George Fox and William Penn: Their Relationship and Their Roles within the Quaker Movement

George Fox and William Penn: Their Relationship and Their Roles within the Quaker Movement Melvin Endy Several historians of Quakerism have described George Fox and William Penn as the two most important seventeenth-century Quakers, as in Rufus Jones' description of John Bright and John Greenleaf Whittier as "the two most distinguished Quakers since the days of George Fox and William Penn" (Later Periods ofQuakerism 2: 630). William Hull argues that Penn would have succeeded Fox as the main leader of the movement had Fox's family not prevented that by seizing on the difficulties that Penn's relationship to James II brought upon himself and the Quaker movement (178). Despite his beliefthat Penn was the natural successor to Fox, Hull is in agreement with those historians who have seen the two leaders as complementing each other in their differing strengths. Fox was the charismatic religious and organizational genius who founded the movement and around whom it congealed, whereas Penn was the well-educated writer and well-placed and far-sighted statesman who enabled it to become tolerated in England and to thrive in the English colonies.1 In this scholarship Penn is portrayed as sharing his prominence with Robert Barclay and a few other Quaker writers in his role in effectively distilling the visions and experiences of Fox and other "First Publishers of Truth" into the theological language ofthe times.2 Some of the more recent scholars of early Quakerism have described what they perceive as significant differences between Fox's and Penn's understandings of Quakerism. In the period marking the revival ofPuritan studies from the 1 93Os through the 1960s the Englishman Geoffrey Nuttall and the American Hugh Barbour—most influentially in, respectively, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (1946) and The Quakers in Puritan England (1964)—headed a generation of scholars who saw Quakerism primarily as a form of radical Puritanism. Nuttall and Barbour possess a better understanding ofthe complexities ofearly Quakerism, and the awkwardness of its fit with the more theologically orthodox groups to their right, than some of their followers. Still, they led a generation of scholars who portrayed Quakerism as a distinctive but primarily Puritan version of Christianity marked by a radical conversion experience, an extreme version ofthe Protestant reliance on salvation by grace alone, and an ambiguous relationship to culture that included elements of both a Puritan transformational and a radical Protestant sectarian perspective. In this school of interpretation, Fox has typically been portrayed as the progenitor of a version of Christianity that is best seen in the Quakers' Quaker History letter to the Governor ofBarbados in 1 67 1 , and that essentially accepted its sectarian status after the Restoration as the only true manifestation of Christianity. By contrast, Penn is portrayed as linking the inward light with several of the epistemological principles being espoused by liberal Christians and proto-deists ofhis day, and as appealing in his tracts on toleration to reason and common sense in a way that is foreign to the original central thrust of the Quaker movement. He thus became the spokesman for what would later become the liberal version of Quaker thought that moved beyond the spectrum of more or less traditional Christian belief and practice. This liberal Quakerism traceable to Penn is said to have later joined with other Protestant liberals who relativized and minimalized the distinctive Christian doctrines and emphasized the essential ethical core that all religions and ethical people share. In addition, as a forerunner of the side of Quakerism that is today best known in the social action of the American Friends Service Committee, Penn joined with political liberals in trying to imprint a version ofthe kingdom ofGod on Western culture in his "holy experiment" in Pennsylvania. To do so he needed to make compromises that, at the least, took Quakerism in a new direction (Barbour, Quakers, 244-48). Some among the most recent generation of scholars of Quakerism have agreed with Barbour that Penn was a leading figure in a second generation of weighty Friends who led the movement in a new direction, but have understood very differently the relationship between the two generations, and the distillation of Quaker thought...