Confessing Together that Christ Is Come

Is the confession that “Christ is come in the flesh” at the point of convergence for theistic and nontheistic Friends? As Bierce might ask, “Can such things be?”

The phrase “Christ is come in the flesh” is from 1 John 4:1-4.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.

A “professor” named William Jeffries attempted to use that passage against the primitive Quakers, writing, “The spirit of antichrist denies Christ come in the flesh, and says the light within is Christ, when at the best it is but the light of nature.” As do his responses to other such charges, George Fox’s response to Jeffries implies a sharp distinction between the belief that Christ came to earth (lived, died, and was raised) 2,000 years ago, which is apostate Christianity’s basis of faith, and the Quakers’ experience that Christ is come here and now in his saints, in the reality of the inner Light, by which his flesh is known in our own.

Before looking at Fox’s response to Jeffries, which will tell us more about what the phrase “Christ is come in the flesh” means in primitive Quaker exegesis and theology, a few words of caution and preparation are in order.

It’s all too easy for us to read Fox under the influence of 2,000 years of the apostate (i.e., defective!) Christian worldview. It is helpful to remember that truth is not a cognitive datum for primitive Quakerism, but is the living Christ himself (who, it bears repeating, is not a cognitive datum). Because, as Fox often said, Christ is the power of God (e.g., The Great Mystery, hereinafter GM, p. 464; see also 1 Cor. 1:24), we can say that “truth is power.” We know Christ by being empowered in his divine life of love here and now. In that intimate union, his flesh and ours is one: we are “flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone” (see Gen. 2:23 and Eph. 5:30).

The church — we saints — is, then, the very body of Christ. Another traditional image of the church, that of the bride of Christ, also tells us that we are formed, as was Eve of Adam’s, of Christ’s own flesh. Fox puts the two together and tells us how to become thus incorporated into Christ: we are, in the mythic and paradoxical language of scripture, to spiritually eat the flesh of Christ. “[T]he saints are ‘flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone,’ and the church which he is head of, is his body. And every one that eats his flesh, knows his body given for the life of the world …” (GM, p. 51). To “eat” Christ’s spiritual flesh (cf. Gen. 9:4 and John 6:53) in holy communion means to be “partakers of the divine nature” through “his divine power” (2 Peter 1: 3-4) — to become, through living in the light and power of love, the living flesh and blood and bone of Christ here and now. This is not what the world knows as Christianity.

Here now is the heart of Fox’s response to Jeffries:

[No one can] know him in the flesh, confess him ‘come in the flesh,’ or know his flesh, or the flesh of the son of man, but who are in the light that comes from him that ‘doth enlighten every man,’ &c…. And walking in the light, it leads into the day, where there is no night, which light is Christ the covenant of God; and such come to know the darkness past. Now I say [none who have their] eyes closed to that of God in them … can ‘confess Christ come in the flesh,’ but only from the letter; for these know not his flesh. [...] The apostates must come all to that which they have ravened from inwardly, before they come to know Christ’s flesh, and are of his flesh, and eat his flesh, and ‘confess that Christ is come in the flesh,’ who is the offering, and the sacrifice of the whole world that makes the peace between God and man, and ‘perfects for ever them that are sanctified.’ — GM, pp. 246-247, emphasis added.

“Christ the covenant of God” refers, of course, to the New Covenant (or Testament) of which the Hebrew scriptures speak:

And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever. (Micah 4:3-5)

and

[T]his shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

This is the new covenant/testament of peace and toleration which Paul said is “not of words [gramma: the letter; the written word; the scripture], for words kill, but of spirit, for spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). “The new covenant is Christ” (GM, p. 507), who is himself the way, the truth, the life, the gospel, the power of God (again, see GM p. 464).

In the theopoetic imagery of 1 John, it is the spirits in us that make confession, and anyone in whom the spirit is confessing that “Christ is come in the flesh” is of the spirit of God. How does the spirit make that confession in us? Again, it is not in words; as Fox points out repeatedly, the devil, the antichrist, the apostates believe and say those words. As we have seen, truth is power. Christ is come in power (GM, p. 449). To confess that “Christ is come in the flesh,” then, has nothing to do with words or beliefs: it is nothing other than to live in the power of the God who is love, to be the living presence of Christ here and now.

As Quakerism has always recognized, one need not know the words “God” and “Christ,” or the story of Jesus, in order to do that, whereas “many have the words, and [yet] deny the word itself [e.g., the divine Logos, the creating, illuminating, enlivening power of God]” — and “the word is Christ and God” (GM, pp.364 and 463, respectively). To actually “confess that Christ is come in the flesh” is to surrender to the searching and empowering work of the light of love in the heart. Then one’s life is the divine spirit’s confession, a confession not in words but in the Word, which is “the true light that enlightens every one,” the creative power of love “made flesh” in us.*

Principle. He [i.e., Samuel Eaton, "who calls himself a teacher of the church of Christ"] saith he doth ‘not believe that there is any substantial, essential, or personal union betwixt the eternal spirit and believers.’

