The Book of Books (12 page)

But while the kingdoms of Britain were setting out for quiet and regressive times after exhausting and murderous Civil Wars, America was heading for the first Great Awakening, where the King James Version would be the key determinant in the moulding of the character of a new nation.

THE GREAT AWAKENING

B
ible stories had circulated before the publication of the King James Version. As well as the medieval stained-glass windows, resplendently illuminating the Bible, the medieval mystery plays acted out scenes from the Old and the New Testaments. The spectators would know something of the stories of Moses and Noah and Jonah, of David and Goliath, of Solomon and perhaps of Salome and Jezebel, of Christ on the Cross, the Virgin Mary, Ananias, the Three Kings . . . the most pertinent and graphic stories had studded the minds of largely illiterate Christians for centuries. The mystery plays were not allowed to be performed inside the cathedrals or the abbeys. The ‘real' Bible had been effectively denied to the many: these few stories were regarded as somewhere between education and entertainment and they were tolerated only in so far as they were harmless.

But with the wider development of printing, the rapid increase in literacy in the English-speaking world and the translations from the Latin into English, there was a new dynamic – the King James Bible. In its way, the ‘discovery' of America, the newfound land, matched the uncovering of these sacred Scriptures, the newfound landscape for the mind. Their laws and proverbs, their parables' examples and the prophecies became for a long time the
lifeblood of the awakening modern world. The King James Version both in itself and what it led to and inspired was a transfusion which revitalised the consciousness of the post-medieval world.

It was a form of Pentecost for the masses. The Apostles were endowed with the gift of tongues to be able to spread the Word to all people. The King James Version gave tongue to English-speaking people who had been made dumb by deliberate and rigorously monitored silences. The new book broke the silence. And what a remarkable book it proved to be! Even more remarkably, it gave energy to its opponents and even to its enemies.

 

After the Civil Wars in Britain, the next major move in the voyage of the Bible was the Great Awakening in America.

The notion that life would go on after death is as old as recorded civilisation and the evidence for that belief is regularly unearthed in the most ancient burial grounds the world over. Neanderthal grave goods have recently been unearthed. Some think that the belief in another life is no more than wishful thinking or a mere superstition. To others it expresses something true though currently ‘unprovable' save by the Resurrection, itself often doubted. Others believe in it completely. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-speaking worlds (as in those of many other nations and peoples) there were many people who believed in it completely. The question was – how did you arrive at such a belief? How were we to explain eternal life? The Christian version was layered, tantalising and elaborate, and for millions over the centuries, convincing. It carries what many feel to be an essential probability.

The Christian agenda, for most of the time since the death of Christ, was set by the Roman Catholic Church. It had built its authority on the promise that only through belief in and
obedience to the Roman Catholic laws, its bishops and priests and through its churches could eternal life be attained. It claimed direct succession from St Peter the Apostle, the rock on whom Christ built His Church.

Calvinists, at the other end of the Church spectrum, believed that you were chosen and if you were, there was to be eternal life. Some thought you were chosen even before you were born. But there was to be eternal life. The Celtic monks in seventh-century Britain had won over the royal courts and the pagan populace by this promise of eternal life. Indigenous populations of countries conquered by Westerners were expected to have the bitter pill of oppression sweetened by the religion which promised life after death. It was described as the glorious and unique gift.

The faith that went to America from England at the beginning of the seventeenth century was exceptional in its high level of literacy, its emotional intensity, its tenacity and its intellectual certainty. The Chosen, the few Calvinistic settlers, had an influence way out of proportion to their numbers. They lived through faith. To have faith in itself was to be fulfilled. To have the promise of eternal life was to be saved for eternity, a goal so far beyond all others that to live for it and to lay down your life for it was welcomed: and a duty.

In simple terms, eternal life has often been seen as a blessed if illusory hope of release from a life that is nasty, brutish and short. So bad can earthly life be that a life after death becomes not only a hope but a sole purpose. The earthly duty for Christians is to live with a moral rectitude and spiritual devotion which will earn you an eternal reward. This was the message that had to be burned into the minds of the people: the message that would save their immortal souls besides which all else was insignificant. ‘True believers' welcomed death in the intoxicated heightening of faith in what they saw as a just cause. Or it was the glad moment, the
tranquil glory moment, when your earthly race was run and you were called to meet your Maker and join the heavenly host.

These two factors, the moral faith to see you through this life and the spiritual faith to take you into eternal life were kindling to the fire brought by the preachers who lit the flames of the Great Awakening. This was stoked through the words and messages of the King James Version, which was to go on its most significant and far-reaching voyage, from Britain to America.

 

As more settlers came to America, not only from England but gradually and increasingly from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, there was a change in the development of the Protestant Christianisation of America.

Fewer of the new settlers wanted to take on the rigours of being one of the Chosen, with its heavy duties of prayer and daily observances which confined them to a scheduled God-centred life.

There was also the issue of the Native Americans. Many died from imported diseases which led to an easy excuse for neglect. This ‘proved' they were of inferior stock and therefore God saw it right to let them perish to make room for the Chosen People. There were a few settlers who set out to convert and as they saw it ‘help' the Indians by translating the Bible into a dialect of the Algonquin tribe, for instance, or organising Indian ‘Prayer Towns' in which the Indians were encouraged to follow a Christian path. But it was all but lost in what soon became a norm of destruction and deceit as the Europeans drove west, robbed the Indians of their lands and trampled down their population and their culture.

