ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Gerrard Winstanley's beliefs about universal redemption and particular election, which must be viewed in the light of a schism among Baptists. It shows how Winstanley's attitudes towards the Saturday and Sunday Sabbath, tithes, ministers, magistrates and violence position his teachings as on the whole budding forth from fertile General Baptist soil. John Gurney argues that Winstanley should be seen as emerging from both a vibrant, fluid and heterogeneous puritan underground, and radical and heterodox tradition of religious mysticism' embracing texts by the Family of Love's founder Hendrick Niclaes, Boehme and the anonymous Theologia Germanica. In Truth Lifting up its head above scandals Winstanley adopted a catechetical format, telling his readers that, although church attendance was voluntary, the state could not force people to either hear clerical interpretations of scripture or maintain ministers by tithes. Winstanley reproved the clergy for enforcing the collection of tithes through the magistrate's power, despite lacking justification in either Reason or Scripture.
