by Joshua Shaw

BF Westcott, whom we have introduced in a previous post, compared himself on more than one occasion to a Quaker (see here); the likeness might have died on the surface, as it were, of the comparison (at least for all of us), if he had not written a short essay on the specific contribution of George Fox (d. 1691), one of the founders of the Quakers, to modern Christian doctrine.[i]

In his book The Social Aspects of Christianity, he treats of the Kingdom of Heaven, that is, how the gospel in the power of the Incarnation transforms the family and society.  Yet in connection to what Matt recently has written, Westcott’s short essay on “Modern Efforts: the Quakers (George Fox),” will occupy us for the space of this post.

Here, following his look at the admirable but abortive efforts of the Franciscans to renew society (pp. 101-116), he looks at what he considers to be their spiritual complement: the Quakers. The former had failed (so Westcott) to transform society by their disregard of individual worth, ignorance of the forces of national life (which in fact the Gospel strengthens), and concentration on the “Christ after the flesh” (II Cor. 5:16), rather than on the Risen Lord.[ii]

Westcott goes on on to give, in epitome, an account of the work rendered by the Renaissance, when the duties and responsibilities of nations (not their “rights,” he emphasizes) began to emerge more clearly. And, considering the Reformation, the younger twin of the Renaissance, he writes,

No view of the Reformation can be more superficial than that which regards it simply as negative, as a protest against dominant errors, a removal of widespread corruptions. It was this, but it was far more than this. It was the affirmation final and decisive, it was, I had almost said, in the order of Providence, the revelation of Individuality, the assertion that every man, every Christian man, has throned in his own heart a sovereign power whose counsel he must seek, seek with unwearied patience, and whose dictates he must obey; that to subject conscience blindly to any external authority is treason: to fail to bring to it every tribute of light and power is moral suicide (121).

But he goes on, lest we condemn him of the evils of modern subjectivism built on individualism, to qualify with the addition: “No one can rejoice more than I do to maintain that individuality is not the sum of life, but it is an essential part of life in every region of our nature and our work. … It is true, though it is not the whole truth, that we must live and die alone, alone with God” (ibid.).[iii]

This statement and qualification are both indispensable to understand his judgement of the Quakers (George Fox particularly): without the revelation of the holiness of the individual conscience, their work had not been possible; yet the failure to affirm the subordination, joyful and willing, of the individual into society, made their movement defective.

As his epigraph to the whole volume suggests (Mark 1:15), Jesus enshrined the claim on the individual as individual and for the kingdom when he affirmed the cry of John unreservedly: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Repent addresses itself to the will, and thus the inmost individuality, of every person, who is thereby called to own their actions, past, present, and future and so claim and cleanse their personhood; but the second clause grounds the first. That is, the repentance and conversion of the individual is for the body and, indeed, their conversion is not yet complete until this supremacy of the kingdom is acknowleged. (Perhaps it should be added that, of course, the king rules through and over the kingdom, so that the subordination of the individual is finally to God).

From this introduction he goes on to outline in three points the affirmation of this “one side of the Gospel, if one side only” by George Fox.

Fox’s first conviction was that we lived in an age of the spirit; that book-learning could not adequately prepare for ministry; that the words of God do not replace the Word; that we must wait in solitude and silence for the still quiet voice of the Spirit to guide us: “The Gospel is not not words, but facts, not a tradition, but a voice even now to the heart of man, which man can recognise and embody in life” (125).[iv] This conviction was made manifest in steadfast prayer. This was not the prerogative of one but the intended life of every saint (each in their measure and power). Westcott remarks then sadly, “We seek anxiously, when we desire to move, for patterns and precedents instead of listening in devout silence till the first message to ourselves grows articulate through thoughts opened in many hearts” (126).

