George Keith. Photo: Public domain.
‘The Question betwixt us is not who is the best Christian, but who is the best Quaker.’
Debates about Christian identity have always been a part of Quakerism. Madeleine Ward takes a look at one of the very first.
Modern British Quakerism is often (unhelpfully) portrayed as an intractable battle between polarised groups: theists versus nontheists, modernisers versus traditionalists, liberals versus the intolerant. But underlying these purported dichotomies lies a whole range of more fundamental questions: what do we mean by ‘that of God in everyone’? Is anything apart from personal experience necessary for spiritual growth? In fact, are any specific beliefs at all necessary to be a Quaker?
These questions aren’t inconsequential, and it’s not always easy to admit that our answers to them might vary. One resource by which we can explore our modern differences more constructively is a shared reflection on our past, and I believe that a neglected case study in this regard is the Keithian controversy: an explosive dispute which afflicted seventeenth century Quakerism for almost a decade.
This controversy centred around many of the issues listed above, and is nonetheless unknown by most modern Friends. Above all, this forgotten dispute serves as a reminder that we’ve been holding our multiple identities in tension – and in community – for a very long time.
The protagonist
The protagonist of the Keithian controversy was one of the most prominent early Quakers: the Scottish Friend, George Keith. He wrote the first systematic theology of Quakerism and was the travelling partner of the better-known theologian Robert Barclay. Indeed, since George Keith was older and had been a Friend for longer, he was probably the senior partner in the team. The seventeenth-century philosopher Henry More described him as ‘absolutely the best Quaker of them all’. George Keith became a Quaker in Aberdeen during the early 1660s but moved to America in 1685, and it was in Philadelphia that the Keithian controversy began.
In 1690, motivated by a concern over the lack of Christian education in the nascent colonial communities, George Keith – who had recently been appointed as one of Philadelphia’s first schoolmasters – proposed that all adult Friends should make a confession of faith as a minimum standard of Quaker membership. His suggestion was not endorsed, and he continued to advocate enthusiastically for the Quakers, but his concern for stronger Christian teaching would ultimately prove fateful. Just a year later, George Keith was accused by the Quaker William Stockdale of preaching ‘Two Christs’. William Stockdale here referred to the inward Light (‘Christ within’) and Jesus (‘Christ without’) and essentially accused George Keith of undermining the Quaker belief in the centrality of inward revelation by over-emphasising faith in Jesus of Nazareth. A very modern criticism indeed!
Local Quakers supported George Keith against William Stockdale on this occasion, but tensions only worsened a few months later when his preaching was criticised again: this time, the Quaker Thomas Fitzwater accused him of denying the ‘sufficiency of the Light’ to save without any external help, including knowledge of Christianity. While local Quakers deliberated over the case, George Keith and his followers lost patience and called an alternative meeting to clear his name. Relations now rapidly broke down, and George Keith was denounced by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in September 1692. Meanwhile, his supporters published a counter-testimonial in his favour and continued to hold their own separate Monthly Meetings as self-proclaimed ‘Christian Quakers’.
George Keith returned to England in 1694, and the dispute was the main business of London Yearly Meeting for the following two years. English Friends eventually agreed that George Keith was wrong, and disowned him in May 1695. He ended his days as an Anglican priest, and one external commentator described his fall from grace as ‘One Wonder more, Added to the Seven Wonders of the World’.
How should we make sense of these events? To conclude that the early Quakers disowned one of their most prominent leaders because of his Christian faith would be to caricature the debate. Nonetheless, the Keithian controversy was driven by theology – and, in particular, two fundamental theological differences between George Keith and his opponents.
The opponents
First, the two sides navigated their ‘Christian’ and ‘Quaker’ identities differently. We can start to understand this by realising that George Keith’s opponents agreed to almost everything he demanded of them regarding the historical Jesus. For example, the Philadelphia Meeting of Ministers wrote to powerful Quakers in London stressing that they had already told George Keith that their faith was ‘according to Scripture, both as to [Christ’s] Conception, Birth, Life, Sufferings, Miracles, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Intercession, and that all he did and Suffered was to Compleat our Redemption, and we expect Salvation by no other name, but by the Name of Jesus’. They also claimed that they had offered to make a confession of faith to this effect, but this had not satisfied George Keith.
These declarations confirm that Christian faith was undeniably understood as the minimum standard required of a sound Friend in the 1690s. In the safety of their own Meetings, however, the same people were prepared to challenge George Keith forcefully on the relevant points of Quaker doctrine. Thus, one of his opponents apparently asserted that ‘the Question betwixt us and [George Keith] is not who is the best Christian, but who is the best Quaker’. George Keith also recalled another of his adversaries stating that his heresy was ‘in a Fundamental Doctrine of the Quakers’ – that is, the ‘sufficiency of the Light’ to bring about a ‘saving faith’.
These passages indicate both loyalty to the distinctive Quaker vision and a desire to be situated in the Christian church. But they also suggest that a ‘Quaker orthodoxy’ was emerging as a powerful rhetorical force in its own right by the 1690s – and this is confirmed by what actually happened when George Keith’s opponents offered their confession of faith. Rather than producing their own confession, they offered to affirm something ‘put out by Ancient approved Friends’. They felt that it was ‘Safer and Modester’ to rely on previous generations, rather than create something new. But George Keith reacted against this apparent reliance on Quakerism as a new frame of orthodoxy and demanded that their statement should arise from their own faith. It is more than a little ironic that he was the one appealing the authority of the inward Light here, echoing George Fox’s famous challenge: ‘What canst thou say?’
