“… There is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship – but not before.”

                                    — William Morris, News from Nowhere.

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Foundational to the American doctrine of rights is the concept of equality.  As Jefferson has it in The Declaration of Independence:  “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

This is a purely political statement which has nothing to do with reality.

It should be perfectly obvious to even the most obtuse among us that all men are not created equal – that is to say, the same.  The “equality” envisioned in this time-honored, all-hallowed, never-to-be-questioned assertion is simply “equality before the law.”  One might even go so far as to call it a legal fiction.

Legal fictions, of course, are matters of little or no consequence to the Pilgrim.  That’s because the Pilgrim, as a stranger and sojourner in the kosmos, cares nothing about politics and law.  He takes his cues from another quarter altogether.

The purpose of equality before the law isn’t difficult to discern.  It’s a protective measure:  a defensive weapon to be used against enemies who seek to gain mastery over me and promote their agenda and interests at my expense.  It’s the hill on which I take my stand against hostility and aggression, the barricade behind which I hide in my attempts to fight off your ill-willed efforts to demean, enslave, or impoverish me.  “Step off!” it says.  “Get back!  Keep your hands off me and my stuff!  I’m every bit as good as you are!”  We cling to this doctrine of equality primarily out of fear.  We need it desperately because we operate on the assumption that ours is a world in which everybody is constantly trying to dominate everybody else.   Unfortunately, it’s a pretty fair assessment of the situation.

But the Pilgrim, as we have said, wants no part of all this.  He does not belong to the kosmos.  On the contrary, he lives his life as part of a community that operates on the basis of a very different set of rules and assumptions.  It’s a community made up of refugees and foreigners, people from another place and time, tramps and travelers encamped in the middle of an alien society who, in spite of adversity and criticism, continue to speak a different language and cling to the tenets of a different culture.  They are a colony, an embassy, a rebel outpost in occupied territory.  And within the context of this strange outlandish sub-culture they have no need for “equality.”  They have no need of it for the simple reason that they have no interest in dominating or mastering one another.  Instead of the law of “equal rights,” Pilgrims live by the rule of koinonia.

Koinonia means “sharing.”  It’s the state of “holding something in common.”   The Greek word is most frequently translated into English as “fellowship” – though, if it weren’t for negative historical, political, and social baggage, we might possibly understand it as referring to a form of voluntary “communism.”[1]  The basic idea here is summed up in the New Testament’s teaching that, in Christ, “we are members of one another” – parts of the same body – so that what affects and concerns you affects and concerns me.  Most importantly, koinonia takes it for granted that we are not all “equal” or alike – no more than a hand is like an eye or a head like a foot.  This is the assumption upon which it operates.  In koinonia we supplement, complement, fill up, and balance one another’s strengths and weaknesses.  You supply what is lacking in me.  I supply what is lacking in you.

“Bear one another’s burdens,” writes Paul, chief of sinners and Pilgrims, in his letter to the Galatians.  In another place, he says, “We who are strong ought to bear with the weak, and not to please ourselves.”  There is no question here of competition, no room for domination.  In the words of the Master Himself, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them.  Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant.”

All men are created equal.  When you stop and think about it for a moment, this well-worn axiom begins to ring with near-Huxleyan overtones.  It’s the law of survival in the jungle of the kosmos:  a cold, impersonal rule calculated to ensure the peace, prosperity, and happiness of the Brave New World.  And so, perhaps, it must remain until the kosmos is no more.

As for the Pilgrim, he has ceased from all such strife, for he lives in a kingdom where the first are last and the last first, and where every member lives and thrives by lending to and leaning upon every other.

It’s a vision of an entirely different order.

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[1] It’s not without reason that the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer labeled Marxism “a Christian heresy.”  Pure Marxism is essentially a vision of Christian koinonia without Christian inspiration or motivation – in other words, without Christ Himself.  It’s no coincidence that there is such a striking resemblance in wording between Acts 2:44, 45 – “Now all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and divided them among all, as anyone had need” – and the most famous of the early communist slogans – “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” See also Acts 4:32-35.

     I am a Christian … so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains … some samples or glimpses of final victory.

 — J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter to Amy Ronald, December 15, 1956  

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A long defeat. Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation, one of the most celebrated of all true Pilgrims, would have understood this way of looking at human history. He was intimately acquainted with disappointment and failure. He never knew his father. His mother died when he was seven. While still an adolescent he was forced to flee the land of his birth. He lost his young wife to the waves of the North Atlantic. Half of his companions on the Mayflower perished during their first few months in the New World. After enduring all these toils and sorrows, he watched his most deeply cherished dream – the dream of Christian brothers and sisters living together “in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord” – wither and fade before his very eyes. But he bore it all with “answerable courage” and unyielding confidence in the faithfulness of God; so that in the end his “defeats” were transformed into something more than mere “glimpses of final victory.” In a very real sense they became “stepping stones unto others” for the performing of a great and enduring work.

