‘That of God’ – more Lewis Benson

November 18, 2010 § 4 Comments

Quite a few Friends have participated in the discussion of Lewis Benson’s Quaker Religious Thought essay on “That of God in Every Man,” so I thought I would try to summarize more of it. I started out with his critique of its evolution in the modern period, from its reintroduction by Rufus Jones at the turn of the twentieth century to its very widespread use today (well, 1970, actually, when he wrote this piece; but the trends he decries have only gained momentum since then).  In this post, I want to focus on his discussion of its original meaning in the works of George Fox.

As Patricia Dallmann pointed out in her comment to the earlier post, Fox was working from Paul’s letter to the Romans when he used the phrase:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. (Romans 1:18-19; King James Version)

Benson goes on to say this about Fox’s use of the phrase:

Fox does not use the declarative sentence, “There is that of God in every man,” and he never makes it the central theme of any of his sermons or writings. . . This phrase belongs to his pastoral vocabulary rather than to his doctrinal vocabulary.

Two salient facts point to an understanding of what Fox meant by “that of God in every man”: first, it is not used by Fox to designate the central truth that he is proclaiming; and, second, it is used most frequently to refer to the response that Friends were trying to evoke by word and deed. . . What was this special kind of response? (pp. 2-3)

Benson answers this question later:

The verbs that Fox usually link with “that of God” are “answer” and “reach.” The goal of Quaker preaching, either by word or deed, is to reach or answer something in all men. (p. 9)

Answering that of God in man involves the judgment of God and a call to repentance. . . . Fox maintains that there is something of God in man that shows him what is evil. (p. 12)    [though it is not the conscience:]

That of God in the conscience is not conscience itself, but the word by which all things, including conscience, were created. (p. 13)

Here, of course, Benson is referring to the Word of John 1. Here are more definitions and clarifications. (Benson uses italics for emphasis in many of these quotes, but I haven’t yet revised WordPress’s CSS code to keep the template from applying italics to all of the blockquotes; hopefully by next posting, I will have done.)

In every man there is a witness for God that summons him to remember the Creator. This is “that of God in every man.” . . . It is a hunger and thirst that God has put in man. . . [It is ] a voice that is personal and transcendent. It calls us to repentance. It judges and condemns the transgressor, and blesses the obedient. (pp. 5-6)

He believes that it is something more dynamic than a mere capacity to hear God’s wisdom, but an active impulse, a hunger, a “witness” eager to testify:

“There is something in man,” he [Fox] says, “that answers the power which is the gospel.” . . . Fox taught that it is the wisdom of the Creator that answers the witness of God in all men. . . That which answers that of God in man is the truth. (pp.10-11)

Benson clearly rejects any ‘gnostic’ character of “that of God.”

In creating man, God did not create another god. Man was not endowed at creation with the wisdom of God, but is a creature to whom God imparts his wisdom. (p. 10)

Confirming the essentially pastoral thrust of Fox’s use of the phrase:

The help of God’s spirit is needed in a ministry that answers that of God in man. Fox says, “the Spirit . . . giveth an understanding . . . how to wait, speak, and answer the Spirit of God in his people. . . . The Holy Spirit teacheth the holy, gentle, meek, and quiet lowly mind to answer . . . the light, grace, and Spirit and the gospel in every creature.” (p. 12)

And this is how that of God is answered:

  • Preaching by word of mouth.
  • Preaching with our lives.
  • The love of the brethren for one another.
  • Unity of the brethren.
  • Direct encounter with that which is contrary to truth—“confounding deceit”.

Thus, according to Lewis Benson, Fox uses “that of God” in ways very different from, if not diametrically opposed to, the uses prevalent in liberal Quaker circles today. It is one key to his approach to gospel ministry, rather than a key to what he “believes”. It hasn’t any substance, in the sense of being essential to human nature or as a share of God’s nature or substance: it was put there by God to hear God’s voice. Its role is to serve God’s judgment and our salvation by revealing sin and answering to the truth.

Bailey, King, Reynolds and the other writers who argue for a more ‘gnostic,’ more ‘substantial’ meaning, who speak of ‘celestial flesh’ and of salvation as a complete transformation of the soul by Christ’s presence within us, are reading a different Fox.

