Isaiah 27 – The
Lord’s “terrible, swift sword” will
“punish Leviathan, the swiftly moving serpent” (27:1). And, following up on
image of the vineyard presented in Isaiah 5, the prophet tells us of God’s love
of it. “I, the Lord, will watch over it, watering it carefully. Day and night I
will watch so no one can harm it. My anger will be gone (27:3-4).
The Lord will burn up the “briers and thorns” (27:3) that
try to invade them, but if they “make their peace with me” (27:5), they will
find shelter in the Lord. The exiled will return and worship on the holy
mountain
From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through
Quakerism
Part 25
In January of 1980, I had an opportunity to attend a
conference in Pennsylvania of a Quaker group called New Foundation Fellowship,
led by a man named Lewis Benson. Born a Friend in 1909, Benson discovered the
writings of George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends, early in
his life, shortly after experiencing a Christian conversion similar in some
respects to the conversion Fox had undergone. Benson had been amazed to learn
how different Fox’s message was from the message he had grown up with as a
birthright Friend [even then]. By the late
1970s, he had become the leading authority on Fox and Fox’s theology among
Friends. The disparity between that theology and the relatively incoherent
theology of twentieth-century Friends distressed him, so he made it his life’s
work to try to revive the Christian vision of Fox in the Society of Friends.
New Foundation was only his latest effort to promote this mission.
The gathering was my first formal exposure to Fox’s thought
and to the kind of worship that could happen when everyone was gathered into
the same vision of Christ. It was very inspiring. I had read a little of Fox in
shorter pamphlets and collections of early Quaker writers, but now I became
familiar with his journal. Because of the importance of Fox’s vision to my own
ideas and my own journey, I need to spend some time presenting his thought. To
do that I must also touch a little on the historical context in which he lived.
Fox was born in 1624 in the midlands of England. To put that
date into some historical context, 1624
was just a little over a hundred years after Luther posted his Ninety-five
Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church and just a little under a hundred
years since England’s Henry VIII had broken from Rome to start the Church of
England. In that hundred years, England had suffered enormous religious
turmoil. Henry’s daughter Mary had tried to reestablish the Roman Catholic
Church, burning at the stake some three hundred Protestants in the effort. Elizabeth
I reversed her sister’s work and reestablished the Protestant church along more
“moderate” lines – keeping a good deal of the Catholic pageantry and
hierarchical structure while moving away from Catholic dogmas a bit more than
her father had.
At the same time all these religious changes were taking
place, the economic and political stability of the country was also being
shaken to the core, a shaking that brought forth numerous splinter groups of
religious dissenters. The dissenters had radical ideas about the shape
England’s social and political structure should assume. By the time Fox was
born, religious tolerance had gained a modest foothold in England, but radical
Protestants and Catholics were still subject to persecution – lose of property,
jailing, whipping, branding, and other trials. The brutality and persistence of
religious conflict in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would ultimately bring about an antireligious
reaction with the coming of the Enlightenment, but Fox lived in the turmoil
just before, a period of radical religious thought and millenarian
expectations. Fox was sixteen when the English Civil War broke out. He was
twenty-five when Charles I was put to death by the Puritan faction of the
English Parliament.
Fox describes himself in his journal as an ardent Christian
from his earliest years, but his devotion to Christ and his constant reading of
the scriptures did not bring him happiness. This depressed and distressed him.
At nineteen, he left home to seek out
someone who could give him advice or guide him, encourage him, and help him
achieve the kind of peace he thought the gospel of Christ promised to
believers. He visited everyone he thought might be able to help – all the
“experts” in religion – but no one could help him. His relatives tried to get
him to find a wife and settle down, but he was persistent. After a few years,
he began to have what he called “openings” into the gospel and the Scriptures –
things he felt clear and certain about. He realized, for example, that true
believer in Christ is not just someone who calls himself a Christian, but one
who has in some way “passed from death to life” (Fox, Journal, 7); that being a real “minister of Christ” (Fox, Journal, 11) meant more than just
getting a degree at a university; and “that God, who made the world, [really]
did not dwell in temples made with hands . . . but in people’s hearts” (Fox, Journal, 8).
Then, sometime in the year 1647, when he was twenty-three, Fox had a powerful personal experience of
God’s presence. He described it as a voice saying “There is one, even
Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition . . .[and] when I heard it my
heart did leap for joy” (Fox, Journal,
11). It is hard at first to understand
why these words had such revelatory power for Fox. He already believed that God
dwelled in human hearts, and he already knew that Christ was the center of his
faith. But what he experienced was not an intellectual idea but and experience
of God’s voice opening Christ’s presence to him in a very immediate way. Fox’s experience of Christ’s voice and
presence in him were not the end of his seeking, any more than they would be
for me centuries later. It was the beginning. For several years after this
opening, Fox continued struggling with the temptations and worldly habits that
kept him from entering into Christ’s peace. But he finally did come into a
state of mind and heart so settled and so sure of Christ’s support that he
described it as a kind of reentry into paradise. The idea that a Christian could come into such a blessed state in this
life outraged many contemporaries of Fox, who believed as a matter of doctrine
that man could never overcome sin in this life but had to wait for God’s reward
of peace in heaven. Fox didn’t mean by his claim that all the outward
incidences of life could be perfect – he suffered many outward hardships over
the course of his later life – but he never retracted his statement that
believers could come into a state of spiritual restoration in this life. In
fact, many of the “testimonies” Friends later became famous for flowed directly
from the conviction that they could.
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