Mrs Attaway: (almost certainly not) the first female Baptist Preacher/Minister

I reference Mrs Attaway (her first name is lost to us, as far as I am aware) fairly often, and each time end up going back to the original sources. I wanted to do it again this afternoon, on nothing more erudite than a Facebook thread, and thought I really should write up a few notes and leave them somewhere I could find them, and could point other people to them easily. We have a detailed, if hostile, reference to Mrs Attaway preaching in December 1645, in Thomas Lambe’s church on Bell’s Alley, in London. (I’ve recently argued that there is good reason to suppose this was the continuation of Helwys’s original Baptist congregation–available Open Access here.) The evidence is found in Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, published in 1646 (pp. 116-119 of the 1646 Ralph Smith edition, Wing E229). She and at least one other woman were preaching regularly, every Tuesday, in the church, and Edwards suggests that they sometimes drew congregations of a thousand or more. (He tells us that the other woman was married to a Major in the army, and gives us some details of her clothing and jewellery, but omits to mention her name; no doubt he thought we had what was important.) Edwards is perhaps best compared to the sort of modern-day media commentator who makes a career out of being regularly outraged. The book is a breathless catena of letters and reports, with details emphasising those aspects which he judges will most shock his intended reader (who is a Presbyterian minister or parliamentarian who sees the replacement of an episcopal national church with a presbyterian national church as the only way forward for England in the 1640s). Criticising the Scottish establishment repeatedly draws his ire–this is the perfection he strives towards. He detests Arminianism, which he sees as the gateway drug to every heresy, and is very concerned to have his readers understand that the leaders of the various communities he criticises are obviously not people who should lead churches–rude mechanicals, who lack breeding, social standing, and university education. (The Major’s wife may escape public ridicule because she is at least of the right social class; Mrs Attaway is in trade (horror!) selling lace in Cheapside.) Edwards seems to have a particular objection to any activity undertaken by a woman. The way he lingers on (very scant) reports of women being baptised nude in rivers at midnight really does invite a Freudian analysis, but the fact that he was roundly trounced in an exchange of pamphlets with the remarkable Independent (i.e., Congregationalist) leader and church planter Katherine Chidley over the first half of the 1640s may not have been irrelevant to this focus (he fails to mention Chidley in Gangraena, which silence is fairly eloquent testimony to how he felt their debate had gone). Already in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ we have a passing swipe at ‘Jezebel’ (A4v; you knew it was coming, right?) and a rising crescendo of outrage, culminating with ‘what swarms are there of all sorts of illiterate mechanik Preachers, yea of Women and Boy Preachers!’ (a1v) In his introductory catalogue of the errors of the various sectaries, the 124th entry reads ‘That tis lawfull for women to preach, and why should they not, having gifts as well as men? and some of them do actually preach…’ (30) When he comes to his evidence, the account of Mrs Attaway and her colleague is the bulk of the material. According to Edwards, Mrs Attaway first referenced the classic justificatory text, ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all people … your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’. She then prayed, for ‘almost halfe an hour’ and then preached for about 45 minutes on the text ‘If you love me you will obey my commandments’. Later, in the face of some resistance to the ministry of the Major’s wife, she identified them both in prayer as ‘Ambassadors and Ministers of God’. Lambe’s church is not the only place women are preaching, according to Edwards. He claims in briefer compass to have evidence of female preachers in Southampton, Holland in Lincolnshire, Ely in Cambridgeshire, several in Hertfordshire, and (possibly several) in Brasted in Kent. Of these, he identifies the woman in Southampton as a Baptist (she was ‘dreamt [!] into Anabaptisme‘; p. 84) and claims the woman in Lincolnshire ‘baptizeth’, at least strongly implying she is a Baptist. Ely was at the time home to Henry Denne, associate of Lambe and significant General Baptist leader, and not a large town, so it is very hard not to assume some Baptist influence there, and of course Mrs Attaway and her colleague...

