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COPYRIGHT 1993 Johns Hopkins University Press
Christianity, however, never, even in its most reformed mode, renounces nostalgia and desire. Even as reformers preach an "experimental" understanding of the Word, their own orthodoxy insists that the Word is never fully and immediately experienced in what we familiarly call the here and now. They preserve allegorical ontology even as they rail against exegesis and a faith based on tropes and shadows. If the Word is always literal, then experience itself is but an allegorical shadow of the life to come.
In claiming that his flesh had been destroyed ("scrap't away," Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God
Philippians 2:6
If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself.
Judith Butler(1)
If the Bible is true, then I'm Christ. But so what? You know being Christ ain't nothing. I claim my father sits on the throne. Doesn't yours? Isn't your father God?
David Koresh, Leader of the Branch Davidians, Waco, Texas, February, 1993
One day in July 1649, William Franklin told Mary Gadbury that his outward body had been "destroy'd" and had been replaced with the spiritual and glorified body of Christ. He had "closed with Christ," body and soul.(2) According to her confession, recorded by a hostile, but clearly fascinated witness, Gadbury found Franklin's claim difficult to credit at first. Indeed, she says that she laughed in his face. But within a short space of time, probably no more than a few days, she came to recognize in Franklin the man of her hopes and dreams, indeed the man of all Christendom's hopes and dreams. By Christmas time, Franklin and Gadbury (now announcing herself as the "Spouse of Christ") had gathered to themselves a number of disciples, including a Hampshire minister, William Woodward and his wife, Margaret. Humphrey Ellis, a Congregational minister, was alarmed enough by the couples' success to compose a rather detailed (62-page) account of their activities and trials. By some accounts, their followers numbered in the hundreds even after they and their chief supporters had been apprehended and imprisoned (E, 47).
Franklin was not the first English pseudo-christ, but he appears to have been the first of a flurry of pseudo-christs and ecstatic women prophets who commanded the anxious attention of the English public in the years immediately following the execution of Charles I.(3) Thomas Tany, for example, dated his bodily conversion from November 1649, saying "I have been emptied of temporalls, but am filled with the eternall being . . . I am One."(4) Over the course of his seven-year career, Tany, calling himself Thoreaujohn, also claimed to be high priest of the Jews, King of England and France, and even King of the Jews.(5) In 1650 John Robins was reported to be raising the dead and announcing himself as Christ.(6) According to Lodowick Muggleton, who believed himself to be "one of the two last Prophets & Witnesses of the Spirit, being the Third & last Record from God on Earth," Robins preached "that he was the first Adam that was in that innocent State; & that his Body had been Dead this Five Thousand, Six Hundred and odd Years, & now he was risen again from the Dead; And that he was that Adam Melchisadek that met Abraham in the Way."(7) Robins's wife, Joan, like Mary Gadbury before her, believed she was about to give birth to Christ, a Christ in "substance," rather than one of "types and shadows."(8) Mrs. Richard King and Mary Adams made identical claims in 1651. Mary Vanlop and Joan Garment, whose husband Joshua was a minister and disciple of John Robins, both claimed that the man they followed was the "true god to serve."(9) Anna Trapnel accompanied Baptist leader Vavasour Powell to Whitehall in 1654, only to fall into a twelve-day trance during which she uttered a series of fifth-monarchist prophecies denouncing Cromwell and the army for threatening to betray Christs kingdom on earth.(10) In 1656, the Quaker James Nayler rode into Bristol on a donkey as women followers strewed palms in his way.(11) This list is far from complete, but the literature from which it is drawn suggests that if the early interregnum years were not unusually blessed in the frequency of such episodes, they certainly attracted more widespread attention, both popular and official, enthusiastic and anxious, than before or after.
Most of the stories involve sexy bits--a perennial attraction for press and public. The "Abominable Practices" men and especially women were supposed to have acted with and upon their bodies were as much a concern and attraction as the "Horrid Blasphemies" they uttered with their mouths. Indeed, the 1654 List of Some of the Grand Blasphemers, published by "The Committee for Religion," is preoccupied with the sexual behavior of women, especially "Ranters, Quakers and Seekers."(12) Almost all of its examples betray the fear that the radically "inward" religion of Puritan "heartwork" threatened to become, at least on its sectarian vanguard, very much an "outward," bodily--carnal--experience: women claiming that the men they slept with were Christ or God, that they were literally pregnant with Christ, or that the routine practices of everyday life were as worshipful as--or more so than--organized "ordinances."
Mary Gadbury's situation epitomizes this fear. A married (and deserted) woman, she appears to have shared a bed for several months with William Franklin (also married), the man she believed was Christ. However, she insisted that her relations with this Christ were not "carnal," but "spiritual"--that since Franklin's body had been replaced by the glorified spiritual body of Christ, any physical relations with such a body must, by definition, be spiritual relations. Ellis invites his readers to scoff, along with the courtroom audience, at what he takes to be Gadbury's transparently self-serving confusion of the carnal and the spiritual:
She answered, to free herself from being accounted a harlot, . . . that he knew not such fleshly relation, that she companied with him not as a carnal, but as a spiritual man; . . . she companied not with him in an uncivil way, but as a fellow-feeler of her misery; at which last word the whole Court laughed exceedingly, some saying, Yea we think you companied with him as a fellow-feeler indeed. (E, 50).
The court's excessive laughter at what might have seemed to many, perhaps even to Ellis, an exceedingly pathetic self-account of a woman who imagined Christ as a fully present, even palpable, "fellow-feeler of her misery," marks and masks a perennially troubling--because imperfectly suppressed--contradiction in Puritanism. This is the contradiction between Puritanism's homiletic encouragement of an "experimental" as opposed to "notional" understanding of and relationship to the Word incarnate, its equally strong commitment to a dualist ontology according to which the experience of the body in this world is at worst wholly to be despised, and at best an allegorical "shell" whose temporal blessings are to be understood as no more than a dim figure of the eternal blessings of the world to come. Bunyan, for instance, defined a notionist as one who knows the scripture but only "in the notion, and hast not the power of the same in |his~ heart," having a head "full of the knowledge of the Scriptures," but a heart "empty of sanctifying grace."(13) Once the allegorical shell of bodily experience has been cracked by hermeneutic contemplation, it must be resolutely tossed away. "For we must hold," taught Calvin, "that our mind never rises seriously to desire and aspire after the future, until it has learned to despise the present life."(14)
With this doctrinal privileging of experience over notions, Protestant and Puritan preachers encouraged their flocks so as to experience the Word in scripture that they might say, "Jesus Christ . . . was never more real and apparent then now; here I have seen him and felt him indeed."(15) On the other hand, no version of Christianity is more committed than Calvinism to the absolute separation between this world and the next where Christs glorified body exclusively resides; no more miracles, no eucharistic "real presence," no ecstatic raptures.(16) God is everywhere represented in his creation, especially in "man," but our ontological realm and Gods remain as distinct from each other as figure and thing figured, except in the single exceptional case of Christs sojourn on earth. Even Calvin's christology emphasizes the distinction between rather than the combination of the divine and human.(17) The divine is never human; soul is never body; this world is never changed into the next, or mingled with the next; the eternal does not participate with the temporal. The divine may manifest itself in the human, "hid under a humble clothing of flesh," but the two remain as distinct as sign and thing signified. In this world there is no fulfillment, only signs and shadows.
Despite this doctrinal distinction, the expectation of fulfillment, of a new creature in a new heavenly kingdom, ran high in the late 1640s and early 1650s, and many proclaimed that fulfillment had arrived. The king was himself a sort of pseudo-christ, both before the dramatically public execution of his body and after. The frontispiece to Eikon Basilike depicts Charles I kneeling in what can only be described as a Laudian's fantasy of Gethsemane as he prepares to crown himself with a coronet of thorns. Owen Felltham's epitaph for Charles I reads: "Here Charles the First and Christ the Second lies."(18) Appended to the 15 March 1649 edition (and all that followed) of Eikon Basilike was an epitaph by one J.H. that apostrophized the King as "thou earthly god,...
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