‘That of God’ – Lewis Benson and the ‘new interpretation’

November 15, 2010 § 21 Comments

I said in the post that opened this thread on ‘that of God in every person’ that I had discovered new light on Fox’s meaning of the phrase when looking for the source in Rufus Jones’s work for the modern mystical meaning of a divine spark, or some quality of the divine that humans share. I was then already reading but had not yet finished Lewis Benson’s wonderful essay in Quaker Religious Thought (QRT) entitled “’That of God in Every Man’ – What Did George Fox Mean By It?” (Volume XII, Number 2, Spring 1970).  Benson (1906 – 1986) was a life-long student of Fox’s work, the inspiration for the New Foundation Fellowship, and a “champion of a forgotten faith”—the Quakerism of George Fox and early Friends. In addition to his own books, he created a massively thorough concordance of Fox’s works that is an indispensible tool for later students of our prophet founder. Pendle Hill’s library has a copy.

In this issue of QRT, Benson answers my quest for the source in Rufus Jones: he cites Jones’s “Introduction” to his abridged edition of Fox’s Journal, first published in 1903 (George Fox, An Autobiography, 1919 edition, pp. 28 & 29), as the earliest instance of the revived use of ‘that of God’. Jones reiterates this theme, Benson says, the next year in Social Law in the Spiritual World (p. 5). Here is Jones from this latter work, as quoted by Benson:

What was the Inner Light? The simplest answer is: The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is something Divine, ‘Something of God’ in the human soul.

Note that Jones has divorced the Inner Light from the Light of Christ and made it universal and ‘generic’, if you will, a generally mystical ‘something’ no longer associated with the particular presence of the unique Christ. Benson goes on to say:

As a consequence of statements like these, the phrase “that of God in every man” began to acquire a meaning for twentieth century Friends that it did not have for Fox. The new “interpretation” made “that of God in man” the central conception around which everything else in Quakerism revolves.

Between 1700 and 1900, Benson says, “‘that of God in every man’ [had] virtually disappeared from the Quaker vocabulary.” But after Jones and also A. Neave Brayshaw introduced this Neo-Platonist interpretation, a “torrent of promotional literature and other publications” flowed from the pens of the publicists and staff writers of the American Friends Service Committee spreading the doctrine throughout the Society of Friends. He goes on: “The elevation of “that of God in every man” to the status of root principle (emphasis his) has affected Quaker life in several areas, namely: the peace testimony, social testimonies, the meaning of membership, and missions.”

Lewis Benson was not happy about this. He writes:

We know that it is the policy of some Monthly Meetings to make belief in “that of God in every man,” which has been called “the Quaker’s creed,” a primary and essential condition of membership, whereas faith in Christ is regarded as a secondary and non-essential factor in examining prospective members. I maintain that this meaning and use of “that of God in every man” has no connection with its meaning and use in the writings of Fox. There is no such Christ-transcending principle in the thought of Fox.

Benson ends his essay thus:

There can be no full understanding of Fox and his message apart from a knowledge of what he meant by “that of God in every man.” However, when we jump to the conclusion that “that of God” is the central truth of the Quaker message, then we cut ourselves off from that which Fox made central; namely, the message about Jesus Christ and how he saves men. If we make “that of God in man” the basis of our peace testimony and other testimonies then they become an inference from a theory about the nature of man rather than a response to a divine command, and our witness loses its prophetic impact. While we are under the spell of the “that of God” theory we cannot make the witness for the distinctive interpretation of Christianity which is the special task for which we were called to be a people, and the inner life of our Society becomes confused and at war with itself. The irony of our present situation is that any plea to seek the unity that is received from Christ is bound to be regarded in some quarters as a breach of the truce between divergent opinions that we have come to regard as the highest measure of unity of which we are capable. This false peace must be broken before we can enjoy the unity in Christ which God intends for us.

Benson wrote this in 1970 (which perhaps helps us forgive his sexist language, which was nearly universal at the time). Since then the triumph of the “new interpretation” of the phrase over (liberal) Quaker life has only become more entrenched and the drift away from the Christ-centered message and mission of Friends that it enables and Benson describes has become more pronounced and less likely to be noticed, let alone questioned.

My own ministry concerning the phrase has focused on raising the questions: What do we mean when we use it? (What do you mean when you use it?) Is this meaning faithful to Friends’ traditions? If it isn’t, what then? More importantly, is it the Truth? When did we decide that it was the Truth, and how? Did we decide at all? If not, how shall we decide whether our ‘new’ meaning (it’s already a hundred years old) is the Truth, and when will we do it? Should we distill 350 years of rich tradition down to just this one phrase at all, whatever we mean by it? How shall we treat it going forward, when, for instance, we next revise our books of discipline or the text on our websites?