Answer. [But] the scripture saith, the spirit dwells in the saints, 1 Cor. 6, and, ‘He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.’ 1 John 1. As though the saints had not union with God, which the scripture saith they have. — GM, p. 34.

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits….” The spirit of the God of love is Christ, the head of the body of saints, we saints who, abiding in love, are “flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone.” Christ is come in our flesh. In light of the reality expressed in those theopoetic images, we see that words and beliefs are mere pointers, pointers that lead to delusion and death when spirits are poorly discerned. The world believes that it knows Christ, that it confesses Christ come in the flesh, but that confession, in words of belief, leaves evil rampant: the bloody “man of sin,” the spirit of self, still dominates the world. It is only in our effective life-confession, our living in the power of love, that evil is overcome. “Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.”

Here, again, in our living in the unity of the holy spirit of perfect and perfecting love, not in the words “Christ is come in the flesh” but in their actualization, is the point of convergence for Friends. We do well to keep that before us, to live and celebrate our unity in the “universal love” that many of us name “God,” “till we all come, in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

——
* From “Several scriptures corrupted by the translators” in Fox, The Great Mystery, p. 582 (punctuation and emphasis edited): “John i. 14: ‘The word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us’; in the Greek it is in us …. By true interpretation it is, ‘the word became flesh, and pitched his tent in us.’”

To Bridge or Not to Bridge

My 8/21/09 post on “Worship, Nontheism, & Convergence” proposed a bridge by which theistic and nontheistic Quakers might come together, a bridge that I have found in my ministry to be eminently useful for that purpose (with the welcome effect, by the way, of helping some of us to better obey the advice to “take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts”). The post applied a standard reading of a scripture passage — and I am grateful for seasoned Friends’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of that reading — as a hermeneutical key to unlock the reported primitive Quaker experience qua text, a key that the texts themselves harbor as well.

Comprising only about 1,300 words and being shaped to its purpose, the 8/21 post is not a tiny theological or philosophical treatise or the prelude to one; it is simply a light on a way forward in the sometimes stalled, often acrimonious, always peculiar interfaith dialogue between theistic and nontheistic Friends. As interfaith dialogue requires, it is an attempt to point to a commonality, to a place where we might be together in peace, might even work and worship together, while we explore other commonalities and differences. It’s understandable that such an endeavor would arouse anxiety, and, not unexpectedly, I have received a number of complaints — that I am attempting to reduce God, to distort Quakerism, to rewrite scripture or history, or to do some other irresponsible thing — that, being pressed, seem to want to justify switching off this light, shutting down this bridge. They’ve kept me busy. And in addition to those conversations, other corre­spondents have helped develop the topic, while yet others have written about further interesting, more or less related, material, and it’s easy and all too enjoyable for me to walk down that road with them.

I am very grateful, if a bit overwhelmed, for the dialogue, for the sharing of concerns and information, and for the challenges that have helped me think more clearly and carefully. I’m even grateful for some opportunities to respond to adamantine opinion; if nothing else, they fired up the little gray cells, and sometimes they brought out additional aspects of the topic as well. I have tried to reply to everyone, but I may not be able to continue that: I lack the time now, I have increasingly frequent Internet access problems (thanks, Verizon), and I want the post to serve as intended and not be lost in clouds of (again, more or less) related conversation, however much I have learned from my correspondents in these threads.

So while further comments on that post are certainly welcome, I can’t promise to publish or reply to those that rehash issues already discussed or that carry us into philosophical or other areas much beyond the scope of the post. I want to use the time I can give to that post to focus on its ministry of reconciliation for those who are open to the message. And I have more posts in me; for one thing, I’d like to get back to my analysis of George Fox’s metanoia.

I’ll leave you tonight with this from Thomas Merton‘s No Man Is an Island (1955, p. 165):

Charity [i.e., caritas, love] alone is perfectly free, always doing what it pleases, since it wills nothing except to love and cannot be prevented from loving. Without charity, knowledge is fruitless. Love alone can teach us to penetrate the hidden goodness of the things we know. Knowledge without love never enters into the inner secrets of being. Only love can truly know God as He is, for God is love.

