Reflecting and Responding
George Fox
Learning to Follow the Light of Christ Within
Then I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition,” and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.
THE JOURNAL
GEORGE FOX (1624-1691) WAS BORN in the small village of Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire, England. He belonged to a heroic age of great kings, great poets and great unrest. He died in 1691, three years after the English Revolution formally and finally defeated the crown. He was raised in the Church of England, but the religious and political ferment overrunning England forever marked him. For five years he pursued answers to his religious questions and found no one capable of helping him. Only when he had a dramatic experience of Christ was his religious thirst satisfied. Eventually he left the Church of England, and for the next forty years he underwent some of the most severe persecution anyone in the church has ever endured. Before he died, though, he saw many laws enacted to protect the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and bring religious liberty to the English-speaking world.
All great movements begin long before their time. Around 529, the Academy in Athens where Plato and Aristotle had studied and taught closed its doors, and in the same year the first Benedictine monastery opened, signifying a shift that came to dominate the Christian world. This shift had a marked influence not only on the religious life of England but eventually on the understanding of George Fox. Several individuals played a role in this transition, including Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Francis of Assisi, Jacob Boehme and Julian of Norwich, but the influence of Augustine and Francis is especially noteworthy.
The thinking of these two saints helped Christianity understand its reliance on Neoplatonism while also moving beyond it. Over time the emphasis of Christian mysticism shifted from its Neoplatonic context in the Greek world back to the biblical tradition of the Hebrew prophets and ultimately Jesus himself.
The Inward Christ
In his own time Augustine made a strong case for following the inward Christ as Lord and Teacher. This inward guide was the foundation of knowledge and supplied our mind with what we needed in order to understand the spiritual life. “Jesus alone,” Augustine writes, “teaches me anything who sets before my eyes, or one of my other bodily senses, or my mind, the things which I desire to know.” Eventually, Fox modified Augustine to emphasize Christ as the light within. Still, this inner light was tied directly to the biblical Jesus.
The teachings of the Franciscans, Fox’s second primary influence, focused on the unique qualities of Jesus. Four components were especially important to Fox: the Franciscan emphasis on itinerant ministry, a willingness to suffer at the hands of the authorities for a greater cause in the tradition of martyrdom, a belief that the true church is made up only of those whose life exemplifies the life and teachings of Jesus, and a recognition that union with God is possible only through the person and work of Jesus Christ. The inner light might govern our understanding, but the reality to which it speaks is governed by our experiences of the historical Jesus. As a result, Fox advocates seven basic, progressive steps to understanding our experiences of God.
Seven Elements in Our Life with God
Experiencing God. Throughout his life, George Fox emphasized the importance of experiencing the living presence of God. This emphasis was born of his own experience. Here is how he came to the full wealth of conviction in his own life: “And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.”
This experience cemented Fox’s belief that each of us needs to have a real and vital experience of God through Jesus Christ. Fox believed this knowledge comes directly and immediately. We do not need anything other than a desire for God to find him—mediated knowledge is not necessary or even desirable since Christ alone is sufficient.
Understanding our experiences. The need to reconcile our experiences with Scripture can be found in Fox’s own writing. When we read his Journal we are immediately struck by how much he quotes the Bible. In fact, many of his contemporaries marveled out loud that if the Bible were ever destroyed, Fox could recite three-fourths of it from memory. In the first one hundred pages of his Journal alone, there are at least 148 direct references or allusions to Scripture. Fox consistently uses the Bible to gain insight into the realities of life and to show the relevance of the spiritual life to these realities. In every instance, our experiences of Jesus unlock the hidden mysteries of God and of our life. Fox expresses it this way: “Jesus is the opener of the door by his heavenly key, and it is through Christ that the entrance is given.”
The challenge for Fox is to move us beyond the objective text of Scripture to embrace the Spirit of God, which is love. For Fox, this meant that the spirit of Scripture, which is God’s love, must be exalted over the text of Scripture. Inevitably, this position heightened the conflict between himself and the religious authorities.
