Theopedia

Religious Society of Friends

Definition

The Religious Society of Friends, whose members are known as Quakers, is a Christian tradition begun in mid-seventeenth-century England by George Fox, distinguished by its doctrine that the Holy Spirit gives an “inward light” to every person, not only the regenerate, as a guide to salvation and duty.1 Early Friends, including Robert Barclay, treated this light as coordinate with Scripture rather than simply subordinate to it.2 Its practical consequences follow: no ordained clergy, no observed sacraments of baptism or the Lord’s Supper, and a refusal of oaths and military service.3

Historical Origin

George Fox (1624-1691), born in Drayton, Leicestershire, and trained as a shoemaker, grew dissatisfied with the corruption he saw in the church and state of his day and felt himself called “by direct revelation and inspiration” to denounce the existing church and proclaim what he took to be “a restoration of the apostolic age, when the church was guided and extended by the Spirit, without the intervention of the written Word,” or of “a special order of ministers.”4 His followers were called Quakers either for trembling under the Spirit’s influence or for calling others to quake at God’s judgment, and called themselves Friends for their opposition to violence and war; their early refusal to pay tithes, take oaths, or perform military service brought repeated persecution.4

William Penn, the son of a British admiral, used his standing with James II to obtain the royal grant of Pennsylvania and transported a colony of Friends there, founding one of the original American colonies as a refuge for the movement.5 Robert Barclay (1648-1690), a Scottish convert from an aristocratic family, gave the movement its classic systematic statement in his Theologiae Christianae Apologia (“An Apology for the True Christian Divinity”), an exposition of fifteen theses that did more than any other work to order Fox’s principles for a literary and theological audience.5

Core Tenets

The inward light

Barclay and the broader tradition following him taught that the Holy Spirit grants an inward light, or “seed,” to every person, not only the regenerate, distinct from natural reason and conscience and from the ordinary spiritual illumination Reformed theology holds is given to believers alone.1 This light was said to communicate “the mysteries of salvation” apart from Scripture’s own content and, if not resisted, to work salvation even in those “ignorant of Adam’s fall, and of the death and sufferings of Christ.”6

Scripture and continuing revelation

The Society’s own Yearly Meetings, the representative bodies whose testimony Hodge treats as more authoritative than any individual writer’s, affirmed the Holy Scriptures’ divine inspiration and held them “the only fit outward judge and test of controversies among Christians.”7 Barclay’s own writing is less consistent on this point: he denied that Scripture is “the principal ground of all truth and knowledge, or… the adequate primary rule of faith and manners,” calling it instead a secondary standard subordinate to the Spirit, while also affirming that whatever “cannot be proved by Scripture, is no necessary article of faith” and that any claim made in the Spirit’s name “contrary to the Scriptures” is “a delusion of the devil.”2 He distinguished this continuing guidance from any claim to “a revelation of a new gospel and new doctrines,” which he denied, from “a new revelation of the good old gospel and doctrines,” which he affirmed the Spirit still gives directly to believers.8

Ordinances, ministry, and oaths

Because the Spirit’s guidance was held to reach every believer alike, Friends historically made little of formal church structure: Quakers, in Hodge’s summary, “make very little of the Church and its ordinances; of the Sabbath; of a stated ministry; and nothing of the sacraments as external ordinances and means of grace.”3 The same conviction, that every person may be immediately taught and led by God without an intervening human authority, underlay Friends’ refusal to swear oaths and to bear arms.4

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession opens by declaring Scripture “the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,” adding that God’s earlier, partial ways of revealing himself to his people are “now ceased” with Scripture’s completion.9 Archibald Alexander Hodge’s Reformed statement of the objection targets the inward light doctrine directly: it differs from the illumination Reformed theology grants every true believer because “it leads to the knowledge of truth independently of its revelation in Scripture” and because “it belongs to all men,” not the regenerate alone, a view he judges contrary to Scripture, which “never promises an illumination which will carry men beyond, or make men independent of, its own teaching.”10

The confession likewise treats baptism and the Lord’s Supper as abiding, Christ-instituted ordinances rather than merely spiritual realities needing no outward sign: “Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordinances of positive and sovereign institution, appointed by the Lord Jesus, the only lawgiver, to be continued in his church to the end of the world.”11 Where the confession holds these ordinances obligatory because Christ himself appointed them, Friends’ practice of leaving them unobserved as merely outward reflects the same conviction that outward forms have been superseded by the Spirit’s direct work.3

Variants

Hodge, writing in 1871, distinguished three groups within the Society. The great majority, “orthodox” Friends represented by the Yearly Meetings’ own testimony, differed “very little from the great body of evangelical Christians,” affirming one God in three persons, Christ’s full deity and humanity, his atoning sacrifice as “a propitiation and atonement for the sins of the whole world,” and a future resurrection and judgment.7 A second, disowned class calling themselves Friends were, in his judgment, “really Deists,” admitting no authority beyond natural reason and conscience.12 A third, unorganized group of individual Quakers held more radical views: some “explicitly denied the doctrine of the Trinity and the satisfaction of Christ,” some dispensed with the historical Christ in favor of “the Christ within,” and others held Christ’s redemption to be worked only in believers rather than accomplished for them.12

Related Doctrines

George Fox is the Society’s founder; sola scriptura and the illumination of the Holy Spirit are the Reformed doctrines Quaker teaching on the inward light is most often measured against. Infant baptism, believer’s baptism, and means of grace bear on the dispute over the sacraments. Protestantism is the broader movement Quakerism emerged within during the English Reformation’s aftermath.

References

  1. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 4, “Mysticism,” 92-93. ↩ ↩2

  2. Hodge, 1:94-95, quoting Robert Barclay. ↩ ↩2

  3. Hodge, 1:97. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Hodge, 1:88. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Hodge, 1:89. ↩ ↩2

  6. Hodge, 1:93. ↩

  7. Hodge, 1:90-92, quoting Thomas Evans’s summary of the Society’s doctrine in I. Daniel Rupp, ed., History of Religious Denominations in the United States. ↩ ↩2

  8. Hodge, 1:95-96, quoting Barclay. ↩

  9. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  10. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 3, “Sources of Theology,” 54-55. ↩

  11. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 28, “Of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper,” para. 1. ↩

  12. Hodge, 1:92. ↩ ↩2