Then there were the slaves in the South. Diarmaid MacCulloch points out that ‘It was ironic that in the 1640s and 1650s as the English on both sides of the Atlantic were talking in unprecedented ways about their own freedom and right to choose, especially in religion, slaves were being shipped to the English
Colonies in hundreds then thousands. In the early years Protestants did not challenge this any more than Catholics.'

There was often a double standard. The philosopher of liberty, John Locke, in his
Two Treatises of Government
, wrote that to Englishmen ‘slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of man . . . that 'tis hardly to be believed that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.' Yet they did. Including one English gentleman, John Locke himself. When he helped draft the constitution for the new English colony in South Carolina, in that constitution slaves were accepted. At the end of the seventeenth century blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina. They were essential labour. They were cheap. They could pose a great threat. So were they really God's people? ‘Blacks,' as MacCulloch writes ironically, ‘were different.' It was very useful for the whites to believe that.

But that began to change, first stirred by white clergymen preaching the King James Version, and then seized on and driven by the slaves themselves. This came about partly because the African-Americans used the language and the stories of that key to the white American mind – the King James Version. They took the words of their enemy and used them to fight and ultimately to overcome him.

It is a strange twist of history that while the descendants of the millions of the Native Americans of the seventeenth century are now a small, dispossessed, disempowered minority, the descendants of millions of Afro-Americans who came as slaves have argued for, fought for and gained parity and grown in number. They have achieved success across the spectrum from Nobel Prizes to the presidency of the United States itself. That 300-year struggle, still ongoing, could be said to have one of its tap roots in the Great Awakening which itself owed a great deal to Methodist preachers, young, idealistic, religious men who, in a running thread in the story, once again came from Oxford.

After decades of intense close inspection of the Scriptures and disputation sentence by sentence, sometimes around a single word, it is not surprising that the pendulum swung. There came a moment to throw off the shackles of scholarship and go to the heart of the matter. This, in the first third of the eighteenth century, was what the English evangelicals did. According to Diarmaid MacCulloch they ‘sought to create a religion of the heart and of direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in consciousness of his suffering on the Cross and his atonement to his Father for human sin'. He observes that ‘once more, it was the message of Augustine, filtered through Luther.'

This movement found its natural home among the Dissenters – part of the Presbyterian grouping – who played such a persistent role in missions and conversions. Dissenters were not only outstandingly active in the religious sphere but across society. It was a society whose establishment barred them from most of its ruling heights including parliament, but they were to play a seminal part in education, science, philosophy and philanthropy.

They formed the bedding for the English evangelicals who were spearheaded by Methodism. Methodism began inside the Anglican Church and its founders never wanted to abandon the Anglican Church. But by degrees, due not a little to the sloth and smugness of the Anglican Church, Methodism separated from it and joined the congregation of Dissenters who took the Bible to the people and through the Bible found a vital role.

Initially, the Anglican rejection of Methodism was a cause of sorrow to its leader John Wesley, an Anglican clergyman like his father before him.

Again, as so often in the first centuries of the story of the English-speaking Bible, we have a man who went to Oxford to be ordained as a minister in the inner temple of the establishment and came out of it to rattle the cage of that establishment and
change it. Oxford in Wesley's time, in the eighteenth century, was a fastness of reactionary views. Its graduates were expected to be gentlemen and buttress the status quo and perpetuate it. They were admitted to the colleges to be the docile persuaders for the existing authorities. Some of them would become the authorities. Yet it could be and had been the perfect stalking horse for radical ideas. They had taken root there since the fourteenth century.

John Wesley formed an Oxford group which went back to Apostolic practices, feeding and helping the poor, practising regular and passionate devotion – meaning it, in short, unlike most of the other young men who came to the university. Wesley's ‘Holy Club' was mocked and given the derisive nickname of ‘Methodists'. Like many a clever and derided minority, they took on that nickname as a badge of honour and Methodists they became. Some, however, acknowledging the preaching success and enthusiasm of John Wesley and his brother Charles, who wrote almost 9,000 hymns, called themselves ‘Wesleyans'.

Wesley stumped up and down the country like a politician at election time. He mounted the hustings. He spoke with a passion which dismayed both the entrenched conservatives and the new daintily mannered Anglicans. He called out for converts. And they responded. This vulgar method was frowned on by the powers that be. The Wesleys brought rousing music into the churches, they sought and got warm and positive reactions from their congregations who did not follow the Church of England practice of deference, timidity and tepidity. Their hymns exalted the Lord and the congregations alike. The Wesleys lit up feelings which their fellow Anglican priests preferred to be doused down.

Justification by faith, the message of St Paul, taken up by Luther, became a mantra for John Wesley. This was still radical. The waters had closed over the seventeenth-century religious wars and the Church of England, like the Church of Rome before it,
much preferred the people to express their faith within its own established customs and practices. Wesley's ‘enthusiasm' was disturbing and alien – although a century or so previously it would have seemed commonplace.