Always growing. Fox’s third element, how these experiences not only confirm current leadings but also provide new insights as we move through life, is taken from the life of the apostle Paul. As early as 1647, Fox writes that following the light of Christ brings new insights into our life with God. These insights are acquired as we learn to love God, and this love for God brings us into a deeper union with him. These perceptual shifts do not occur easily or often, but when they do we gain insight and a deeper life with God.
Borrowing from the life and witness of Paul, Fox demonstrates how the outward law of his Jewish heritage prevents Paul from realizing the inward reality of Jesus Christ. It is only on the road to Damascus, when Paul’s entire life and perspective are changed, that we see the reality and power of the inward Christ. This perceptual reordering is a result of a direct experience of Jesus Christ. It is critical for Paul and critical for Fox and the early Friends as well.
The importance of Jesus. This is probably the most significant contribution Fox makes to our life with God. Following the example of Augustine, Fox identifies Christ as the inward Teacher who alone brings insight. In developing this understanding of Christ, Fox uses two phrases interchangeably. One is the “light of Christ within,” while the other is “Christ as inward Teacher.” Both embody the Augustinian ideal and stand apart from either Locke’s understanding of the “light of reason” or Descartes’s understanding of the “light of nature.”
As early as 1648, Fox begins to comingle references to the Holy Spirit with the divine light of Christ evident in all things. His intent is to direct us to the “Light within,” which is Christ, who can teach us all things. Fox amplifies his position by stating, “I was sent to bring people off from all the vain religions of the world in order to turn them to the inward light by which all might know their salvation.” These teachings further alienated Fox from the religious authorities. Criticizing the ministry of the professional clergy for being hollow and vain, Fox encouraged the people to turn to “your true teacher, Jesus Christ, and not these hirelings such as teach for fleece and prey upon the people.”
The role of suffering. The fifth element for Fox is to enter into the sufferings of Jesus and understand our own experiences of suffering in relation to him. For much of Fox’s life the Quaker movement was officially banned. Much like Christianity in its first four centuries, waves of persecution against Quakers ebbed and flowed according to the attitudes of different rulers. Not until 1689, with the passage of the Act of Toleration, were Quakers able to gain legal status in English society.
This persecution subjected Fox to some of the most brutal religious oppression of his time. When we suffer at the hands of nature or other human beings, we can sometimes doubt the goodness of God. Fox, however, never allowed this to happen. Though he experienced repeated stonings, beatings, general misfortune and torture, Fox always saw it as an opportunity to experience Christ apart from the limits of conventional religion.
The true church. Fox was perceived as a huge threat to the religious and political order of his day. Essentially, his positions initiated religious innovations long before their time. He also sabotaged several religious rituals and traditions that he believed stifled the spirit. As an alternative, Fox advocates a whole new community of faith based on a common love of Christ. True Christians, in Fox’s mind, are those who live with a perfect expression of the life and teachings of Jesus. Thus, Fox emphasizes that the true church is not the building down the street but “living stones, those who are part of God’s spiritual household of which Christ is the head.”
The pure love of God. The final element is the realization that all of these experiences and insights lead us to a pure love of God. Fox believes that our experience of God’s love must propel us into public service. We are not to retreat from society as monks in earlier times had done. Our experience of love propels us into the world in order to accomplish God’s work. Every social engagement, therefore, is an expression of our Christian beliefs.
Pacifism, according to Fox, is not a nice social position but an expression of the active love of God capable of bringing peace to the world. Prison reform is not the latest crusading notion of a social activist but the active love of God restoring human dignity to all of God’s creatures. Honesty in business is not the accidental product of social upbringing but the outworking of God’s love to live with integrity.
In each case, Fox sees the endless love of God as the satisfaction of all our needs as humans and the ultimate pattern for our life. Thus, to love our neighbor is to love ourself and to hate our neighbor is to hate ourself. Ultimately, Fox’s emphasis on our experiences of God is central to understanding our life with God. Such experiences usher in spiritual confirmation and provide the assurance that produces peace and personal rest.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
George Fox is an absolute marvel. Self-taught, he had the most astonishing insights (he called them “openings”) into the heart of the gospel message. Using the seven elements discussed in this chapter, I want to comment on a few of these insights.
