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FRIENDS, GOD, AND THE BIBLE
As Seen Through a Glass, Darkly
T. Vail Palmer, Jr.
*ALL RIGHTS RESERVED*
CHAPTER 1
GEORGE FOX MEETS THE SEEKERS: A MIGHTY ACT OF GOD?
. . . I will begin with a recent controversy between two Quaker historians: Larry Ingle and Doug Gwyn. Ingle sharply criticized Gwyn as being one of a succession of Quaker historians who have proposed theological interpretations of George Fox and the early Friends instead of concentrating on a careful examination of the social, political, and economic context of the movement. Ingle argued that “people like Gwyn are so enthralled by their quest for the holy grail of theological truth . . . That they are simply unable or unwilling to submit themselves to the lowly and pedestrian discipline of simply trying to make sense about what happened.” (Ingle 1991: 25) Gwyn responded that “Ingle’s viewpoint is just as ideologically conditioned and interested as is a theological position. His pose . . . holds that the historian, using scientific methods of research, can overcome all partisanship and become value-free, detached in presenting and interpreting the data. There is no such position on earth!” (Gwyn 1991: 31) Gwyn insists that Ingle, too, as “an honest self-aware scholar must put his or her position of engagement out front to the reader and not pose as an impartial oracle, testifying to ‘what happened.’” (Gwyn 1991: 32)
I am in complete agreement with Doug Gwyn on this point. No historian, no scholar, no observer of any event is capable of having a completely objective, value-free view of what is happening or has happened. We inevitably interpret what we perceive and how we understand the experiences of others, and our interpretations are colored by our personal temperaments, life-experiences, and values. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead so aptly wrote, "If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography." (Whitehead 1960: 22) Paul grasped this point nearly two thousand years ago: “We see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12 NRSV) -- or, in the evocative words of the King James translation, “through a glass, darkly.” Even in physics, we now know that we cannot achieve absolutely precise knowledge. At the quantum level, the very act of observation makes an impact on the position and momentum of the objects being observed.
This does not mean, as some relativists or extreme post-modernists would have it, that there is only your truth and my truth, but no ultimate truth behind and beyond what we see and understand. We can never, in this world, attain to a complete and perfect knowledge of “what really happened,” but we can reach toward a converging grasp of it, as we bring our contrasting interpretations into dialogue with one another. This dialogue can be open and honest only if we first become as self-aware as possible about our own interpretive biases and values and then become as open and up-front as possible with one another in our mutual quest for truth. This is the “holy grail” which historians and theologians alike are seeking. Is this search folly or a worthy quest?
Folly enters in when the human scientists -- historians, sociologist, economists, psychologists -- are tempted to approximate the relative precision and objectivity that the physicist and the chemist expect to achieve. In the physical world, it makes sense to speak of objective truth -- but not in the human world. Martin Buber so wisely reminded us that our understanding of other persons does not come through an objective, I-it, relationship. It must be I-thou. The ultimate truth, in all interpersonal and social relationships, is not objective but intersubjective. We will come closer to this truth, not through objective detachment but through empathy. None of us, of course, attains to complete empathy with everyone here and now, or in the past. All of us empathize more readily with some people than with others. Yet the better we can put ourselves inside the skin of the people we are seeking to understand and explain, the closer we will come to the full truth about them and their place in society and in history.
And so it is time for me to be up-front about my own stance -- about the starting points of my own outlook on life and history. . . .
As I have developed the values and refined the world-view through which I understand society and history, I have been inspired by two movements in our history: the Quaker movement of the mid-seventeenth century, and the Biblical Theology movement of the mid-twentieth century. . . .
I resumed my graduate studies -- at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In my first weekend at the Divinity School, I attended a retreat for entering students. I recall vividly the words of Old Testament professor J. Coert Rylaarsdam at that retreat; he affirmed that our goal as students and scholars should be to learn to “think Hebrew.”
