Quaker Universalist Conversations

Were early Friends Universalists?

by Tony Lowe


By Tony Lowe, Pastoral Minister, Fancy Gap Meeting


There seems to be a great deal of discussion taking place of late about whether or not early Quakers were universalists. Many modern Friends struggle with or even reject what they perceive to be the exclusive claim of Christianity to be the only valid path to God, and they question whether or not there was something broader and more universal in the message of the early Quakers.

Quakers were universalists in the sense that they believed as Robert Barclay says, “there is an evangelical and saving light and grace in everyone, and the love and mercy of God toward mankind were universal both in the death of his beloved Son the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the manifestation of the light in the heart.” Barclay refers to the Light within, the seed of God, or that of God in every person as a universal saving principle. So early Friends were universalists in the sense that they believed there was that of God in each and every person.

They were not, however, universalists in the sense that we use the word today. They did not believe that every religion was a path to God. They in fact did not believe that any religion was a path to God. Fox himself makes the claim that he was called to bring people out of or off of the world’s religions and into “a new and living way.” And the religion Fox was calling people out of was not Islam or Buddhism, it was actually Christianity as it was being practiced in England by the Catholic church, the Church of England, the Puritans, and a variety of other dissenting groups. Fox found in all of the churches of his day a tendency to rely on the wisdom of the leadership, their traditions, or their own interpretations of the Scriptures rather than Christ himself.

For more, see Posted on March 30, 2011 by Scott Wagoner (posted also in Quakerquaker.org)

Comments

"Fox found in all of the churches of his day a tendency to rely on the wisdom of the leadership, their traditions, or their own interpretations of the Scriptures rather than Christ himself." When I read this, I can only find its echo in myself if the word 'Christ' is removed from the Jesus of the Bible and from notions of substitutionary atonement and understood in the sense of that universal light that is part of all humanity when people live in accordance with our Quaker testimonies, which are universal in the sense of allowing people to live in accord with each other, whatever the details of their religious beliefs. Ironically, the words that speak most to my particular condition in understanding Christ as the universal light of God within all people are those of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
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