Chapter 17

The English Tradition

Cambridge Platonists, Restorationists, and William Law — A Long Hope Stream in the English-Speaking World

A. The Old Man at King's Cliffe

Picture an old man at his writing desk. The village is King's Cliffe, in Northamptonshire. The year is around 1753. The man is sixty-seven, in robust health for his age, and known across England as the author of a devotional classic called A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. John and Charles Wesley once carried his book in their saddlebags. So did Samuel Johnson. So did George Whitefield. The man's name is William Law.¹

But the book Law is writing now is a different book. He has fallen, in his later years, under the spell of a strange German shoemaker-mystic named Jakob Böhme. And out of that influence, mixed with the New Testament Law has loved his entire life, comes a series of late writings whose tone is unlike anything in his earlier work. The Spirit of Love, parts one and two, will appear in 1752 and 1754. In them Law makes claims that would have astonished the readers of the Serious Call: that God's love for His creatures is unconditional and unwearying; that "It is much more possible for the Sun to give forth Darkness, than for God to do, or be, or give forth anything but Blessing and Goodness"²; that the eternal punishment imagined by Law's own Anglican contemporaries is incompatible with the God Christ has revealed.

Law was not an isolated voice. He was a late representative of a tradition that had been running quietly through the English-speaking world for a hundred years. The tradition had its roots in the Cambridge of the 1640s and 1650s. It surfaced in Cromwell's chapel. It went underground at the Restoration. It came back in pieces — through nonjuring mystics like Law, through a Scottish Catholic convert with friends in the French court, through nineteenth-century Anglican preachers willing to lose their jobs over the doctrine of hell. By the time the Westminster Abbey controversy of 1877 broke, this stream had been flowing for more than two centuries.³

This chapter follows that stream. It is the English-speaking world's own native long-hope tradition — not borrowed from German Pietism (see Chapter 16), not transplanted from the patristic East (though indebted to Origen and Gregory of Nyssa), but homegrown. And it matters, because in evangelical apologetics today the "modern innovation" charge is leveled most often by English-speaking writers, against an English-speaking audience. The honest answer is that the long hope has been part of their own tradition the whole time.

B. The Setting

The English Reformation, settled in its Elizabethan shape, produced a Church of England with broadly Reformed convictions, a Cranmerian liturgy, and a deep ambivalence about the more rigorous parts of Continental Calvinism. By the 1640s that ambivalence had cracked open. The Civil War, the abolition of episcopacy, the rise of the Westminster Assembly and its Confession, the proliferation of radical sects — all of this destabilized a previously assumed orthodoxy. Into this confusion came a small circle of dons at Cambridge who refused both the Puritan and the high-Laudian options and went looking for a third way.

They were not a "school" in any formal sense. They published independently, disagreed on details, and were sometimes hard to count. But by the early eighteenth century they had a collective name: the Cambridge Platonists.⁴ Around the same time, and partly overlapping, a small group of Cromwell's chaplains had begun to think their way past Calvinist reprobation into something close to universal restoration — though they had the sense to publish only after they were safely dead. Half a century later, William Law would graft Böhme's mystical theology onto a thoroughly Anglican spirituality and produce his own late universalism. By the early nineteenth century, the Scottish lay theologian Thomas Erskine of Linlathen would carry the stream north of the border. And by mid-century, the controversy would erupt openly inside the Church of England with F. D. Maurice and, twenty-four years later, F. W. Farrar.

C. What the Figures Actually Said

The Cambridge Platonists

The senior figure was Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), Provost of King's College, Cambridge, until the Restoration cost him his post.⁵ Whichcote published very little in his lifetime. What survives — the Moral and Religious Aphorisms, the Discourses, the long correspondence with Anthony Tuckney — gives us a man whose deepest commitment was to a single text from Proverbs 20:27: "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." Whichcote returned to it again and again. Reason, for him, was not Calvinism's "blind guide" but a divine light planted in every human being. To deny it, or to teach a God whose acts contradicted it, was to insult the Creator.

That sentence — to go against reason is to go against God — is the engine of everything the Cambridge Platonists do on hell. They were not biblicists in the sense of ignoring Scripture. They were biblicists in the sense of refusing to accept any reading of Scripture that turned God into a tyrant. If a doctrine could only be sustained by abandoning the moral intuitions God Himself had given, then the doctrine was being misread.

Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), Master of Christ's College and the most systematic of the group, made the philosophical case at length. His True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) is a vast, sometimes exhausting book aimed primarily at Hobbes and the atheists; but tucked inside it is a sustained argument against theological voluntarism. The voluntarists held that the difference between right and wrong is a matter of God's bare will: whatever God decrees is right, simply because God decrees it. Calvinist accounts of reprobation often leaned on a version of this. Cudworth would have none of it.

Cudworth's point was simple but devastating. Goodness is not made up out of nothing by God's choice. It is rooted in God's own eternal nature. So if a doctrine of hell makes God act in a way that the moral law itself condemns — torturing the helpless, punishing infinitely for finite faults, choosing some for misery before they exist — then that doctrine has misread the God whose nature is the moral law.⁶ Cudworth never published a treatise on hell. But the framework he laid down made the framework of strict Calvinist reprobation philosophically untenable for anyone who took him seriously.

Henry More (1614–1687) carried the argument further. More was a fellow of Christ's College for nearly fifty years, and he wrote almost everything. His parents, he tells us, were Calvinists; but he himself, even as a boy, "could never swallow that hard doctrine."⁷ In The Immortality of the Soul (1659), Divine Dialogues (1668), and a long stream of related works, More argued that the standard Latin construction of aeterna poena — eternal punishment as endless conscious torment — could not be sustained either from the biblical Greek or from the moral nature of God. He read the Greek Fathers carefully. He absorbed Origen's reservations about endlessness. He distinguished biblical aiōnios — "of the age" — from strict philosophical timeless eternity. (For the full lexical case on aiōnios in patristic Greek, see Chapter 8.)

None of the major Cambridge Platonists wrote a public treatise asserting universal salvation outright. They were too cautious for that, and they lived in a country where dissenting from the Westminster line in print could ruin a career. But the implication of their work was clear. By the time More had finished, the philosophical and exegetical machinery for a softer English doctrine of hell was assembled and waiting.

The Cromwellian Underground: White and Sterry

Meanwhile, two of Oliver Cromwell's chaplains had quietly traveled further than the Cambridge dons. Peter Sterry (1613–1672) was a Cambridge-trained Independent, a member of the Westminster Assembly, and a chaplain successively to Lord Brooke and then to the Protector himself.⁸ Sterry's mature theology — set out in A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will (published posthumously in 1675) and The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the Soul of Man (1683) — kept the bones of Reformed doctrine and refigured them. Predestination is not abandoned. Election is not denied. But Sterry's God is "Eternity it self," the "supream and universal good," the love whose work in the elect spills outward until at last every rational creature is gathered into the divine harmony.⁹

Jeremiah White (1629–1707) traveled the same road. He had been a sizar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and like Sterry he ended up serving Cromwell at Whitehall.¹⁰ White wrote his great universalist treatise during his years at Whitehall, but he never dared print it. It would not appear until 1712, five years after he died, under the title The Restoration of All Things: or, A Vindication of the Goodness and Grace of God, to be Manifested at Last, in the Recovery of His Whole Creation Out of Their Fall.¹¹

White's argument was not a soft sentimentalism. He kept the Calvinist apparatus of predestination, election, and the irresistibility of grace — and turned it inside out. If grace is irresistible, then God's choice of any soul guarantees that soul's eventual restoration. If God wills the salvation of all (1 Tim 2:4) and is sovereign, then all will be saved. If the patristic East — Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, the descent tradition surrounding 1 Peter 3:18–4:6 — pointed in this direction, then the Reformers' supposed novelty in narrowing the scope of redemption is itself an innovation, not a recovery.

William Law's Late Universalism

William Law (1686–1761) is in some ways the most extraordinary figure in this chapter. He was a serious, disciplined, sometimes severe Anglican priest — a nonjuror who lost his Cambridge fellowship in 1714 because he refused the oath of allegiance to George I, and who spent the rest of his life on the margins of the establishment. His Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) became, almost on publication, one of the most widely read devotional books in the English-speaking world.¹² Wesley called it indispensable. Johnson said it was the first book that ever made him take religion seriously.

