Daily Old Testament: Isaiah 29 and My Own Book "Leadings: A Catholic's Journey Through Quakerism" (Part 27)

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.

The Barbados Letter or statement basically goes through the major points of the Apostles’ Creed and affirms the facts stated therein in an attempt to silence criticism of Friends’ doctrinal orthodoxy. The letter appears on pages 602-606 of Fox’s Journal

Daily Bible Reading: Amos 9 and John 5:24-47

Amos 9 – In another vision, the prophet sees the Lord standing by the altar asking that the building be reduced to rubble so that no one can escape. God has led not only the Jews. He has led the Philistines and the Aramaeans too. The Israelites cannot just rest on their laurels, thinking God will always be by them. But his anger will not strike all. There will be a remnant, “For now I will issue orders and shake the House of Israel among all the nations, as you shake a sieve so that not one pebble can fall on the ground. All the sinners of my people are going to perish by the sword, all those who say, ‘No misfortune will ever touch us, nor even come anywhere near us’” (9:9-10).

The book ends with a vision of restoration – possibly added on. “’The days are coming now—it is Yahweh who speaks—when harvest will follow directly after ploughing, the treading of grapes soon after sowing, when the mountains will run with new wine and the hills all flow with it. I mean to restore the fortunes of my people Israel; they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them, plant vineyards and drink their wine, dig gardens and eat their produce. I will plant them in their own country, never to be rooted up again out of the land I have given them, says Yahweh, your God’” (9:13-15).

John 5:24-47 - Jesus goes on to speak more broadly of the “life” – “the eternal life” – he offers us. I will use the simplest English translation: “I am telling you the truth: those who hear my words and believe in him who sent me have eternal life. They will not be judged, but have already passed from death to life . . . the time is coming – the time has already come – when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear it will come to life” (5:24-25). 

Then he speaks again, this time just a little bit differently, of this life-giving power: “[T]he time is coming when all the dead will hear his voice and come out of their graves: those who have done good will rise and live, and those who have done evil will rise and be condemned” (5:28-29).

It seems on the surface as if he is speaking of two separate times – a spiritual resurrection that can happen NOW and a resurrection to judgment and separation of good and evil that will come at the end of time. It is mysterious!

The main power Jesus has in John, the power that makes him one with the Father, is his power to bring life out of death. And it is not just a promise of life after our physical death; it is a promise of a life we are not fully living NOW. We think we are living, but the natural state of man on this earth is not real life – the life God meant us to live when He created us - but merely a physical (or fleshly) semblance of life.  In saying this, John is continuing to place his gospel message in the context of the Genesis narrative. In Genesis 2, the second creation narrative in the redacted text, God tells Adam, “’You may eat indeed of all the trees in the garden. Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die’” (Gen.2:18). When Eve and Adam violate this “word” or commandment, they do not die physically – not immediately – but they do die spiritually; and this spiritual death, which we all partake in, is the death John’s gospel wrestles with. It is this death we are already in that Christ can bring us out of.

TS Eliot also put this Johannine vision into powerful words:

But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender (Eliot’s “Dry Salvages” V, 16-21)

This is the dimension where Christianity reveals its unique truth – at the crossroads of timelessness and time where the incarnation happens, where we can become joined with our eternal Father through love of His Son.

I think George Fox and early Friends understood this dimension of the gospel in a unique and powerful way.  That’s why they placed such urgent emphasis upon hearing the voice of God, experiencing the judgment of Christ inwardly, and clinging to that inward presence so it would bring you into life.

Returning to the text, Jesus goes on to speak about John the Baptist.  He says that John was “a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. But I have a testimony greater than John’s” (5:35-36). Then Jesus speaks of ALL the signs or testimonies that have pointed to him, to Jesus. John the Baptist testified to Jesus’ coming; the works Jesus performs testify to his truth, and the ancient scriptures too testify to Jesus, but the people still do not want to believe. Jesus tells them it will not be he who accuses them of unfaithfulness. They say they believe in what Moses has taught, but Moses too has testified to Jesus and they do not SEE it (Deut. 18:15).