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Introduction: Quaker Engagements with Mysticism

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Quakers and Mysticism

Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism ((INTERMYST))

Abstract

From their beginnings in the middle of the seventeenth century in England, Quakerism has emphasized a spirituality of divine imminence and interiority. For early Quakers, a “Testimony” was the result of a comprehensive transformation of one’s whole self. A doctrine of unity with God, first called the “Inward Light” or “Light Within,” has led many to consider Quakerism as inherently mystical. Quaker interiority led Quakers in a long tradition of interacting and dialoguing with other religious traditions. While the types of spirituality have changed over time, Quakers have maintained a strong interest in the mystical and have borrowed from mystical sources in ways that have internal resonance. This chapter explores the historiography of Quakers and mysticism and introduces the main contributions of this volume.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (London: Religious Society of Friends, 1986), 11.

  2. 2.

    Steven Katz, “The ‘Conservative’ Character of Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 4–5.

  3. 3.

    Steven Katz, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), n.p.

  4. 4.

    H.P. Owen, “Experience and Dogma in the English Mystics,” in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 148.

  5. 5.

    Bernard McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness: A Modest Proposal,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 47.

  6. 6.

    McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness,” 47.

  7. 7.

    McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness,” 44.

  8. 8.

    Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (2003): 277.

  9. 9.

    Bernard McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness,” 44; see also, Bernard McGinn, Mysticism in the Reformation, 1500–1650, Part 1, The Presence of God (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2016), 3.

  10. 10.

    McGinn, “Mystical Consciousness,” 44.

  11. 11.

    Timothy Burdick and Pink Dandelion, “Global Quakerism, 1920–2015,” in The Cambridge Companion to Quakerism, ed. Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 64.

  12. 12.

    For an overview of contemporary Quakerism and its diversity see chapters in Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

  13. 13.

    I am grateful to Marie Vandenbark for many of the ideas and phrasings in the following paragraphs.

  14. 14.

    Jon R. Kershner, “Evangelical Quakerism and Global Christianity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Quakerism, ed. Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 299.

  15. 15.

    Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 275.

  16. 16.

    Robert Gimello, “Mysticism in Its Contexts,” in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 63.

  17. 17.

    Fox, The Journal of George Fox, 27.

  18. 18.

    Fox, Journal, 27.

  19. 19.

    Fox, Journal, 27.

  20. 20.

    Nikki Coffey Tousley, “The Experience of Regeneration and Erosion of Certainty in the Theology of Second-Generation Quakers: No Place for Doubt?” Quaker Studies 13, no. 1 (2008): 6–88.

  21. 21.

    Michael L. Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 3.

  22. 22.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 3.

  23. 23.

    Calvin J. Keene, “Historic Quakerism and Mysticism,” Quaker Religious Thought 7, no. 2 (1965): 9–10.

  24. 24.

    Melvin Endy, “The Interpretation of Quakerism: Rufus Jones and His Critics,” Quaker History 70 (1981): 6–7.

  25. 25.

    Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism,’” 292.

  26. 26.

    Elaine Pryce, “‘Upon the Quakers and the Quietists’: Quietism, Power and Authority in Late Seventeenth-Century France, and Its Relation to Quaker History and Theology,” Quaker Studies 14, no. 2 (2010): 216; Endy, “Interpretation of Quakerism,” 6–7; Kathryn Damiano, “On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Eighteenth Century Quakerism as Realized Eschatology” (PhD Dissertation, Union of Experimenting Colleges and Universities, 1988), 92.

  27. 27.

    Endy, “Interpretation of Quakerism,” 18.

  28. 28.

    Geoffrey F. Nuttall, “Puritan and Quaker Mysticism,” Theology 78, no. 664 (October 1975): 519, https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X7507801003

  29. 29.

    Nuttall, “Puritan and Quaker Mysticism,” 528.

  30. 30.

    Endy, “Interpretation of Quakerism,” 8.

