Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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violating the current sexual code or by swearing and blaspheming in public. Coppe was particularly famous for drunkenness
and smoking. Once he had become a Ranter, he had indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and
swear. We hear of him cursing for a whole hour in the pulpit of a London church and swearing at the hostess of a tavern so
fearfully that she trembled for hours afterwards. This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its
unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind. Fox and his Quakers insisted that sin was by no means inevitable. He
certainly did not encourage his Friends to sin and hated the licentiousness of the Ranters, but he was trying to preach a more
optimistic anthropology and restore the balance. In his tract A Single Eye, Laurence Clarkson argued that since God had
made all things good, 'sin' only existed in men's imagination. God himself had claimed in the Bible that he would make the
darkness light. Monotheists had always found it difficult to accommodate the reality of sin, though mystics had tried to
discover a more holistic vision. Julian of Norwich had believed that sin was 'behovely' and somehow necessary. Kabbalists
had suggested that sin was mysteriously rooted in God. The extreme libertarianism of Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson can
be seen as a rough and ready attempt to shake off an oppressive Christianity which had terrorised the faithful with its
doctrine of an angry, vengeful God. Rationalists and 'enlightened' Christians were also trying to shake off the fetters of a
religion, which had presented God as a cruel authority figure, and discover a milder deity.
Social historians have noted that Western Christianity is unique among the world-religions for its violent alternations of
periods of repression and permissiveness. They have also noted that the repressive phases usually coincide with a religious
revival. The more relaxed moral climate of the Enlightenment would be succeeded in many parts of the West by the
repressions of the Victorian period, which was accompanied by an upsurge of a more fundamentalist religiosity. In our own
day, we have witnessed the permissive society of the 1960s giving way to the more puritan ethic of the 19805, which has
also coincided with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the West. This is a complex phenomenon, which doubtless has no
single cause. It is, however, tempting to connect this with the idea of God which Westerners have found problematic. The
theologians and mystics of the Middle Ages may have preached a God of love but the fearful Dooms over the cathedral
doors depicting the tortures of the damned told another story. The sense of God has often been characterised by darkness
and struggle in the West, as we have seen. Ranters like Clarkson and Coppe were flouting Christian taboos and proclaiming
the holiness of sin at the same time as the witchcraft craze was raging in various countries of Europe. The radical Christians
of Cromwell's England were also rebelling against a God and a religion which was too demanding and frightening.
The new born-again Christianity that was beginning to appear in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
was frequently unhealthy and characterised by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals. We can see this in
the wave of religious fervour known as the Great Awakening that swept New England during the 17305. It had been
inspired by the evangelical preaching of George Whitfield, a disciple and colleague of the Wesleys, and the hell-fire sermons
of the Yale graduate Jonathan Edwards (1703-58). Edwards describes this Awakening in his essay 'A Faithful Narrative of
the Surprising Work of God in Northampton, Connecticut'. He describes his parishioners there as nothing out of the
ordinary: they were sober, orderly and good but lacking in religious fervour. They were no better or worse than men and
women in any of the other colonies. But in 1734 two young people died shockingly sudden deaths and this (backed up, it
would appear, by some fearful words by Edwards himself) plunged the town into a frenzy of religious fervour. People could
talk of nothing but religion; they stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible.
In about six months, there had been about three hundred born-again conversions from all classes of society: sometimes
there would be as many as five a week. Edwards saw this craze as the direct work of God himself: he meant this quite
literally, it was not a mere pious facon de parler. As he repeatedly said, 'God seemed to have gone out of his usual way' of
behaving in New England and was moving the people in a marvellous and miraculous manner. It has to be said, however,
that the Holy Spirit sometimes manifested himself in some rather hysterical symptoms. Sometimes, Edwards tells us, they
were quite 'broken' by the fear of God and 'sunk into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was
beyond the mercy of God'. This would be succeeded by an equally extreme elation, when they felt suddenly saved. They
used 'to break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping.
Sometimes they have not been able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration'. {42} We are
clearly far from the calm control that mystics in all the major religious traditions have believed to be the hallmark of true
enlightenment.
These intensely emotional reversals have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth,
attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with God. The Awakening spread
like a contagion to surrounding towns and villages, just as it would a century later when New York state would be called the
Burned-Over District, because it was so habitually scorched by the flames of religious fervour. While in this exalted state,
Edwards noted that his converts felt that the whole world was delightful. They could not tear themselves away from their
Bibles and even forgot to eat. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their emotion died down and about two years later Edwards noted