And then, in the 1730s, Law discovered Jakob Böhme. The German cobbler-mystic's visionary writings — strange, ornate, often impenetrable — took hold of Law and never let go. His later works are unlike anything else in eighteenth-century English religion: The Spirit of Prayer (1749–1750), The Way to Divine Knowledge (1752), The Spirit of Love (1752–1754). Wesley broke with him over them. But it was in these late works that Law's universalism — sometimes implicit, sometimes nearly explicit — came forward.¹³

Law's argument was that the doctrine of hell as endless wrath got the divine nature wrong at the root. God is not partly love and partly wrath, dispensing each as circumstance allows. God is love, full stop — and what we experience as wrath is simply God's love met by a creaturely refusal. The fire of judgment is the same fire that purifies; whether it heals or torments depends on what the creature is. Stay with the creature long enough, and the love will win.

Wesley admired Law in his earlier mode and rejected him in his later one, and the rejection was not minor — Wesley accused Law of veering into mysticism and pantheism (see Chapter 18). But Law's late writings would shape later English Christian mysticism for two centuries. Through them ran a thread of medieval German mysticism — Eckhart, the Theologia Germanica, the language of the divine spark in the soul — coming through Böhme and into English religious culture (see Chapter 14).

Andrew Michael Ramsay

Across the Channel, a Scottish convert to Catholicism was carrying another version of the same hope into the eighteenth century. Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743), known as "the Chevalier Ramsay," was born in Ayr, traveled to France as a young man, fell under the spell of François Fénelon at Cambrai in 1710, converted to Catholicism, and never lived in Britain again.¹⁴ He moved in the highest French Catholic mystical circles, tutored James Stuart's sons in Rome, married into the Jacobite nobility, and quietly worked for years on the book that would only see print after he died: The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, Unfolded in a Geometrical Order (Glasgow, 1748–1749).

The book is curious. It is laid out, as the title says, in "geometrical order" — like Spinoza's Ethics, with definitions, axioms, and propositions. But its content is a wide-ranging defense of Fénelon's mystical Catholicism wedded to a universal-restorationist eschatology. "God's primitive, positive, ultimate and absolute designs cannot be eternally frustrated," Ramsay writes; "therefore before the general re-establishment of lapsed beings, the earth and all its inhabitants are to be restored to their primitive, paradisiacal beauty, perfection and happiness."¹⁵

Ramsay's importance is less in his individual influence than in his role as a conduit. Through him, Fénelon's quietist mysticism reached English-speaking readers. The Wesleys read him. So did Law. So did later Methodist Restorationists who would carry the long hope across the Atlantic (see Chapter 19).

Thomas Erskine of Linlathen

If Ramsay is a Scottish Catholic in France, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788–1870) is a Scottish Episcopalian in Scotland — a lay theologian, a landed proprietor, a friend of Carlyle and Charles Kingsley and Benjamin Jowett, a quietly serious man whose home in Forfarshire became a kind of theological salon for a half-century.¹⁶ Erskine never held a pulpit and never sought one. He wrote: Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (1820), An Essay on Faith (1822), The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828), The Brazen Serpent (1831), The Doctrine of Election (1837).

Erskine's central conviction was that the gospel is unconditional. God's pardon, in Christ, is already offered to every human being; the only question is whether each will come to know and rest in it. He held that "life is an education rather than a probation"¹⁷ — a phrase that would shape later British theology more than its short length would suggest. By the 1830s Erskine had moved past his friend John McLeod Campbell's "universal pardon" into something closer to explicit universalism. He believed, as his Dictionary of National Biography entry plainly says, "that ultimately all men would be saved and restored to the image of God by the same atonement of Christ."¹⁸

Maurice and the King's College Controversy

Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) is the figure through whom the long hope finally erupted into the open in the Church of England. Maurice was born into a Unitarian household, was baptized into the Church of England in 1831, was ordained in 1834, became chaplain to Guy's Hospital in 1836, and joined the faculty of King's College London in 1840. By 1853 he was Professor of Theology at King's. That year he published Theological Essays, a careful, irenic, but devastating little book.¹⁹

The essay that finished his King's College career was the final one, on "Eternal Life and Eternal Death." Maurice argued that the New Testament word "eternal" — aiōnios — should not be read as a temporal description ("of unending duration") but as a description of a kind of life. "Eternal life" is knowledge of the only true God and of Jesus Christ whom He has sent (John 17:3). "Eternal death" is its tragic opposite — a state of separation from that knowledge. Whether either state goes on without end is, Maurice insisted, not a question Scripture answers in our preferred temporal terms.

