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A Quaker Understanding of Jesus Christ, Part 1

© Arthur O. Roberts

For George Fox it was central to "the people of God called Quakers" to let everyone know, whether Jews, Turks, Christians, or heathens, that "there is no salvation in any other name under heaven, whereby they must be saved but in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, crucified and raised from the dead." (Works 5, 87) Early Friends did not use scholastic atonement theories but used a variety of Biblical metaphors to affirm casuality. To the question: How doth Christ convey life? Isaac Penington wrote:

As the living Word; as the promised seed. He soweth the seed of the kingdom in the heart, in which is life: and as he maketh way for this to spread and grow up in and leaven the vessel, even so he quickeneth and gathereth into his life.

Again, he is the enlightening word, the quickening word, the word of wisdom, the word of power, the word of love and reconciliation, whose voice worketh mightily towards the destroying of sin, and saving of the soul from it.

Job Scott, at the end of the eighteenth century, stressed the outer-inner meaning of Jesus' death in a plenary rather than substitutionary mode. He speaks for the conservative Quaker tradition:

Christ...has shown us plainly that nothing will do, short of death in us. That the death must be in man; that we must die to all creaturely corruption, as he died to the creaturely life. "In that he dies, he died unto sin once," says the apostle, "and in that he liveth, he liveth unto God." Though he was sinless, yet he died unto sin; he died to the very first risings and motions of evil; for "he was in all things tempted as we are." In yielding to these temptations, lust would have been so conceived as to have brought forth sin, but in dying, instantly, the death of the holy cross, to every motion whose tendency was unto sin, he is properly said to have died unto sin. And herein, as well as in his death on the cross outwardly to the life of the creature, he has powerfully taught us the necessity of dying with him unto all sin. He that will lose his life for his sake, shall save a divine and eternal life with and in him. But he that will save his life, will not die with him unto sin, must and shall lose it. He that will reign with him, must suffer with him; and he that will rise with him in the newness of the divine life, must first be buried with him in that baptism which is into real death unto all sin, even the baptism by which the floor of the heart is thoroughly cleansed. [from Essays on Salvation by Christ, ca. 1793, pp. 40-44 in Quaker Heritage Press edition]