The Christian Quaker: George Keith and the Keithian Controversy, by Madeleine Ward

Author: Madeleine Ward. Review by Simon Webb

George Keith was an important early Quaker, but, as Madeleine Ward reminds us in this book, this fascinating Scot is little-known among modern Friends. Little-known and even worse understood: Ward implies that scholars have tended to get him wrong.

Born in Peterhead around 1638, Keith was raised as a Presbyterian. Some time in the 1660s he was convinced and became a Friend, and was sufficiently valued as a Quaker missionary to be invited to accompany George Fox, William Penn, and his fellow-Scot Robert Barclay, on a tour of the Netherlands and Germany. Barclay, who was the same age as George Keith, was of course a leading apologist for Quakerism. His Apology for the True Christian Divinity was for many years the book Friends turned to if they met with theological challenges.

Keith’s own theological literacy allowed him to collaborate with Barclay, and also to help sow the seeds of Quakerism in Europe and North America. But by around 1691 he was having reservations about the beliefs of his fellow-Quakers. Keith’s concerns were centred around one question: Who or what exactly is, or was, Jesus? To put it simply, Keith was concerned that many of his fellow-Quakers were relying for their salvation on Jesus as manifested in their own hearts, in the form of the Inner Light. Keith wanted them to pay more attention to Jesus the man, the Jesus of history.

Having previously defended Quaker beliefs in debates with non-Quakers, Keith now found himself in debates against fellow Quakers. Ward’s book identifies at least two grounds on which Keith’s opponents could object to his approach. First, they believed that their Inner Light was sufficient for salvation, and, second, they felt that Keith was splitting up the person of Jesus. They believed he should be understood as a complete and unified figure.

Previous commentators have misread the so-called Keithian controversy by attributing it to personal and political causes, says Ward. She puts theology back at the heart of it, tracing the development of Keith’s theology through several decades, until he felt obliged to characterise many of his fellow-Quakers as inadequate.

The Quaker establishment in London and Philadelphia objected not only to Keith’s point of view, but also to his aggressive manner. He was disowned by London Yearly Meeting in 1694, by which time he had formed his own splinter-group of ‘Keithian’ Quakers. We have them to thank for the first printed objection to African slavery to appear in North America. 

George Keith ended his life as an Anglican priest. According to Ward, it was by resisting his critiques that Friends worked out where they wanted to go, theologically, and to identify what they wanted to avoid. At least until the Hicksite controversy of the 1820s…

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