to “the other.”

  The Almighty brought forth all Nature for this only End, that boundless Love might have its Infinity of Height and Depth to dwell and work in, and all the striving and working Properties and Nature are only to give Essence and Substance, Life and Strength, to the invisible hidden Spirit of Love, that it may come forth in outward activity.174

  Law’s doctrine of creation is grounded in his notion of “Eternal Nature”—this is not an actual concrete world of nature, but rather a world of infinite possibilities (or an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds); all the many ways in which God’s goodness, love, wisdom, power, and beauty might be manifested “beyond” the divine being in finite creaturely being. All these possible worlds have some mode of beginningless and endless “reality” in Eternal Nature (which Alan Gregory describes as “the beginning before the beginning”). The act of creation is God’s actualizing one of these worlds. In Law’s mind this was not creation out of nothing, but creation out of Eternal Nature.175 And once God does this he commits himself to bring that created world and its particular history to its goal of manifesting his glory, come what may.176

  According to Law, God first creates the angelic world. However, some of the angels began to adore themselves, rather than God, the source of their beauty. This led to the fall of the angels and the origin of Satan and his demons. However, the fate of the angels is their own self-destruction (not a punishment imposed from outside by God). The angelic desire for God is turned inward and is unable to find any satisfaction. They inevitably spiral inward and downward into despair and anger, for God never made the desires of creatures to be satisfied by finite creation. The “glassy sea” that was their heavenly environment is transformed into the formless waters of chaos that we find in Genesis 1:2.

  However, God took this ruined angelic creation and set it within bounds, forming the material world we inhabit in the process, bringing good out of evil. (This is Law’s interpretation of the Genesis 1 creation story.) In Law’s view, our world is indeed good, but it is not perfect—there is within it the constrained potential for chaos and darkness. Resurgent evil is always a potential reality within material creation and, as we see in Genesis 3, when Adam and Eve divert their desire from God to themselves, as the angels before them had, it was indeed actualized.177 Curving in on itself, humanity condemned itself to destruction, cut off from divine life.

  “Nature” is structurally ordered by desire; it is part of the fabric of our very be-ing. The fall is a misdirection of our desire—a turning of the self in on itself and away from its true object (God), a process that ends up generating our own alienation and “death”—and salvation requires its reorientation.

  Yet God does not leave us alone, even for a moment. Immediately following Adam and Eve’s sin, God acts in grace and love for restoration. He not only promises salvation through Christ, the seed of the woman (Gen 3:15), but he actually implants God the Son within them at that point. According to Law, the divine Word is “breathed” or “inspoken” to them, and all human beings ever since have a divine seed within them. This divine seed within is the potential for recovery of the glory of God in us, the restoration of the image of God. This is our first explicit hint of Law’s universalism. “See here the Beginning and glorious Extent of the Catholic Church of Christ, it takes in all the World. It is God’s unlimited, universal Mercy to all Mankind.”178 This seed is “the hidden Treasure of every human soul . . . till it changes the Son of an earthly Adam into a Son of God.”179

  Of course, the inner Word can only bring about our eventual deliverance from sin because of the work of that same Word incarnate, Jesus Christ. It is those two aspects of the ministry of God the Son that “could begin, carry on, and totally effect Man’s deliverance from the Evil of his own fallen Nature.”180 It is the work of the Word within that enables us to trust in the Word incarnate, and participate in his body through faith in Jesus and the sacraments of the church. It is the work of the Word incarnate that creates the environment in which the implanted seed of the Word can grow and form Christ-in-us. Indeed, Christ himself—the body of Christ, the church—is the environment in which the inner Word can grow. Law says that he “will assert no inward Redemption but what wholly proceeds from, and is effected by that Life-giving Redeemer, who died on the Cross for our Redemption.”181 Salvation thus requires the work of the Word both as incarnate and as within us, bringing us to new birth in the Spirit. Unless our will and desires are reoriented we remain locked in sin. (So we see that sanctification is, for Law, not an add-on to salvation, but integral to it. Christ has perfected our human nature in his own humanity and by the Spirit is able to conform our own humanity to his.)

  How does Jesus save us? “God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, took our human nature upon him, became a suffering, dying man, that there might be found a man, whose sufferings, blood and death had the power to extinguish the wrath and hell that sin brought forth, and to be the fountain of the first heavenly life to the whole race of mankind.”182 Jesus participates in our broken humanity and defeats both sin and death in our humanity. He lives a fully human life—with his desire directed Godward—and opens up such a human life for us.

  Law had no time for penal substitution theories of the atonement, because these see the cross in terms of God’s fury and punishment. The cross does make satisfaction for sin, he said, but not by pacifying an angry God. Rather, it satisfies God’s love by working salvation and it satisfies sinners by restoring the divine image.

  And Law, in his later work, was unflinching in his universalism and his condemnation of those who “blaspheme God” (his phrase) with a doctrine of double predestination and eternal hell. “[Christ] is the universal Remedy of all Evil broken forth in Nature and Creature. . . . He is the breathing forth of the Heart, Life, and Spirit of God, into all the dead race of Adam. He is the Seeker, the Finder, the Restorer, of all that was lost and dead to the Life of God. He is the Love, that, from C
ain to the End of Time, prays for all its Murderers.”183

  Law reinterpreted the doctrine of election such that the objects of election and reprobation are not particular persons, some elected and other rejected, but natures. There are two natures that reside in all humans as seeds—a sinful nature and the divine Word, Adam and Christ, darkness and light. What God eternally elects to salvation is the heavenly seed implanted in everyone; and what God elects to reprobation is that which is “earthly, serpentine, and devilish”184 in everyone. Thus, God has predestinated that the seed of the Word in each human will bring about life and the evil within each person will be destroyed. “Election therefore and Reprobation, as respecting Salvation, equally relate to every Man in the world; because every Man, as such, has That in him which only is elected, and that in him which only is reprobated.”185 (This is an interpretation of election that we will find repeated in some later universalists. It is, it ought to be said, somewhat implausible as an exposition of the plain sense of Scripture.)

  The achievement of God’s ultimate purpose in creation may well take eons to come to pass, but come to pass it will, and for all, as the following quotation makes clear:

  God’s Providence, from the Fall to the Restitution of all Things, is doing the same Thing, as when he said to the dark Chaos of fallen Nature, “Let there be light”; He still says, and will continue saying the same Thing, till there is no Evil of Darkness left in all that is Nature and Creature. . . . And if long and long Ages of fiery Pain, and tormenting Darkness, fall to the Share of many, or most of God’s Apostate Creatures, they will last no longer, than till the great fire of God has melted all Arrogance into Humility, and all that is SELF has died in the long Agonies and Bloody Sweat of a lost God, which is that all-saving Cross of Christ, which will never give up its redeeming Power, till Sin and Sinners have no more a Name among the Creatures of God.186