Since I had taken basic Old Testament and New Testament courses at Oberlin, and was concentrating in a different area (Ethics and Society) at Chicago, I took no more formal Bible courses. Nevertheless, in order to clarify my own basic theological stance, over the next few years I studied books by a number of biblical scholars, including Oscar Cullmann, Walther Eichrodt, G. Ernest Wright, Bernhard W. Anderson. These scholars were representative of what can be termed the Biblical Theology movement. As I read their works, I kept finding myself forced back to the great theological pioneer of that movement: Karl Barth. Although I have not read anywhere near all of Barth’s works, I have read enough to appreciate enormously his contributions to contemporary thinking about God and the Bible.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biblical scholars had concentrated on analysis, on objectively understanding the historical and literary context of the biblical writings, on breaking down traditional understandings of the Bible and its meaning. By the middle of the twentieth century, Barth and his followers in the Biblical Theology movement had taken the next step and were attempting a new synthesis, a fresh understanding of the message of the biblical authors. The goal of their scholarship was to recover the theology of the biblical writers, to the extent that they -- and we -- can feel ourselves into the position of the writers and first readers of the biblical books. Coert Rylaarsdam had summarized this goal in a single phrase; Karl Barth and Bernhard Anderson have spelled it out in a little more detail:
The commentator is thus presented with a clear “Either-Or.” The question is
whether or no he is to place himself in a relation to his author of utter loyalty. Is he to
read him, determined to follow him to the very last word, wholly aware of what he is
doing, and assuming that the author also knew what he was doing? . . . Anything short
of utter loyalty means a commentary ON Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, not a
commentary so far as possible WITH him -- even to his last word. (Barth 1968: 17)
Our task, then, is to try to understand the biblical message in its dynamic context of
culture, politics, and geography. We shall seek to enter into the concrete life- situations
out of which the various writings have come, and to understand what the writers were
saying to their times, . . . to enter sympathetically and imaginatively into this
community and to relive its sacred history. (Anderson 1975: 13-14)
The approach to Bible study that Anderson urged “is one in which together we shall attempt to stand within the Bible and to look out at the world through the window of biblical faith.” (Anderson 1957: 12)
I have come to agree that our aim is to get into the same drama in which the Hebrews and early Christians were involved, to examine the Old Testament and the New Testament from within. In a word, the goal of our biblical study is: empathy.
I can go a step further. When G. Ernest Wright wrote: “Biblical theology is first and foremost a theology of recital. The worshipper listens to the recital and by means of historical memory and identification he participates, so to speak, in the original events,” (Wright 1952: 28) he was affirming that biblical theology itself is an exercise in empathy. . . .
While I was a student at Chicago, several Friends got together and organized the Quaker Theological Discussion Group. These Friends, sobered by two world wars, world-wide economic collapse, and the horrors of Naziism and the Holocaust, had come to question Protestant and Quaker liberalism’s optimistic faith in human progress; they were also questioning Rufus Jones’ and Howard Brinton’s interpretation of early Quakerism as a mystical movement centering on an optimistic belief in that of God in everyone. They wanted to establish a forum for discussing theological issues and understandings of Quakerism with one another, as well as with any liberal or evangelical Friends willing to enter the dialogue. They also envisaged founding a journal in which the fruits of this dialogue could be published.
I attended the first conference of the Quaker Theological Discussion Group, and found it to be a place where I could sharpen my own understanding of what Quakerism was all about. I became a regular attender of the Group’s conferences and soon of its executive committee meetings, and eventually served for several years as editor of its journal, Quaker Religious Thought. During my college-teaching years, when I was remote from any Friends meeting or church, the Discussion Group became my de facto spiritual home.
The Quaker Theological Discussion Group afforded a context in which I could clarify my own understanding of what Quakerism is all about. In one paper which I read at a conference of the Discussion Group, I affirmed my basic position: “The thought and practice of the first generation of Quakers is somehow normative. . . . We cannot go back to a literal repetition or imitation of seventeenth-century Quakerism, but the insights of that generation will form the basis for any meaningful reconstruction or renewal of Quaker Christianity.” (Palmer 1971: 6-7) My fundamental quest was to tease out that “somehow”: just what was the central insight of early Quakerism -- what Melvin Endy has more recently termed “the lynchpin of the [Quaker] movement” (Endy 2004: 34)?
