Through the Flaming Sword

The liberal Quaker mutation began in the late nineteenth century as a set of innovations that were largely a reaction to the evangelical spirit that had dominated much of the Quaker movement during most of that century, but which had by then lost much of its vitality. Many of these innovations found embodiment in the thought and work of Rufus Jones and his good friend, John Wilhelm Rowntree. Here, I want to discuss three of these innovations: a new historical sensibility, which was itself one aspect of a new more general scientific sensibility, and third, a new conception of Quakerism as a “mystical religion”.

As part of the new historical interest, Rowntree and Jones conceived a series of publications that would, for the first time, lay out a comprehensive history of the movement. Rowntree died before the project could be completed and Jones saw it through to completion, naming it the Rowntree Series. The series includes:

• The Beginnings of Quakerism and The Second Period of Quakerism, both by William Charles Braithwaite, now acknowledged as classics.
• Two volumes by Jones on the history of religion, with a focus on mysticism: Studies in Mystical Religion and Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Jones seems to have emerged from these studies with his idea that Quakerism was a form of “practical mysticism” and with the idea that “that of God in every person” could be understood as the divine spark of neo-Platonism, which he believed accounted for the universal experience and character of mystical experience.
• The Quakers in the American Colonies, by Jones.
• And the two volumes of The Later Periods of Quakerism, also by Jones, which cover the 18th and 19th century.

I have begun reading volume one of The Later Periods, and I want to pass on in this post some key passages and insights from its introduction. The first paragraphs of the introduction read as follows:

The type of religion studied in the historical series of which these are the concluding volumes has been essentially mystical. No other large, organized, historically continuous body of Christians has yet existed which has been so fundamentally mystical, both in theory and practice, as the Society of Friends—the main movement studied in this series—from its origin in the middle of the seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, and in certain sections even through the nineteenth century. [This volume was published in 1921.]

These present volumes [of The Later Periods of Quakerism] record the profound transformation which occurred in the nineteenth century, and which carried a large proportion of the membership of the Society of Friends, both in England and America, over from a mystical basis to what for want of a better term may be called an evangelical basis. . . . It is clear, however, in historical perspective, that where the changes in the Society of Friends have been in the direction of a “return” to the evangelical systems of the reformed faith, a type of Christianity has been produced which is in strong and radical contrast to the mystical movement inaugurated by George Fox. The latter broke with the theological systems of Protestantism as completely as Luther and Calvin had done with Catholicism. He felt that he was inaugurating a new reformation (emphasis his). His movement was an attempt to produce a type of Christianity resting upon no authorities external to the human spirit, a Christianity springing entirely out of the soul’s experience, verified and verifiable in terms of personal or social life. The simplification seemed possible to Fox and his friends because they had made the memorable discovery that the Christ who saves is a living Christ, operating in vital fashion within the lives of men (sic). They had thus to do no longer with a system constructed on a theory of a God who was remote or absentee. . . . To abandon that position and outlook and to “return” to the systems of the past would mean, of course, that Augustine and Luther and Calvin had won the victory and had triumphed over Fox, as in some sense and in some degree they have done.

Rufus Jones, The Later Periods of Quakerism, 1921, pgs xiii–xiv.

I think Rufus Jones misunderstood George Fox in at least one way. I think he both correctly apprehended and recovered for us the mystical core of Fox’s experience and that of early Friends. But I think that, unfortunately, he also retrojected his fascination with neo-Platonic thought onto Fox when he equated “that of God” with the divine spark of Plotinus and later neo-Platonists. I’ve written about this elsewhere.

But here I want to raise up how important this new historical consciousness was in itself, and how important recovering the mystical core of Quakerism was, independent of the philosophical peculiarities that Jones introduced. And to remind us that liberal Quakerism began as a reaction to evangelicalism. That reaction is in our religious DNA and I think it deserves more study than it’s gotten.

And now another century has passed and liberal Quakerism is as old now as evangelical Quakerism was when Jones and Rowntree began their project. The original impulses in the liberal Quaker tradition have themselves been mutating and losing their vitality since then. How many meetings regularly teach Quaker history? How many Friends study it? How many mystics do we have (more than we know, I suspect—and why don’t we know about it?), and how often do our meetings for worship feel gathered in the Spirit? 

The reaction against a rote and hollow evangelicalism has itself become rote and knee-jerk. The yearning for a lively but critical approach to the Bible has given way to attitudes of indifference or hostility. In some meetings, the allergy to certain ideas and words that have been central to Quaker Christianity throughout all these centuries has mutated into an auto-immune disease in the throes of which we sometimes attack each other with an oxymoronic liberal intolerance. 

Having walked away from both the baby and the bath water, we are left with an empty rhetorical toolbox, in which only two messages can be heard rattling around in its hard metal shell—“that of God in everyone” and The Testimonies, often treated as a kind of Allen wrench set with six tools that swing from the handle known as the SPICES.

We are in need of renewal. All the previous renewal movements in Quakerism have been led by young adults. All have been reactions against an ossified religion that no longer seemed relevant enough, either to the spiritual lives of individual seekers or to the challenges and problems of the world we live in.

What would Quaker renewal agents be reacting against today? Where are they? And what is their mutation?