Born in the spring of 1590 and baptized on the 19^th of March, Will Bradford was raised by two uncles, Robert and Thomas, in the agricultural community of Austerfield, Yorkshire. A long childhood illness proved to be the first of many instances of Divine Providence in his life: unable to work in the fields or play in the town square, Will became an avid reader. Of all the books he read, it was the Bible that most profoundly impacted his thinking.

By the age of twelve the scripturally savvy young Bradford was actively questioning the policies and practices of the state-sanctioned Anglican Church. In pursuit of the ancient purity of the New Testament ekklesia, he joined a small Separatist gathering that met in the home of Elder William Brewster, the Puritan postmaster of Scrooby. When the Scrooby congregation, under the persecution of King James I, made the difficult decision to flee to Holland, eighteen-year-old Will Bradford was among them.

In Holland, the Separatists discovered that religious liberty had a down side: doctrinal disputes, fostered by Amsterdam’s open-minded atmosphere, were destroying Christian unity among the various groups of English Protestants residing there. The Scrooby refugees escaped to Leyden, where they lived in comparative peace for the next eleven years. But rumors of war and concerns about the “liberalizing” effects of Dutch culture eventually compelled them to embark for America, where they hoped to live out their vision of Christian community undisturbed.

The decision to leave Leyden was fraught with pain and stress. Among other things, Bradford and his wife, Dorothy, were forced to concede that their little son John was too young to make the trip. The process of arranging the logistical details was far from simple. But after three years of delays, disappointments, and strained negotiations with potential financiers, the first group of Leyden emigrants finally sailed on the Mayflower on September 6, 1620, under the sponsorship of Thomas Weston, a profit-minded London entrepreneur. Thanks to Weston, the Separatists’ Christian ideals were compromised from the very beginning: at his direction, they were joined by a contingent of fifty “Strangers,” selected by the company for the commercial advantages they could bring to the new colony.

It could have been a recipe for disaster. But during course of the Mayflower’s tempest-tossed 66-day crossing, William Bradford emerged as a leader capable of addressing both groups’ needs and concerns. When the ship landed at Cape Cod, he played a key role in quelling the spirit of division that already threatened the colony’s survival. Together, he and Brewster drew up a “contract” by which Saints and Strangers agreed to “combine themselves together into a civil body politic” with the goal of promoting the glory of God and advancing the Christian faith. The Mayflower Compact, as “the first foundation of their government” in the New World, made every member of the community equally responsible for the welfare of the entire group. As a result, dangerous dissension was averted and Plymouth colony was granted a hopeful beginning.

Their agreement held good throughout the hardships of the first bleak winter. The few settlers who remained healthy during the days of starvation and disease that followed attended tirelessly to the needs of their sick companions. Bradford, whose wife had drowned within six weeks of the Mayflower’s landing, was himself among the ailing. By the end of March, half the company had perished. When John Carver, Plymouth’s first governor, succumbed to the lingering effects of his illness the following spring, the colonists elected Bradford to be his successor. It was a post he would hold for the greater part of the next three decades.

Through the years that followed, Governor Bradford bore the heavy responsibility of managing a relentless barrage of discouraging setbacks and disheartening circumstances, including Weston’s broken promises; fire, famine, and drought; disciplinary problems with “untoward persons;” threats from the hostile Pequots and Narragansetts; trade disputes with the Dutch and French; and, later, border conflicts with the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts Bay. In addition, he and his fellow Pilgrims had to contend with a long list of unsuitable “pastors” – men like the Reverend John Lyford, an English preacher who upon his first arrival in Plymouth appeared to be “made all of love,” but who was eventually implicated in a plot to undermine the Separatists’ plans for a unified and holy Christian commonwealth.

But none of these adversities and obstacles left Bradford as thoroughly cast down in spirit as the unexpected enemy he had to face during the final phase of his career: success. Within two decades of the sufferings of that first harsh winter, Plymouth Plantation was thriving and its inhabitants were growing rich. And the richer they grew, the less they valued the “sacred bond” that had brought them to the New World and preserved them through so many trials. “As their stocks increased,” wrote Bradford, “there was no longer any holding them together … Those that had lived so long together in Christian and comfortable fellowship must now part and suffer many divisions … This I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there … ”[i] In many respects, his words proved tragically prophetic. In a short time, as he tells us, “wickedness” of the most unspeakable sort was breaking forth among the people: theft, murder, adultery, sodomy, and even bestiality.

