“Inexpressible horror”: The Devil and Baptist Life Writing in Cromwellian Ireland

Crawford Gribben

doi:10.1017/s0009640720001353

Abstract

AbstractThe Baptist movement in Cromwellian Ireland displayed a number of distinctive features. Adherents of the movement regularly claimed to have heightened spiritual experiences, which in a number of cases included firsthand encounters with the devil. This article observes the political contexts in which these claims were made while analyzing attempts by Baptist leaders to promote a more critical spirituality and counter illegitimate claims to supernatural experience. It argues that these unusual experiences, reflective more of their geographical than their denominational context, were rhetorically enabled, and Baptist leaders would struggle to both sustain and contain claims to spiritual experience.

Highlights

532 Crawford Gribben contemporaries, Sankey joined the controversy against the Baptists until, “upon the very edg of his railing against it,” he was convinced by Thomas Patient—one of the most prominent of the new religious movement’s leaders—that the “faith of his parents” could not “make his infant washing effectual.”4 identified with the Baptists, Sankey positioned himself at the center of a web of religious and political conspiracy
Baptist leaders defended their movement by arguing that its theology sustained and contained a robust spirituality, which responded to the “voice of the true Shepherd” by emphasizing objective over subjective knowledge claims. Such spirituality was grounded in, and limited by, its dependence upon scripture. Emphasizing this containment of spiritual experience, their confession of faith, like other puritan confessions, included little of the warm, elevated, and devotional language that occasionally marks some other creedal statements of the period: for instance, A Confession of Faith, of the Holy Separated Church of God (1645) acknowledged, alongside its doctrinal claims, that “the sweetest thing is Christs name and presence.”41 This silence as to the nature of true spirituality, or what might be expected of spiritual experience, was to become a structural weakness in the advance of the Particular Baptist movement, as members of the movement articulated claims to spiritual experience that elevated subjective over objective knowledge claims, creating a culture that could sustain but not so contain accounts of unusual experiences
More cautious new religious movements of the period—such as the Presbyterians, whose more objective spirituality combined with other geographical and political advantages to create a sustainable dissenting community—the “ideological faltering” of the Irish Baptist movement can be clearly traced in the aftermath of the Restoration and the trend toward theological and political conservatism

Summary

Introduction

532 Crawford Gribben contemporaries, Sankey joined the controversy against the Baptists until, “upon the very edg of his railing against it,” he was convinced by Thomas Patient (died 1666)—one of the most prominent of the new religious movement’s leaders—that the “faith of his parents” could not “make his infant washing effectual.”4 identified with the Baptists, Sankey positioned himself at the center of a web of religious and political conspiracy.5 It is not clear when he was baptized by Patient or whether he was a member of a Baptist congregation, but it is evident that he did not understand this baptism as representing a binding commitment to his new community.

Results

Conclusion