How Britain began to unite into one nation, under God.

Last week, Clifford Denton reminded us that God blessed Britain very early on with the arrival of the Gospel to our shores perhaps not a century after Jesus walked the earth.

Thanks particularly to Roman Christians who travelled here as part of Rome’s settlement of the island (AD 43-410),¹ the Gospel began its work of conversion amongst the pagan Celtic tribes. But Britain remained a patchwork of warring tribes and religions, with no central government. Then, c.410, the Romans abandoned the island.

This week, we fast-forward through faithful persons in our island’s history who, overseen by divine grace, together established Britain as one nation, united under the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Early Missions

After the Romans abandoned ‘Britannia’, British Christianity did not die out, but spread independently and developed its own distinctive flavour. But the soon arrival of Anglo-Saxon invaders pushed the fledgling Church to the western fringes of the island complex – to Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

A depiction of Augustine of Canterbury preaching to Æthelberht of Kent. JWE Doyle, 1864.

While the Gospel continued to spread here thanks to the efforts of devoted missionaries like Patrick (who was converted at 16 through dreams and visions from the Lord), Columba and Aidan, England was subsumed under Germanic pagan rule until the late 6^th Century. But God did not forget England nor its history of faith.

In 597, at the direction of Pope Gregory I,² a troop of 40 intrepid monks led by a prior called Augustine arrived on the shores of Kent. These missionaries reportedly almost bottled out on their way from Italy, halting in Germany and nearly turning back but for further encouragement from Rome. Mercifully, they found the courage to continue to Britain, where they were received favourably by Anglo-Saxon King Æthelberht, himself a pagan, but influenced by his Frankish Christian wife Bertha. This oft-forgotten duo, moved by the Father’s hand, opened the gate for the Gospel to be brought back to England, permitting preaching and funding the building of churches.

Anglo-Saxon King Æthelberht and his Christian wife Bertha, moved by the Father’s hand, opened the gate for the Gospel to be brought back to England.

What followed was the remarkable conversion of almost the entirety of Anglo-Saxon England – still then split into warring tribes – within the space of a generation. Britain saw pagan kings as well as thousands upon thousands of ordinary people converted and baptised, with no force or bloodshed. The genuineness of these conversions may have varied, but certainly biblical living and thinking came to define the tribal monarchies of Britain in extraordinary ways.

This was particularly the case for the kings of Wessex, such as Ine and Alfred, who started to integrate inspiration from Scripture into codes of laws from the late 7^th Century onwards. Alfred the Great’s legal code was prefixed with the Ten Commandments and it was Alfred who really laid the foundation for state laws grounded in Christian ethics, applied evenly to rich and poor and even to relationships with enemies (he famously baptised the invading Vikings rather than slaughtering them).

By the Lord’s direction, it was the house of Wessex which eventually prevailed across the land and united England from regional tribal kingdoms into one nation, under God.³

The ‘Dark Ages’

It is from these centuries that we derive our historic close relationship between Church and state, which can be dated right back to the early discipleships established between the Gregorian missionaries and the Anglo-Saxon kings. But for God’s unfathomable grace, those missionaries might have stopped in Germany, or the kings may not have welcomed them, or the Viking invaders may have triumphed, and things would have turned out very differently.

Yet, it is easy to romanticise and smooth out this period of Britain’s history. Paganism still persisted, arguments erupted between the Roman missionaries and the ‘native’ Church, and undoubtedly clergy became embroiled in royal power play. Nevertheless, the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were actually marked by an extraordinary spread of the Gospel by missionaries who were as concerned for the fate of ordinary souls as for those of kings.

In the process, the Christian faith became inseparably intertwined with the development of a new nation. Biblical beliefs and ethics clearly influenced nascent codes of law, integrating into Britain’s early political culture Judeo-Christian principles of justice and mercy. Surely Almighty God was overseeing all of this.

The so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were actually marked by an extraordinary spread of the Gospel.

Speaking Truth to Power

After 1066, when the Anglo-Saxon elites were deposed by the Norman conquest, God made sure that England’s budding legal and administrative system was not tossed aside, but kept and gradually institutionalised by royal charters.⁴ Many of our major cathedrals were built, as well as Oxford and later Cambridge (both as religious schools). But these centuries were also flavoured by a corruption of both Church and state, civil unrest at home, power struggles abroad and tension with the papacy in Rome, which by then had become supremely dominant in Europe.

