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].

———-
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