The Levellers

This article is being posted on the 370^th anniversary of a battle you may never have heard of as an excuse to write about a group you may never have heard of. But there is some value in knowing about First Battle of Newbury (fought on Sept. 20, 1643) and especially about the group known as the Levellers.
 

(The group I am writing about, though, is not to be confused with the English rock band founded in 1988 and named the Levellers.)

While most USAmericans know quite a bit about the Civil War in the U.S., most of us don’t know much about the English Civil War, which was fought in the 1640s. One of the major battles of that war was fought at Newbury, about 60 miles west of London.

That First Battle of Newbury was led by King Charles I, who ended up losing his head (literally, in Jan. 1649) in the civil war. He was the leader of the Royalist forces, but the Parliamentarian forces won the battle.

Thomas Prince was on the side of the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War, and he was badly wounded at the Battle of Newbury. In the late 1640s, Prince, along with John Lilburne and Richard Overton, became a leader of a political movement that came to be known the Levellers.

If you have read “A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age,” Glen Harold Stassen’s 2012 book, you know something about these matters, for he narrates how Overton and the other Levellers were “pioneers of democracy.”

Stassen also explains that the Levellers group was one of the “free-church sects,” along with the Anabaptists, Baptists and Quakers, which had considerable influence on the development of democracy in England and then in New England and the other Colonies.

While there is some confusion about the origin of their name, it is clear that the Levellers believed all people should be equal before the law; that is, the law should equally protect the poor and the wealthy. They were also advocates of the complete freedom of religion.

Overton (1599-1664) was a Baptist during the “contentious days” of the English Civil War. According to Stassen, “He strongly advocated the human right of religious liberty on the biblical basis of following Jesus” (67-68). In 1647 Overton published the first comprehensive doctrine of human rights.

Overton first made a confession of faith and was baptized at the Waterlander Mennonite Church in Holland in 1615. (The Waterlanders had broken off from the main Mennonite branch in 1555, and by 1615 they were comprised of about 1,000 baptized believers in Amsterdam.)

But back in England he became a Baptist, and also became friends with Roger Williams, it seems. Williams left England for Boston in 1630 and founded the first Baptist church in North America later that decade. In the 1640s he was writing the same sort of thing about religious liberty in New England that Overton and the other Levelers were writing in England during that same decade.

Stassen links the central emphases of Overton to the American Pledge of Allegiance, saying that the words about “liberty and justice for all” were central in Overton’s writings. (It is estimated that Overton wrote about fifty pamphlets arguing for political and religious liberty.)

Thinking about the Levellers and their emphasis on equality and justice reminded me of this cartoon, which you may have seen on Facebook where I found it.

Or maybe there is not much difference between equality and justice, if you are talking about eye level rather than where one’s feet are.

Happy Kiju, Glen Stassen!

Noted Baptist ethicist/theologian (and Thinking Friend) Dr. Glen Stassen was born on February 29, 1936. (I’m not revealing any secrets, for he has included his birth date on his Facebook page.)

Even though there is no February 29 this year, Glen was still born 77 years ago, which means that this would be a time of special celebration if he were Japanese (or in Japan). One’s 77^th birthday in Japan is called kiju, which literally means “joyful longevity.”

So, please join me in wishing Dr. Stassen a Happy Birthday at this auspicious time in his life.

After serving for 20 years as an ethics professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Stassen joined the Fuller Theological Seminary faculty in 1997 and is now the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics there.

Glen is the author of several books, and he is particularly known for his emphasis on “just peacemaking.” His book Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace was published in 1992, and since then he has edited two other books (published in 1998 and 2008) on the same theme.

In addition to his birthday greeting, I am writing this to recommend Dr. Stassen’s new book, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age (2012).

Academics have been using “thick” and “thin” to talk about interpretations and arguments at least since anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ used those terms in his book The Interpretations of Cultures (1973). A “thick” interpretation gives more than the basic information about a culture, or a person; it emphasizes historical context.