Worship, Nontheism, & Convergence

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.” (Acts 2:1)

In seventeen years of online discussions with other Quakers, I have found that Friends who hold belief in the personal God of Western tradition may have a difficult time understanding even the possibility of worship for a nontheist. Their assumption seems to be that Quaker worship is, like other forms of worship, an act of reverence toward an object of worship, and that therefore a person who does not believe in God has no divine object and cannot worship. If the assumption were correct, then the conclusion — that nontheist Quakers do not actually engage in Quaker worship — might follow. But the assumption is erroneous. It does not reflect the unique Quaker understanding of worship as taught, for example, by George Fox.

We can read about George Fox’s understanding of worship in various places in his collected Works. But grasping it is difficult, because we tend to approach Fox’s words with unrecognized preconceptions about his meaning. It’s easy to forget the fact that Fox and other Friends, convinced that everything that had come between the apostles and them had been cunning distortions of the Antichrist, completely re-defined Christianity. Those distortions, which continue to shape almost all of Christian thought, color our interpretation of both Fox and scripture in ways that we fail to see. And so we are quite confident that we read Fox and the scriptures aright (as he might say), and we don’t realize that our confidence is blind.

But even to justify that assertion, much less to explicate Quaker worship from the writings of Fox and other primitive Friends, would require quite a bit of space (and time). So I’ll just wade in now and define Quaker worship as succinctly as I can, assisted by a couple of passages from an epistle by George Fox. If anyone feels that I am in error, we can examine the primitive texts together. I can say, however, that I have studied those texts sufficiently to be confident of the fidelity of my definition. I do my best to apply the testimony of integrity to my explications of historic Quakerism. And I am a realist who avoids anachronism; I don’t pretend, for example, that primitive Quakerism was somehow not theistic.

I said above that it is erroneous to assume that Quaker worship is, like other forms of worship, an act of reverence toward an object of worship. But if it is not that, then what is it? Simply put, Quaker worship, modeled on, among other passages, the biblical story of Pentecost, is “silent waiting upon God.” That’s a very different thing.

Before letting George Fox speak to us about silent waiting, I want to help nontheists as well as theists to hear him — and to hear each other. Because, as 1 John 4 asserts, God is love and love is God, and because, as Paul asserts, Christ is “the image [in whom we are made; see Gen. 1:27] of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), we can define worship in a way that speaks to theists and nontheists by simply substituting the word “love” for “God” and “Christ” in the source texts. That substitution has been made (except when the meaning would not be clear, or when mythological agency is attributed) in the following passages from Fox.*

And this is to all that would learn silent waiting upon [love] and silent meeting; for none shall ever come to [love] … but as they do come to that of [love] in them, the light which [love] hath enlightened them withal; and that is it which must guide everyone’s mind up to [love], and to wait upon [love] to receive the spirit from [love], and the spirit leads to wait upon [love] in silence, and to receive from [love].

Other than waiting patiently and trustingly for the working of love in our hearts, then, we perform no action in Quaker worship. Our worship is essentially passive. Therefore there is no object toward which our worship is directed, toward which we proffer reverence. We’re simply waiting to feel the motions of love directing our lives. Thus do we avoid the error of attempting to objectify, to reify, God. And thus do we, if we are theists, avoid the error of secretly thinking that we are pleasing God by the work of worship.

Such worship is proper for Friends because Quakerism is about leaving behind all “types and figures” — i.e., words and mental images (which “are spoken to the carnal part of man”**) — and entering the “substance,” which Fox said is Christ — i.e., love. So there is no need for one to be a theist in order to join in Quaker worship, because silent waiting upon love’s working in the heart is the whole of it.

Keep to that of [love] in you, when you are still from your own thoughts and imaginations, and desires and counsels of your own hearts, and motions, and will; when you stand single from all these, waiting upon [love], your strength is renewed; he that waits upon [love], feels his shepherd, and he shall not want: and that which is of [love] in every one, is that which brings them together to wait upon [love], which brings them to unity, which joins their hearts together up to [love]. … [F]or the light is the door, the light is the power, that doth enlighten every man that cometh into the world, that all through the light might believe, and he that believeth is entered into his rest [i.e., sabbath], hath ceased from his own works as God did from his [after creating the world], and he hath the witness in himself. And he that is born of [love] overcometh the world, he does not make haste: he knows a silent meeting and waiting upon [love]; and knows that … Christ ([love's] covenant of peace, of light with [love] and man) they must come into; then all flesh must be silent before [love]; so the life of [love] comes to guide.

We talk about being “convergent Friends,” yet even in our converging we continue to push each other away, breaking the body of love with words, dividing the “substance” by “types and figures.” George Fox has something to say about that, too, in the same epistle:

And you that think yourselves above the world … giving names one to another, throwing dirt one to another, where the enmity is … and they that do so, mock one another; and here is the generation of mockers, out of the life, and out of the light, and every one striving for mastery and lordship and authority one over another: but it shall not be so with you who are children of light, disciples of [love], not of this world, whose kingdom is not of this world, and who come out of strife, come into peace.

