Within Protestantism, opposition to state churches began as early as the Reformation
itself, among groups such as the Mennonites, Hutterites, and other radicals who advocated
a voluntary church of believers with no relation to the state. In the sixteenth century,
as we saw in chapter 5 , radical groups were persecuted by Catholics and magisterial
Protestants, and many fl ed to areas that were more tolerant, such as Moravia, Silesia,
Transylvania, and other parts of eastern Europe. The disruption of the English Civil
War allowed radical and dissenting groups to fl ourish in England for a brief period,
but the Restoration brought renewed suppression by royal and Anglican authorities.
Some English groups and other radicals migrated to the Netherlands, eastern Europe,
or Britain’s New World colonies.
In the seventeenth century, several groups continued the emphasis on inner devotion
that had characterized some of the earlier radicals, downplaying the importance
of the Bible, an ordained clergy, outward ceremonies or sacraments, higher education,
and sometimes reason. These groups are often called “spiritualists,” of which the most
organized was the Society of Friends, called the Quakers, founded by George Fox during
the 1650s. Fox had a powerful conversion experience, which he described as receiving
the Inward Light of Christ, and he regarded this contact with the divine as open
to all people. Quakers had no ordained clergy or formal services, but worshipped in
silence until someone was moved by the spirit to speak or pray; decisions were made
communally, by discussing a matter until an agreement was reached. They refused to
pay tithes, swear oaths, or show deference to their superiors; they dressed simply and
addressed each other as “thee” and “thou,” the older and less formal version of “you,” to
signify their rejection of hierarchy and their distinctiveness from others. Early Quakers
were often very vocal in their rejection of other forms of worship, disrupting services
they saw as ungodly.
Quaker men and women preached throughout England and the English colonies
in the New World, and were active as missionaries also in Ireland, continental Europe,
and occasionally elsewhere in the world. They were whipped and imprisoned, and often
wrote apocalyptic prophecies or “encouragements” for co-believers while in prison.
Many Quakers moderated their position with the accession of William and Mary in
1688 and the Toleration Act of 1689, agreeing to pay tithes and moving out of politics.
Both British and American Quakers continued to be involved in social action, however,
and were among the founders and leaders of the international antislavery and women’s
rights movements.
Other spiritualist leaders never achieved the level of organization that Fox did, and
their groups remained much smaller than the Quakers. Jakob Boehme (1575–1624), a
German cobbler, began having mystical visions as a young man, which gained him admirers
but also brought him to the attention of the Lutheran authorities. His visions,
which he wrote down in a series of works, mixed together Christian themes with ideas
from magic and alchemy to develop a complex theory of the dialectical emergence
of the world from chaos into being through God’s power. His language about “virgin
wisdom,” the eternal womb of God, and the power of intuition to hear the sympathetic
vibrations of God’s emergence in nature, often confused the theologians who were
trying to determine whether his ideas were heresy or not. What seemed more clearly
dangerous was Boehme’s rejection of the importance of the Bible, and his stress on
the freedom of the spirit and direct revelation. The town council where Boehme lived
ordered him to stop writing, an order he followed for a while, but toward the end of
his life writing streamed from his pen. Many of his works were published later in the
Netherlands and England, where they infl uenced Fox and many other religious thinkers;
they were also important to Romantic poets, including William Blake, and later
German philosophers, including Georg Friedrich Hegel.
Jane Lead (1623–1704) was one of those who read Boehme, writing that true religious
knowledge came only through turning inward and fi nding one’s own inner light. She
organized a circle of like-minded people called the Philadelphian Society, urging them
to seek the “virgin wisdom of God” and not go “whoring after Lord Reason.” Jean de Labadie
(1610 –74), a French ex-Jesuit, and Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80), a French mystic,
also developed spiritualist ideas, writing that spiritual rebirth was more important
than baptism, so that Jews and Muslims might also be blessed and resurrected. They
gained a small group of followers, usually called Labadists, and were forced from France
to Flanders, then to Germany, and fi nally to the Danish-controlled city of Altona and
to the Netherlands, which provided a refuge for Philadelphians and Quakers as well. By
the late seventeenth century, the Netherlands was the most tolerant part of Europe, so
that it was also the most common place of publication for the works of radical religious
thinkers.
Though Boehme and Lead were suspicious of reason, not all spiritualists were antiintellectual.
Some of them carried on the tradition of the Italian reformer Fausto Sozzini,
who had emphasized the links between reason and revelation. The Swedish nobleman
Emanuel Swedenborg ( 1688–1772), for example, edited the fi rst Swedish scientifi c journal,
and was interested in geology and cosmology. He investigated the lobes of the brain,
deciding that the soul was located in the cortex, and combined scientifi c and religious
speculation to explain the origins of the world. Like Fox, Boehme, and Madame Guyon,
he had a mystical vision he regarded as a direct message from God about true reality;
this vision would usher in a new age of the spirit, he wrote in his many works, in which
all that exists would be shown to be simply a refl ection of God. Swedenborg had few
followers during his lifetime, but after he died the Church of the New Jerusalem based
on his writings was founded in London; there are small groups of Swedenborgians still
around today, most of them in North America.
Except for the Quakers, most of the spiritualist groups remained very small. A much
larger movement, and one that did not break totally with state churches, was pietism, a
word that originated as a term of ridicule and derision but, like Yankee, was later used
positively by those who had been so labeled. Different pietists had different specifi c
aims, but in general pietists wanted to build a meaningful religious fellowship within
the state church through devotion, moral discipline, and personal religious experiences.
Puritanism in England is similar to pietism, as it also emphasized personal conversion,
voluntary prayer meetings, and rigorous moral standards.
Lutheran pietism developed late in the seventeenth century. The German pastor and
theologian Philipp Spener (1635–1705) set up Bible study groups that he called “colleges
of piety” in Frankfurt during the 1670s, and in 1675 published Pia desideria , which
outlined a program for the enhancement of piety through reforming the seminaries,
charitable activities, and prayer circles for lay people. Spener called for preachers
to emphasize the word of God in their sermons instead of complicated doctrinal
issues, and to provide evidence of their own personal spiritual regeneration as well
as their theological training before being given a position. He never directly attacked
any Lutheran doctrine, but the orthodox Lutheran theologians at the University of
Wittenberg and elsewhere decided he was a Calvinist, as he emphasized sanctifi cation
– holiness of life, achieved through the power of God – more than justifi cation by
faith. Spener was forced to leave fi rst Frankfurt and then Dresden. Despite – or perhaps
because of – this opposition, lay people organized and joined colleges of piety in many
German cities, and other Lutheran pastors also began to advocate similar ideas. August
Francke (1663–1727), a pastor in Leipzig, was forced to step down from his position for
his emphasis on spiritual conversion and lay involvement; he joined Spener at Halle
in Brandenburg – the most tolerant state in Germany – where they established a new
university.
The University of Halle became the largest divinity school in Germany, and its graduates
set up orphanages, schools, and study groups. They were the fi rst Protestants to
engage in missionary activity; in 1707, the king of Denmark sent two graduates of Halle
to the Danish colony of Tranquebar in India, and soon pietist Protestant missionaries
were in Lapland, Greenland, and colonial America. Lutheran pietists varied in their
reaction to political changes. Some of them were politically passive, while those in the
expanding state of Brandenburg- Prussia played an important role in the establishment
of the bureaucratic absolutist state.
World History