Some of these questions are rhetorical, of course. We never have ‘decided’ to abandon Fox’s meaning or early Friends’ mission, not in good gospel order, anyway, by which I mean with worship and prayer and spirit-led corporate discernment. We just drifted, unconscious of our path, ignorant of our past. And of course I feel that we should recover the full breadth of our tradition; we have so much more to say than that we believe that there is that of God in every person—assuming that ‘we’ do believe that.

So—what do we say? Well, more in later posts. . .

 

‘That of God’ – new light (?)

November 11, 2010 § 17 Comments

For years, I have labored under a concern about our misuse of the phrase ‘that of God’, which most Friends know from an epistle to ministers that George Fox includes in his journal, though he used the phrase in various forms more than seven hundred times, by my count in Lewis Benson’s massive concordance of Fox’s works. One of the things I’ve been harping on is that we now mean something by the phrase that turns Fox’s meaning on its head, that we’re mostly ignorant of this 180 degree turn, and that we should not use it without being more knowledgeable and reflective about, not just its history but our own intentions. Most Friends today, I think, have a vaguely neoplatonic, neognostic meaning in mind: that we each have some little piece of God in us, that inherent in the human is some aspect of the divine—a divine spark—and that this spark is the key to the direct experience of God that is fundamental to Quaker faith and practice.

I have argued instead that Fox could never have held such an idea. That for him, a huge chasm separates humans from God, and that, while there may be a seat within the human soul waiting for Christ to come in and sup with us, as early Friends were wont to quote Revelation (3:20), that only because Christ had bridged that gulf did we partake of the divine in any way. I had argued further that the current mystical, divine-spark meaning of ‘that of God’ had entered modern Quakerism from Rufus Jones and was therefore a relatively new meaning, and that it was an innovation of his own or brought in from outside our tradition. But I had lost the record and the memory of where in his writings Jones had first introduced the idea. When I went looking for it, I discovered a rather extensive body of analysis that seemed to indicate that I might be totally wrong about all of this.

These writers claim that Fox was, in fact, some kind of gnostic (though his theology is truly unique in the long history of neoplatonic ideas). That ‘that of God’ does in fact refer to a share of the divine in the human. That many early Friends agreed with him about this. That they went quite far beyond the simple presence of a divine spark to include a view of salvation that so fused the believer with Christ that s/he was virtually—no, not ‘virtually’, but actually—fully one with him. And that William Penn, Thomas Ellwood and others deliberately removed or withheld these ideas from Fox’s published works, especially the first edition of the journal, in order to protect the Society from the charge of blasphemy.

I am eager to pursue this further with Friends who know more about Fox’s biography, writings and theology than I do. First, I want to share the bibliography that I’ve begun to read, so others can read this stuff for themselves. I am lucky to be close to Princeton Theological Seminary and their great library, but I suspect these books may be hard to get for many Friends. Still, I am hoping that we can have a lively and informed dialog about these uncovered themes in early Quaker experience and thinking. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

The Creation of Quaker Theory: Insider Perspectives; Pink Dandelion, editor. Two essays touch on these ideas: “’Go North!’ The Journey towards First-generation Friends and their Prophecy of Celestial Flesh,” by Michele Lise Tarter; “George Fox and Christian Gnosis,” by Glen D. Reynolds.

Was George Fox a Gnostic? An Examination of Foxian Theology from a Valentinian Gnostic Perspective; Glen D. Reynolds.

New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God; Richard Bailey.

The Light in their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain 1646-1666; Rosemary Moore.

George Fox and the Light Within, 1650-1660; R. H. King. (I’ve not got my hands on this one yet, but it is quoted quite a lot by the others.)

I still have other concerns about the way we use the phrase ‘that of God,’ but these must wait for another post.

Quakers and capitalism – enigma & amnesia

November 4, 2010 § 15 Comments

Who would you say is history’s second most famous Quaker? I am assuming that William Penn is the first most famous Quaker, and that Richard Nixon does not qualify as a Friend, despite his nominal membership.

In the United States, it might be Herbert Hoover. He’s certainly famous enough. Problem is, so few people know that he was a Friend. When I ask this question at the beginning of my presentations, many people propose John Woolman, George Fox, Lucretia Mott or Alice Paul.

The answer I propose is John Bellers. A prominent British Friend around the turn of the 18th century (1654 – 1725), Bellers was well known to his contemporaries. Yet you would join an overwhelming majority of modern American Friends if you have never heard of this man.

So why do I say he’s the second most well-known Quaker in world history? Because some of his essays were required reading in Soviet schools throughout the Soviet period in the former Soviet Union—tens of millions of Russians have known who he is. Because he impressed Karl Marx and Friederich Engels so much that Das Kapital mentions him by name.

Here is a man who enjoyed the fullest respect of his own generation, who possessed a deep, compassionate heart and a creative and far-ranging mind, who brought these faculties to bear on the problems of his own time in searching moral critique and bold proposals for pragmatic solutions to the problems he so clearly defined—in some cases for the first time. With equal measures of insight and foresight, Bellers wrote about economics and the plight of the worker, medical research and education, international politics and domestic social policy.

He was the first person in the English-speaking judicial tradition to call for the abolition of the death penalty. He added his voice to that of William Penn in calling for a unified government for Europe. And Bellers was the first to propose a national health service and a number of other reforms in health care:

  • standardized medical education, so that all doctors would be trained in the best treatment practices and the public would have some protection from quacks and charlatans;
  • medical conferences and journals to keep doctors abreast of new developments in medicine; and
  • testing and certification of medicines to guarantee their efficacy and protect patients and patient’s families.

But his most important contribution in his own eyes was his proposal for “colledges of industry”. These were working and educational communities of (ideally) 250 or so people, made up mostly of the working poor, built around profit-making businesses in a wide range of trades that also conducted industrial research. His model anticipated that a third of the time and profit from the college would be surplus and would be reinvested in the research and used for relief to the poor. He wrote several essays on this topic throughout his life, never giving up on it, writing to Parliament and to London Yearly Meeting (essentially a grant proposal). Parliament didn’t listen. London Yearly Meeting created a workhouse at Clerkenwell, but this frustrated him no end, because they had ignored the most important aspects of the idea: community, education, research, profitable contribution. Clerkenwell was a palliative, not a systemic solution.

So how has this important contributor to Quaker—and even Western—history fallen into such relative oblivion among his own people? Why did even his own contemporaries shy away from his genius? And what, if anything, does our amnesia say about Quaker culture and our testimonial  relationship to the concern that most exercised him: the social organization of capitalist enterprise? Why do I start my exploration of Quakers and capitalism with John Bellers?

For me, our Bellers amnesia is a useful indicator of a bigger puzzle. Bellers is not the only important political economist whom we’ve forgotten; I would add Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871 – 1954) and, more importantly, David Ricardo (1773 – 1823). (Will we forget Kenneth Boulding, too?) Moreover, while Quakers from their earliest days have had a disproportionate influence on capitalist culture, especially in Great Britain, as we shall see, nevertheless, we are only now beginning to develop a coherent, comprehensive testimony on economics. To my knowledge, no one has tried to write a comprehensive economic history of Friends, despite its obvious and enormous importance, until this leaky vessel you are reading right now, though there have been some marvelous treatments of specific people and topics. Friends are weird about money, too, as anyone who’s served on a finance committee well knows. Why?

Why, when we have for so long been in the forefront of efforts to reform prisons, stop war, serve its victims, advance the rights of women, and end slavery, have we been so tardy in addressing the social failures of capitalism? For years, I have felt led to try to answer these questions and John Bellers was my first poster boy, if you will.

I would like to start a new conversation along these lines.

Quakers and Capitalism — a lost history

October 29, 2010 § 11 Comments

I have been writing a history of Quaker contributions to capitalist culture and of the ways that Quaker fortunes have, in turn, shaped Quaker culture, with a commentary on this history’s significance. Most of the history portion of the book is basically done, up into what I call the third transition period, between the great conferences at Richmond and Manchester and the end of the Great War. My interest is not in how Quakers deal with money, in their personal lives or even their professional and business lives, but rather with how we as a community have related to the capitalist economic system itself, as a system.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important Quakers were to the transition from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism and to the progress of the industrial revolution itself. It is also almost impossible to exaggerate how unknown most of this incredible history is to most Friends.

This has always been a mystery to me and is, in fact, what got me started on this project in the first place: what is it about Quaker culture that finds this radical historical amnesia useful, given how obsessed we are with our own history?