Under Norman rule, the Church became sought after for its wealth and political influence. However, God did not give Britain over to corruption, but chose this time to raise up reform movements calling for justice, greater autonomy for the Church from royal influence and greater independence for England from Rome.

John Wycliffe, Washington National Cathedral. The text is a variant of 2 Timothy 2:4: "No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer." See Photo Credits.It was against this backdrop that Bishop Stephen Langton led a protest movement of local landowners to pressure King John to sign the Magna Carta, which he did in 1215. In doing so, Langton raised the ire of both King and Pope, since Magna Carta checked the powers of the monarchy and represented a rebellion against Rome. However, crucially, it established protections and liberties for the Church and for ordinary citizens, laying a firm and just foundation for English statute law and later inspiring the US Constitution. Thanks to Stephen Langton, Magna Carta not only applied biblical ethics, but also gave glory to God, proving to be a foundational document in the establishment of Britain as a truly Christian nation.

Nevertheless, while Magna Carta guaranteed important freedoms, it did not prevent the continued corruption of the Church from power and wealth. Less than a century after Magna Carta was inscribed into English statute law by Edward I (who was also, less wonderfully, responsible for expelling Britain’s Jewish population in 1290), the Lord raised up a powerful prophetic figure in the form of Yorkshire scholar and dissident John Wycliffe.

Wycliffe’s writings vociferously attacked the pomp and corruption of the clergy. His criticisms of Roman Catholicism – he has been dubbed the ‘morning star’ of the English Reformation⁵ - brought him into constant conflict with the established Church.⁶ However, Wycliffe had the support of many priests and itinerant preachers who ministered outside of the institutional Church in a sort of non-conformist exile, suffering poverty in order to preach the Gospel to ordinary people. In Wycliffe, the faithful remnant around the nation found a spokesperson raised up by God to protest the ways in which British Christianity departed from the truths of Scripture.

In Wycliffe, the faithful remnant around the nation found a spokesperson raised up by God to protest the ways in which British Christianity departed from the truths of Scripture.

In fact, convinced of the centrality of the Bible as God’s revealed truth to all men, Wycliffe set about translating it from Latin into English, completing the project in the 1380s. And so, God chose this time and this man to make his word available to the masses, who before had been beholden to priests and unable to study Scripture for themselves.

Though the death penalty was eventually levied against those found in possession of an English Bible, Wycliffe jump-started the nation’s journey towards Protestantism which, according to Professor Linda Colley, “was the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible”.⁷

Faithful Servants

Æthelberht, Bertha, Augustine, Patrick, Columba, Aidan, Ine, Alfred, Stephen Langton, John Wycliffe…Britain’s Christian heritage is a wonderful and complex fabric made up of the faithful service of individuals guided by the Lord’s hand. These servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, many now forgotten or side-lined in historical accounts, were used powerfully of God to bear the truths of the Gospel to this land, into its laws and culture, and into the hearts and minds of its people.

As we look over the broad expanse of our history, whether we understand it fully or not, we witness the hand of God at work and the Spirit brooding over our nation. Surely it was not on account of our own righteousness, but on account of the Lord’s grace, that Britain was established over the centuries under the stabilising influence of the Bible, with freedom given to the sharing of the Gospel, and with faithful men and women being raised up to hold our institutions to account.

Next week: The establishing of biblical laws.

Notes

1 As well as archaeological remains of church buildings, Roman villa chapels have been uncovered, suggesting that house churches were alive and well in Roman Britain. See John Bradley’s The Mansion House of Liberty: The untold story of Christian Britain (2015, Roperpenberthy).

2 According to the Venerable Bede, Gregory had been moved by the sight of Anglo-Saxon boys being sold as slaves in the Roman marketplace, and resolved to send a mission to their place of origin. If this is true, how much we have to thank the Lord for arranging this encounter and moving the heart of the future pope.

3 This is generally attributed to Alfred’s grandson, Æthelstan, who also outlawed paganism in 927 and arranged for the Bible to be translated into Anglo-Saxon (Old English).

4 E.g. William II (1093), Henry I (1100).

5 Michael, E, 2003. John Wyclif on body and mind. Journal of the History of Ideas, p343.

6 Wycliffe distinguished between the visible, institutional Church and the true, redeemed Body of Christ, just as we would today.

7 Britons: Forging the Nation: 1707-1837. 1992, revised 2009, Yale University Press.

The Gospel message comes to Britain and beyond.