The shared, traditional understanding of Quaker worship as silent waiting upon and submission to the working of love in the heart can and should be the point of real convergence for all Friends.

This time, dear reader, I leave the word substitutions to you:

[A]nd all people, know the mind of Christ (which none can but who come to the light he hath enlightened them withal), that you may come to be of one mind, heart and soul; and all people wait to receive the spirit of Christ Jesus, which if you have not, you are none of his; and all people come to live in the power of godliness … and you will come to live in the gospel [which, as Fox often reminded us, is the power of God-who-is-love].

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Notes:
* Except as indicated below, all passages from George Fox are adapted, as described in the text, from “An Epistle to All People on the Earth,” which begins on page 119 of Vol. 4 of the 1831 edition of Works. For a classic primitive Quaker statement on love as the nature of God, see Isaac Penington’s Concerning Love.
** Fox, Works Vol. 4, p. 34

Wrestling with Nothingness

The intuition of nonexistence, which I wrote about recently, continues. It has a definite Buddhist flavor, as in these lines from Ryōkan (1758–1831), a Zen Buddhist poet and hermit.*

This is an old truth; don’t think it was discovered recently.
“I want this, I want that”
Is nothing but foolishness.
I’ll tell you a secret:
All things are impermanent.

But given my bi-spirituality, I acknowledge a Christian aspect as well. Zen and Christianity come together in the religious experience of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who, through his writings, was my spiritual guide for many of my younger years, and who in the latter part of his life studied and wrote about the Zen experience. Here is a statement from an interview with Brother Paul Quenon, a Trappist who studied under Merton at Gethsemane Abbey.

[Merton and I] were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness.

Wrestling with nothingness seems to be a good description of where the intuition leads me. If I possessed the kind of theistic faith that sustained Merton, I might be able to frame the intuition as apophatic mysticism. When I am just coming out of the experience, I can sense how easily my perception of it could be changed by such faith. But while I don’t rule faith out on a priori grounds, each time I consider it I see that the world makes less, not more, sense from the perspective of theism. And so I wrestle, trying to come to terms with the experience, learning to accept the unacceptable and to allow this reality to shape my remaining time.

For without God, emptiness is truly empty. In Buddhist thought, the term “voidness” is not always reframed as “plenitude”: sometimes it is permitted to mean what it says, and that’s how I must use it now. This all seems most ironic to me, that a man who is grasped by the moral vision of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus comes, as he approaches the end of his life, to this Buddhist-like experience of voidness, of emptiness — without even the escape hatch of a substantialist interpretation of the doctrine of Buddha-nature, sometimes used to pretend that emptiness isn’t really empty.

Ryōkan again:

The village has disappeared in the evening mist
And the path is hard to follow.
Walking through the pines,
I return to my lonely hut.

When I was young, the Catholic Church was my village. (See “The Making of a Quaker Atheist.”) Leaving there discouraged, I found this poor heart-hut at hand and stayed here, thinking that it would be but a temporary shelter. It became my base for exploration. After wandering about and staying awhile among other communities, I discovered the Quaker village, and it is there that I continue to visit when I leave my inner hermitage. But that village, too, is swallowed by mist at the end of the day, and I see no path elsewhere. In the obscurity of age, I return to my lonely self. I will visit the village again, but I understand now that this temporary hut is my spiritual home. And I am beginning to understand that no one lives here. But if that truly is the case, I wish I could learn it fully while no one is still someone.

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.” — Ryōkan

In the physical house in which I bide my time, there is a beautiful, although damaged, Buddhist shrine, in which reside images of the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Thích Quảng Đức (who immolated himself in Saigon when I was 13 years old). For a couple of years, the shrine, facing a space too small for sitting in meditation, has been closed. The shrine is something like my heart: beautiful, intricate, Bodhisattva-harboring; broken, misoriented, latched. Today, I think I will turn both of us around and open the doors.

———-
*Note: passages from Ryōkan are from “Zen Poetics of Ryokan” by Meng-hu, reprinted at The Hermitary.
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[Related post: "I Know What It's Like to Be Dead"]

That of God, Spirit, and Light — Lite

Almost a month ago, I quoted F. S. C. Northrop in a post on modern liberal Quakerism.” (I use “modern” to refer to the Enlightenment-influenced worldview that was undermined by the events of the twentieth century.) Northrop wrote that “the truly important thing” for the modern person is either material “substances” or

the blank, purely spiritual, intrinsically unemotional, introspectively given mental substance with which … he communes on the Sabbath. … Thus the Quaker, sitting in silence without a professional preacher in his unadorned meetinghouse, most directly, completely, and perfectly exemplifies the religion of [the] modern Cartesian and Lockean man.⁽¹⁾

I went on to point out that the subjectivism (“truth = what’s true for me”) of contemporary liberal Quakerism remains tethered to the modernist paradigm. But I didn’t explain why I thought so. I want to write a little about that now.

