The making and unmaking of a god: New light on George Fox and early Quakerism

This study is a departure point for new discussion about Fox's meaning of the inner light. What is put forth here is that Fox's inner light was none other than the celestial Christ who inhabited and divinized the believer. Fox argued for a celestial inhabitation of the believer that was almost corporeal. This helps to explain Fox's thaumaturgical powers, the exalted language used among early Quakers and especially towards Fox, the blasphemy trials and the Nayler incident. All these things do not belong at the fringes of early Quakerism, they belong at its very centre. They are the logical result of the core elements of Fox's teaching.;Thus the way was opened for the massive re-shaping of early Quakerism, early Quakerism as we have come to know it today--a dissenting sect with powerful spiritualist, mystical and Quietist tendencies. This, however, was the view that a second generation aristocratic, sophisticated and very intellectual Quakerism wanted us to have. It was not, in actual fact, what early Quakerism was. George Fox's notion of celestial flesh was one of the greatest challenges to Christian orthodoxy ever to appear in Christian history and it may be compared to Jesus' own challenge to Orthodox Judaism or the appearance of the high heresies of the second and third centuries after Jesus. And early Quakerism, as a result, was the most charismatic sect to appear since the days of the early Church, or at least since the era of Montanism.;Fox's doctrine of celestial inhabitation was the centrepiece of the early (primitive) Quaker weltanschauung and this is what later Quaker editors literally excised from the sources in the name of Respectability--that is, in their effort to move Quakerism within the pale of respectable English non-conformity. William Penn, Robert Barclay and George Keith, under the influence of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, de-divinized the inner light, disembodied the Spirit, and replaced the inner light as Christ (literally the celestial flesh of Christ in the believer) with an inner light re-defined as Reason or an ethical principal of the highest order that was informed by the Divine but was not itself part of the Divine.