This was too much for Richard William Jelf, the Principal of King's College, who corresponded with Maurice through the summer of 1853 and brought the matter before the College Council in October. Maurice refused to retract. He demanded that he be "either acquitted or dismissed." The Council, on October 27, dismissed him.²⁰

It is important to be precise about what Maurice did and did not say. He did not deny postmortem judgment. He did not deny that some are lost. He explicitly disclaimed universalism. "I have no faith in man's theory of a Universal Restitution," he wrote — though he immediately added that the longing for the prodigal's return must not end at the grave.²¹ What Maurice refused was the popular evangelical doctrine of an unending, conscious, retributive torment, fixed at the moment of physical death. He stood at the door of long hope without walking all the way through it — which made him, in the eyes of the Church of England's public, a heretic anyway.

Farrar at Westminster Abbey

Twenty-four years later, F. W. Farrar (1831–1903) — Canon of Westminster, headmaster of Marlborough, soon to be Archdeacon of Westminster and then Dean of Canterbury — preached five sermons at the Abbey in November and December 1877.²² The sermons became a book the next year: Eternal Hope. Farrar argued, with rhetorical fire that Maurice had never permitted himself, that the popular doctrine of eternal conscious torment, especially in its more lurid forms, was not what Scripture taught and not what the early Church had uniformly believed. He coined a phrase for one feature of the traditional doctrine — the idea that the saved would, from heaven, behold and somehow rejoice over the torments of the lost — calling it "the abominable fancy."²³

Farrar denied, like Maurice, being a universalist. He held out a careful "wider hope": God's mercy might extend further than the popular evangelical doctrine allowed; postmortem repentance might be possible for some; the duration and nature of hell were not as settled as the popular preachers claimed. Mercy and Judgment (1881) followed, developing the case at greater length in response to E. B. Pusey's heavyweight rebuttal What Is of Faith as to Everlasting Punishment? (1880).²⁴

D. Reception and Controversy

The English long-hope tradition did not roll through history as a steady triumphal procession. It was contested at every stage. The Cambridge Platonists were treated with suspicion by both Puritans and the high-church party. White and Sterry kept their universalism in manuscript until they were dead. Law was dismissed by Wesley and ignored by most respectable eighteenth-century Anglicans. Ramsay published in French and posthumously. Erskine, as a layman, was easy to overlook. Maurice was sacked. Farrar drew the full weight of Pusey, the most learned defender of traditional Anglo-Catholic orthodoxy in his generation.

And yet the stream kept widening. The Cambridge Platonists became standard fare in eighteenth-century English moral philosophy; their influence runs from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson through to the Scottish common-sense tradition.²⁵ Law's late writings shaped English mysticism for two centuries — Coleridge read him, the early Tractarians read him, the Victorian devotional revival drew on him. Erskine influenced Maurice; Maurice influenced Farrar; Farrar influenced a generation of late-Victorian Anglican pulpits.

The decisive institutional moment came in 1864. Two Anglican clergymen, Henry Bristow Wilson and Rowland Williams, had contributed essays to Essays and Reviews (1860) that, among other things, declined to teach eternal conscious torment as a dogma. They were prosecuted in the church courts. In February 1864, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council reversed the lower court's condemnation and ruled in their favor. After 1864, an Anglican clergyman could decline to preach eternal conscious torment as a positive doctrine without facing ecclesial discipline. The Maurice prosecution of 1853 would not have ended the same way if it had come a decade later.²⁶

By the time the Anglican Doctrine Commission produced its 1995 report The Mystery of Salvation, the long-hope position had become respectable enough that the report could treat conditional immortality, hopeful universalism, and traditional retribution as live options within Anglican thought — while clearly distancing itself from the most lurid versions of medieval hell.²⁷

E. Assessment

How should we read these figures, taken together?

First, they were not all saying the same thing. The Cambridge Platonists were largely implicit; they laid down a moral and philosophical framework within which strict ECT became hard to defend, but they rarely went on the record asserting universal restoration. White and Sterry, in contrast, were explicit universalists — though they kept their work in manuscript. Law's late mysticism is closer to a Böhme-inflected universalism, with a strong purgative element. Ramsay was a more straightforward restorationist of the patristic kind, mediated through French Catholic mysticism. Erskine was, by the end, a confident universalist with a Scottish-Reformed accent. Maurice was a careful agnostic on duration who refused to call himself a universalist. Farrar was a public defender of "wider hope" — postmortem opportunity and a softer doctrine of hell — without explicit universalism.

