Grace and Faith: The Means to Salvation (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES115 Grace and Faith: The Means to Salvation. By Donald S. Nesti. Manasquan, N.J.: Catholic and Quaker Studies, 1975. xxi, 368 pages. $7.50. Donald Nesti, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, is a leading sponsor of the Catholic and Quaker Studies series. In this important study, subtitled "An Analysis of Early Quaker Soteriology and Sacramentality : 1650-1689," he develops a novel and interesting interpretation of early Quaker theology—specifically of the thought of Fox, Dewsbury, Nayler , Burrough, Howgill, Farnworth, and Penington. His central diesis is that the early Friends placed a radical emphasis on God alone as responsible for man's salvation. Revelation of God's saving intention comes through a confrontation between God and man; human awareness of this inward encounter cannot be reduced to any set of concepts or propositions. Donald Nesti follows such historians as Geoffrey Nuttall and Hugh Barbour in placing early Quaker thought and experience within the context of seventeenth-century Calvinistic Puritanism. He gives considerable attention to the ways in which early Friends appropriated and reacted to the thoughtpatterns and religious problems of their English Puritan contemporaries. The basic questions which Donald Nesti asks of the early Friends arise out of a Roman Catholic sacramental theology. Nevertheless, he interprets these writers as sympathetically as the best Quaker scholars do, and his points of criticism are fair and generally convincing. This study contains a number of remarkable insights. For instance, the passage from Fox's Journal so beloved by many modern Friends—" 'There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,' . . . my heart did leap for joy___ And this I knew experimentally"—is "a typical Puritan confession of religious experience"; the novelty and originality of Fox's thought lie elsewhere! Such a seminal interpretation will inevitably raise questions. One crucial problem emerges in regard to the early Quaker understanding of the covenant . Nesti argues that, in contrast to other Puritan covenant theologies, for the Quakers the covenant was purely an inward one between God and the individual and was not a covenant between God and the community. He documents this by citing Isaac Penington's clear treatment of the covenant -idea. But is Penington's thought as typical of the early Friends, on diis subject, as Nesti implies? Cannot there be found, at least in Fox, Nayler, and Burrough, an emphasis on the corporate dimension of the covenant between God and his people? No one interested in early Quaker religious thought or in Quaker interfaith dialogue can afford to ignore this significant new study. Rio Grande CollegeT. Vail Palmer, Jr. ...