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Is God An Englishman?
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The
claim that ‘God is an Englishman’ was a somewhat ‘tongue in cheek’ expression
that was fashionable at the height of the British Empire. I don’t think many,
if any, believed in this literally, but it did capture a sense of Victorian
optimism and confidence. As
the industrial revolution took hold and the country became ever more
powerful, a view developed that this was not just through co-incidence. There
was a sense that these advances were happening in England for a reason and
that it was divinely ordained. Britain, and more particularly England, was
being given a divine mission to take the lead in the world. We were the New
Israel and through our industry, military might and our sense of fair play,
adherence to the law and democracy, we were to build the New Jerusalem. |
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To this day, the unofficial national anthem of England is the
hymn ‘Jerusalem’, written by William Blake who was, amongst many other
things, part of the folkish revival in England. The words to this sacred and
patriotic hymn are:
The phrase was used by the novelist R.F. Delderfield as the title of a series of novels that
looked at the profound changes and advances in English society during the
19th century. This created a great sense of optimism and a strong sense of
purpose – something we are sadly lacking today. The English were being given
the tools to go out and make the world a better, more civilised place – more
like England. This view was central to 19th century British Imperialism.
It was not just a justification for expanding and exploiting the resources of
the Empire, but for doing good. It led to the
building of railways, massive improvements in agriculture which provided more
food for local populations, improved health care, the (eventual) introduction
of democracy and the rule of law and the outlawing of questionable local
practices such as that of Suttee (in which the live widow is forced to join
her dead husband on the funeral pyre) in India. The English have long believed that God is on our side.
This forms part of our national myth going back a long way – far beyond the
technological advances of the 19th century and the growth of the British
Empire. For the most part, it was just a belief that provided we stayed true
to God, God would stay true to us. It developed out
of seeing ourselves being rescued time and time again by divine intervention,
from the scattering of the Spanish Armada by freak storms to the evacuation
of an entire army at Dunkirk during the second world war. Perhaps the first
major example of this was from King Alfred who believed that the Danish
invasions and conquest of much of England was due to the decline of English
Christianity. Alfred’s strategy to reverse the Danish incursions included not
just military innovations, but also reviving English Christianity –
specifically with the idea of getting God back on our side. And it worked!
Alfred proved a national saviour and one of our greatest monarchs. |
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The
image of God not just being on our side, but that we had been given a divine task
to make the world a better place also goes back a long way. Britain, and
specifically England, was the New Israel and we had a New Covenant with God.
There are ancient legends that St Joseph of Arimathea established the British
Church just a few short years after the crucifixion of Christ, well before
the establishment of the continental ‘Catholic Church.’ The legend of the
Holy Grael and Glastonbury is even more important as it embodies the idea
that Joseph ‘transferred’ the ancient Covenants from the biblical Israelites
to Britain and to the Christian religion as practiced in these islands. At
the heart of the ancient Grael legends, then, there is a deep and mystical
message that Britain and specifically England is now the New Israel. The
British Church grew out of these legends and because it was so much older
than the continental Churches, it always had a different identity and sense
of purpose. During the Saxon invasions of the 6th century, the
British monk Gildas wrote a number of testaments about the retreat and
decline of British Christianity in the face of Saxon paganism. These were
written in much the same style as the Old Testament ‘Book of Lamentations’
and clearly compared the Britain of his day to Israel, even referring to the
Britons as ‘Israelites’. Even when the British and English Churches were
absorbed into the medieval Roman Catholic Church, it retained this sense of
identity. The legends of King Arthur rework some of the myths of ancient
Israel and the Covenant with God. |
The Elizabethans
looked back to the historic British Church and sought to restore it in the form
of the modern Church of England. Many Anglicans, not least ASA, see themselves
as the heir to this ancient Church which has independent origins to the continental
Catholic and Orthodox denominations. This is probably where the idea arose that
the English and British people were in some way a restoration of the ancient
Israelites.
