Short Review of the Scholarly Biography of George Fox by H. Larry Ingle

First Among Friends by H. Larry Ingle

This is a very important historical study for all Friends and other readers! Probably, First Among Friends is the best book on George Fox and early Friends. (See below for other detailed histories and biographies.)

Unlike so many studies of the religious past, his book isn’t hagiographical but emphasizes verified facts. At some points it even errs to the side of trying to be so objective, that I wondered whether or not Ingle is even a Quaker.

While pointing out many of the outstanding good actions and perspectives of George Fox, Ingle goes into detail showing Fox’s (and other early Quakers) bad characteristics and acts, their major failings, warts and all. Keeping a scholarly tone, Ingle seldom deals with Fox from a spiritual point-of-view.

The volume focuses mostly on outward actions and is more of a cultural biography. And at times, the text comes across almost too academic and skeptical. For instance, the last paragraph of the biography is disconcerting from a transcendental/spiritual perspective.

Still, it seems that this is a must read for all modern Quakers. First Among Friends has given me new awareness of how all moral and spiritual truth is conditioned by culture, time, and other events. Tragically, even the best moral leaders are still weighed down by pettiness and squabbling.

A good companion history to read is Cavaliers and Roundheads. That outstanding history of the England in the 1600's helps readers to understand that though the secular governments of the period persecuted, oppressed, even killed the early Friends, the authorities weren't necessarily evil but often mistook Fox and Quakers for dangerous violent revolutionaries.

It is also strange seeing in Ingle’s account how at times Parliament vs. King varied in their behavior toward the Friends, not always badly.

How very strange it was that James II, a Roman Catholic (who the early Friends opposed) should be the first to really grant Friends and others religions tolerance, while in stark contrast, Parliament in 1683 was so against Friends and other nonconformists that hundreds were sent to prison.

Such intriguing facts show how complicated real history is versus the myths and over simplifications that most people hear about and think is the truth of their movement.

Other powerful histories on Friends:

Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb's War

Quakers in California

Quakers in Conflict


In the LIGHT,
Daniel Wilcox

Part #4: Saved to Slay? "The Immoral Arc of the Religious Universe"

No, this article isn’t going to end with one of those Christian appeals
where all will be solved if only everyone gets saved
or claims the mythical Rapture will happen in this generation
and solve all problems.

Every historian knows that often “getting saved” is the first awful step to evil, to later committing mass slaying and lying and stealing as the religious wars of the last 500 years horridly show. Consider what the other Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, said after he “got saved”:

“When it is a case of only upholding some spiritual tenet, such as infant baptism…the stubborn sectaries must be put to death."
“Why do we not rather assault them with arms and wash our hands in their blood?"
Martin Luther, On the Pope as an Infallible Teacher, 25 June 1520

“Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly..”

And for Jewish people: “set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians…”

“I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.”
Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543)

And there are countless other examples from Cromwell, Calvin, Augustine, the Puritans, the Popes, etc.

Where is the moral arc of hope if not in Christianity, not in religion since those so often cause evil and despair?

We must be realistically pessimistic. Our own troubled lives are so finite, so brief, so very short. Like Scripture says, we are a “vapor,” then gone.

While God “has been our dwelling place in all generations,” we have to admit we don’t usually see the Good triumph NOW, and won’t in our whole lifetime, or the many future lifetimes of our great-grand kids and descendants after them, on into a thousand years, or a million.

Seldom, even when we do our very best and pray our hardest and finally cry out with Jesus to God,“My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?”

And the very worst fact is that Christians like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day are, too often, the very ones doing evil in the name of God.

As explained earlier in the article, Christians have imprisoned and killed many millions of humans.

Thousands of nonviolent Brethren and Quakers were persecuted and killed in the 1500 and 1600’s. Those followers of Jesus died young and largely forgotten by everyone. They never saw “the arc of the moral universe…bend toward justice.”

