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A Quaker Understanding of Jesus Christ, Part 2© Arthur O. Roberts
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is taken, by permission, from an article, "A Quaker Understanding of Jesus Christ", by Arthur O. Roberts in Quaker Religious Thought, Vol. 29, No. 3, July 1999. Due to the length of that article, it is being published online here in four installments. Part 1 was published October 1, 1999. The article was adapted from a paper read at the Quaker Theological Discussion Group, Orlando, Florida, November 21, 1998, and responses to it. Arthur Roberts is the Editor of Quaker Religious Thought. He is the author of many journal articles, poems, devotional pieces, books, and other writings. He has served in the past as Professor of Religion and Philosophy and as Dean of Faculty at George Fox University, as well as a pastor in Friends' (Quaker) churches. Quaker Religious Thought is published two times a year, and subscription information can be obtained from Phil Smith, Religion Department, George Fox University, Newberg, OR 97132.] 5. The indwelling Christ is a reality distinct from persons indwelled. George Fox frequently referred to Christ as the substance, fulfilling the types and shadows of the past, offering a greater reality, one subordinated to God the creator, not to man the created. Christ has come, he said, "to redeem, translate, convert, and regenerate man. . . out of all the true types, figures, and shadows, and out of death and darkness, up into the light, and life, and image, and likeness of God again as man and woman were in before they fell." (Nichols ed. Journal of George Fox, p. 367) Friends such as Stephen Crisp repeatedly emphasized a spirituality that, even in its fullness retains a lowliness of spirit before the indwelling Christ. No one can become smug about the Light of Christ. Immediate revelation increases rather than decreases awe before the Lord. Indeed, Crisp warned that Satan deceptively comes as an angel of light to draw away from the "simplicity of the Truth" those who haven't fully died to self. Such persons are beguiled into "libertinism." In their carnal reasoning they put their trust in uncertainties and neglect weighty matters; or they decide hell is only in one's conscience, or that death annihilates one anyway so why struggle, or that if one falls short of righteousness now they can make it up in other bodies in the hereafter. ("A Faithful Warning" in Gospel Labours and Writings, Philadelphia: 1822, p. 340-1) |
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