Abstract
For various reasons spiritual direction since the Reformation has been associated more closely with the Roman church than with Protestant traditions. To a large degree this assumption is valid. The Reformation era saw the role of the spiritual director often wedded to that of the confessor; the Protestant deemphasis on sacerdotal powers, particularly those exercised in confession, led many Protestants to grant less attention to spiritual direction. On the eve of the Reformation spiritual direction was found mainly within religious orders; since Protestant churches disavowed monasticism, they had de facto eliminated spiritual directions chief locus of operation. Jesuits advocated spiritual direction; Protestants were bitterly anti-Jesuitical. Sixteenth-century spiritual direction literature in the Roman tradition talked at length about the stages and levels of development in the spiritual life; Protestants avoided references in their literature that reinforced privileged class terminology employed by the clerical estate. Finally, Romans retained and continued to produce great spiritual masterpieces that were the basis of their spiritual direction; Protestants immersed themselves in Scripture, theology, and organization, and only rarely in spirituality.
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Notes
Martin Bucer, On the True Cure of Souls and the Right Kind of Shepherd, cited in Kenneth Leech, Soul Friend: A Study of Spirituality (London: Sheldon Press, 1977), 85.
See Jean-Daniel Benoit, Calvin, directeur d ’ames (Strasbourg, 1947).
See Martin Luther, Table Talk of Martin Luther, tr. Thomas S. Kepler (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1952).
Moravians and later movements led by Mother Ann Lee (Shakers) and Jemima Wilkinson (Universal Friends) were other important radical groups that promoted women spiritual directors. Within contemporary evangelical circles spiritual direction has received some attention. See, for example, Dallas Williard, In Search of Guidance (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1984); idem, The Spirit of Disciplines (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991);
and Francis A. Schaeffer, True Spirituality (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1971).
Richard Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret… (London, 1681), 67–68, cited in Jacqueline Eales, “Samuel Clarke and the ‘Lives’ of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Women in the Church, ed. W J. Shiels and Diana Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1990), 375.
Thus Governor Winthrop declared at Anne’s trial at Newton in 1637. Rosemary Skinner Keller, “New England Women,” in Women and Religion in America, vol. 2: The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods, ed. Rosemary R. Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), intro., 140, claims it was Anne’s “radical proposition that spiritual equality before God sanctioned social equality of men and women on earth” that led to her banishment. “You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul,” Anne proclaimed at her trial, so if the hierarchy did not acknowledge the superior claim, “you will bring a curse upon you and your posterity.” Ibid., doc. 7, 172.
Hester Ann Roe to John Wesley, April 7, 1782, in Armenian Magazine 13 (1790), 329, cited in Earl Kent Brown, Women of Mr. Wesley’s Methodism (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 21.
Daniel Fristoe, cited in Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 62.
One should not forget that in mid-seventeenth-century England, the question of who was a preacher was not limited to questioning the validity of women preachers. The more widespread, heated issue was over men who claimed to be preachers. This situation led to a bitter literary debate and even the passage of a bill in 1645 that silenced all ministers not properly licensed. Thomas Edward’s Gangraena was written as part of this debate, and it was this publication that first brought to the public’s notice the growing presence of women preachers. See Thomas Edward, Gangraena (London, 1646);
and Thomas Hall, The Pulpit Guarded With XX Arguments, in Seventeenth Century England: A Changing Culture, vol. 1: Primary Sources, ed. Ann Hughes (London: Open University Press, 1980), 140. Among Quakers Ann Docwra vehemently challenged anyone who called her a preacher: “And to (Francis Bugg’s) report, that I am a she-preacher, that he cannot prove, that I ever preached in a public meeting,” because “that is not the office in the church that God hath called me to.”
in Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 316.
See Susan Mosher Stuard, “Women Witnessing: A New Departure,” in Witnesses for Change, ed. Elizabeth Potts Brown and Susan Mosher Stuard (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 3;
Catherine M. Wilcox, Theology and Women’s Ministry in Seventeenth-Century English Quakerism (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 145;
Dale A. Johnson, Women in English Religion 1700–1925 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 40; and Brown, Women of Methodism, 113. Although Wilcox says the implications of their beliefs were “without parallel,” (145), she also argues that “there were various factors, then, which combined to create an atmosphere in which the Quakers’ radical ideas about women could take root” (144). I would deemphasize the radical nature of their ideas and add that Quaker ideas flourished in part because of the long tradition of women’s spiritual equality and women spiritual directors that paved the way for them.
Christine Trevett, Women and Quakerism in the Seventeenth Century (York: Ebor Press, 1991), 13.
For revisionist challenges to this view, see Winthrop S. Hudson, “A Suppressed Chapter in Quaker History,” Journal of Religion 24 (April 1944), 108–118;
Christopher Hill, World Turned Upside Down (New York: Penguin Books, 1972);
and Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985).
Bonnelyn Young Kunze, Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), claims that “Fell’s personal power within Quakerism was greater than traditional Quaker historiography has conceded” (230) and that “there is strong evidence that she and Fox were co-founders of equal importance in the Quaker administrative structure” (167). Kunze also says that if we “infer from the word ‘mother,’ a woman who was an overseer, gentle, meek, and mild, then we have a misnomer in the descriptive title ‘mother of Quakerism’” (230).
See George Fox, To the Men and Womens Monthly and Quarterly Meetings, in Mack, Visionary Women, 286–288; and William Loddington, The Good Order of Truth Justified: Wherein our Womens Meetings … Are Proved Agreeable to Scripture and Sound Reason (1685), in ibid., 287–288. The debate over the meetings system eventually gave birth to a schism among the Friends. See also Richard T. Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism, 1655–1755 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
Margaret Hope Bacon, Mothers of Feminism (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 43.
Mary Penington, Experiences in the Life of Mary Penington, in The Hidden Tradition: Women’s Spiritual Writings Rediscovered. An Anthology, ed. Lavinia Byrne (New York: Crossroads, 1991), 107–108.
Letter to Lady Yarborough, in Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings, ed. Charles Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 35.
Samuel Hopkins, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn (1799), cited in Mary Beth Norton, “My Resting Reaping Times: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine Activities, 1767’” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2:2 (1976), 517.
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© 2000 Patricia Ranft
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Ranft, P. (2000). Spiritual Direction among the Protestants. In: A Woman’s Way. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-38533-1_9
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