JORIS
1011
JORNANDEZ
until he felt safe nowhere. Suddenly we meet in Switz- erland, in the city of Basle, a person by the name of John of Bruges, the owner of real estate iu the town and in the country, a peaceable and good citizen, a com- municant in the Keformed Churcli, who hail come to Basle with his family in the spring of 1544. This man was none other than David Joris, the celebrated Ana- baptist leader, who, tired of years of wandering, preferred a life of safety and comfort under a fictitious name to a Ufe of celebrity and danger as the leader of a large re- ligious sect. No one ever suspected under tlie garb of John of Bruges the form of David Joris, and he ended his days peacefully, in the midst of his family, in 1556. By the people of Basle, John of Bruges, alias David Jo- ris, was highly esteemed while he lived among them, for, being a man of wealtli, he miited magnificence with virtue and integrity. But they thought differently after his death, when his son-in-law, Nicholas Blesdyck, a Keformed preacher in the Palatinate, an avaricious and unprincipled man, charged the deceased with the most blasphemous errors. However much David's family might remonstrate and deny the serious charges, the university and the clergy were called upon to pronounce Joris's opinions as heretical, and his body was ordered to be dug up forthwith and committed to the common hangman to be burned. Thus, strangely enough, the Basle people actually brought to pass what Joris him- self had tokl some of his disciples before his decease, that he would rise again at the end of three years.
Respecting the character and opinions of Joris, Mos- heim says (^Eccles. Hist. bk. iv, cent, xvi, sec. iii, pt. ii, ch. iii), " He possessed more sense and more virtue than is commonly supposed, as is evinced not only by his books, of which he published a great manj', but also by his disciples, who were persons by no means base, but of great simplicity of manners and character. ... In the manner of the more moderate Anabaptists, he labored hard to revive languishing piety among his fellow-men; and in this matter his imagination, which was exces- siveh' warm, so deceived him that he falsely supposed he had divine visions ; and he placed religion in the • exclusion of all eternal objects from the thoughts, and the cultivation of silence, contemplation, and a peculiar and indescribable state of the soul. The I\Ij-stics, there- fore, of the highest order, and the Quakers, might claim him if they would, and they might assign him no mean rank among their sort of people." He believed that the true word of God is no external letter, but God himself, his word, and his voice in man himself. He opposed the doctrine of the Chiu-ch concerning the Trinity on the ground that God is impersonal. " Is it not contra- ry to the manifestations of God in the creature to be- lieve him to be three, and to call all three one?" he asks ; and then replies, " God reveals himself in three periods, following each other successively — the periods of faith, hope, and love, all of them headed by a God- man appearing in God's stead." The second commenced with Jesus Christ, but the third and higher period, the period of perfect manhood, was inaugurated with the appearance of David Joris. The true Christ is the spir- itual, the eternal word, eternally hid in the Father, tlie r heart and the nature of God. This spiritual Christ has by no means really become flesh, but Jesus took the form of Christ in the flesh to make himself manifest. All that was done on or by Jesus in the body was a shadow (type) of wliat man will do and suffer in the spirit. Hence also there was no power for salvation in Christ's external (i. e. bodily) sufferings and deatli, but we of our own accord must save ourselves by the suffer- ings and death of our old man. This deeper and more complete revelation is made to the world by David Jo- ris, the true David, the Christ, not by descent in the flesh, but in the Spirit, and not in the spirit of the cru- cified and deceased, but of the resurrected and living Christ. With Joris's appearance must terminate the announcement of Christ after the flesh. Joris himself is to establish, both internally and externally, the eter-
nal kingdom of Christ, which hitherto was the king- dom of Christ only internally. He who has rcaeluil the perfection of this kingdom [which, of course, could also be done in this world, his external kingdom] is freed thereafter from all law, be it human or divine. Evidently Joris's doctrine was nothing but a fully de- veloped system of INIontanism (q. v.). He denied the doctrine of future judgment, as he declared that perfec- tion is attained in this world, and thereafter the depend- ence of the subject on the Creator ceases. Of course he also ruled out of existence angels, both good and bad. He held, with Manes, that the body only, and not the soul, was defiled by sin ; and he took a "most impolitic step when he adopted the principles of the Adamites with respect to marriage.