This leads us to the second important theological issue at stake. For the inherent compatibility of Quakerism and Christianity had in fact been George Keith’s particular concern since young adulthood – it was what led him to reject the Scottish Presbyterianism of his youth – and, above all, he was keen to establish the relationship between the Light within and the historical Jesus. This posed a problem, though: the Incarnation was a physical event, but the whole thrust of Quakerism was to turn to what was inward and spiritual. This had led the Quaker movement as a whole to emphasise their faith in the historical Jesus increasingly over time. And yet, despite the fact that George Keith was travelling in the same direction as his peers, from the early 1690s he started to travel more quickly. The significance of the dispute over ‘outward forms’ is reflected in the various accounts of the controversy at the time, which listed the main issues at stake as: the correct understanding of the ‘outward’ Christ, justification and sanctification by Christ’s ‘outward’ blood, the resurrection of the physical body, and Christ’s literal second coming. And if we find these issues somewhat obscure, it is important to realise that they had practical implications too. For the first Quaker Meeting ever to endorse an anti-slavery position was the Keithian Monthly Meeting of Philadelphia in 1693 – and they made this argument precisely on the basis of a link between inward and outward bondage, and the need to eliminate both. By comparison, George Fox wrote of how enslaved people could be free, spiritually, despite their literal enslavement. As the Keithians insisted that Christ had come to ‘bring into Liberty both inward and outward’, they were many decades ahead of their opponents.
So, George Keith was not satisfied with anything less than the full coherence of Christian teaching and Quakerism, and this brought increasing tension between him and his community, as he increasingly emphasised the importance of ‘Christ without’. It was these tensions which eventually led to his departure from the Quaker movement.
The lessons
I believe that these events can teach us three main lessons. First, they are a reminder that what we believe about ‘that of God in everyone’ is not always just a matter of personal theology. This is demonstrated most obviously by the Keithians’ statement against slavery. But the dispute also had important historical implications for the Society as a whole. As one historian wrote: ‘[George] Keith’s words were unheeded, and what he foresaw came to pass: in fact, exactly that which generations later led to the total disruption of Quakerism… was what Keith tried in vain to expunge at the outset.’ Here, he referred to the Orthodox and Hicksite split in American Quakerism during the nineteenth century – the crucial issue this time being Elias Hicks’ focus on the Light within over and above Scripture. Might nineteenth century Quakerism have been less vulnerable to schism if Quakers in George Keith’s time had been more willing to deal with the doctrinal issues head-on? Perhaps, although any solution he proposed would also have limited the scope of Quaker faith and precluded the possibility of modern liberal Quakerism in the process. In all these cases, the lesson is the same: that beliefs have implications and we should not be shy about explaining to each other why and how our beliefs affect how we see the world. This is simply one aspect of letting our lives speak. When we fail to do so, we prioritise the appearance of harmony over true, sustainable peace.
Secondly, the Keithian controversy should remind us that Quakerism has its own native Christian tradition, which is generous, inclusive and listening. To be clear, it is simply factually wrong to say that the early Quakers conceived of their faith as anything other than centrally Christian: they understood the nature of the Light within as Christ, and both sides clearly felt the need to prove their own Christian credentials if they were to be taken seriously. However, it is equally incorrect to say that early Friends saw Christianity as the only true basis for faith. Rather, they passionately defended the ability of the Light to save people without it, and even sacrificed one of their greatest theologians to this cause. Advices & queries 4 challenges us to consider how we interpret our faith in the light of our Christian heritage. There is a tendency within modern Quakerism to disparage ‘Christianity’ as narrow-minded and dogmatic – and therefore to view it as something to engage with reluctantly, rather than learn from as a valid source of ‘new light’. Yet the early Quakers themselves were instrumental in pioneering a different kind of Christianity, which made room for everybody at the table.
And this leads us to the third lesson. For those early Friends who went on to direct the Quaker movement into the eighteenth century were both absolutely committed to authentic Christianity as a pillar of faith and fiercely committed to the saving capacity of the Light even beyond the Christian church. And this should serve as a reminder that, from the start, Quakers have chosen those paths which affirm the validity of multiple identities operating alongside one another. In this sense, unlikely as it would have seemed to Friends at the time, the Keithian controversy offers an excellent resource for bridging divides in our community and for constructing a more nuanced self-understanding centred around a shared, open-hearted heritage. Having listed their demands of their opponents in Philadelphia, the Keithians requested an ‘answer’ from their opponents ‘and the Sooner the Better’. They ultimately left the Quaker movement without the ‘answer’ they sought – and not for want of trying. Together, we are still seeking that ‘answer’ today.
Madeleine’s book on this topic, The Christian Quaker: George Keith and the Keithian Controversy, was recently published by Brill.
Comments
‘One resource by which we can explore our modern differences more constructively is a shared reflection on our past’ - you speak my mind, Madeleine. Negotiating the tensions between the original experience of the Light and finding a way to live with it as a community in the world has been the task of Friends from the start, and still is. Knowing and understanding something of our history is one of the best ways of making visible that ‘core’ (for want of a better word) that takes on different clothing in different eras, as well as of reducing that sense that we need to feel anxious about our differences and the implications of change.
By Kersti on 25th April 2019 - 8:47
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