by Joffre Swait
Here at Kuyperian Commentary we go from strength to strength, marking one holiday after another, processing through the year beset on all sides by significance, meaning, and the weight of history.
Today is another holiday. It is Guy Fawkes Day.
Remember, remember the fifth of November, the Gunpowder treason and plot!
This is the day the English celebrate the foiling of a plot to blow up parliament in 1605.
I have never celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, but I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of it; my mother had been educated at a British school and had painted vivid images of bonfires and burnings in effigy. Seemed like a pretty cool holiday. I mean, fire.
This is not a call for you to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day rightly. It is not a call for you to celebrate it at all. But today would be a good occasion for Kuyperians, we who wear the Orange, to recall our own shared heritage and history, and perhaps to look forward. As we see it, there’s no need to engage in the Girardian scapegoating of burning a Guy in effigy.
As the Ecclesia Semper Reformanda, who just observed Reformation Day on All Hallows Eve, we like to remember their doctrines and old books, but are sometimes guilty of being weak on our own history that solidified them as a people – a forgetfulness that has helped to fragment us.
As much as Guy Fawkes has become a political icon, especially as a symbol for anarchism (would you care to purchase an Anonymous/wikileaks Guy Fawkes Libertarian/revolution Hacker Anarchy T‑shirt?), the Gunpowder Plot was not simply a political plot. It was a plot by Roman Catholics to install a Catholic monarch.
Now, most American Christians who are aware of the holiday or the Plot know that Fawkes was Catholic. But he wasn’t just Catholic.
Guy Fawkes was part of a struggle between Protestants and Catholics that engulfed most of Europe and traveled with the Europeans to the Americas. Guy Fawkes was a soldier. He became a soldier not by joining an English army. Fawkes went to Holland, where the Dutch were fighting for independence from the Spanish Empire. That war is not often called the Dutch War of Independence, but the Eighty Years’ War. This was an epic struggle. It was a war between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Not simply a war that happened to be between “Catholic” and “Reformed” belligerents, but a war that was about their Roman-ness and Protestant-ness. Guy Fawkes made his way over to the Low Countries specifically because he wanted to fight Protestants. Then he brought the fight home. This was common on both sides (Sir Philip Sydney was a kick-ass knight of Protestantism who could write a mean poem – he died of a wound taken on a Dutch battlefield).
The Roman Catholic Church, his Most Catholic Majesty of the Spanish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and many popish powers and principalities were wishing and willing to exterminate Protestants. To us, this ought not be just bare historical fact. If we are Reformed, we ought to embrace that history as our own. Thirty years before Fawkes the Huguenot Protestants were driven underground and out of France. After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, they were scattered to the four winds of the world. Wherever they settled, if the Catholic powers found them, they were exterminated. Unless they settled in English territory.
The orange in the flag of today’s Catholic Ireland is there because of English involvement in the Eighty Years’ War. If you don’t know how, I’ll let you play the wikipedia game to figure it out. Scotland gets involved too. All of Western Europe and North America was involved.
What is all this to say? That we Protestants are enemies of the Catholics? No. Those days are gone. All this is to say that Protestant and Reformed history goes beyond Reformation Day. We’re not just about 95 Theses. We’re about everything that came before, and everything that came after. Perhaps you identify with the Covenanters, or the Oxford Martyrs, Sir Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada, or William of Orange. There are many streams.
We tend to identify ourselves by our theological stream. But do you know who else was alive, or what deeds were being done, when your favorite theologians were writing? When we think of the Reformation, we should not only think of the dissemination of theologies, but of the mustering of armies, the flight of refugees, the building of ships, and the plottings of assassinations. It is more salutary to get our identity from our history, than our theology. It is from our history that we gain perspective, growth, and forgiveness. I would even dare to say that history plays a greater role than theology in helping us trust God. What is better in trusting God than knowing how he has cared for his people through every age?
I don’t celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, really. I’m not English. But I kind of dig it. I’ve decided that it’s part of my history, not only by blood, but by Christian identity. And yes, unlike many Reformed, I identify more with the English than with the Scots or the Dutch. Here’s what I ask of you: know where you come from, what your stream is. Find out its history, not just its theology.
Your children should not see your theology as something you picked off an a la carte menu, even though for a lot of Americans, including me, it definitely feels that way. Assume the entire mantle of your theology, and let it cover you in its history.
This is not a call for you to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day rightly. It’s not a call for you to celebrate it at all. But today would be a good occasion for Kuyperians, we who wear the Orange, to recall our heritage and history, and to look forward to making more.
The Fifth of November (c. 1870)
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!
<>