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With
the advent of Protestantism, and specifically the Puritans of the Cromwell
era, the old ideas that Britain was a New Israel took even firmer root as
they sought to restore what they saw as a simpler and more pure form of the
faith. The idea that the Protestant Englishman was heir to the old covenants
and thus God’s new chosen people grew with this. These ideas survived down
the ages, even into fairly modern times. For instance, whilst the Luftwaffe
was bombing London during the Second World War, a civil servant called
William Beverage was drafting a report that was to herald the post war
‘Welfare State’ in Britain. On seeing his rather dry early drafts, he was
admonished by his wife to make it more inspiring and put some ‘Cromwellian’
spirit into it. The result though was to produce one of the most inspiring
documents of 20th century Britain, with its call to ‘slay the Five Giant
Evils of Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness and Disease and to build a New
Jerusalem of social justice. An interesting aside is that we can see from
these ‘Five Giant Evils’ that the Welfare State was meant to help people help
themselves and not to create the culture of dependency that it has become. |
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The 17th century
saw the flowering of the arts and sciences in England. It saw a freedom to
pursue knowledge and the birth of numerous societies dedicated to this. In
particular, the Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge (the
Royal Society) was established in 1662 and stood to ‘enlarge knowledge by
observation and experimentation.’ Whilst essentially a
scientific organisation, many of its early members (such as Christopher Wren
and Isaac Newton) also had a profound interest in religion – often in esoteric
Christianity. It portrayed itself as a restoration of the ‘House of
Solomon’ (knowledge), a tradition that gave birth to English Freemasonry. It
also gave birth to a greater appreciation of the role of ‘reason’ in modern
Anglicanism than in most other religious traditions. English Christianity
became less concerned with doctrine and dogma and more concerned in the
flowering of human liberty and freedom of thought as a means of doing God’s
will and making the world a better place.
If the English
and British were to be seen as the New Israel, then London was to be the New Jerusalem.
Indeed, Christopher Wren’s design for the rebuilding of London after it was
destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666 included remarkable,
and little known, symbolism that showed its creators were deliberately
rebuilding London as a physical New Jerusalem, with St Paul’s Cathedral at its
heart as the new Temple. The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, in particular, was
not just intended to be a bold architectural statement. It was deliberately
designed with esoteric symbolism, form and proportions that had their origins
in ancient Egypt and which were believed to optimise their ‘energy’ and beauty.
Capturing this energy through building design led to the popularisation of neo
classical architecture during the Imperial era as it made a statement that God
was not just with us as a people, but was evident in our very buildings and
townscape.
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Christopher
Wren also designed ‘The Monument’ a great column similar to ‘Nelson’s Column’
that commemorates the Great Fire. Situated on Monument Street in the heart of
the City of London, this column is 202 feet tall, a figure that is supposed
to have been chosen because it is the distance from the column to the bakers
shop on Pudding Lane where the fire started. However, there is another more
esoteric explanation. At the summer solstice, the sun appears just above the
‘crown’ just as it did with the obelisk of Sesostris
I in the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis, the seat of the Sun God ‘Ra’.
Not only this, but the length of the shadow of the column
cast by the sun on the solstice is 350 feet. This is 1.732 times
longer than the height of the column itself (202 feet). This ratio is the
square root of 3 and known as a ‘vesica piscis’ (bladder of the fish) which has been commonly
used in sacred geometry and architecture going back to ancient Egypt. However,
there is more! If you drew an imaginary circle around the monument some 350
feet in diameter (length of the shadow cast at the solstice) and then drew a
square of equal perimeter inside it, and then drew lines from each of the
four corners of the square to the top of the column, you will get a pyramid
shape with exactly the same dimensions as the Great Pyramid of Giza! All of
this sacred geometry and symbolism served to build a myth in Victorian times
about how London was the New Jerusalem and Britain and the British were the
new Israel. |
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Another
interesting link between London and ancient Israel is the ‘Stone of Scone’
which used to be housed in St Paul’s Cathedral (the new Temple of Israel) and
which is still used in the coronation of British monarchs. The Stone of Scone
is believed to be the actual stone of King David, transferred to Britain –
another symbol of the transfer of God’s covenant from the old Israel of the
bible to the new Israel in Britain.
The general idea
of God been on our side and us having a national mission was keenly taken up by
the national Church and is clearly seen in the triumphalist pageantry and music
of the 19th century Church of England. God wasn’t just an
Englishman. He was an Anglican to boot! This is why so many of our modern left
leaning clergy hate the ‘traditional Church’ so much.
The idea that the
British were the spiritual descendants of Israel developed into a movement
known as British Israelism which believes that the British are the actual
physical descendants of the ‘lost 10 tribes of Israel.’