Fighting the Star Chamber

I’m not going to say that the British poet John Milton was inspired in the sense of a prophet, even though Paradise Lost has been a source of inspiration for many generations of Christians. What I will suggest is that he may have been “inspired” in the same way Cyrus was, when God prompted the Persian king to liberate His people.

How so? Back in 1637 the British Parliament abolished the Star Chamber, a notorious court designed to keep the aristocracy from settling their legal affairs in the courts used by the lower classes. Part of the Star Chamber’s work was to protect the interests of the crown, which meant that publications critical of the royal family seldom saw the light of day. In 1643, however, the Parliament passed An Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing, which gave the government the power to regulate publication. If the government didn’t approve of what you wrote, it simply wouldn’t allow it to go to the press.

John Milton nearly lost his mind over this matter, and on November 23, 1644, he published the Areopagitica, which may be one of the most important defenses of free speech ever written. We may actually—in part—have Milton to thank for the existence of our church.

Let me explain.

Milton had been a victim of censorship. In 1643 he wrote an essay defending the practice of divorce under certain circumstances. The Puritans, who held the reins of power at the time, argued that Milton’s ideas would lead to a decline in morality if the people read them, and they wanted them banned. When Parliament insisted that books had to be licensed by the government, Milton was angry—and his response is a large part of why you and I are now free to read whatever we please.[1]

It’s a lengthy work, and I’d encourage you to read it, because I think you’d be surprised at just how hard-won our present liberties really are. I’ll do my best to give you a brief thumbnail sketch.

Biblical Christianity Has Never Been Afraid of Ideas

Milton built part of his case on the notion that Christians have never been afraid of conflicting ideas. The early church actually flourished because they were persecuted and vigorously opposed, which forced them to examine their own beliefs very carefully. After all, you don’t want to die for a lie.

As a result, there is no record of censorship among the very earliest Christians—and Milton argued that the Inquisition, with its list of banned books, was actually in opposition to the way our Christian church was established. It was only after the Roman emperors began to profess Christianity that the lines between church and state were blurred, and we started to practice official church censorship, backed by the state.

At a church council in Carthage, Milton reminds us, nearly 400 years after Christ, bishops were forbidden to read the works of pagans, but they were still permitted to read books by Christian heretics, so that they would know how to refute them. It was at that point that bishops began recommending books to parishioners, with a warning to avoid falsehood—but there was still no official church censorship.

The Birth of Book Burnings

That changed when the first rays of the Reformation started to break across the horizon. With the emergence of people such as Wycliffe and Huss in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, full-fledged book burnings took place. So did the burning of heretics.

Milton’s argument? The British government doesn’t want to make the same mistake and become another Inquisition. So how do we get from there to our church? This is where it gets really interesting.

It simply cannot be a coincidence that just prior to the emergence of the Millerite movement, notable Bible students were beginning to sense that God would pull His church together with the truth before the close of history.

Milton argued that it is indeed a shame that the Christian church is fragmented—that Christians have a centuries-long habit of fighting over doctrine. But if we were to let that run its course, he said, and if the various sectors of Christianity would openly debate their positions, we would eventually land on the truth. The Reformation, he argued, was just the beginning, and that God was moving His people closer and closer to the truth, restoring what had been lost when the church had been corrupted.

In other words, he believed that if the opinions of Christianity were allowed to freely interact, the truth would rise to the surface—something Milton referred to as “new light.”[2] Censoring opinions, he suggested, would arrest the work of the Reformation and cause great damage. He writes in defense of truth being allowed to reveal itself:

“And though the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”[3]

God’s Final Church

Over in the New World, in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards strongly suspected that what Milton suggested regarding the restoration of truth was right: Before Christ returns, he preached, God will restore His church completely and undo the damage we caused after the marriage of church and state. Just as the Old World had given birth to Christ, he said, the New World would give birth to a final, glorious manifestation of God’s church on earth:

“America was discovered about the time of the reformation, or but little before: which reformation was the first thing that God did toward the glorious renovation of the world. . . . So that, as soon as this new world stands forth in view, God presently goes about doing some great thing in order to make way for the introduction of the church’s latter-day glory—which is to have its first seat in, and is to take its rise from, that new world.”[4]

It’s as if these men understood what was coming. It simply cannot be a coincidence that just prior to the emergence of the Millerite movement and our own movement, notable Bible students were beginning to sense that God would pull His church together with the truth before the close of history. The fact that Edwards understood there would be a final, remnant church? Telling.

It makes me wonder just how many details God had to choreograph perfectly in order to bring about the birth of this movement—from the birth of missionary societies in the wake of William Carey to the establishment of Bible societies. Both happened mere decades before William Miller. Missionary societies emerged in the 1790s.[5] Bible societies, which took translations of the Scriptures from 80 languages to more than 1,000 in very short order, were birthed in 1804.[6]

That’s why I wonder about Milton and inspiration. It’s completely in keeping with the way God has worked throughout history. Cyrus openly declared that the Hebrew God had prompted him to release the Jews back to Jerusalem (2 Chron. 36:23). Milton felt the irrepressible urge to prevent censorship from destroying the Reformation because the restoration of truth was still ongoing.

Coincidence, or the finger of God nudging history forward without violating human free will? I’ll have to wait for the books to be opened to know for certain, but from where I sit, it sure seems designed. Meanwhile, I will participate in the fight for religious liberty, because sometimes just a few well-placed words can have an astonishing impact.

[1] I write this recognizing that there are still many places in the world where this is not true.

[2] John Milton, Areopagitica and Other Writings (Penguin Classics), p. 137. Function. Kindle Edition.

[3] John Milton, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 269.

[4] Jonathan Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (Evangelical Revivals), Book 38. Revival Library. Kindle Edition.

[5] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/founding-christian-missionary-societies

[6] https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-beginning-of-the-bible-societies/