It began around 4,000 years ago. Abraham’s obedience to God was accounted as righteousness and God cut a covenant with him (Gen 15). At the time, though the nations who had scattered across the world from Babel knew nothing, God committed himself unconditionally to establishing for himself one day a community of faith drawn from every nation.

While Abraham was learning to be God’s friend, tribes who settled on the island later to be called Great Britain worshipped gods of their own imagination. They congregated for human and animal sacrifice at such structures as Stonehenge, without fellowship with the One True God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were neglected and lost, like all other nations across the world.

History moved forward. As God strove with his chosen people Israel through the times of the judges, prophets and kings, the Celtic tribes of Britain warred with each other - sometimes, perhaps, looking up into the universe wondering if there was a great god of Creation, but still having no means of becoming included in God’s covenant people.

But God did not forget his covenant with Abraham. In the fullness of time he sent his Son into the world and, through his sacrifice for sin, made forgiveness and salvation available to all.

While Abraham was learning to be God’s friend, tribes who settled on the island later to be called Great Britain worshipped gods of their own imagination.

Had this not happened, the tribes of the earth, including those in Britain, would no doubt have moved ever further away from God, and more quickly towards an ungodly alliance like the one at Babel. But God restrained their decline, dividing the nations in such a way that there would be a readiness for multitudes through history to hear the Gospel message and receive the truth gladly, by the same faith through which Father Abraham received the initial covenant promise.

Reminders still exist of Britain's pagan beginnings.Soon after the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, apostles trod the Roman roads in obedience to God, who had remembered his oath to Abraham. The history books are not clear just how and when it happened, but before Christianity was systematised in Britain by the Romans, the Gospel began its work of salvation among the Celtic tribes, having been brought to our shores perhaps barely a century after Jesus walked the earth.

This Sceptred Isle

Surely in this time of accelerating spiritual decline in Britain, which seems increasingly tribal and prone to strife, it is honouring to God for us to remember the great act of grace that established our nation, transforming it from pagan tribes to a kingdom avowedly under God. So magnificent was this transformation perceived that Shakespeare by the 16^th Century could describe our country as ‘this sceptred isle’.

Putting aside the often lukewarm or shallow responses our island people have displayed through the generations, there is nonetheless a thread of God’s grace that can be traced through 2,000 years to the present day. God found sufficient faith among our people to raise our nation high in the world. Is it not time to remember this and to study our history to uncover the multitude of testimonies of God’s goodness, putting aside all our pride, so that we might thank him afresh?

Going to the Nations

Not only did God bring the Gospel to Britain, but he also used our nation as a staging post to pass it on to other nations. There are many examples of the missionary zeal cultivated among those saved by grace in Britain. We can hear too much about the achievements of men in the establishment of the British Empire, but it was often despite man’s best efforts that God used us to take the Gospel to the rest of the world.

Consider, for example, the contending for the faith that led to the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ abandoning Britain to set up new colonies in what was called the ‘New World’, later the United States of America. The Mayflower Compact illustrates the way the truths of the Bible were by then so ingrained in the consciousness of British people that men and women would not settle for anything less than the pursuit of purity and the establishment of a truly Christian nation.

In this time of accelerating spiritual decline in Britain, it is honouring to God for us to remember the great act of grace that transformed our nation from pagan tribes to a kingdom avowedly under God.

The Pilgrims on board the Mayflower signed a document before landing on the shores of America. William Bradford was a key leader who recorded the resolution of intent regarding the new colony, which in more modern English reads:

The Mayflower at Plymouth Harbour (Halsall, 1882)."IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. IN WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620."

In the following decades thousands more followed, among whom was the future first Governor, John Winthrop, on the ship Arbella. The passengers of the Arbella who left England in 1630 with their new charter had a great vision, which could be built on the foundation of the first pilgrims. They were to be an example for the rest of the world in right living according to biblical teaching. Referring to the Sermon on the Mount, John Winthrop stated their purpose quite clearly: "We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us."

The Mayflower Compact became a foundational document that inspired the writers of the American Constitution over a century later, when the first 13 colonies along the east coast, from New Hampshire to Georgia, became the forerunner of the USA.

Not only did God bring the Gospel to Britain, but he also used our nation as a staging post to pass it on to other nations.

In Praise of God

Surely we can see God in all of this, not leaving us as pagan warring tribes to unite in some new form of Babel-worship one day, but to send us his Gospel and privilege us to be those who passed it on to others.

There are multitudes of details and testimonies from history which, if we remember them together, might fill us with a new humility and zeal of faith in this generation of decline.

Let us record our remembrances together in praise of God.