Power of the Lord

A study by Howard Alexander found that the most common used phrase in the Journal of George Fox was "Power of the Lord", when you include similar phrases such as "Power of God" and "The Lord's Power". There are many aspects to the meaning of this phrase used so frequently by early Friends. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all aspects, or to discuss it in great depth.

The immediate prompting for writing an article this month on this theme was an article by Scott Martin on "Quaking and the Rediscovery of Primitive Quakerism" in the May 2001 Friends Journal. While I am uneasy with some of the directions that article took, I thank him for highlighting some key questions that have long interested me. He notes about early Friends' experience of the power of the Lord:

Friends would experience this power surrounding them or flowing through their bodies under a variety of conditions, but most often at the point of convincement, when facing a trial, or during meeting for worship. An experience of the power was often associated with some kind of involuntary physical or mental phenomenon. When seized by the power, some Friends quaked, vocalized, or fell unconscious to the floor, while other Friends saw brilliant light, had visions, experienced healing, or felt a force emanating from them that was capable of subduing an angry and hostile mob.

We really do not know a lot about the typical early Quaker meetings for worship, but we do know that Friends were dubbed "Quakers" because they were said to tremble with the power of the Lord. We do not how common the various phenomena Martin mentioned were, and Martin notes that "Not all 17th-century Friends were of one mind regarding this power..." It is possible, even likely, that many references to such phenomena in early Quaker writings were edited out for fear they would be taken the wrong way by readers.

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