Colleagues in the Quaker Theological Discussion Group made noteworthy contributions to my understanding of major themes in the thought and work of early Friends. Hugh Barbour and Canby Jones showed how George Fox, James Nayler, and Edward Burrough distilled the picture of the Lamb’s War out of the profuse imagery of the Book of Revelation. These early Friends understood that they were engaged in an intense, yet always nonviolent struggle against the powers of evil within themselves and in the social and political structures of their world.. I was particularly inspired by Canby Jones’s insistence that the Lamb’s War provides the basis for Quaker testimonies and action in the world today:
Just as the early Friends expected to win the Lamb’s war and then see his victory in
England so must we. The arena of the present day conflict is on every level of existence
wherever evil is found.
We are called to overcome ignorance, poverty, disease, secularism, racism and war;
all social ills; the depths of sin and the deepest spiritual needs of men. All of these are
the arena of the conflict. Wherever they are being overcome the power of the
conquering Lamb is already at work. . . .
This is a new kind of war that restores instead of kills. (Jones 1964: 40)
My thinking was stretched by Rob Tucker’s expansion of the social and political implications of the Lamb’s War in his seminal essay, “Revolutionary Faithfulness.” He summed up his analysis of the Lamb’s War in these words: “The first Friends stormed the Kingdom as though it were the Bastille. New Christian behavioral patterns, new social and political and economic insights were spun off as a by-product. . . . The central principle was and should be faithfulness, private and corporate, and its corollary, an openness to the unexpected.” (Tucker 1967: 28-29) He clarified how different was the meaning of Christian language for early Friends from the use of that language by modern evangelical or liberal Christians and Friends:
When early Friends spoke of Christ’s saving grace and the need to respond to it, they
meant not only that individuals should be reborn, but that Christian community
should be reborn to perform a revolutionary function in history, through day-to-day
immediate corporate faithfulness to its divine Leader. . . .
Our problem is complicated by the fact that early Quaker thinking about community
was aborted. (Tucker 1967: 23)
Rob Tucker reminded us
that early Quakerism was “prophetic, catholic, and revolutionary.” . . .
It is not easy to focus upon the revolutionary aspects of early Quakerism. Because
George Fox was relatively successful in his ecclesiastical and theological aims, and
unsuccessful in his social aims, we naturally tend to see his program in the former
terms. (Tucker 1967: 4)
I find it essential to recognize that the first Quakers were a people, a community called by God, not simply a gathering of God-inspired individuals. More specifically, they were a covenant community. . . .
One question on which Friends in the Quaker Theological Discussion Group have held varying views is the question of the place of early Quakerism in the manifold spectrum of churches, denominations, and movements that constitute Christianity. Rufus Jones had positioned Friends in a long tradition of mystical movements, within both Roman Catholicism and heretical sects, stretching back to the Greek philosopher Plato. Hugh Barbour placed Quakerism squarely in the Protestant camp: “Historically and theologically, Friends are Protestants.” (Barbour 1969: 2) Lewis Benson, for a period in his life, felt that early Quakers belonged together with sixteenth-century Anabaptists as examples of “Spiritual Reformation” or perhaps “churches of the Cross;” later in life he backed away from this association with the Anabaptists and emphasized the absolute uniqueness of George Fox’s vision of Christian faith and community.
To me it has seemed clear that the early Quaker vision of Christianity had much in common with the positions of the fourteenth-century Lollards in England and the sixteenth-century Anabaptists in Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands (particularly the strands that became the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Hutterites). I found my views supported and clarified in an essay by Maurice Creasey, “Radical Christianity and Christian Radicalism.” In this essay, Maurice pointed to “two disastrous weaknesses which have beset the Christian community throughout its history. These are its theological timidity and its ethical insensitivity.” (Creasey 1973: 5) In contrast, he listed
many groups and movements which, throughout Christian history, have felt after a
quality of spiritual life and have sought to embody a pattern of Christian discipleship
closer than anything they saw in the church of their own day to that reflected in the
New Testament. (Creasey 1973: 7)
He gave special attention to two such movements: the sixteenth-century “Radical Reformation” (including the Anabaptists) and seventeenth-century Quakerism.
