"if the Quakers were creative in their heterodoxy, they were remarkably unimaginative when it came to proving their orthodoxy."

      Madeleine Pennington, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 114.  116:

even in its earliest form, the letter [to the Governor of Barbados] reflected Fox’s aspirations to demonstrate the Quakers’ theological reputation. 

Yet it also ultimately reflected how ill-equipped he was to do so. It drew on none of the Quakers’ own theological resources or distinctive insights. Fox’s use of the Apostles’ Creed in his description of God as ‘Creator of all things both in heaven and in earth’, and of Jesus as ‘Conceived by the Holy Ghost, and Born of the Virgin Mary’, was particularly surprising given the Quakers’ general position on conciliar authority. What purpose was served by quoting the creed in this manner, if not to deflect aspersions regarding one’s orthodoxy? And yet, Fox did not—could not—speak entirely with his own voice in this regard.

Shades of Marcellus of Ancyra?

Edward "Burrough defended the Quaker position on the historical Jesus, explaining that whilst Christ 'is one with the Father, and was with him before the world was', he was also 'made manifest in Judea and Jerusalem. … and was persecuted of the Jews, and was crucified … was buryed & rose again, according to the Scriptures'. Nonetheless, he went on to state that 'the same that came down from Heaven, is ascended up to Heaven, and the same that descended is he that ascended'. This suggested a denial of any true hypostatic union, as it implied that a spiritual presence had descended to earth, separate from humanity, and had returned to heaven untouched by the Incarnation. The same was reinforced by his highly spiritualized understanding throughout the piece, constant reiterations that God is Spirit, and reluctance to talk about Christ’s body."

     Madeleine Pennington on early Quaker spiritualism in general, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 97.  On Marcellus of Ancyra, see this post.  Cf. the Quaker George Whitehead in 1669:  "Where doth the Scripture speak of a Humane Nature of Christ in Heaven?" (111)  And again in 1674 (Christian-Quaker, 141):  ". . . we cannot own these to be Scripture Language, viz. 1. That Jesus Christ consisteth of human Flesh and Bone.  2. That the glorious hypostacical Union consists of a human and divine Nature, or that they are hypostatically one. . . ."  Though this seems damning enough, I have not nosed around in context, but am relying, for now, on Pennington's reading (126).  Some of what Whitehead says (just above this point) of the Son seems patently orthodox.  But he wants to restrict the concept of a hypostatic union to the doctrine of the Trinity, where it would be profoundly unorthodox, and denies to it here, within Christology (its only home!), any place whatsoever for a human nature.  Wow.  I'm beginning to see why it might once have been—to speak only of roots very, very deeply buried—a surprise to me to learn that God (which is to say, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity) is still—and will be forever—incarnate.  It's not "Scripture Language" to be sure, but then that's why you need the rest of the canonical tradition.
     Cf. Hugh Barbour:  The early Quakers "tended to make Jesus' life simply the ultimate instance of a human life and a human body taken over by the power of God:  'Distinguish . . . between that which is called Christ, and the bodily garment which he wore.  The one was flesh, the other Spirit.  The flesh profiteth nothing. . . .  The body of flesh was but the veil' [(Isaac Penington)].  Friends insisted that Christ's soul was not human, and that his body was not in heaven.  His earthly nature did not share in the resurrection" (The Quakers in Puritan England, Yale publications in religion 7 (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1964), 146).

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).

.

Index librorum prohibitorum

"the shifts we have outlined affected even individual Quakers over the course of a single lifetime. On this point, it is notable that of the 131 publications written by George Fox and considered by the [Second Day] Morning Meeting before 1704, 50 per cent written between 1652 and 1660 were retrospectively deemed unacceptable, compared to 40 per cent written between 1661 and 1670. Of course it is remarkable that the Meeting should reject so many of Fox’s works in either period, but the shifting pattern also illustrates a subtle shift in Fox’s thinking—towards a later, more acceptable ‘brand’ of Quakerism over time. This pattern cannot have been caused by Fox’s direct response to the concerns of the Morning Meeting, as the publications in question were all written before its foundation. Rather, it suggests a steady and deliberate trajectory which affected even those who were Quakers from the start: Tickell, Travers, and Burrough . . . were all convinced Friends of the 1650s, and their Quakerism was therefore the result of direct conversion rather than upbringing. That they also bore the hallmarks of change implies that developments were being driven by a cultural or theological shift within Quakerism, beyond a merely sociological adjustment in the profile of the movement or the character of its members."

     Madeleine Pennington, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 48, underscoring mine.

Quaker discernment. Or Is my Measure my Rule?

Egbert van Heemskerck II

      "The Papists say, Believe as the Church believes:  So likewise G. Fox; but I say, Nay, I am not to believe a thing barely because the Church believes it, but because it’s manifested in me, else I am to wait till God reveals it."