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Interviewing for an academic post in the UK

A few years back, I wrote a blog post on how to apply for an academic job in the UK. I ended it commenting that I would do something similar on how to interview, but never did—partly time, partly Covid, partly not wanting to say too much while I was still the one doing the interviews several times a year. I write simply as someone who has interviewed something over a hundred candidates for academic jobs, and has formed some views on the things that, in my view, helped some candidates, and the things that seemed to disadvantage others. I dismiss some points as embarrassingly obvious (the candidate who referred to the students we were asking them to teach as ‘lazy little f**kers’ did not get the post, oddly enough). The points below are things I have seen credible, well-prepared, candidates trip over, and as such are things I have wanted to pass on to those who have sought my advice. The comments below are roughly what I have passed on to every colleague or student who has asked me for advice in the last few years. They seem to have worked for most of them—no doubt more because I have had the privilege of having outstanding colleagues and students than because this advice really changes things, but this stuff at least hasn’t hurt… These comments are about the UK system, because that is what I know. Typically, in the UK, a candidate for a lectureship in an Arts discipline will be asked to give a presentation (20-30 minutes, to prospective colleagues and (perhaps) graduate students) and to attend an interview. I am assuming that pattern in what follows, as it is what I have experience of, from both sides. Getting an interview is the tough bit; if you keep getting interviews you will get a job fairly quickly.To make the point I made previously again: you can appear as someone wanting any job, or you can appear as someone wanting this job. Try to know as much as you can about the context, and explain why this particular role and your passions and experience are a perfect match. (Yes, and then do the same next week for a different role.) From my perspective, as an interviewer, I am interested in how you will fit into our context; if you can show me you have looked into who we are, and still want to work with us, you go a long way to reassuring me on this point.The person specification matrix remains king (or monarch of unspecified gender). Look at what we say we are going to test at interview and give us what we need, or at least as much of what we need as you can.There is an incumbency bias, but it is not vicious, or at least should/might not be. The committee is essentially asking ‘can you do this job?’; if one candidate has been doing it on a temporary basis with some success, they have a clear advantage over other candidates.You can blow it in the presentation session, but you can’t win it there. If the crowd form the view that your research is facile, or that you wouldn’t be able to teach our students because of a lack of presence/broad knowledge of the subject/whatever, then you have a very high mountain to climb (Typically, after these sessions, those present are asked for comments, to rank the candidates in order, and to specify if any candidates appeared unappointable; if your prospective colleagues suggest that you are unappointable en masse, you will not get the job—no-one wants to have to manage that car crash. If they rank you as appointable, but behind other candidates, then you have a chance—the committee have access to documents and the interview, and others will understand if these made the difference.)For the presentation: do what we have asked you to do (please?); keep to time (please?); present adequately well—if you are brilliant, this will be noted, and will count in your favour; if you are inadequate, this will make you unappointable. ‘Adequately well’ here means: audible; expert; clear; able to engage with questions. Bonus points for saying something interesting, but if we are asking you to role-play an undergraduate lecture, you don’t need to excite the experts in your field.On this, remember that most of the committee are not experts in your field (although most of the presentation audience might be). Probably only one of the committee members from within the School is actually a subject specialist; the others are adjacent —Biblical scholars assessing a theologian, e.g.—but that generally means they stopped giving serious attention to...

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Musing on anointing: some (rather Baptist) thoughts on the Coronation

I did not watch this morning’s coronation; I read the liturgy when it was published, and have today read the sermon text. I saw various people on social media, including many who are on my ‘generally sane’ list, speaking excitedly about how this explicitly and unapologetically Christian event was going to be broadcast to the world—and I realised I couldn’t agree, although I didn’t know why. I am not republican: I think a non-political Head of State is an excellent thing, and, while the current form of British monarchy is not a system you would invent, it does guarantee that. No doubt it should be reformed in all sorts of ways, but I am not convinced that, if we ripped it up and tried to devise something better, we would succeed. I was therefore surprised by the level of antipathy I felt towards the coronation. I tend to ignore royal events: I find pomp and pageantry merely distasteful (if I never have to be in a formal academic procession again, it will be too soon). The coronation, however, actually troubled me. I have been trying to think through why, and ended up, as I often do, in the seventeenth century. (I realise talking about the seventeenth century on the day a King Charles was crowned is potentially in bad taste, but…) The 1644 Confession of Faith of those Churches Commonly (though falsely) called Anabaptists was signed by representatives of seven baptistic congregations in London, all holding to Calvinistic soteriology, and all directly or indirectly offshoots of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Separatist congregation that had more-or-less survived through the first half of the seventeenth century in London. It is, in my judgement, the best confessional document Baptists have ever produced, in English at least, although it is clearly of its time, and not something one would reintroduce unedited today. One of its key features is organisation around the munus triplex, the threefold office of Christ. This was borrowed from the 1596 True Confession of the church that Henry Barrow and founded, and that then had Henry Ainsworth as its pastor in exile in Amsterdam, because the former pastor, Francis Johnson, was still imprisoned for his faith in London. Both documents locate a surprising amount of content under the offices of Christ. It is not just that the kingly office of Christ drives their commitments to congregational government and separation of church and state; christology proper, soteriology, accounts of revelation and authority, matters of ecclesiology, and even eschatology, sit under these heads. The munus triplex is in origin a hermeneutical rule: there are three offices in ancient Israel (at least as ancient Israel is narrated in the Hebrew Scriptures) that are marked by anointing: priesthood, prophethood, and kingship. To call Jesus the ‘Messiah’ or ‘Christ’ (Hb/Gk for ‘anointed one) is to insist that these three offices all find their true meaning and fulfilment in Jesus. Thomas Aquinas presents the doctrine like this; Calvin starts to use it as an organising principle for narrating the work of Christ. The expansion of its range amongst the English Separatists and Baptists is extensive and perhaps surprising. It is also dependent on a further claim that King Jesus does not delegate any of these offices: he is our great high priest, so there is no need for any human priesthood; he alone is the true prophet, and so we look for truth nowhere other than his word; he alone is king, and so no-one else may presume to command any congregation of his people. Now, both the expansion of the scope of the offices and this point about the lack of delegation are contestable, of course, and so other theological constructions than a Baptist one are possible. But the instinctive Baptist fear/complaint/demand is always that some human authority is trying to muscle in on a role that belongs to Christ alone. British Baptists have not, generally, been anti-monarchy: there is a temporal realm, that requires governing, and a monarchy is a possible way to do that. The seventeenth-century English Baptists, even when persecuted, did not stop declaring their loyalty to the crown—but they thought that, in imposing forms of worship and doctrine, the crown had badly over-reached its authority, and was trying to govern where Jesus alone can reign. So, to anointing, and coronation, which is centred on anointing in ancient British tradition, at least. The instinctive Baptist worry will be that, in using the symbol of anointing (particularly in claiming it is not symbol but sacrament, as some do), there will be a danger of confusing a proper temporal role with that role that belongs only to ‘the Lord’s anointed, great...

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Another C17th Charismatic Baptist!

After my post on Caffyn, David Lytle on Twitter alerted me to similar sentiments in Thomas Grantham; his only responsibility for the comments below is sending me back to the text to look at it, but that was very fruitful: Grantham argues at length against the idea that the gifts of the Spirit have ceased, and claims to have witnessed in various ways, not shying from the word ‘miracle’, the gifts at work.Thomas Grantham was certainly the most productive General Baptist of the seventeenth century, in terms of published output; it is hard to dispute the claim that he was also the most influential. Christianismus Primitivus was his most lengthy work by some distance, and probably his most important. The basic argument of the book is that the General Baptists are recovering apostolic (‘primitive’) Christianity, and so all should join them in that.In Book II Part II of CP, he discusses church ordinances. The third chapter is devoted to the laying on of hands, which, on the basis of Heb. 6:1-2, had become a required practice for General Baptists. Grantham argues that the laying on of hands is the Biblical way of asking God to fulfil the pentecostal promise to pour out the Spirit on this disciple, too.The first section of the chapter considers what it means to receive the Spirit; the second insists that the Spirit is poured out on women and men indifferently.The title of the third section announces a desire to offer ‘…a more ample disquisition of the nature of the promise of the Spirit …’. This is to be fulfilled by exegesis of 1Cor.12:1 ‘Now I do not want you to be ignorant about spiritual gifts, sisters and brothers.’ The text discussed is more expansive—chh. 12-14—but his prospectus of the discussion includes the intention to show ‘that the Church hath a perpetual right to (though not alwayes a like necessity of) all these spiritual gifts’A subsection is headed ‘That the Gifts of the Spirit … belongs [sic] to the Church of Christ, as her right, to the end of the World.’; there are various exegetical arguments, but the point he returns to is that God calls the church of today to the same duties and ministries as the apostolic church was called to, so it is not credible that God will not give the church of today the same gifts that the apostolic church found necessary to fulfil its calling.He then suggests another exegetical argument: ‘That the gifts and graces intended by the Apostle, are a portion of the right belonging to the Church in every age, appeareth from the nature and extent of the exhortations which she is under to ask or seek for them’ (referencing, inter alia, Lk. 11:13, but also extensively 1Cor. 12-14).He turns next to an argument from experience: he suggests that the only reason anyone doubts the continuation of the gifts is that they have not seen them. But there are many examples in church history, and he himself has seen gifts like words of knowledge and prophecy evident in the ministry of preachers, and miraculous healings—and other miracles. And he has testimony from people whose word he cannot doubt that they have seen similar. It’s not a project for me, at least for the next couple of years, but there’s some work to be done here, surely? Two significant national leaders insisting the gifts have not ceased, with one insisting on personal and reported testimony to miraculous...