The second conviction from Fox is that this enlightenment belonged to every man as man before God because the light coming into the world lighteneth every man (see John 1:3-4). This brings about the greatest attestation of the Gospel and redemptive history conceivable, “that which may be verified at any moment, even that it is able under the greatest variety of circumstances to fashion believers of every race and every class after the Divine likeness” (128).[v]

The final observation he makes about Fox’s convictions is that “religion” cannot be conceived apart from “morality.” Christianity was a life and this life in the Christian is the revelation of God to the world (even as Christ had said in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere). Fox insisted again and again that justification was not only an accounting but a making just; Wisdom’s children in this case were his disciples, for “he was able to shape a character in those who followed him which for independence, for truthfulness, for vigour, for courage, for purity, is unsurpassed in the records of Christian endeavour” (129).

In light of all this,

We cannot wonder therefore that the Society of Friends has achieved results wholly out of proportion to their numbers. No religious order can point to services rendered to humanity more unsullied by selfishness or nobler in far-seeing wisdom. Our prisons purified, our criminal law reformed, our punishments rescued at least in part from the dominion of vindictiveness, witness to the success of Quaker labors (131) [vi].

Yet their success, great as it was, must be qualified:

[Fox] had no sense of the action of the Holy Spirit through the great Body of Christ. He had no thought of the weak and immature, for whom earthly signs are the appropriate support of faith; no thought for the students of nature, for whom they are the hallowing of all life. And so it came to pass that he acknowledged no gracious means for the personal appropriation of God’s gifts, as he knew no stages in the popular embodiment of the Truth. He disinherited the Christian society, and he maimed the Christian man (132).

For all this, and in part because of his “false negations,” the accomplishments of the Quakers contain much for our “strengthening and for our guidance”: the renewal of society by the expurgation of sin; the appeal to the conscience; a life of faith.

The beginning verse from Galatians forms also a fit ending:

“If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also walk. That is the law of the Kingdom” (134). This was the chief aim of Westcott’s life, and insofar the Quakers live(d) thus, the comparison between the two holds true.

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[i] The life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, vol. I.189, 334; vol. II.336.
Such essays as these are numerous, and it stirs up serious remorse that his opus magnum, a history of Christian doctrine to counter that of Adolf von Harnack, remained nothing other than an enormous collection of notes, comments, and readings in boxes. One wonders how different the apparent victory of liberal Protestantism might have looked if such a work of towering erudition could be set against Harnack’s seeming monopoly of the material. Yet to say that it remained “nothing other than” a heap of boxes is misleading since we have not a few of his outlines scattered throughout his many books – sometimes as appendices, others as sermons or talks to academic or lay audiences. Whether these boxes of his are still lying around in Cambridge is a question that ought to be definitively answered. His opposition to the Tübingen School of Bauer and all that went with it, the so-called “Higher” criticism, would have appeared more manifest in a history of doctrine than in his commentaries and early historical works on the Canon (though even these declare his allegiance quite clearly to those who know the debates).

[ii] One sees here Westcott’s dual capacity for admiration and criticism, reverence and reserve, sometimes within a single sentence – it characterises all of his historical writing and distinguishes him from the liberal critics of his day, for whom reverence could only be idolatry of something other than the truth. But Westcott always repeated, “we want the spirit of the past, not the form.” This is of a piece with his condemnation at the end of the essay of Fox himself for whom “the past was a ‘a long and dismal night of apostasy and darkness’. He had no eye for the many parts and many fashions [Hebrews 1:1] in which God is pleased to work.”

[iii] Westcott offers here another interesting parallel to the Quakers, viz., the Jesuits, as most embodying the aforementioned truth of the Reformation and Renaissance in contrasting ways. A comparison which, he says, is “full of interest” but cannot (alas! we feel) be pursued at the moment.

[iv] The former (words) is a contrast to scholastic Protestantism; the latter (tradition) of course to Greek and Roman Christianity.

[v] This Westcott claimed was “in the spirit of Greek theology, though he knew not his forerunners.” And one need only to read the opening chapters of Origen’s De Principiis book IV to verify the fact.

[vi] He goes on to note the well-known anti-slavery work of this group, as well as the interesting fact that “William Penn was … the only colonist in America who left his settlement wholly unprotected by fence or arms, and his settlement was the only one which was unassailed by the Indian tribes” (130-131). Of course Penn’s business deals and treaties with the native Americans come into this, but I have not been able to verify this general statement myself.