     [William Mucklow], The spirit of the hat: or, the government of the Quakers among themselves, as it hath been exercised of late years by George Fox, and other leading men, in their Monday, or Second-dayes Meeting at Devonshire-house, brought to light (London:  F. Smith, 1673), 12.
     The objection is to the departure from the radical individualism of early Quakerism, i.e. the reversion to a principle other than that of "the true Light, which lighteth every man [(i.e. individual)] that comes into the World" (20).  And so it is to a kind of hypocrisy:  "How do they build up that which they once pulled down; and do that themselves which they have condemned in others?"  "some of you [Quakers] were Judged, Condemned, and Executed, for no other Cause than the Hat [(i.e. the insistence upon the right to leave it on before men of rank)], and now they [(i.e. Fox and others)] Judge, Condemn, and Excommunicate [us] for the same [(i.e. the insistence upon the right to leave it on before God in prayer)], . . . Not that I am against this practice when required of the Lord, but against the [merely] customary use thereof" (32), as imposed, "against . . . my Conscience" (16), by "the Body the Touchstone" (18) rather than solely the Light within.  "as others before them set up the Scriptures above the Spirit, in having that to be the Tryal, Touch-stone, Standard of Doctrine Worship, and of all Spirits; so do they greatly err in setting up the Body above the Spirit, in having the Spirit tried by the Body; the one saieth, The Scripture is the Rule; but in truth, their Meanings they make the Rule:  The other saieth, The Spirit (and not the Scripture) is the Rule; but the Dictates of the Body they make the Rule.  For if I walk according to my Measure, and my Measure is my Rule, and it differs from the judgment of the Body; by their Rule I am to deny my Motion, because it answers not the mind of the Body; for they lay down this as an infallible Rule, That the Body will have a true sense, feeling, and understanding of Motions, Visions, Revelations Doctrines, &c. and therefore safest to make Her my Touch-stone in all things relating to God" (21).  And so "The same Arguments which the Pope, &c. makes use of to support himself, the Body useth; and severe judgment is denounced against him that shall speak a word against the Authority of the Body, as it is against him that shall speak against the Power and Authority of Rome" (22).  "My Friend observe; What difference is there in these things between George Fox and the Papists?  The one faith, No Liberty out of the Church; the other, No Liberty out of the Power.  Saith the Papist, What Liberty to the Sectary?  No, What Liberty to the Heretick?  No:  And George Fox saith, What Liberty to the Presbyter?  No; What Liberty to the Independent?  No; What Liberty to the Baptist?  No:  Liberty (saith he) is in the Truth" (12).  "Many of the most eminent have had potent Impulses, to give forth solid, and sound Arguments for Liberty of Conscience [in this matter], and have pleaded strongly for the same, yet George Fox was heard to say in a selected great Assembly thus, Though many Friends have writ for Liberty of Conscience, I never lik’d the word, it is not a good word.  No Liberty to the Presbyterians, no Liberty to the Papists, no Liberty to the Independents, no Liberty to the Baptists, &c.  Liberty is to be only in the Truth, and, saith he, no Liberty out of the Power" (41).
     No, "the Unity that the Lord approves of, is for every one to act according to his measure and growth in the Truth" (11).

     "Thus, whilst the earliest Quakers characterized disobedience to the Light as the archetypal sin (and obedience as the sole path to salvation) their successors envisaged a similar obligation to the community itself. Again, this reinforced the notion that Quakers viewed the movement as a Church not only in a mystical sense (that is, as Christ’s body) but an institutional sense, and, therefore, that the emerging organizational machinery of the movement had the authority to demand compliance" (Madeleine Pennington, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 34, italics mine).

"It is not just any civilization that" hands the riches of others on down intact

"It is unheard of in the history of religions that the holy book of a religion contain, at its side, that of an earlier religion.  Moreover, the second book, the New Testament, constitutes something like a commentary on the first.  More exactly, using the technical term of Jewish exegesis, the New Testament is like a pesher of the Old, which is to say an interpretation that applies the text to the present situation and interprets it in function of a key event, here the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus."

     Rémi Brague, "Inclusion and digestion:  two models of cultural appropriation in response to a question of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Tübingen, September 3, 1996)," in Rémi Brague, The legend of the Middle Ages:  philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 155 (145-158).
     According to Brague, digestion (to the point of destruction) is the approach characteristic of Islam, and inclusion, that of Christianity.  If I understand him correctly, the latter is viewed as a strength at the beginning of the essay ("It is not just any civilization that encourages a style of appropriation that permits the transmission of an object of that appropriation to future generations so that they can newly appropriate it themselves" (145)), but a weakness at the end ("European culture suffers from dispepsia", which is to say indigestion; for the European "stomach—precisely because of all the undissolved inclusions within it—has become more like a gizzard. . . . thanks to the model of appropriation that Europe developed with its sources, it can appropriate other cultures without feeling obliged to digest them" (158)).

An old story

Nineteenth-century "U.S. expansion into the Southwest was built on a Comanche antecedent.  Comanches are at the center of the story and the westward-pushing Americans remain in the sidelines, stepping in, often unknowingly, to seize territories that had already been subjugated and weakened by Comanches.  The narrative does not ignore the vast imperial ambitions and resources of the United States, but it shows that the stunning success of American imperialism in the Southwest can be understood only if placed in the context of the indigenous imperialism that preceded it."

     Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche empire (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2008), 142.  This on top of the impact that the Comanches had already made upon Anglo-Americans and other immigrants, the French, Mexicans, and especially the New Spanish (i.e. the Spanish Empire) throughout much of the previous century.