The first and the fourth elements go hand in hand: that we can have direct, immediate experiences of Jesus and that Scripture teaches us how to relate our experiences of the historical Jesus with the leadings of the inward Christ. Now, these notions may sound tame to modern ears, but they caused a firestorm in Fox’s day. And when we understand the full import of the teaching we can see why it was so revolutionary in his day—and in any day.
In its shortest form, Fox’s gospel message was, “Jesus Christ is alive and here to teach his people himself.” Jesus is the fulfillment of the great eschatological prophet—“the Prophet like Moses”—who will teach his people, here and now (Deut 18:15-19; Acts 3:22; 7:37). Fox often spoke of taking people off of human beings and leading them to Christ, their present Teacher. He writes, “I was commanded . . . to bring people off all their own way to Christ the new and living Way, and from their churches which men had made and gathered, to the church in God . . . which Christ is the Head of . . . and off from all the world’s worships.”
This utter confidence in Jesus as the inward Teacher and leader of the Christian community was deeply threatening to the religious authorities. We can see why. If Christ has come to each of his people himself, all human authoritarian rule and control is effectively undermined.
But, of course, that is precisely Fox’s point. His contention is that the living Christ can be trusted to lead, discipline and guide his people. At one point he exclaims, “Christ Jesus, who was dead and is alive again, and lives forevermore, a prophet, counselor, priest, bishop and shepherd, a circumciser and baptizer, a living rock and foundation for evermore, the beginning and ending, the first and last, the Amen.” This was Fox’s way of expressing Jesus’ multiple functions among his people. Jesus forgives us, teaches us, guides us, comforts us, oversees us, rules us and so much more. During a huge gathering at Firbank Fell, Fox taught the people that they can truly “know Christ to be their Teacher to instruct them, their Counselor to direct them, their Shepherd to feed them, their Bishop to oversee them, and their Prophet to open divine mysteries.”
This kind of highly functional Christology insists that Christ alone is in charge of his church. Even more to the point, human beings are not in charge. And no human being can control the outcome. Well, you can quickly see how this teaching could lead to the creation of a loose association of freewheeling religious individualists. Fox was well aware of this potential danger and set in place a double guardrail to guide those who had accepted Christ away from this outcome.
This brings us to elements two and six from this chapter. Element two says that we always need to reconcile our experiences with the testimony of Scripture. Scripture is central, not as an outwardly imposed authority but as an inward testimony to the life we have with God.
Element six stresses that all our experiences of Christ are tested and confirmed within the living community of faith. While it is certainly true that Fox undermined the vested interests of the religious authorities, at the same time he highly elevated the place of the Christian community. Fox called this community life “gospel order.” For him the church is “raised up” by the power of God without the aid of any religious apparatus or human paraphernalia whatever. To use a contemporary term, Fox was developing a unique form of “religionless Christianity.”
The true church then is found wherever people gather together in the name of Christ and experience his living presence in their midst. Christ has the power to rule and govern his people and give them an orderly corporate existence under his sovereign leadership.
Christ gathers his disciples together and they live under his authority: learning together, obeying together, suffering together. Gathered by Christ as a living community we do not scatter in times of persecution. Rather we are prepared to die for one another and our Master, Jesus. Christ is our prophet to teach us, our priest to forgive us, our king to rule us, our friend to come alongside us. His life becomes our life. And by means of his transforming power we wage the peaceable war of the Lamb against evil in all its manifestations: personal, social, institutional.
One final comment. Element number three affirms that our experiences with the inward Christ provide us with new insights as we move through life. This is a frank recognition that Christ, our ever-living Teacher, continues to teach his people. And so, new understandings emerge. For example, early Friends were on the forefront of literally every social movement of their day. Witness their vigorous attack on slavery, their efforts in mental health and prison reform, and more. Why was this so? What caused them to do this? They were not more intelligent or better able to see the currents of history. No. Their profound experiences of Christ as a living, inward Teacher gave them confidence that when they gathered together, openly acknowledging Jesus as the leader of their worship—“the Presence in the midst,” as they put it—they received the guidance for which they waited.
O Living Christ, teach us what we need to learn. We will do our best to live in a listening mode. Amen.