The Concept of the Church in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism: (Part II)

THE CONCEPT OF THE CHURCH IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY QUAKERISM (PART II) By Emerson W. Shideler V. William Penn William Penn, like Barclay, tended to speak more of a society than of a fellowship experience, but he did not make of the Church an institution existing in its own right apart from particular people who composed it. The Church in the general sense signified any assembly of people, with a two-fold use in the New Testament, Penn said. The Church in the first use signified "the body and bride of Christ," which included the regenerate of all generations. This was the perfect Church, washed clean of all sin, where Christ alone is head; it was the universal and catholic Church which was in no way capable of being convened into an assembly.62 The other use of the term was to designate particular assemblies of adjacent and contiguous Christian believers, which companies were to be told of injuries and wrongs and whose judgment was to be acceded to by individual Christians. Penn used this twofold concept, of an invisible universal Church and of visible discrete groups, as an attack upon claims for a universal and visible Church.63 Penn meant by Church, in the second definition, "a company of people believing, professing, and practising according to the doctrine and example of Christ Jesus and his apostles,"64 a group of people who lived by the principles of religion revealed in Christ. The Church was a voluntary association, "a company of people agreed together in the sincere profession and obedience of the gospel of Christ,"65 implying that the motivation to bring 62Select Works of William Penn (London, 1825), III, 106. 63Ibid., Ill, 106-7. 64Ibid., Ill, 136. 65Ibid., Ill, 101-2. 35 36Bulletin of Friends Historical Association one into the group came from himself, rather than from some outside force, such as the Spirit of God working in one as it worked in others already in the group. Penn used this idea to deny the possibility that the Church could be the rule of faith for any individual, because it was the individual's own agreement with the group which brought him into it, and its nature as a group derived from the fact that several people had thus come together.66 Penn was concerned to restore the glory of God to its proper place in the lives of men and to free the Church from being tied to buildings and organizations which made pretentious claims as Christian but had no sense of the inward glory of the true Church. He put this feeling about the Church, rather than a formal definition of it, in the following passage which sets forth the difference between the true Church and the pretenders to that title among men. "The Spirit beareth witness with our spirits, that we are the children of God;" Rom. viii, 16, and sons of the true church: not she that hath fatted herself with the flesh of the saints, and died her garments in the blood of martyrs, who hath merchandized in the souls of men ; but of that church which is crowned with stars, and clothed with the sun, and has the moon under her feet. A church of light and knowledge, of understanding and truth, and not of implicit faith and blind obedience: one that tramples upon all sublunary glory; and not she that makes her pretences to religion a decoy to catch the empire of the world.67 The true Church in Penn's eyes was that group of sanctified followers of the Light who had come together in their mutual faith into a fellowship of believers. They exercised no control over one another, but were submissive to one another's judgment. They met together in simple places for their true glory was the Spirit of God shining forth in their lives. VI. William Rogers For William Rogers the Church was those who are members of the body of Christ.68 The qualification for membership in Christ's body was sanctification through the Spirit, and wherever«ß Ibid., Ill, 102. 67Ibid., Ill, 120. 68The Christian-Quaker (London, 1680), part 3, p. 55. The Concept of the Church...