Friend Brinton’s insightful study of the Quaker Movement in the last 300 years, how the Society has 4 different emphases

Currently, in the U.S. and many other nations (and in various ideological or religious movements in history), most humans seem given to extremes and fragmentation.
This leaves us often divisive, unbalanced, and distorted in our quest for truth.

As Howard H. Brinton insightfully explains in Friends for 300 Years this divisiveness and fragmentation even happens to good renewal movements such as the Friends, who came into being for the very purpose of regaining wholistic truth and avoiding all destructive tendencies of human history.

"Through the three centuries of Quaker history the four primary elements present in all religion have at different times exerted their influence in varying degrees."
-Brinton

Mystic Inner Life
Evangel Outreach
Social Justice
Rationalism

From 1650 to about 1750, mysticism and evangel outreach were in balance in the group as a whole though some individuals tended to stress one or the other.

But then mysticism and evangelicalism became a major conflict, each pressing the other to bad extremes among Quakers as a whole.

By the 1800’s, Quietism, (an excessive focus on mysticism—the inner life) became dominant, and the early expressive evangel preaching and sharing of truth with those outside of the society greatly receded.

Instead, the Friends became “a peculiar society” which besides their “inner life” focused on exclusive boundaries and rigid rules.
Exactly the Opposite of the Early Friends who emphasized the CENTER, not exclusion and conformity to outward rules and dress.

During the latter half of the 20th century and the 1st 23 years of the 21st, rationalism and social justice took over and have assumed greater prominence,
(except for a few fundamentalist Friends who have abandoned the key points of the Society and, instead, inserted-asserted Reformed theology, the exact opposite of ALL that Quakerism means)!

Brinton:
"The best type of religion is one in which the mystical, the evangelical, the rational and the social are so related that each exercises a restraint on the others. Too exclusive an emphasis on mysticism results in a religion which is individualistic, subjective and vague."

Too dominant an evangelicalism results in religion which is authoritarian, creedal and external; too great an emphasis on rationalism results in a cold, intellectual religion which appeals only to the few.

Too engrossing a devotion to the social justice results in a religion which, in improving the outer environment, ignores serious defects of the inner life which cause the outer disorders.

Brinton also goes on to warn against "vitalism which worships the life-force in its biological sense" which has very little in common with the central message of the Early Friends.

My response to Brinton's excellent analysis: About the only point where I disagree with Brinton is when he says the 4 qualities "each exercise a restraint on the others."

No--and that sounds too negative--it is rather that when Most bathed in the Light, the 4 parts of true transcendental reality relate/commune, giving a redeeming uplifting of each other and are the Seed of true moral and spiritual becoming.

Read Friends for 300 Years (or the updated version, Friends for 350 Years) and be not only intellectually enlightened, but raised up in the LIGHT!
Friend on the edge, Daniel