We liberal Quakers talk about “that of God,” Spirit, and Light as if we agree on the meanings of those terms. If asked to define them, however, those of us who can answer at all tend to take refuge in fuzzy God- (or non-God-) talk: “the divine,” “the Spirit of God,” “a spark of the divine in each of us.” If asked to define our defining terms (i.e., “God,” “the divine”), we get even fuzzier, and our subjectivism becomes apparent: a typical response begins with, “For me, ….” We began speaking about something we hold in common — belief in Spirit, the Light, that of God — but within seconds we’re talking about individual notions, because what we hold in common has very little content.

What has happened to us?

We’ve forgotten narrative. We’ve forgotten that a society, especially a religious society, is a community of a narrative. And we’ve forgotten that, as Jacques Derrida said, there “there is nothing outside context.”⁽²⁾

In their proper context, Spirit, Light, and that of God are characters in a narrative. Within the narrative they have well-defined characteristics and roles. They have life. And they have evocative power. Ripped from that narrative, they become vague metaphysical notions that stir no one: Northrop’s “blank, purely spiritual, intrinsically unemotional, introspectively given mental substance.” On that blank canvas, each of us paints a more or less impressionistic picture of what they mean for me — a process that may take care of “me” but does not “answer that of God” in the other to whom we speak.

But that modern, individualistic avoidance of “indebtedness to the other”⁽³⁾ seems to be what many of us want, although we may resemble a certain egghead.

Alice: I don’t know what you mean by “that of God in every one.”
Quaker: Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “people are basically good.”
Alice: But “that of God in every one” doesn’t mean “people are basically good.”
Quaker: When I use a phrase, it means just what I choose it to mean — for me. You may choose to use it in some other way.

Characters in a narrative, indeed.

———-
(1) F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West. New York, Macmillan, 1964. Page 92.
(2) Quoted in James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2006. Page 52.
(3) From Frans van Peperstraten, “Displacement or composition? Lyotard and Nancy on the trait d’union between Judaism and Christianity.” Int J Philos Relig (2009) 65:29–46. Available here under Open Access. Describing Lyotard’s views, van Peperstraten says, “Modernity, … according to Lyotard, no longer requires any dispossession [of self]. Christianity means that man becomes ‘taken into possession by’ … an alterity, whereas modernity holds that one can be freed from all indebtedness to the other ….”

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[For related posts, see the "Liberal Quakerism" category.]

George Fox, Metanarrator – Part 8, “There is one”

Having described his ongoing depression and the changes in his behavior and thinking that accompany its remissions, George Fox, in the most well-known passage in the Journal, next provides a narrative account of his awakening. The passage is, of course, the one in which we find the famous “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” I find it useful to approach the passage as I would a narrative in the Christian scriptures: as a story that relates events that may or may not have happened, but that dramatizes and communicates religious experience in a memorable way. And Fox’s story certainly does that.

In the beginning of the narrative, which appears in the Journal after Fox has begun presenting events of 1647, Fox takes us back in his chronology in order to work forward from the second “opening,” which apparently had happened sometime in 1646. It was of 1646 that Fox wrote, “So neither them, nor any of the dissenting people could I join with; but was as a stranger to all, relying wholly upon the Lord Jesus Christ” (Journal, p. 72, 1831 Works). On the surface, that’s a one-sentence summary of what he is about to portray in narrative detail. But there’s much beneath the surface.

The remarks leading up to the narrative, although written from a later perspective, can serve as a kind of introduction.

[T]he apostates [i.e., defectors] from the life in which the prophets and apostles were, have got their words, the holy scriptures, in a form, but not in the life nor spirit that gave them forth. So they all lie in confusion, and … to fulfill the law and command of Christ in his power and spirit, … that they say they cannot do [they are quoting scripture to "plead for sin"]; but to fulfill the lusts of the flesh, that they can do with delight.

After that complaint, Fox launches into his story, in which we will learn the surprising meaning of what he has just described.

After I had received that opening from the Lord, that to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge, was not sufficient to fit a man to be a minister of Christ, I regarded the priests less, and looked more after the dissenting people. … But as I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them that could speak to my condition.

His condition, as we have seen, was that he was upset and depressed about what he had described above: Christianity manifestly did not deliver people from the evil within them, no one could tell him why that was so or how it could be changed, and consequently he had become fearful, isolated, and near despair.