A number of Mennonite scholars were seeking ways of recovering the original Anabaptist vision. I sought and found opportunities to inter into dialogue with them and with some scholars from the Church of the Brethren, in hope of clarifying my understanding of the original Quaker vision in the context of a broader “radical Christianity and Christian radicalism.” One such opportunity came at a “Believers’ Church” conference in 1967, which included attenders from a wider variety of denominations. An instructive point of disagreement arose when a couple of persons present argued that, on principle, there could be no “mighty acts of God” after the close of the New Testament period, until the final establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. One Friend (was it Canby Jones?) responded that mighty acts of God have indeed occurred at times through the history of the Christian faith, and that we can expect more. I recognized this as a defining point of the Quaker vision; this might well be the true import of the Quaker concept of “continuing revelation.” With this in mind, I have even speculated on what events in Christian history might be candidates for consideration as further mighty acts of God. The career of St. Francis of Assisi and the founding of the Franciscan movement? The attempts to restore primitive Christianity -- the church of the cross -- by the earliest Anabaptists and the first Quakers? The founding of the Confessing Church in Germany and its struggle against Naziism? The non-violent campaigns of the 1960s civil rights movement in the American South, centered around the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.?
A few months after that conference, I was invited to join a small study group, the War-Nation-Church Study Group (WANACH), whose sessions I attended regularly once or twice a year as long as I continued teaching college. Members of that group from whom I gained important insights included Mennonites John Howard Yoder and Paul Peachey and Lutheran Larry Rasmussen.
The April 1968 meeting of the War-Nation-Church Study Group included a joint session with the Chicago Society for Biblical Research, at which John Howard Yoder read a remarkable paper on “The Possibility of a Messianic Ethic.” In this paper he proposed that Jesus was reaffirming the Old Testament vision of the jubilee year as the platform for his own social ethics. (Yoder later published this paper as part of his classic, The Politics of Jesus.) I found in this essay and in Rob Tucker’s “Revolutionary Faithfulness” a remarkable point of convergence between Mennonite and Quaker scholarship: all the more remarkable because I was able to make certain that neither Yoder nor Tucker was aware at the time of what the other was writing. I made this point of convergence the focus of a paper which I wrote in 1969. In particular, I pointed to John Yoder’s description, in his paper, of the community that Jesus was founding:
There are thus about the community of disciples those sociological traits most
characteristic of those who set about to change society: a visible structured fellowship,
a sober decision guaranteeing that the costs of commitment to the fellowship have
been consciously accepted, and a clearly defined life style distinct from that of the
crowd. This life style is different, not because of arbitrary rules, . . . but because of the
exceptionally normal quality of humanness to which the community is committed. The
distinctness is . . . a nonconformed quality of (“secular”) involvement in the life of the
world. It thereby constitutes an unavoidable challenge to the powers that be and the
beginning of a new set of social alternatives. (Yoder 1972: 46-47)
Meanwhile, in “Revolutionary Faithfulness,” Rob Tucker gave a description of the early Quaker community as a revolutionary fellowship:
It is instructive to make a list of specific revolutionary ingredients in original
Quakerism:
1) Early Friends knew that what they were doing really mattered in world history. . . .
History is God-in-history. To early Friends, they were the whole point of history. . . .
2) They possessed a revolutionary vision. . . . They envisioned a Christian world
radically different from the actual world; this was the source of their social
creativity. . . .
3) Early Friends were not class-bound. . . . They felt alienated from their society; they
were outsiders. . . .
4) Early Friends understood that revolutionists need the support of revolutionary
communities. . . .
The intense corporateness of early Quakerism is its most alien characteristic to us
today. . . .
5) Early Friends had a revolutionary discipline, summarized in the word
“faithfulness.” . . . Discipline . . . was understood dynamically in terms of loyalty to a
leader, rather than statically in terms of obeying rules. . . .
6) Finally, early Friends built a revolutionary apparatus through which to do the
work of overturning the old and instituting the new. (Tucker 1967: 6-8)
I noted in my paper that the similarity between Yoder’s and Tucker’s insights was at the sociological, descriptive level, and I was left hanging with a theological question:
“Even if we have some idea what such a community might look like, how does it actually come into being?” (Palmer 1969: 10) . . .
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