Isaiah 29 – This
oracle probably dates from the period preceding the siege and deliverance of
Jerusalem in 701. According to a New
Jerusalem bible note, the name Ariel
means “lion of God” and is a name given by the prophet to Jerusalem. Here
the prophet foresees the deliverance of the city despite the spirit of lethargy
that the city’s prophets exhibit.
The anger of the Lord is still there against the great city:
“Because this people approaches me only in words, honors me only with
lip-service while its heart is far from me” (29:13). “I shall have to go on
being prodigal of prodigious prodigies with this people. The wisdom of its
sages shall decay, the intelligence of its intelligent men shall be shrouded”
(29:13-14).
The lowly, however, will be able to rejoice because the
tyrants and scoffers will be taken from them.
From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through
Quakerism
Part 27
The fact that this
radically inward approach to the gospel, which he considered the “true” gospel
of Christ had never been preached, as far as Fox was aware, at any point in
Christian history did not sway him from believing it was true. It made him think that he might be playing
a part in the end time story described so mysteriously and symbolically in
Revelation. I think Fox thought that his recovery and reproclamation of
this long lost gospel might actually
bring about the culmination of history that the first-century church had
expected. Maybe the Second Coming had not occurred because the preaching of the
gospel had not gone forward as faithfully as it was meant to have gone. For a
time, it seems possible that Fox believed it might come in his day, inasmuch as
he was preaching the gospel Christ had wanted preached sixteen hundred years
earlier. So Fox went out and preached his radical version of the gospel, and
thousands were gathered in months. Quakerism spread like wildfire in its first
years.
Fox saw his mission as calling people off the outward things
that the “judaisers” in the church had instituted and pointing them toward
their true teacher, the inwardly experienced Christ:
[. . .] the Lord Christ Jesus was come
to teach his people himself and bring them off all the world’s ways and
teachers to Christ, their way to God; and I laid open all their teachers and
set up the true teacher, Christ Jesus; and how they were judged by the
prophets, Christ, and the apostles; and to bring them off the temples made with
hands, that they themselves might know they were the temples of God (Fox Journal 107).
The despair people struggled with as Christians worrying
about their souls, fretting about whether or not they were saved, not being
able to come into a state of spiritual rest or peace came from being caught up
in useless and empty forms and forgetting that the covenant of Christ was
inward and real and full of power. People had forgotten the spring of water
that was bubbling within them:
Oh, when will you be weary of feeding on the wind, and of husks among
swine, and on that which dies of itself? And when will you inquire after the
living God, who is power? How long have you talked of his power to come? Many
years. You are still as far off, if not further, than you were before. You have
told of the glory of the Lord to be revealed, and of his law being written in
the heart, and of God teaching his people himself, and of his spirit being
poured out on his sons and daughters; and you cannot see that you have obtained
nothing” (Howgill, Early Quaker Writings,
179).
Friends were
determined not to make the same mistake. As people responded to Fox’s
message and were gathered together in community, the “form” of worship they
instituted was a corporate silence, where everyone waited on the Spirit to open
God’s word to them, to speak that word as led and to come into the peace and
rest of God. But the elimination of outward forms, complete as it was, did not
mean that Friends rejected the historical reality of Jesus’ coming as Christ or
the basic truths contained in the creeds. It was not a rejection of the
fundamental revelation contained in the Scriptures. The truth as Fox and early
Friends saw it was incoherent and inconceivable without these things. This, of
course, did not stop his seventeenth-century opponents from saying that Fox
denied Christ, the creeds, and Scripture. In 1671, Fox and Quaker leaders
issued a letter denying these slanders formally, but the slanders continued.
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