I’m always on the lookout for new sources in this project and recently came across a great book published in 1953 and edited by John Kavanaugh, then Public Relations Director of AFSC (the edition available on Amazon.com was published in 1970). The Quaker Approach to Contemporary Problems is a collection of essays by Quaker luminaries of the time, including Henry Cadbury, Howard Brinton, Elton Trueblood, and Clarence Pickett, and includes chapters on Peace and War, Education, Race Relations, Health and Healing, and so on. But it was the essay by Kenneth Boulding, the Quaker economist, on Economic Life that caught my eye. Here are his opening paragraphs:

The history of the application of the Quaker experience in the realm of economic life presents a curious paradox. On the one hand we do not find the apparently clear-cut “testimony” which is found in the peace testimony, where a relatively simple standard of conduct has come down almost unchanged through three centuries. It is difficult to find any simple standard of economic conduct or judgment which deserves the name “Quaker.” Quakers have been both capitalists and socialists, bankers and civil servants. Friends have, of course, maintained a testimony for the “minor virtues”—honesty, truthfulness, fulfillment of promises, thrift, hard work, punctuality, and so on in their economic activities as well as in other aspects of daily life. Such testimonies, important as they are, do not, however, constitute a specific attitude toward economic institutions or systems. On the great question of socialism versus capitalism, for instance, the Quaker trumpet seems to  speak with an uncertain sound.

In spite of—or perhaps even because of—this apparent weakness in the clarity of the theoretical position, the practical impact of the Society of Friends on the economic life of the world has been enormous, and quite out of proportion to the small number of Friends. Indeed, it can be argued that the greatest impact of the Society of Friends on the world has been precisely in this sphere of economic life where the theoretical contribution seems to have been small.

Boulding goes on to discuss how Friends have been “deeply implicated in the rise of the whole set of institutional and technical changes, which go under the name of ‘capitalism,’ in two of its essential aspects—the development of a wide ‘market economy,’ and in the initiation and propogation of technical change,” and to claim, as I do, that these contributions have been “a very direct consequence of [our] religious experience, and of the organization of [our] religious life.” He surveys the economic history of Friends up to his time and then turns to the future.

He also considers our shift—and his own shift—toward ever higher standards of consumption, after abandoning plain dress and speech. “In reacting against the censorious imposition of ancient and perhaps meaningless standards of consumption we have relaxed our mutual disciplining of each other to the point where there seems to be no machinery in the usual Meeting, even for the discussion of these problems.” He ends by saying that “separated from God, separated from the sensitizing of the spirit in worship and communion with the source of all love and truth, enterprise leads to damnation in pride, brotherhood leads to damnation in sentimentality. This remains the most important thing which the Society of Friends has to say, even in the field of economics.”

One of the things I want to do with this blog is to share this history of Quakers and capitalism and begin a conversation about our economic testimony and our amnesia: to try to understand why we no longer know who John Bellers was, or Seebohm Rowntree, or David Ricardo, and why these people matter; and to discern what a “clear-cut” economic testimony might be.

Welcome to Through the Flaming Sword

October 20, 2010 § Leave a comment

Welcome to Through the Flaming Sword, an online conversation about the history and future of Quaker culture, hosted by Steven Davison, member of Yardley Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Thank you for joining me.

I have started this blog to share some of my ideas with interested Friends and to join the lively online conversation about Quaker life more directly. The brief introduction below also appears on the “About this blog” page, whose link is on the left.

I’ve been a Friend since the mid-1980s and I’ve always had a passion for the study of Quakerism—its history, its ‘theology’, its approach to the life of the spirit, both personal and corporate, its community dynamics and governance, and its distinctive language and practices.

A writer by both vocation and avocation, I’ve written a lot about Quakerism, the vast majority of which is unpublished, though some essays have appeared in Friends Journal and Quaker Life. I currently am deep into a book on Quakers and Capitalism, which is both an economic history of Friends and a history and commentary on Quaker contributions to capitalist culture. This is not about Quakers and money, but about Quakers and the history and structure of capitalist economy. The history part of the book is more or less complete up to the turn of the 20th century, and roughly sketched out to the present. I have done a number of presentations on this material and I’ve found that Friends are universally amazed at the significance of Quaker economic contributions, a history that is almost completely unknown to most Friends. I am a trained and seasoned public speaker and I welcome opportunities to share this incredible story more widely. Please contact me if you are interested.

I also am a serious student of the Bible and I invite you to visit my other blog, BibleMonster.com, which explores contemporary issues under the light of a radical Bible.

Again, thank you for joining me. I look forward to our conversation.

Steven Davison

 

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