“That of God”—Again
October 17, 2025 § 6 Comments
For decades, I have complained about Friends claiming that “that of God in everyone” is our central tenet of faith and that it’s to be understood as a divine spark of some kind, something inherent in the human that partakes somehow of God’s being or nature. I’ve heard Friends equate it with the “image of God” in which Genesis one says we were created.
For all these years, I have accepted Lewis Benson’s argument that this usage of the phrase was introduced by Rufus Jones and is a misunderstanding of Fox’s use of the phrase. Benson claims that Fox used the phrase almost always in the pastoral sense implied in the quote that we use as our source for it in an epistle which he includes in his journal, that Fox did not use the phrase in the doctrinal sense that is common among us nowadays, usually stated as “there is that of God in everyone.
Then, in Michael Langford’s Becoming fully human: Writings on Quakers and Christian thought, I find this quote from Fox:
None that is upon the earth shall ever come to God but as they come to that of God in them, the light that God has enlightened them with; and that is it which must guide everyone’s mind up to God, and to wait upon to receive the spirit from God. . . . That which is of God within everyone is that which brings them together to wait upon God, which brings them into unity, which joins their hearts together up to God (Doctrinals, Works, Vol. 4, pp. 131–132; page 117 in Becoming fully human)
This quote demonstrates how complex and fluid Fox’s thinking was, how hard it is to pin down what he actually means, or at least what kind of coherent theology we might reconstruct from his truly prolific output. Fox is edging right up to Jones here. Or to put it in chrono-theological order, you can see how Jones might see in this passage some foundation for his own understanding. And there it is in one of Fox’s doctrinal works.
However, Fox is still giving “that of God in everyone” a pastoral role; that is, it brings us to God. And he equates “that of God” with the light of John 1:9, “the true light, which enlightens everyone,” which is the Word, which is Christ. So it looks like this is an Inward Light, because God has given it/him to us for our enlightenment. It’s not inherently in-dwelling; it was given to us.
On the other hand, however, “that which is of God within us”—that looks more like an Inner Light, an indwelling light that might in fact be inherent, since it is within us and everyone has it. It looks like Fox is having it both ways.
My sense from reading Jones’s books on mysticism is that he was some kind of neo-neoplatonist, in the sense that neoplatonism believes that a universal divine spark is what brings us to God, just as Fox is saying here. God’s spark seeks to return to its origin-home in God; this is the source of the religious/mystical impulse. Likewise, God reaches us inwardly by reaching this God-seeking God’s-self within us, and that divine spark recognizes and receives God when God comes. In mystical union, the divine spark has finally come home. This is the dynamic of mystical union experience.
Jones believed that this universally possible God-to-God’s spark connection is what lies behind all mystical experience, whatever the mystical tradition. And Jones is the one who taught us to think of Quakerism as “practical mysticism”. All of this is very close to what Fox seems to be saying in this quote.
Fox’s sublime innovation is to equate all this—the pastoral “bringing” to God, the doctrinal dwelling “within” us—with the light of Christ, the enlightening Word. “God” in this dynamic is Christ speaking to our condition, penetrating the sheath of sin and ignorance around our soul with the Light, seeking to reach that of God within us, which yearns for him.
“That of God” yearns for God, Fox implies in the quote we always use for this phrase. In that epistle, once we have done the inner work of our own transformation in the light of Christ ourselves, then we can answer that of God in others. That of God within us is calling out in the darkness, and the Light answers with the Word.
Through the Flaming Sword 
[…] in everyone”, which my regular readers know is a regular theme of mine; I posted about it just two weeks ago. This is from letter 20 in Brian’s book: “That of God in every one : Can we not say a […]
Steve, an exchange on the Quaker Theology Facebook group caused me to look up the source of “be patterns, be examples.” The first Google hit I got was three or four paragraphs of a pastoral letter from Fox excerpted in Britain Yearly Meeting’s Faith & Practice..
I was quite interested to read the opening of Fox’s letter: “In the power of life and wisdom, and dread of the Lord God of life, and heaven and earth, dwell; that in the wisdom of God over all ye may be preserved, and be a terror to all the adversaries of God, and a dread, answering that of God in them all, spreading the truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding the deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, the covenant of light and peace with God.”
The juxtaposition of ‘terror’ and ‘dread’ with ‘answering that of God’ was quite refreshing!
I take it to mean something along the lines of an injunction to dwell in the power of God so that that power I seek to center myself in can speak to whatever measure of God there is available in another person.
I take the word “that” to be an adverb meaning “whatever there is,” referring to size or amount. Fox never says we all have an equal measure.