The climax builds quickly.

And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, Oh! then I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” And when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.

I am reminded of Luke’s story of Mary and Elizabeth, in which Elizabeth says that, at the sound of Mary’s salutation, “the babe [which would become the prophet John the Baptist] leaped in my womb for joy.” But I’m more strongly reminded of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain:

[Lk. 6:22] Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake. [23] Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.

Fox is becoming a prophet, and he has already learned that, like the prophets of old, he will be rejected and called evil or mad by family members, “professors,” religious authorities, and others who are not “tender.” But of course he had first to reject the teachings and beliefs of all of those others. And as a prophet instructed directly and only by the Lord, Fox’s job will be to speak God’s judgment upon the seducers and call them to turn to the living Christ for enlightenment.

Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him all the glory. For all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief, as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have pre-eminence, who enlightens, and gives grace, faith, and power.

Now Fox understands why he could be helped by no one: he would have become a follower of some humanly-devised system, some “invention of men,” and remained “shut up in unbelief.” He may never have awakened to the true faith, and he may never have realized that he was to be the prophetic vehicle for God’s restoration of the church. But Fox is sure now that the church is to be restored in Christ through him; what Fox is describing in this narrative, what he is experiencing in himself, is to be the norm for all. Through Fox, people will be directed to the light and power of Christ within, the only one who can lead them out of ignorance and sin. This is the time of God’s decisive action for salvation; the Kingdom of God is now arriving in power. In the next two sentences, Fox tells us why he is certain of that.

Thus when God doth work, who shall let [i.e., hinder] it? And this I knew experimentally.

In modern Quaker materials, I have seen the narrative presented in a condensed form in which “who enlightens, and gives grace, faith, and power” is directly followed, through the magic of the ellipsis, by the reference to experimental knowledge. That gives the impression that what Fox knew “experimentally” was the voice directing him to Christ, or, by implication, Christ himself speaking in Fox’s head. And then we are told that “experimentally” simply means “experientially.” But why would Fox go to the trouble of telling us that an experience was experiential? And if he did, why not insert that redundancy immediately, rather than interpose a few sentences?

I suggest that if we attend to Fox’s syntax (remembering, too, that he was dictating) and to the overall direction of his thought at this point, we will see that, when he says he knew experimentally, Fox may be saying that he has learned from his own life experience the answer to the question, “When God doth work, who shall [hinder] it?”

If that is his assertion, then what has he learned? In the King James Version, I find the word “let” used in the sense of “hinder” only in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. The passage is dense, but it leads us to an important insight into Fox’s experience.

[2Th 2:1] Now we beseech you … [2] That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled … as that the day of Christ is at hand. [3] Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; [4] Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. [5] Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? [6] And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. [7] For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. [8] And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: [9] Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, [10] And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

The “falling away” (verse 3) is the 1,600-year apostasy of Christianity. The “man of sin” is the Antichrist, who, both within us and without, usurps the place of God as revealer of truth and even object of worship. The epistle says that the reign of the man of sin is part of the divine plan, and that he will be “revealed,” unmasked, at the appointed time. Until then, “he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.” Who could it be who hinders the revelation of that man of sin “whose coming is after [i.e., according to] the working of Satan”?

Fox recognizes that hinderer as Satan himself: until now, Satan has prevented the exposure of the man of sin at the heart of the individual and the church. But, more importantly, Fox now knows “experimentally” that God has begun to work: Satan is being “taken out of the way.” Fox has experienced that in his own life as he has been freed from the seduction of Antichrist’s false religion; he has seen the man of sin unmasked in his heart and in the church. Now that the “mystery of iniquity” has been revealed for Fox through the interplay of life experience and scripture, the reign of Antichrist will end as Fox exposes him, turning people away from the man of sin to the living power of Christ within, the “hidden man of the heart” (1 Peter 3:4).

And that is the point of Fox’s story: the final work of God has begun. The end is at hand for Satan’s minions, the “priests and professors,” as it is for the man of sin in the heart: Christ the Light is come to teach his people himself, and the Antichrist he “shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.” It is time for people to reject the impotent external religions and to look to the transforming power of the Light within. The priests’ and professors’ days of selling lies and “pleading for sin” are coming to an end. And God has chosen George Fox to tell them so. There is one, even George Fox, that can speak to their condition.

Next post in this series: George Fox’s Metanoia
Previous: “Heavens in the Heart”

George Fox, Metanarrator – Part 7: Heavens In the Heart

In Part 4 of this series, we considered three “openings,” or revelatory insights, that George Fox described as occurring soon after his depression had begun to heal. It will be useful to recall the content of those openings. Here’s Fox’s own summary.