From a certain perspective, the story of Plymouth Plantation is the story of America in a nutshell. It brings to mind the stern words of Puritan divine John Owen, penned in England some thirty years after these ironic events: “Prosperity hath slain the foolish and wounded the wise.”[ii]

But in another sense, it’s vital to remember that the tale doesn’t end here. For these disheartening developments, both past and present, are part of a bigger picture – episodes in an ongoing narrative that is still being written. Bradford, says biographer Gary Schmidt, did not realize that he had left the world “a great account not only of the planting of a colony, but of God’s loving and providential care of a people who had tried to carry out a vision that they had found in the Scriptures. Bradford thought he had failed in this vision; he did not understand how much he had succeeded.”[iii] His vision is still worth pursuing today.

William Bradford spent his final years in quiet retirement, writing poetry, reading Greek and Latin, and learning Hebrew. He died May 8, 1657, “lamented by all the colonies of New England as a common Blessing and Father to them all.”[iv]

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[i] William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (New York: Modern Library College Editions, 1981), 281-283.

[ii] John Owen, “Of Temptation,” in The Works of John Owen, vol. VI, ed. William H. Goold (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), 112.

[iii] Gary D. Schmidt, William Bradford: Plymouth’s Faithful Pilgrim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 1999), 182.

[iv] Rev. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, 1702.

    “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.”

                                    — Jesus; John 12:24

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What do we do when barbarians come knocking at the gate?  Pilgrims of the past have responded by way of costly personal example.  And the answers they’ve left behind can be as tough to chew as they are to swallow.

Similar to the tale of Boris and Gleb is that of Edmund, king of East Anglia (mid-ninth century).  His history comes down to us from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Aelfric’s Lives of the Saints.

The Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of eastern Britain were no strangers to the terror of foreign invasion.  Again and again during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries the people of Northumbria, Anglia, and Kent suffered cruelly at the hands of ruthless Viking raiders.  Edmund knew exactly what to expect, then, when word came that a Danish sciphere or naval force under the command of two bloodthirsty leaders, Hinguar and Hubba, had landed in the north, and was at that moment cutting a swath through the country of Northumbria, wasting fields, looting villages, and killing men, women, and children indiscriminately.

It wasn’t long before Hinguar’s envoy arrived in King Edmund’s hall.  “Hinguar is going to winter in your land,” he arrogantly announced.  “He demands your gold and your allegiance.  You will bow the knee to him at once if you value your life, for it is clear that you do not possess the might to withstand him.”

Despite his bishop’s warnings and pleadings, Edmund gave the Northman an uncompromising reply:  “Worthy of death as you are, I will not defile my clean hands with your foul blood.  I follow Christ, who has left us a very different example, and I will gladly be slain by your people if that is God’s will.  Now go quickly and tell your cruel lord that Edmund will never bow to Hinguar while he lives, for his allegiance is due to Christ alone!”

Aelfric describes the sequel as follows:

     So then:  when Hinguar came, King Edmund stood within his hall, mindful of the Savior, and threw his arms aside.  He wanted to imitate the example of Christ, who forbade Peter to use weapons against the Jews. 

The Vikings’ response?  They bound Edmund, mocked him, beat him, dragged him out of doors, and tied him to a tree.  There they shot him with arrows until the shafts piercing his body resembled “a hedgehog’s bristles, just as it was with Sebastian” (swa swa Sebastianus waes).*  Aelfric testifies that the king did not cease calling upon Christ until the end.  After he was dead, the “impious heathens” (Aelfric’s term) cut off his head and hid it in the woods.

Though many of us today will find this hard to accept, that wasn’t the end of Edmund’s story.  For when the raiders departed, the people of East Anglia found the king’s head and buried it with the body.  In time, a church was raised above Edmund’s grave in recognition of the fact that “many wonders and miracles of healing took place at his tomb, that is, at the chapel where he was buried.”

We may perhaps doubt these miraculous tales.  But whether they be mere embellishments or not, they nevertheless highlight and illustrate a truth that is of critical importance to every Pilgrim:  the truth that death is the prelude to life, and that grace and supernatural power are released whenever we choose to lay down our lives in emulation of the Master.

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*St. Sebastian, a captain in the Roman army, was martyred during the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian after it was discovered that he had been leading other soldiers to Christ.  He was shot by a firing squad of archers and left for dead in the year 288.  His martyrdom is clearly reflected in Tolkien’s description of the death of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring.