Category Archives: Hard-Core Quaker

A Delightful Sketch of John Woolman

The African Saint started Western Europe on the downward course of religious persecution proper. Before him there had, indeed, been persecution of religions for racial or political reasons, but St. Augustine was perhaps the chief of those who supplied the religious motive for religious persecution, and turned God Himself into Moloch, a feat which no one but a really “good” man could have performed. Thenceforth, until the age of the much abused Whigs and sceptics, all the best people in the world were engaged in torturing each other and making earth into hell. It was through St. Augustine rather than through Constantine that the Church drank poison. The torch was handed down from him through St. Dominic and St. Ignatius till it scorched the hand of St. John [Calvin] of Geneva by the pyre of [Michael] Servetus. They were all, at least after their conversions, unusually “good” men, but not good all through like John Woolman.

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Lucretia Mott’s Quaker Easter Message, Still Good the Day After

Lucretia Mott completely rejected this whole [traditional Easter] scenario, decrying the “harm done” by it.

Yet she seemed devoted to Jesus. She quoted his words incessantly, affirmed his “messianic status,” and thought she was preaching his “gospel” message during her sixty controversial years as a Quaker preacher.

But if Jesus’ “gospel” was not about depravity and vicarious blood atonement, what did Lucretia say it was?

Scholar Priscilla Eppinger has put it in a nutshell: Salvation for humans would come through the faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. By this, Mott meant a faith like that of Jesus. She quoted from Paul’s letter to the Galatians (2:20):

“Faith of Jesus Christ is faith in the truth, faith in God and in man. The life that I now live in the flesh, said the Apostle, I live by the faith of the son of God. . . . Well  [Mott added] what is this other than a faith similar to that which Jesus held, the faith of the son of God.” (Greene 124)

The faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. Neither Eppinger nor Lucretia originated this alternate  motto.  And what was this “faith”?

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Sierra Cascades YM: “Our New Thing” versus the “Same Old Thing”?

Promising to reform this traditional system, even while coping with being purged by it, is not a new response. When the group that became  “Hicksites” were pushed out of Philadelphia Yearly meeting in 1827, their initial leadership insisted that they would preserve the recorded ministerial elite system — only they would run it better, less oppressively, than had the rival Orthodox junta. 

And maybe they did, for a short while. But before long, internal agitation surfaced among Hicksites about rising issues like women’s rights, and abolitionism, with the specter of civil war on the horizon. And it was shortly clear that the Hicksite recorded establishment did not like such reforming notions one whit more than did their Orthodox rivals. Soon enough there began among Hicksite meetings what I have called the Great Purge: hundreds of Friends deemed to be, in Kershner’s words, “divisive voices” or “only troublemakers,” who were silenced, marginalized or disowned.

But this time many victims stayed and, pardon the expression, fought back.

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Ashley Wilcox to Liberal Quakers: “I’m coming to uproot, to pull down, and destroy”

But Jeremiah was not the invader. Instead, like the other major Hebrew prophets, he was a kind of mail carrier, delivering God’s message to a generally resistant people:

“Behold, I [God] have put my words in thy mouth  [Jeremiah]. . . Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee (1: 10, 17) . . . .”  

Speak those words, Jeremiah; God (and Babylon) will take care of the rest.

However, Wilcox in her Guilford sermon, did not pick up Jeremiah’s messenger role, but rather that of invading Babylon. She repeated the operative phrase (1:10), but with herself as subject: “I [God] have this day set thee [Wilcox] over the nations and over the kingdoms [mainly unprogrammed liberal Quakers] to uproot, to pull down, and to destroy” what she [and God] have determined to be wrong about them. 

And, she explained, the terrible sin she is being dispatched to uproot and destroy is their practice, now a century old, of not recording ministers. Once that demolition is done, the recording system is what will be replanted in its place.

Wilcox insisted that the end of recording, and resistance to reviving it, has done much harm to liberal Quakerism, and to many in its ranks who are seeking recorded status, especially women. 

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Spiritualism & Quaker Theology: Two Examples

“George Fox”: “Much that I left on record was penned as it were, from the first dawnings of Light upon my mind–I was in a progressive state, and as things opened I penned them; many of them being much in advance of my former views. Instead of taking my writings for a guide, they should be considered as helps marks for encouragement, and never for a moment as laws to govern others.

No written code, however, it may be adapted, will be wholly suited to the time and circumstances for which it was designed, will be wholly suited as an ultimate christian standard–his must be a life ever on the watch, ready to examine whatever draws his attention, and if selfishness is sufficiently subdued, and prepossessions banished from the mind, then with an honest purpose of heart, independent of books or men, a judgment will be formed that will elevate and prepare the mind for advancement while in the body, and will necessarily introduce to a happy eternity. . . .”

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