Early Quaker Christology and Blasphemy
January 12, 2025 § 1 Comment
I’ve been reading “Accusations of Blasphemy in English Anti-Quaker Polemic, c. 1660–1701,” by David Manning, from Quaker Studies 14/1 (2009) [27–56]. The article focuses on polemical charges of blasphemy against early Quakers based primarily on early Friends’ theology of the light within as anti-Trinitarian and on a claim that Quakers were identifying themselves with God.
Before sharing some of the article, it’s worth noting that George Fox was charged with blasphemy three times, tried twice, and convicted once and got jail time. There probably would have been more trials, but his magistrate for the second trial happened to be none other than Judge Fell, Margaret’s first husband. Fox and Fell met before the trial and uncovered a loophole in the law and Fox got off on a technicality. Judge Fell was such a senior and respected jurist that the third charge never went to trial because they knew they would lose, and it probably kept other prosecutors from bringing charges. And then, of course, there was James Naylor.
Pamphlet wars about these claims raged between Quakers and anti-Quakers throughout this period, to which William Penn was a major contributor. Part of the problem was that early Friends were inconsistent about their theology in this period, so it was hard to pin them down. Manning draws on the work of Leo Damrosch and Ted Underwood*, writing: “. . . no definitive account of early Quaker theology can be written because early Quakers regularly equivocated about their beliefs and that their early theology was, quite understandably, somewhat fluid and contestable precisely because it was a new and developing belief system**.” Which hasn’t stopped most of us from offering “definitive accounts” of early Quaker theology anyway.
But as to the theological claims that gave rise to charges of blasphemy, Manning writes:
The terms Christ, God, and Holy Spirit were not denied, but appeared to have been used interchangeably to describe the Light, rather than to acknowledge the existence of distinct divine persons. Early Quakers most commonly identified the Light with Christ, professing that the pre-incarnate and the incarnate Christ were the same. Christ on earth was, therefore, not manifest in human form, but a celestial being in the vessel of a human body. [emphasis mine] Thus, from this position, Christ was wholly supernatural and provided a uniquely spiritual soteriology [salvation theology]. . . .
The Quakers’ type of non-Trinitarianism meant that they rejected the traditional tenets of Christian belief: faith was not a bridge between human and divine, and mortals did not receive the grace of God, but experienced him immediately (i.e. without mediation). For the Quakers, the language of ‘inwardness’ was effectively a euphemism for the only true way to form a relationship with Christ; for his celestial being had no cause, or means, to mediate with humans, but dwelt within them. . . . one can appreciate the thrust of [Richard Bailey’s] argument that Quaker conviction hinged upon a Christo-present, rather than Christo-centric belief system***.
I read Bailey’s book (New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God) some time ago and found it both fascinating and challenging. Here’s a quote from it along similar lines as above taken from Fox’s The Great Mystery of the Great Whore. This is Fox speaking:
God’s Christ is not distinct from his saints, nor their bodies, for he is within them, nor distinct from their spirits, for their spirits witness him . . . he is in the saints, and they eat his flesh, and sit within him in heavenly places.”
This is weird stuff. It is truly unorthodox, and it is much more radical thinking than later Quaker Christology, which has, it seems to me, been retrojected onto Fox and early Friends in apparent embarrassment, or maybe just through incredulity and misunderstanding. Assuming that Damrosch, Underwood, Manning, and Bailey are not the ones who misunderstand. Moreover, these quotes echo ideas in Glen D. Reynolds’s Was George Fox a Gnostic? An Examination of Foxian Theology from a Valentinian Gnostic Perspective, and some of the insights of Rosemary Moore in The Light in their Consciences..
Those anti-Quakers might have been right, from the orthodox point of view.
Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Naylor and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. Ted Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth Century England.
Richard Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God.
Through the Flaming Sword 
I wonder if by ‘Light’, ‘Christ’ the EQs really meant ‘Divine Consciousness’, although they never used that term even to mean awareness.
Also, as I argue in my ‘The Early Quakers and the ‘Kingdom of God”, Kingdom and Light were the same. My research revealed that the ‘Kingdom’ was directly mentioned in 90% of their works from 1652-1700; with indirect mentions that figure rises to well over 90%. This must count for something.
I agree that the ‘Light’ was their main focus but they certainly equated it to the Kingdom. Being also their main focus, then, they were following their mentor, Jesus, since the Kingdom was also his main focus. The Kingdom had an outer focus–the Lamb’s War.
Interestingly, William Penn in 1695 seems to have conflated Light and consciousness.