Accordingly, Dr. Stassen states the purpose of his new book: "Mainline churches need a clearer and deeper theology and ethics, and theology needs to focus on a thicker Jesus. . . . Evangelical churches and seeker-friendly churches need a thicker Jesus to guard their members against being coopted by political ideologies . . .” (p. x).

In the second chapter, then, he writes about how incarnational discipleship embraces “a thick, historically-embodied, realistic understanding of Jesus Christ” (p. 16).

The climactic eleventh chapter, “War: Jesus’ Transforming Initiatives and Just Peacemaking’s Initiatives,” elaborates on his ongoing emphasis.

The book ends with “one remaining question: Will you join in the apostolic witness to a thicker Jesus—in the tradition of incarnational discipleship?” (p. 221).

A Thicker Jesus is a significant book, one that deserves to be widely read. And carefully considering its contents should be especially helpful to all who are concerned with what it means, or should mean, to be a follower of Jesus in world today.

In this secular age when Jesus is often sentimentalized, commercialized, and trivialized in various ways, it is gratifying to have Dr. Stassen publish this significant book emphasizing a thicker Jesus.

And in this age that often presents a very thin interpretation of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, it is helpful to have this new book, in the tradition of the Anabaptists and also of Bonhoeffer (who is rather extensively treated), emphasize the meaning and importance of incarnational discipleship.

So, again, happy kiju, Glen. And thanks for this new book and for your ongoing emphasis on the challenge of just peacemaking. Many happy returns!

In Praise of Roger Williams

February 5, 1631. That is the date on which the Lyon, a British ship, “anchored safe amid great and dangerous ice floes in Boston harbor.” On board that ship (which had set sail from Bristol, England, on December 1) were Roger Williams and his wife Mary.

The words quoted in the above paragraph are from the new book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012). In it the author, noted historian John M. Barry, tells the story of one of the most important people in American history.

Roger Williams was probably born in 1603, the year Queen Elizabeth died and James I was crowned King of England. Roger became a well-educated English clergyman, graduating from Cambridge University in 1627. (As a longtime admirer of Williams, when I visited Cambridge for the first time in 2004 I thought, “Wow! This is where Roger Williams walked 375 years ago.”)

Although ordained by the Church of England, Williams became a Puritan and decided to sail with other Puritans to the “new world.” The massive movement of Puritans to New England had begun the year before. In 1630 John Winthrop (c.1587-1649) led a group of colonists to the New World and later that year became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a post he held at four different times for a total of around 13 years.

It was Winthrop who first spoke of the new colony being “a city on a hill” that would shine for all the world to see. He and those Puritans who arrived with him believed that they were chosen and blessed by God, and they sought to build a Christian country.

In his first years in New England, Williams served as a minister in Salem and Plymouth, but his disapproval of the Puritan church in Massachusetts led to his banishment from the colony. Williams’s criticism was twofold: he did not think that the civil government had the right to force people to hold prescribed religious beliefs. Further, he thought it was not right for the Englishmen to take lands from the Native Americans without compensating them.

Consequently, in order to escape deportation Williams fled into the wilderness in January 1636, and later that year he (and others who had come to join him) established the settlement that he named Providence, which is now the capital of Rhode Island. (Interestingly, Barry, the author of the book mentioned above, was born in Providence in 1947.) Two years later Williams founded the first Baptist church in the New World.

Several years later, in 1644 Williams wrote his most important book. It was published under the less than inspiring title The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, For Cause of Conscience, Discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace. Basically, this treatise calls for true freedom of religion and absolute separation of church and state.

In his new book A Thicker Jesus (2012), the noted Baptist ethicist Glen Stassen points out that in The Bloudy Tenent, Williams contends that the bloodshed of war “is largely caused by religious persecution. Relief from this bloodshed and from the hypocrisy of people who merely pretend to embrace a faith because they fear persecution, will result from establishing religious liberty” (p. 199). That may have been more nearly true in the 17^th century than now, but it is still a point worth considering. 

All of us who believe in, and appreciate having, religious freedom (or freedom from religion) should be continually grateful to Roger Williams (d. 1683) and his significant positive impact upon “the American soul.”