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.
Quaker Justifications for “Plain Speech”
January 6, 2025 § 1 Comment
I’ve just finished reading “Aspects of 17th Century Quaker Rhetoric,” by Richard Bauman, published in The Quarterly Journal of Speech*, and learned some great stuff about early Quaker rhetoric. By “rhetoric,” Bauman means “the art of persuasion,” in in Quaker terms, the art of convincement.
Bauman lays out four explanations and justifications early Friends gave for rejecting “the use of “you” in the second person singular, insisting instead upon ‘thou’ and ‘thee.’” I was only aware of two. Here’s his list in brief:
- “You” ungrammatical. The use of “you” was ungrammatical, and thus not true. “You” was properly used for the second person plural.
- “You” unbiblical. In the Bible, “the equivalents of ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ were employed by Christ and by the primitive Christians as well as in parts of the Old Testament.” The generalization of “you” was a later corruption.
- Spiritual egalitarianism. They rejected the honorific “you” “in order to bring their behavior into line with their principle that the spirit of God was accessible within every [person] and that the unity of this shared bond was of primary importance in interpersonal relations.”
- Social rank and etiquette. “The use of ‘you’ to a single individual communicated deference, honor, courtesy, while ‘thou’ imparted intimacy or condescension when used to a close equal or subordinate, but contempt when addressed to a more distant equal or a superior—either that or boorishness. . . . By refusing to conform their usage to these conventions the Quakers violated very strongly established social norms.”
Bauman goes on to point out that this “active aggressive” approach “was not meant to be merely provocative or exemplary, but to bring people to spiritual self-knowledge—‘to see where they were’—and thus from the world’s honor to a higher state.” Plain speech was a rhetorical tool for convincement. With the practice of plain speech, they sought to “arouse the Spirit of God in those who witnessed it, provided they were ready to receive the Light . . . “ “Any behavior whatsoever that was actuated by the spirit of Truth could lead other [men] to that Truth by evoking the spirit of God within them.”
“. . . the rhetoric of the early Quakers was not simply a rhetoric of words, but a unified rhetoric of symbolic action for which Fox’s words might stand as the keynote: ‘Let your lives speak.’”
* Sorry I failed to capture the date and issue of this journal when I downloaded it.
Through the Flaming Sword 