Early Quaker dualism

"we must not allow instances where [early] Friends implied an indwelling celestial flesh [of Christ] to distract from the more critical point that they were highly dualistic in their worldview."

     Madeleine Pennington, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 82.  82-83, underscoring mine:

Admittedly, Quakers were reluctant to describe Christ as 'humane', and Fox explicitly referred to him as a 'heavenly Man'. Nonetheless, they also made explicit claims that the flesh of Christ was 'took of the virgin', so shutting down readings of the Incarnation which tried to attach celestial significance to the flesh of the human Christ before His resurrection. In this sense, they did not affirm the importance of Christ’s flesh whilst denying that it came from Mary—rather, they resisted the significance of the flesh altogether. Indeed, even where they did imply such a belief, what they affirmed seems not to have differed ontologically from the purely spiritual nature, and the importance of this pure spirit to the Quaker vision is stressed time and time again. This is reflected in Richard Hubberthorne’s 1654 publication, The antipathy betwixt flesh and spirit. The very title of the publication demonstrated Hubberthorne’s acutely spiritualized religious concerns—and so, his distinction between 'terrestrial' and 'celestial' bodies, later in the same publication, must be read in the context of his obvious suspicion of physical matter. . . .

The implications of this context are twofold. First, only the 'celestial' body seems to have been afforded any real value at all. Secondly, Hubberthorne’s description of the celestial body was indistinguishable from how one might talk about the spirit alone: he did not elaborate on its nature except to distinguish it from carnal flesh. Neither did this passage equate to an affirmation of the centrality of Christ’s humanity or the Incarnation. Rather, he was simply using scriptural language as a shorthand to speak about Christ in a spiritual rather than physical sense, entailing the essential superiority of the spirit more strongly than ever—and indeed, this specific criticism would soon be levelled directly against the Quakers.

Again, that is not to say that Hubberthorne denied the Incarnation or the historical Christ: on the contrary, elsewhere he drew extensively on Jesus’s life and teachings to argue against the former royalist chaplain and priest, Richard Sherlock. Yet this was in the context of his fundamental assertion that the flesh was unable to bring forth 'the fruits of the spirit'. . . .

This is followed by a very illuminating contrast with the Muggletonians (84-86), in reaction to whose materialism "the early Friends were uncompromising in their understanding of God (and Christ) as pure spirit" (86).
     In short, the early Quakers were reluctant "to grant the flesh (even the flesh of Christ) any positive soteriological value" (86), and it was "for their spiritualized understanding specifically of Christ" (88, italics mine) that they were criticized by their contemporaries (local ministers, for example).  "the rector of Abbot’s Ripton in Cambridgeshire, Thomas Drayton, was happy to affirm that 'I am, I praise God for it, usually guided and assisted by that Spirit, which is alwayes infallible'. Drayton himself was identified as ‘perfectionist’ by the Anglican clergyman Jeremy Taylor. Yet this did not prevent him taking deep offence at the Quakers' perceived denial of all authority besides the Light (particularly that of the Scriptures) and apparent belief that Christ had no independent existence outside individuals" (88-89).

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