Many of the Quakers around me have latched on to the “walk cheerfully” sentence and hallmarked it into a sweet Quaker meme that implies we’re all equal in the sight of God and we should be kind to each other.
I, myself, was not aware of what the letter goes on to say in its final paragraphs, once we get beyond “cheerfully.” It’s quite sobering.—
“Proclaim the mighty day of the Lord of fire and sword, who will be worshipped in spirit and in truth; and keep in the life and power of the Lord God, that the inhabitants of the earth may tremble before you: that God’s power and majesty may be admired among hypocrites and heathen, and ye in the wisdom, dread, life, terror, and dominion preserved to his glory; that nothing may rule or reign but power and life itself, and in the wisdom of God ye may be preserved in it.”
“This little Light of mine” seems a far piece down the road from “the mighty day of the Lord of fire and sword”!
Please take the time to read this slowly and with detachment, as if you were reading a mathematician’s proof of a difficult theorem:
I count myself a fan of the terror and dread of the Lord, because the Lord, who I (inwardly) know loves us all and wishes the repentance and salvation of each one of us (Acts 17:30, 1 Tim 2:4), must be using all the terror and dread that we see in the world, yes, even all the pain, for our ultimate good.
If this were not so, Jesus would not have (a) let Himself be crucified, (b) made a point of saying “No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18), (c) declined to argue with His Heavenly Father (“Oh, Dad, do I *have* to?”), but rather *saw* that His Father, being omniscient, has voluntarily suffered every pain that every creature has ever suffered or will ever suffer, and yet, being all-wise, has still pronounced this often-terrible and often-dreadful creation “Very good” (Genesis 1:31).
And Jesus, seeing and understanding this, walked uncomplaining and unresisting to the most painful death human cruelty had yet devised, to demonstrate his trust in the goodness of His Father’s will, even, according to Luke (23:34), forgiving the cruelty of all His persecutors, even asking His Father to forgive them also.
And if all this were not so, then the promise that God will wipe away all tears from our eyes (Revelation 7:17, 21:4) is a lie. And so is that maxim, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 4:16). .But I prefer not to think that these are lies. And I think God is happy that I don’t think so. In fact, God is happy when I’m happy.
In fact, God created a creation full of goodness and beauty, and then created me with a built-in appetite for goodness and beauty, so that I could share His delight in all the goodness and beauty that he’s bestowed upon me: Green trees! Blue sky! Butter and honey (Isaiah 7:15)! Music! Sex! Sweet, sweet love!
So, even if I must suffer all the pain of Christ’s cross before I leave this life, my abiding hope is that I will not lose my trust in God’s goodness toward myself and toward all creatures.
I therefore gladly join George Fox in preaching the terror and dread of the Lord, because the terror and dread of the Lord are the very things we have to face, endure, and come to terms with if we wish to die to this world, and face the judgment of our sins, with absolute trust in the goodness of our Judge.
Yes, I, too, dread the judgment. It terrifies me, because I have done things that horrify me and make me loathe myself. I hope that my Judge will hold my hand, in tender kindness, as I endure the display of all the humiliating evidence against me. But my heart assures me that His tender kindness is boundless.
I had a brief brush with a darkside guru named Bubba Free John in the 1970s, who was nevertheless a brilliant interpreter of the principles of yoga, siddha yoga especially, In his book The Method of the Siddha, he unpacks the passage, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” in a way that has stuck with me: Radical spiritual transformation will mean letting go of aspects of self to which we are extremely attached. We will fight it because we know that losing our un-true self will hurt big-time. When the fear of that sets in, we know we are on the threshold of that transformation.
Yes, we tend to ignore the rest of the letter from which we blithely quote “that of God”. As for “cheerfully”, we Americans, at least, have lost some of the meanings that I think were still active in the 17th century. We now tend to give the word a meaning of lighthearted mood or temperament. But “cheer” had also a meaning of uplifting, of blessing, a deeper version of the intention behind the toast “Cheers!” The following words help to clarify this: “walk cheerfully over the world.” I think Fox used “the world” here the way the gospel of John uses it, the world that “did not recognize him” (John 1:10), which John’s Jesus associates with darkness (8:12), which hated both Jesus and his disciples (15:18-19). To walk over the world is to walk in the light that dispels its evil and sins.
So to “walk cheerfully over the world” is to follow a gospel path of light that brings the blessings of the Light of Christ into a world that is hostile to the light, in a struggle full of dread.
My take on Fox’s statement is:
Silence is the best way to dwell with/in God.
In mod. speak: silence affords the best opportunity to dwell in Divine Consciousness who is Unity and Peace Itself.
What do you think?