[1] I saw that to be a true believer was another thing than they looked upon it to be; …

[2] and I saw that being bred at [university] did not qualify or fit a man to be a minister of Christ;

[3] … the Lord showed me clearly, that he did not dwell in those temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people’s hearts.

Fox has decided that the problem is not in the faith of Christ, but in the interpretations and practices of the self-identified Christians whose behavior has depressed him. Given the evil behavior and Antichristian doctrine of the churches, it is evident that virtually all of Christianity is wrong and has been wrong for a very long time. Fox is rediscovering the original, true faith. He is doing that, as we have seen in previous posts, by returning to the source, the scriptures, and reading them in light of the apostasy of Christianity.

I’ll pick up now where we stopped in the Journal, about a page before Fox relates the famous “There is one” experience. Here, Fox is describing his condition: depression alternating with experiences of insight and hope.

Though I had great openings, yet great trouble and temptations came many times upon me, so that when it was day I wished for night, and when it was night I wished for day; and by reason of the openings I had in my troubles, I could say as David said, ‘Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge’ [Psalm 19:2]. When I had openings they answered one another, and answered the scriptures; for I had great openings of the scriptures; and when I was in troubles, one trouble also answered to another.

“When it was day I wished for night, and when it was night I wished for day” describes the depression, the “troubles,” but repeatedly breaking into that depression are the openings, the revelations of a new day: “day unto day uttereth speech [of God's glory: see below], and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” Psalm 19 expresses Fox’s realization of the falsity and mind-seducing evil of “the whore” Christianity as well as his conviction that God is to now be known within the human heart as Christ returns in — and as — power that overcomes evil.

[Ps. 19:1] The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. [2] Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [3] There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard [i.e., all peoples can understand the heavens' testimony to God's glory]. …

Human teachers are not needed. Revelation is an ongoing, universally present event for those who have “eyes to see.” The passage would have reminded Fox of Romans 1, which we will discuss below: in the passage in Romans, which builds on the psalm, revelation is found within. Continuing with Psalm 19:

[7] The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple. [8] The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.

Verses 7 and 8 can be related to Fox’s openings. (1) True believers are those who are converted to God’s perfect law. (2) God speaks to the simple true believers, who have no university education, making them wise. (3) The perfect law is “written” in the heart, in the speaking of God within: the new covenant (see Jer. 31:31-34) is a reality.

[9] The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether…. [11] Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward. [12] Who can understand his [own] errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.

Fox would have had access to the Geneva Bible, which provided commentary for many verses. The Geneva commentary on verse 9b, “the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether,” is of interest: “So that all man’s inventions and intentions are lies,” says the commentary; “Everyone without exception.” (We should recall that statement when we discuss the “There is one” experience.) Fox is beginning to understand the reason for his “troubles”: he is being taught that all people “are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief,” as he will later say; and he is being cleansed from the “secret” or hidden sin, the error, which he did not at first recognize as sin in himself, of allowing himself to be tempted by the false religion of “man’s inventions.”

[13] Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression. [14] Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.

Fox will not be subject to the Antichrist that is the Christian church; he will keep himself separate, and, more, will attack that church and lead people out of it. He will think and speak not from the perspective of Christianity, nor from his own: the meditations of his heart, which is where God dwells, will be from God, and, after Fox’s purification (see Isaiah 6:6-13), his prophetic words will carry them to the world.

As we noted above, Psalm 19′s “the heavens declare the glory of God” would surely have reminded Fox of the passage, in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, from which he would derive the favorite Quaker phrase “that of God in every one” (which we are to “answer” even as Fox’s openings “answered one another, and answered the scriptures; for I had great openings of the scriptures; and when I was in troubles, one trouble also answered to another”).

[18] For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; [19] Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them ["in their hearts," the Geneva Bible's commentary says]; for God hath shewed it unto them. [20] For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: [21] Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. [22] Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, [23] And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. [24] Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: [25] Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

Those “who hold the truth in unrighteousness” are the “professors” of Christianity, those who believe and teach religion that appears to be Christian but actually leads people away from the power of Christ in their hearts. But God’s wrath against them, because they ignore that which is “clearly seen” in them if only they would turn to it, is revealed to George Fox in their dishonor. They are about to be overturned.

The Geneva Bible’s commentary on verse 18b of Romans 1 says, “By ‘truth’ Paul means all the light that is left in man since his fall, not as though they being led by this were able to come into favour with God, but that their own reason might condemn them of wickedness both against God and man.” But Fox will recognize that “that which may be known of God … in them” is not a natural human light but is “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9); it is Christ himself, the divine Word, who is certainly able to lead us into favor with God.