  31. 31.

    Endy, “Interpretation of Quakerism,” 3–4.

  32. 32.

    Hilary Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2011), 24.

  33. 33.

    Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, 25–26.

  34. 34.

    Pink Dandelion, “Introduction,” in The Creation of Quaker Theory: Insider Perspectives, ed. Pink Dandelion (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), 5.

  35. 35.

    Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, 26.

  36. 36.

    Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture, 26.

  37. 37.

    Hilary Hinds, “Unity and Universality in the Theology of George Fox,” in Early Quakers and Their Theological Thought, 1647–1723, ed. Stephen Angell and Pink Dandelion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 49.

  38. 38.

    Michele Lise Tarter, “‘Go North!’ The Journey towards First-Generation Friends and Their Prophecy of Celestial Flesh,” in The Creation of Quaker Theory: Insider Perspectives, ed. Pink Dandelion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 88.

  39. 39.

    Tarter, “‘Go North!’ The Journey towards First-Generation Friends and Their Prophecy of Celestial Flesh,” 88.

  40. 40.

    Stephen Angell and Michael L. Birkel, “The Witness of Richard Farnworth: Prophet of Light, Apostle of Church Order,” in Early Quakers and Their Theological Thought, 1647–1723, ed. Stephen Angell and Pink Dandelion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 96.

  41. 41.

    Pink Dandelion, An Introduction to Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 43.

  42. 42.

    Dandelion, Introduction to Quakerism, 43.

  43. 43.

    Dandelion, Introduction to Quakerism, 42.

  44. 44.

    Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 2.

  45. 45.

    Dandelion, Introduction to Quakerism, 57.

  46. 46.

    Elaine Pryce, “‘Negative to a Marked Degree’ or ‘An Intense and Glowing Faith’?: Rufus Jones and Quaker Quietism,” Common Knowledge 16, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 520–22.

  47. 47.

    Rufus Jones, “Quietism,” The Harvard Theological Review 10, no. 1 (1917): 4–5.

  48. 48.

    Pryce, “‘Negative to a Marked Degree’ or ‘An Intense and Glowing Faith’?: Rufus Jones and Quaker Quietism,” 528; Rufus Matthew Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (London: Macmillan and Co., 1909), xxxvi.

  49. 49.

    Patricia A. Ward, Experimental Theology in America: Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and Their Readers (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 89.

  50. 50.

    Ward, Experimental Theology in America, 89.

  51. 51.

    Ward, Experimental Theology in America, 2.

  52. 52.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 4.

  53. 53.

    Ward, Experimental Theology in America, 56.

  54. 54.

    Francis Frost, as quoted in Ward, Experimental Theology in America, 90.

  55. 55.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 4–5.

  56. 56.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics.

  57. 57.

    Dandelion, Introduction to Quakerism, 87–90.

  58. 58.

    Robert Barclay, The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth: Considered Principally with Reference to the Influence of Church Organization on the Spread of Christianity (Hodder and Stoughton, 1877), 266.

  59. 59.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 5.

  60. 60.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 52.

  61. 61.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 5.

  62. 62.

    Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (London: Macmillan, 1909); Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962); William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (London: Macmillan, 1919); Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Boston: Beacon, 1914); Jones, The Later Periods of Quakerism, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1921); William Charles Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (Macmillan, 1919).

  63. 63.

    Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 6.

  64. 64.

    Carole Dale Spencer, Holiness—the Soul of Quakerism: An Historical Analysis of the Theology of Holiness in the Quaker Tradition, Studies in Christian History and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), 29.

  65. 65.

    Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624–1691) (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1986), xv.

  66. 66.

    Nuttall, “Puritan and Quaker Mysticism,” 529.

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  1. Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA

    Jon R. Kershner

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    Jon R. Kershner

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Kershner, J.R. (2019). Introduction: Quaker Engagements with Mysticism. In: Kershner, J. (eds) Quakers and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21653-5_1

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