The Living Sense of Scripture

Everard appears frequently in studies of English antinomianism. His sermons, printed posthumously in 1653, reveal a startling array of influences, from Maimonides to Nicholas of Cusa, and a propensity for extravagant glosses on scripture. Notably, Everard saw the gospel as an allegory for the spiritual regeneration of the reader. The literal or ‘living’ sense of scripture played out in the annihilation and resurrection of the individual conscience-as-script. Starting with those few divines who chose to celebrate rather than disparage him, this article considers Everard’s work as a particularly colorful, but not altogether unrepresentative, sample in the thorny history of sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant hermeneutics. Specially, Everard’s work constitutes a unique merger of an older spiritual tradition with Protestant discourse on the literal sense which not only addressed long-standing issues in Puritan thought but had a real claim to the mainstream in Cromwell’s England.