Ranter:
a term broadly and pejoratively used to refer to those who held antinomian beliefs. Antinomianism forcefully reasserted the primacy of faith over works, in response to a sense that, in the 1640s, more orthodox Calvinism was retreating from a full reliance on faith alone, instead tempering it with notions of piety and hence of ‘will’ and ‘works’. The term antinomian (meaning ‘against law’) indicates the absolute character of the state of grace in which the elect dwelt, a state that supersedes life under the Law. The Ranters constituted one extrapolation of the antinomian position, believing that election, and life under the Gospel, freed Christians from the obligation to keep the moral law; the result was (as Nigel Smith put it) ‘a mystically justified practice of swearing and free love — though many reports of Ranter activity were invented’. ¹ Quakers (like other sectaries) were sensitive about being accused of being Ranters, and many contemporaries — including John Bunyan — indeed thought the two groups to be similar. ²

1.    Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) page 8.     Return

2.    Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) page 237.     Return