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THE POLITICAL USE OF THE BIBLE IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN:
Britain’s most extraordinary constitutional crises. Some
of these early moderns presented constitutional models
so significantly shaped by biblical arguments that they
cannot be separated from them or their interpretive
methods reduced to “rag bag” approaches.
British Political Use of the Scriptures:
English Civil War and Interregnum
(1640-1660)
Britain’s distinct contribution to biblical political
readings resulted from the constitutional crises of the
Puritan Revolution, also known as the English Civil
War and Interregnum periods (1649-60). Not only did
the Civil War divide the population between
Parliamentary and Royalist sympathies, Parliament’s
eventual victory, coupled with its swift and public
execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649, produced a
political vacuum; what would replace the ancient
constitution of Monarchy, Commons and Lords? The
regicide and subsequent English political events
astounded the monarchies of Europe, who now placed
themselves on a cautionary foreign policy footing with
their ‘commonwealth’ neighbour across the Straits of
Dover.
The Parliamentary victors immediately engaged the
constitutional question of settlement, starting with the
Putney Debates held at St. Mary’s Church, London
from October 28 through November 8 of 1647,
followed by the Whitehall Debates of December 14,
1648 to January 13, 1649. In attendance were officers
and soldiers of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, as
well as General Cromwell himself, accompanied by
pastors and theologians. Intense deliberations often
turned on the enduring political relevance of Scripture,
especially the Old Testament. At issue was a new
constitution, principles of civil government,
jurisdiction, liberty of conscience and the political
franchise. With the greater freedom to publish, the
Putney and Whitehall Debates widened to include the
public’s perspective on a political settlement, motivating
various sects to promote political platforms to newmodel
the ancient constitution.
The dialogue between various Protestant and non-
Protestant groups was often aggressively argumentative
and contentious. These constitutional debates are
revealed in various correspondences, Civil War
pamphlets, treatises, tracts, broadsides, newspapers,
Parliamentary speeches and sermons. The Thomason
Collection of Civil War Tracts alone includes 22,000
political and religious documents spanning the entire
Civil War and Interregnum period (1640-1660). Many
ministers and civil servants were less appreciative of the
public’s input into the settlement crises, including the
great English Kidderminster Presbyterian Pastor,
Richard Baxter (1615-1691). He remarked with dismay
in his Reliquiae Baxterianae (London,1696), an
autobiographical account of his more memorable life
moments and perspectives, that once the monarchy had
been dismantled, with no reinstatement of Charles II in
sight, “every self-conceited Fellow was ready to offer his
Model for a new Form of Government.” 10 Despite the
many concerns on the part of those who shared Baxter’s
observations, pursuit of a new enduring civil form
prompted a focused political reading of the Scriptures
resulting in radical theories, often adverse to
monarchical forms, and sympathetic with republican
and commonwealth models, which incorporated various
dimensions of the Hebrew Old Testament polity.
The Bible as a Political Text:
Hermeneutics and Conflicting Political
Readings
Some early modern British writers developed civil
proposals dependent solely upon classical and/or
Renaissance texts, while Puritan sects typically
combined non-biblical authors with Scripture, or
attempted to new-model the government with Scripture
alone. Nevertheless, those who did use the Bible
politically did not reflect upon it the same way, employ
the same hermeneutical approach, or select the same
texts from which to deduce civil and constitutional
material. Some actually resorted to the Scriptures in a
sort of pick-n-mix fashion to decorate their preconceived
proposals, or denounce their opponents’ models.
Simply stated, tremendous contrasts in method and
motive exist among those who attempted to contribute
a scriptural civil model.
Hermeneutical methods among early moderns range
from the literal, grammatical and historical approaches
to paradigmatic methods, to the more free allegorical
and typological modes of interpretation. Sometimes
differences in reading related to models confined to
either the Old or New Testament. This was true of
Anglican Royalists and Presbyterians, who tended to
resort to the Old Testament, especially the polity of
ancient Israel, as a normative civil model for England.
They attempted to draw exact correspondences and
political parallels between the type and extent of
governance which Israel’s rulers displayed as a positive
model for England’s Kings or, as negative examples to
avoid. Independents and Separatists focused
predominantly upon the New Testament and the
Gospel dispensation. They read a new Christian liberty
in the place of the Mosaic Judicials, a separation
between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres, and a
democratic approach to installing ecclesiastical
leadership within a decentralised New Testament
10
Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, Book 1, 118.
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