By now, George Fox has a clear understanding of both the problem and what he is called to do about it. Now he must be further cleansed from secret fault. He must undergo the metanoia and metamorphosis that will make him fully one with Christ, “bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh” (see Ephesians 5:30 and Genesis 2:23).

But before he describes that process in the Journal, Fox will present us with a narrative that sums up his new understanding in an unforgettable event: he will describe his experience of and reaction to hearing the words, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” I hope to examine that narrative in the next post in this series.

Next post in this series: “There Is One”.
Previous: “George Fox’s Revival”.

“I know what it’s like to be dead”

My title is from the Beatles’ song called “She Said, She Said”: a couple of the lyric lines are relevant to my topic. When I attempted to describe to my friend Gary G. the change in my experience that I will attempt to describe to you now, he immediately recalled the song.

“She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’”

Back in May, I decided to tell my relatively new acquaintance, John C., too, about this significant change in my life. I’ll use some of what I wrote to John to help me introduce it here.

Not long ago, something “clicked,” and suddenly I understood the ineluctable reality of evolution as a soulless and self-contained process. From then on, I have awakened many mornings in a kind of near-death experience, a strong intuition of what it means to really not exist at all. That experience returns to me a few times during each day as well. As a result, my felt sense of the world has changed, and I have more compassion now about people’s desire to remove the fear of the unknown. Another positive result seems to be that I no longer fear the dark so much, metaphorically speaking. But I understand first-hand now how dangerous that experience can be, because time is telescoped and, in a real sense, I already do not exist. I seem to have more respect for and yet less fear of death now. Maybe one function of religion has been to protect us from such knowledge — to serve as a kind of socially-inculcated defense mechanism?

That last sentence raises some interesting issues, but I’ll leave them for future musings. Today I want to focus on the experience.

I remember reading many years ago a Zen dialogue (which, if I haven’t imagined it, I may be able to locate later). In the story, a monk is challenged with something like this: “You can conceive of nonexistence, but can you conceive of the nonexistence of nonexistence?” The question itself is subject to a variety of interpretations. For example, one may read it as implying that nonexistence does not exist, that there is no such thing. Well, yes, nonexistence is not a thing: it’s a predicate. One could even go on to say that the Zen master must be teaching that nothing ever ceases to exist. But I don’t think that the master was teaching that: Buddhism attributes only conditional reality, if that, to things. My reading of the question was more like this: do you understand what it means, in terms of your life, that “nonexistence” not only is not a thing, but also is a characteristic that cannot be predicated of any thing? My answer then was, “Yes, but I’ll need to think about that.”

Thinking more about it didn’t give me a useful understanding then, but now the ongoing intuition of nonexistence is helping me to think (and feel) differently. No thing can be said not to exist, I see now. I cannot not exist: not because I am eternal, but because nonexistence is not a characteristic of any real — existing — thing, and I am such a thing. (“Existing” as a thought in someone’s mind is not the existence I require for myself.) There is no time when I will not exist, and yet there will be a time when others can rightly say of me, “He no longer exists.” Contemplating that paradox, I begin to understand “the nonexistence of nonexistence.”

And the reality of death. I might say that death is unconsciousness that never ends, but only with the proviso that no one is unconscious — and that unconsciousness can be predicated only of an existing being. Analogies can’t be of much help here. But this I can say: there are dead bodies, for a time, but no dead persons. I will die, but I will never be dead.

“And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

And yet, in a sense I am dead now, because to intuit nonexistence is to feel past and future in the present. As I told John, time is now telescoped. Seeing beyond existence allows me to feel the timeboundness and momentariness of our existence. Knowing now the eternal reality of nonexistence and the relentless relativity of time, I begin to understand that already I do not exist. And I see, too, that, from the perspective of eternity, I have never been born.

I’m reminded of a kind of prelude experience that I had in 1990, on the day that my adult family’s first pet dog died. Below is a paragraph from the entry I wrote that day in my journal. (Click here for the entire entry. At the time, I was thinking of Zen Master Bankei‘s notion of “the Unborn,” thus my reference to “Mind” in that entry, but my experience now is different, beyond the reach of doctrine — as, for all I know, Bankei’s was, too.)

A line seems to have an origin and an end, but I come from nowhere and go nowhere. I am an imaginary series of points between two deaths. Each point is drawn on the plane of emptiness; each point of life is a point of death. In perfect stillness I pass through them all. If I could enter that stillness, I would know peace. I would know death in life and life in death; I would no longer want to deny what I am. I would live, at last, as a free man.

I now know death in life. And, because of that, I am learning to know life in death. It may be that freedom is at hand.

[Follow-up post: "Wrestling with Nothingness"]