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THE POLITICAL USE OF THE BIBLE IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN:
varied political movements, is somewhat of a reversal of
good hermeneutics. No doubt their exegesis seemed to
lack a definitive set of interpretive rules which resulted
in some rather imaginative and subjective expositions
unattractive to most. This is where the study of many
serious scholars stops. For those “uninitiated,” Medley’s
A standard set up, the Fifth Monarchist’s second-to-lastmanifesto,
in the words of Woolrych, their
“constitution of the kingdom of Christ, . . . must have
looked fitter for cloud cuckoo land.” 269
But even if their use of the Scriptures appears
unappealing, it certainly cannot mean it is unscholarly
or unsophisticated, or wholly wrong-headed. The depth
of their conviction, that Christ’s millennial rule was
beginning with Britain’s saintly representatives, and to
be exported abroad, cannot simply be treated as an
expository sideshow. After all, they advanced their
scholarship along-side some impressive continental
Reformists. The extraordinary lengths they went to
analyse the dark and difficult prophecies, which many
Christians today hardly trouble themselves with, to
understand Christ’s millennial rule, is only matched by
their loyal commitment to God above all else. What
can we learn from them?
The spirit which drove the more militant among them
finds its counterpart in the modern era. Bernard Capp,
who has made a study of the Fifth Monarchists as well
as other millenarian visionaries and movements,
identifies them with a “theocratic agenda.” “The rise of
fundamentalist, theocratic Islamist movements in Iran,
Afghanistan, and Iraq has made such ideologies all too
familiar today, a development paralleled by the
emergence of extremist groups within the Jewish and
Christian faiths. Paradoxically, it is the Fifth
Monarchists rather than communist Diggers who now
appear most “relevant” to our age.” 270
Fifth Monarchy emphasis upon “King Jesus” as the only
legislator, with Moses’s judicials as Britain’s only rule of
law, was hardly an uncommon scriptural perspective
relative to settling Britain’s constitution. Other
millenarian (and not so millenarian groups), including
those in the American Colonies, found in the
Scriptures evidence for saintly rule in the
commonwealth as well as in the churches, believing a
property-franchise too limited to prevent the
unrighteous from wielding civil and therefore coercive
authority over men’s consciences. Other religious
sectarians also denied various levels of magisterial
legitimacy to the Rump and the Protectorates, and most
deferred to some aspect of the Hebrew Polity as a model
commonwealth, or at the least, a primitive rule of God’s
first governors. But, those apocalyptic and prophetic
passages of extraordinary appearing beasts and talking
horns, times and half times, the Dragon, Antichrist,
Armageddon and Christ’s thousand-year reign—passages
which drove the Fifth Monarchists in their political and
religious sentiments—are a difficult set to settle
definitively on hermeneutically. These same texts are
even heatedly debated within Christendom today by
those with no sense of the millennial movements which
pre-date their not-so-unique views. This, coupled with
their unwavering demand of a parliamentary
membership of saints only, elected by churches, who sat
for King Jesus more than the faithful (and not so
faithful) of the Commonwealth, who viewed themselves
charged with a global mandate to pulverise pagan
nations and liberate the persecuted saints from their
midst, would provoke many to agree with the spirit of
Woolrych’s observation: that Fifth Monarchists
represented the lunatic fringe of the absolute religiously
daft. Nevertheless, their views are not so cosmic and
biblically unpalatable as they may seem, as more than
mere remnants of them have survived within various
modern evangelical movements and denominations.
269
Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 661.
270
Capp, “A Door of Hope Re-opened,” 17.
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