Second, the figures were neither cranks nor fringe. Whichcote ran King's College. Cudworth ran Christ's College and held a Regius chair. Sterry sat on the Westminster Assembly. White preached in Whitehall. Law's Serious Call was a generation-shaping devotional. Ramsay was a Fellow of the Royal Society and an Oxford honorary doctor. Erskine was the most important Scottish lay theologian of the nineteenth century. Maurice held a chair at King's. Farrar was a Canon and then a Dean. These were respected scholars and clergy, not the lunatic fringe.

Third — and this is where the historical argument bites — the English-speaking world produced this tradition from within, not by importing it. The Cambridge Platonists read the Greek Fathers, but they also developed their own ethical metaphysics. White and Sterry built on Reformed foundations. Law's late mysticism is heavily indebted to Böhme, but its English Anglican spirituality is local. Erskine and Maurice and Farrar wrote out of the Anglican (and Scottish Episcopal) tradition, not against it. There is no point at which one can say: "ah, here is where the English imported their universalism." It grew there.

Fourth, the limits of the figures should be named. The Cambridge Platonists' confidence in human reason was sometimes excessive; later evangelical critics were right that Cudworth and More underestimated the noetic effects of sin. Law's late dependence on Böhme made some of his prose almost unreadable and, at times, edged into a mystical monism that orthodox readers should resist. Erskine and Maurice both struggled to specify exactly what they were saying about the duration of judgment, and parts of Theological Essays read as evasive. Farrar's polemical fire could outrun his exegesis. These are real flaws. They do not negate the contribution.

What the English tradition gives the long hope, taken as a whole, is what no patristic chapter could give: a sustained Protestant, English-speaking, often Reformed lineage of careful theological dissent from strict ECT. It is the answer, in advance, to the claim that the long hope is a Continental import or a patristic curiosity unfit for sober Anglo-Saxon Christianity. The most sober Anglo-Saxon Christians of three centuries have themselves doubted and dissented.

F. Why This Matters

I have been writing this book in part because, in the evangelical world I know best — the English-speaking evangelical world, the world of my pastors and my classmates and the books on the shelves of nearly every Christian bookstore I have ever browsed — the long hope is most often dismissed with one rhetorical move: "This is a modern innovation. The Church has always taught that death seals one's fate." The chapters before this one have already shown that the patristic East refutes that claim. So does the Syriac tradition. So does the medieval mystical undercurrent. So does the Anabaptist-Pietist stream. But for the English-speaking evangelical, none of those answers quite lands. Patristic Greek is far away. Syriac monks are stranger still. German Pietists feel foreign.

The Cambridge Platonists, William Law, Thomas Erskine, F. D. Maurice — these are not far away. They are part of the English-speaking world's own Christian past. They wrote in English. They preached in English pulpits. They held English chairs and English livings. They were quoted approvingly by Samuel Johnson and John Wesley and Charles Kingsley. To dismiss them as "modern innovators" is to dismiss the English tradition itself.

That is the historical contribution of this chapter to the larger argument of the book. The pastoral contribution is smaller but real. A reader who has been told that hopeful long-hope eschatology belongs only to liberals, foreigners, and the unserious has, in this chapter, met a different company: nonjuring mystics, Cromwell's chaplains, Anglican Canons, Scottish lay theologians. The roll call is its own kind of pastoral comfort. None of them was a liberal. Most of them were as conservative as their times allowed. Several of them paid serious professional costs for their views. They could be wrong, of course. But they were not what the popular rhetoric says they were. They were serious Christians, reading Scripture in dialogue with the broad Christian tradition, refusing to silence the doubts a careful conscience kept raising about a doctrine many of them had themselves once preached.

The long hope, in the English-speaking world, is older than most who oppose it imagine. It has its own pedigree, its own primary sources, its own martyrs. The next chapter will take up Wesley, the figure in whom the wider hope and the high-evangelical instinct met most fully — and where the tradition would split into the various streams that filled the nineteenth century.