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A C17th Charismatic Baptist?

The paragraph below was published by an English Baptist leader in 1660. I first noticed it (I had read the book before) about a year ago, and noted to myself that it sounded very much like a repudiation of (what now gets called) cessationism, and a suggestion that he and his readers should seek a renewal of the Pentecostal gifts of the Spirit. Nothing else in the (admittedly fairly sketchy) narrative we have of his life shows any hint in this direction, and, despite his eminence as a national leader, there is no evidence I know of that anyone acted on this suggestion. As a result, at the time I filed it under ‘puzzling’, with a note to myself to think more about it. I’d be interested to know if others can see an alternative reading–or did a C17th Baptist pre-empt Edward Irving and Azusa Street, at least in exegesis and desire? The paragraph (square brackets are my editorial notes; otherwise exactly as published, with the sort of interesting orthography that is common to the age): Together with these things, let it not be thought a needless work, or besides the business in hand, to consider whether Saints are not now (in these latter dayes wherein ’tis evil, as appears by the Apostle, to depart from the Faith professed in former Apostolical dayes, I Tim. 4.1.) whether Saints (I say) are not now to seek for, and in Faith to wait whereby to receive the Spirit, with the same particular gifts and operations which Saints formerly enjoyed, in order to their carrying on the great Work of the Gospel, both among themselves and others? Since God in his making Promise of pouring out the Spirit upon his People, (which Promise we in these latter dayes flye unto as the ground of our Faith) makes mention also of several gifts of the same Spirit, John 2.28,29. [rd Joel 2: 28-29—or just possibly Jn. 12:28-29??] And withal considering, that the Apostles exhorted the Churches ‘earnestly to covet, and follow after the several gifts of the Spirit,’ I Cor. 12. 28, 29,30, 31. 14. 1, 39. Which exhortations, if they reach us, and speak to us, as much as any other Scripture-exhortations (which for any to deny is hard) then, Oh then! great need have all to pray, Lord, increase our Faith. Matthew Caffyn, Faith in God’s Promises, the Saints best weapon… (London: S. Dover for F. Smith, 1660; Wing2 C207), p....

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Of Kings: Three? Or two? Or one?

(For Brett, who asked for Epiphany poems beyond Eliot) Why do you look for poems About us? Kings? Oh, you are generous, Friend; words are elastic, Yes, but that one will not stretch to Us. Say we are governors, courtiers, Retainers, perhaps. Not Prince Hamlet, but Attendant lords. Honoured enough in our own land (Though careful of those above us) We found ourselves strangers, outsiders, Aliens, perhaps When we reached the place we sought. There a king (or, at least, A man on a throne) Summoned us, instructed us, and Dismissed us. No welcome there; we were wrong—our Faces, clothes, accents, our Diets, our customs, our Assumptions. There is honesty in the streets ‘Ere, Mister! You look Funny—you sound funny— You dress funny—Mister, You smell funny!’ In the halls of the Palace … courteous Lies to our faces; behind Our backs? Careful cuts, Plausibly deniable; Perspicuous; Deadly. ‘Good chaps, of course … but … Not the right sort. Not Clubbable, if you know what I Mean? Something I can’t Put my finger on is Wrong…’ If you asked, you could put your finger on My skin. Discover That it feels as yours, if A different shade. But to Ask would be to Admit. They sighed, no doubt, in Relief when we left for The town we were told of. ‘Satisfactory’? Perhaps For those expecting … less Than we had once known. But we had discovered our Disqualifications. Gentiles (Persians!). Pagans. Sorcerers By calling. Uncircumcised. Unchosen. Uncalled. Unwanted. Travel will Teach you such Truths if you let it. Like the refugee Brain surgeon who Mops your floors, friend, We left our status behind. But we knew when to kneel. Gifts given, we chose (Aided by an angel) To confirm their suspicions And disobey their ‘king’. ‘I told you, unreliable, not The right sort. Should never have Trusted. Left with a Mess.’ ‘Send the army to deal, Quietly of course.’ While we Return east, to places, That know us, places We no longer Belong. And the family flees west, To a land strange to them As theirs was to us. But all lands are his. But no land will ever Welcome...

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