How many people have heard of the witness Michael Sattler? The Christian leaders of Austria wrote, “Michael Sattler shall be committed to the executioner. The latter shall take him to the square and there first cut out his tongue, and then forge him fast to a wagon and there with glowing iron tongs twice tear pieces from his body, then on the way to the site of execution five times more as above and then burn his body to powder as an arch-heretic."

Hutterite Large Chronicle, quoted in William Roscoe Estep, The Anabaptist Story 3rd ed., Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 19960, p. 57.

Or Mary Dyer, the Quaker evangelist, who was hanged in Boston by the Christian authorities?

“Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’

There is something in the universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying, ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’”
Martin Luther King, Jr. in The Gospel Messenger

Then he got murdered, shot down in a motel while he was seeking to bring justice to humans seeking better working conditions.

So, you see, there is no real slick answer, no easy fix-it, no doctrinal foundation that doesn’t shake when it comes to confronting evil and asking why God doesn’t act soon!

Rather, we have the never-ending job of Job—to wrestle with the God we seek, asking why He doesn’t act and why his followers so often are numbered among those who cause evil, rather than oppose it.

But we don’t lose hope, because we do have this impossible ultimate, future hope like Mary Dyer and Michael Sattler and Martin Luther King Jr. and Tom Fox and so many others, a great cloud of witnesses for truth, so many who refused to accept wrong, who were determined to bring in goodness, who trusted, against all doubt, that God is, despite all the evidence against that incredible hope.

No matter how many future centuries or many millenniums pass, no matter how much evil in all its forms—the petty and the ghastly—continues to destroy…

Good will keep rising,

evil
falling
and failing
until it will, eventually and completely, be defeated.

And then God’s eternal communion will come.

Peace will replace conflict.

Justice, truth, love and mercy will fill the Earth.

Let it become.

Choose to act for justice and mercy, love and kindness, truth and joy-- today, now, this very moment.

No matter how LONG it takes.

Yes, God, lover of all.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

All is not calm, all is not bright...

All is not calm, all is not bright…
One of my favorite hymns from childhood is “Silent Night” by the German priest Josef Mohr written in (or maybe before) 1816.

Needless to say, northern Europe in the early 1800’s was neither calm nor bright, nor holy, nor at peace, nor filled with love’s pure light, nor redeemed by grace.
There was a high infant mortality rate, crop failures, ravaging disease, and horrendous slaughter. Europe had had almost continuous, calamitous war for 25 years! No “calm” there.

Napoleonic troops and anti-French troops had ravaged back and forth. 558,000 French-lead soldiers died during the campaign into Russia. In 1813, over 600,000 soldiers fought in one battle alone at Leipzig, Saxony. As many as 110,000 were killed or wounded.

Approximately 1 million or more civilian died from the war. Total war deaths reached between 3 to 6 million! Then Germany as a confederation was created from parts of the former Holy Roman Empire, however, German nationalists assassinated leaders…

Speaking of assassinations, that takes us back to the time of Jesus’s birth in Roman Palestine under Herod the Great in about 4-3 B.C..

Not a time of love, peace and light either.

Nor was Britain at the birth of the Quaker movement (so dear to my heart). Strangely, not even the early Quakers waged peace, contrary to Friends histories and popular understanding! Many of the Quakers fought in the great slaughter of the English Civil War.

George Fox, who would later emphasize the peaceful way of Jesus, at one point urged the Puritan killer Oliver Cromwell to carry forth his holy war all the way to Rome!! “Let thy soldiers go forth…that thou may rock the nations as a cradle.”

Not at all like the cradled-manger of Jesus.

So much for “silent night, holy night”…

Instead, even with the Friends of Jesus, the Children of Light, we have an "ocean of darkness" at first…

Nor was America peaceful in the time of my own childhood, when in a small Nebraska village, we sang this beautiful carol, shining the God’s light out into the overwhelming darkness of fighting and killing…

Consider this powerful “Silent Night” meditative song by Simon and Garfunkel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZazHqdNeXA

What a paradoxical contrast between the way of Jesus and the, too often, horrific way of us.

May we truly witness of the love and peace of God in this often Christ-less, unholy season.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox