Quaker Heritage Press > Historical Essays > What Fox Meant by "Gospel"

This paper, which I wrote in 1984, is posted here at the request of several people for its research into Fox's understanding and use of the word "gospel." In some ways the paper is out of date, especially as regards what it describes of Lewis Benson's activities and those of the New Foundation Fellowship. Lewis Benson died in 1986, and the NFF is not the same social entity today that it was in 1984. But it did not seem feasible to revise the paper, which reflects much of my personal history, so it is reproduced here as written. -- Licia Kuenning (1998)


"THE GOSPEL IS THE POWER OF GOD":
WHAT DID GEORGE FOX MEAN BY IT?

Lisa Kuenning
June 1984
Sometimes one has to get entirely outside one's own usual circle of associates and mental assumptions to see what's in front of one's nose. That is how I discovered that I had never understood what George Fox meant when he said that the gospel is the power of God.

I definitely thought that I knew what he meant. I thought that Fox's gospel was Fox's message -- a message of good news about who Christ is and how he saves people. I knew that Fox had preached that Christ was come to teach his people himself, and I thought that when he referred to "the gospel," he meant this message, in one form or another.

Accordingly, when Fox said that "the gospel is the power of God," I thought he meant that his message was the power of God, and I thought he was saying that the most powerful thing in the world was a message -- the particular message summed up in the words "Christ is come to teach his people himself." And I thought he meant that by preaching this message we could release God's power into the world, turn men and women to Christ their teacher, and gather a great people who would make mighty witness for Truth by obeying and suffering together.

All this, I believed, could be effected by preaching the good news, because the news was the power of God. Didn't Fox say so over and over? And hadn't he made a mark on history? So I preached the message in meetings, and I published articles about it in magazines, and I typed the message on mimeograph stencils and produced tracts, and I stood on the street for hours handing out leaflets with the power of God on them, and I tacked them on every bulletin board I could find, and exhorted all my friends to do the same. The country didn't shake; but I thought it was only a matter of time.

And then, one day, I met someone who wasn't a Quaker and who didn't know a single soul that I knew, and who hadn't read most of the modern Quaker writers that I'd read, but who'd been reading George Fox independently. And this person looked over my stuff, and said to me, "You've got it wrong about the gospel. The gospel isn't the news that Christ has come, or anything of that sort. The gospel is the power of God!"

Huh?

I mean, I thought that was the silliest thing I'd ever heard. Of course I knew the gospel was the power of God. But I didn't understand that in any other sense than that the news about Christ was the means of God's powerful work.

I thought my informant was making an elementary logical blunder, mistaking the 'is' of attribution for the 'is' of definition -- as if someone were to say, "George Fox wasn't the son of Christopher and Mary Fox; he was the founder of Quakerism," or "Psychology isn't the study of the mind; it's what I majored in in college."

In hopes of putting a speedy end to such nonsense (as I thought it), I turned to Fox, expecting that any random five pages would probably yield me a clear statement that the gospel is the message that Christ has come to teach his people himself. And I found out that I'd been wrong.

Rediscovering Fox

I started by leafing through Fox's Journal, Nickalls edition, where the word Gospel is easy to pounce on, being printed with a capital G. I found that Fox often said that he or another Friend "preached the Gospel" or "declared the Gospel" -- that seemed safe enough. What would one preach or declare if not a message? Now if only I could get him to say he "preached the Gospel that Christ was come ..." I'd be in the clear. Annoyingly, he never seemed to quite put it that way. Even more puzzlingly, I kept stumbling across passages in which "Gospel" performed a semantic function incompatible with my instinctive sense of how the word ought to be used.

Look, for instance, at the odd parallelism of "Gospel" and "Cross" in the following passage:

Friends ... know the power of God in one another and in that rejoice; for then you rejoice in the Cross of Christ ... which Cross is the power of God to all them that are saved. So you that know the power and feel the power, you feel the Cross of Christ, you feel the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth. [1]
Feel the Gospel? What is Fox telling Friends to feel? Some kind of power -- a power in people, to be felt in oneself and recognized in others. And what is it powerful to accomplish? Not -- so far as this passage goes -- to gather a great movement or to make an impact on history -- but to save the believer. And it is the same power of God that is called the Cross of Christ. Now the Cross, however we understand it, is not a message, though it might well be the subject matter of a message. How can Gospel be the same thing as Cross?

Look again, at one of the earliest mentions of "Gospel" in Fox's Journal:

Now, when the Lord God and his son, Jesus Christ, did send me forth into the world, to preach his everlasting gospel and kingdom ... [2]
Gospel and kingdom! Is the kingdom a message? Surely not. The kingdom is what Fox's message was about. Grammatically, then, the "everlasting gospel" in this passage should also be, not the message itself, but the thing the message was about. This is not the way we are used to using the word, but it is quite consistent with the way Fox talks about preaching and declaring. "Preach Christ," "preach up sin," "preach repentance," "preacher of righteousness," "declare the day of the Lord" are all phrases found in Fox where "preach" or "declare" takes a noun rather than a proposition as its object. Then any of the places where Fox says he "preached the gospel" might, for all I could tell, mean not that he preached the doctrinal message I was used to thinking of as "the gospel," but simply that he preached about the gospel -- whatever "the gospel" might be!

Look again, this time at a passage where Fox's definition of "the Gospel" is pitted against one commonly held in his time:

some of the heads of the town ... reasoned that the Gospel was the four books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and natural. But I told then the Gospel was the power of God, which was preached before Matthew, Mark, Luke and John or any of them were printed or written, and was preached to every creature who might never see nor hear of the four books aforesaid; so that every creature was to obey the power of God, for Christ the spiritual man, would judge the world according to the Gospel, that is according to his invisible power. [3]
Now, a modern theologian would certainly agree with Fox that "the Gospel" is not "the four books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John." But there the agreement ends. The modern theologian would surely go on to say that the gospel is the good news about Christ, or the good news of the Kingdom of God, or perhaps that the gospel is the kerygma, the message the apostles preached. And so, I think, would most educated theologians in centuries past. Luther, for instance, said that "the whole gospel is simply the good news of the forgiveness of sins," though it "may be proclaimed in few words or many," and again that "This gospel proclaims Christ as the Son of God; that He was man; that He died and rose again for our sakes, as Paul says...." [4]

Of course I would have expected Fox's "gospel" to differ from Luther's "gospel." But I would have expected the difference to be in propositional content -- i.e., in their accounts of what the gospel says. Fox frustrated my expectations by having nothing to say about the propositional content of the "gospel," leaving me to wonder whether he thought of it as having propositional content at all. Fox's account of "the gospel" is different in a different way, and it is really very odd.

Note, first, that "the Gospel is the power of God" is stated as though it were a definition of the term "gospel," rather than an attributive statement about a gospel message already defined in some other way. Note, too, that while the gospel is said to have been "preached," this preaching is not attached to any historical events or preachers. Rather it was preached "to every creature" -- a feat that no human preachers could fully accomplish. This does not seem to be "preaching" as we think of preaching -- a visible, audible public activity. Rather the gospel is an "invisible" power. Finally notice the functions of this power of God: every creature is to obey it; then it must give commandments. This in itself is semantically odd if we have the conventional concept of "gospel"; news does not give commandments. And finally, Christ will judge the world according to this power.

I was having to face the fact that George Fox's usage of the word "gospel" was not what I had expected it to be, and that his phrase "the gospel is the power of God" didn't mean what I had thought it meant. But I was far from sure that I had pinned down what he did mean. Could he really be ignorant of the obvious etymological connection of "gospel" with "good news"? Was Fox's "gospel" not a message at all? What did "preaching the gospel" mean to Fox? And what was "the power of God"?

There was nothing to do but start from scratch. It had been several years since I had read the Works of George Fox from beginning to end, and at that time I read them through Lewis Benson's glasses, knowing what I was supposed to find and not finding much else. This time I think I approached the material with more awareness of my ignorance. I did not comb the vaults; I figured that the 6 non-Journal volumes of the 8-volume Works, plus Nickalls, would give me enough material to chew on. And they did.

More Rediscovering Fox

For the statisticians, George Fox uses the word "gospel" in these volumes some 1,548 times, give or take a few.

At least 373 times, he explicitly equates "the gospel" with "the power of God."

In all these volumes I cannot find that Fox ever uses the phrase "gospel message" or follows the word "gospel" with the propositional "that." Nor does he ever say that a proposition or a message is the power of God, or that preaching a proposition or a message will release God's power into the world.

Here with are some of the things he does say:

a) The gospel, the power of God, is not written words
P. And he saith, 'The gospel is the letter,' &c.
A. The apostle saith, it is the power of God; and the letter kills, and many may have the form, and deny the power, and so stand against the gospel, which is the power of God. [5]
he that ... makes a profession of God and Christ, and saith, the letter is the word, and the four books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is the gospel, he knoweth not Christ which is glad tidings, the lamb of God, which takes away the sins of the world; for the letter takes not away sin. [6]
Notice that in this second passage the gospel is Christ! More on this later.

In a lengthy paper against biblicists who said they wouldn't know there was a God or Christ without the written law and gospel, Fox cites a series of heathen persons mentioned in the Bible who perceived some truth from God even though they had "neither written law, nor gospel, so called." [7] Here Fox is using his opponents' terminology; the "so called" indicates that this is not the proper use of "gospel" in his own vocabulary.

b) The gospel, the power of God, is not spoken words
the power of God, which is the gospel, in which is the fellowship, when there are no words spoken. [8]
P. He saith, 'He dare boldly assert, that the gospel is not first made known by the seeing within, but by hearing tidings without,' etc.
A. Contrary to that which they call their original, which saith, 'the gospel is preached in every creature.' And none come to hear and see the gospel, but with the eye within, that which is oppressed. For the Jews that heard not, and saw not within, stood against the gospel: and Christ said, 'their ears were stopped, and their eyes were closed;' and so they heard words, but the gospel, the power of God, they could not hear, but stood against Christ; and so none hear but they that hear within; and he only is a preacher of the gospel, which is the power of God, that preacheth to the inward eye. [9]
Not only must a preacher preach to that which is inward to be preaching the gospel, he must preach from that which is inward, for "none can bring the glad tidings, but as the spirit moves them." [10]

c) The gospel is glad tidings. But this is not understood in such a way as that the "tidings" are put into words. Rather it means that the gospel, the inward power of God, is occasion for rejoicing.
When I first begin to realize how unusual Fox's use of "gospel" was, I wondered whether the etymological sense of gospel as "good news" was simply absent from his mind -- whether he was ignorant of the etymology. To me "news" meant an outward report. What I discovered was that Fox knew that gospel was "good news" or "glad tidings" but these terms, too, are used in his own special way, to refer not to a report but to the good thing itself, as something to be glad of. We still sometimes use the expression that way, as if after a long hot dry spell it starts to rain and someone says, "That's good news!" meaning not the report of the rain (we both see it falling) but the rain itself.
the power of God, (the gospel) expels away that which burdened your spirits, minds, hearts, consciences, and souls; ... then, by the power of God, man seeth over that which hath burthened his spirit, mind, soul, and conscience, and beyond it, and before it was; where the spirit, soul, mind, and conscience cry 'glad tidings.' And here is the joyful gospel.... [11]
We witness the happy day of the Lord is come, the good and happy day, and glad tidings to souls, the day of Christ; praises, praises, be to him for ever.... This is the day of salvation, and the everlasting gospel, glad tidings are come into our souls.... [12]
The apostles ... would have made their gospel to have stunk, if they had come into all nations to preach the gospel, and then ... if their hearers would not have given them maintenance ... haled their hearers into courts .... Would this have been glad tidings...? [13]
And the word of faith that saves the soul, was in their hearts; and there were the glad tidings, the gospel.
the power of God is immediate; and that is the glad tidings to poor souls, that sets the soul free. [14]
d) The gospel is inward, immediate, eternal, received from God and not from man.
P. He saith, 'Is not the gospel an external way,' &c.
A. No; the gospel is a living way, which is revealed within, and is the 'power of God to salvation.' [15]
P. He saith, 'We attain our gospel another way than Paul did.'....
A. ... is it not blasphemy for you to speak and preach that which ye have not received from heaven? and so you have brought yourselves under the curse, and showed yourselves ministers of another gospel. For whosoever receiveth the gospel, which is called 'the power of God,' it is immediate, and by immediate revelation from God. And so your gospel which is of men ... is another, not the power of God. [16]
Notice, again, what Fox means when he asserts that his gospel is different from the gospel of his opponents. I had always thought that the Quaker gospel was different because it asserted different doctrines -- e.g., the prophetic office of Christ. Fox isn't talking about that. Nothing here about having gleaned a lost stratum of apostolic teaching out of the New Testament. He says it is different because his gospel is received from God, theirs from man!
none on earth can preach the gospel, but who are in the immediate call; for the gospel is the power of God, and that is immediate. [17]
as I was speaking in the meeting that the Gospel was the power of God and how it brought life and immortality to light in men ... this high priest said the Gospel was mortal. But I told him the true minister said the Gospel was the power of God and how could he make the power of God mortal. Upon that the other priest, Philip Scafe, that was convinced and had felt the power of God which was immortal, took him up and reproved him. [18]
e) The gospel is the Light; the gospel is the Cross; the gospel is the Seed; the gospel is the Truth; the gospel is Christ.
And this is the counsel of the Lord God to you, dwell all in the power of God, which is the gospel of peace. And the power of God is the cross of Christ; and ye that feel the power of God, ye feel Christ; for Christ is the power of God. The power of God is but one, and the light is but one, and the cross of Christ is but one, which is the power of God, and the gospel of truth is but one, which is the power of God, and there is no other. [19]
I guess there isn't!

the power of God, which is the gospel, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world [20]
all that received the everlasting gospel, the seed in which all nations are blessed, are ... children of the seed.... [21]
I declared to the people the Gospel, the Truth, the light of Jesus Christ in their own hearts.... The priest told me Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the Gospel, I told him the Gospel was the power of God. [22]
The gospel is also the Word, the Image of God, the Grace of God, the New Covenant, the Substance. [23] These various identifications, which occur in all sorts of permutations and combinations in Fox's writings, all refer to the same spiritual reality, which is also called the power of God.

Every student of Fox is familiar with the way he strings together lists of spiritual things, all more or less synonymous, as "light, life, spirit, grace and truth," "truth, grace, light, spirit, gospel, faith, and word of life," "light, grace, truth, power, spirit, gospel, and faith." I have found the word "gospel" in such lists no less than 97 times -- showing again that for Fox "gospel" is the same sort of thing as the others, and is essentially one of his many synonyms for Christ within.

f) The gospel, the power of God, sets people free from the power of Satan.
"Power of God" is a very broad idea. Philosophically speaking, one might feel that nothing in the universe happens without God's power. When Fox says that the gospel is the power of God, however, he is thinking of a particular kind of work. This is an inward work in the souls of men and women, which Fox repeatedly speaks of in terms of liberation from captivity, and defeat of the devil, death, and sin. One of Fox's frequent statements is that the gospel "brings life and immortality to light."

the gospel is the power of God which turns against that which bondageth, to wit, the corruptions, and so gives liberty and freedom to the captives; and this, which is the power of God, is glad tidings ... that which gives liberty and freedom to all, is glad tidings. [24]
the everlasting gospel, the power of God, is over the prince of the world ... and is stronger than he, whose dark unclean spirit and power had a beginning, and must have an end ... but the power of God, the gospel, is everlasting and without end, though it hath a beginning in men, to the saving of them; and therefore it is called 'The Gospel of Salvation.' [25]
the liberty in Christ, in the gospel, in the spirit, is far above the liberty of the old Adam in the flesh, in the sin, the wages of which is death. [26]
the gospel, which is the power of God ... gives liberty to the captive soul; this is glad tidings to the just. [27]
And so they are partakers in the gospel, of the deliverance over the devil .... [28]
I have not, in these few pages, covered everything Gorge Fox does with the word "gospel," which would be a monumental undertaking. I have left out a large bulk of material comparing "gospel" and "law," in which his use of the term is somewhat tangential to that which I have described, though not unconnected. Another major topic would be "gospel order" which also appeared in a somewhat new light once I'd gotten straightened out about what "gospel" is.

Fox is not a systematic writer, and there are occurrences of this word in his writings which are hard to categorize. There are even a few places where he seems to make the gospel a proposition -- I have counted at most ten such places, which are few enough among so many hundreds. Some of them are doubtful. None of them is "Christ has come...." The clearest instances of a propositional use of "gospel" are in a paper on "The Antiquity of our Gospel," [29] where Fox sets forth the gospel three times as quotated sentences: that to Abraham, "'In thy seed shall all nations be blessed'"; that to Adam, "'The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head'"; and that heard by John, "'Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come, and worship him that made heaven and earth, and the sea, and fountains of water.'" Interestingly, all three of these messages were spiritually preached -- two by God and one by an angel. Before the essay is finished Fox has reverted to his more accustomed way of talking, saying that the gospel is the seed itself.

How Robert Barclay Did my Homework for me if I'd Only Known

I have not done extensive exploration to see whether Fox's unusual usage of the word "gospel" was shared by other early Quakers. However, somewhere in the midst of my reading, I ran across a statement in Barclay's Apology showing that he had fully absorbed Fox's idea.

Barclay is a more systematic writer than Fox, and his school training must have made him more aware of the way that theological terms were understood by his contemporaries outside the Quaker movement. He fully realized that, to most educated people, "gospel" denoted an outwardly preached message. He relates this common usage to the distinctively Quaker usage in the following passage:

This saving spiritual light is the gospel.... For the gospel is not a mere declaration of good things, being the "power of God unto salvation to all those that believe," Rom. i.16. Though the outward declaration of the gospel be taken sometimes for the gospel; yet it is but figuratively, and by a metonymy. For to speak properly, the gospel is this inward power and life which preacheth glad tidings in the hearts of all men, offering salvation unto them, and seeking to redeem them from their iniquities, and therefore it is said to be preached "in every creature under heaven:" whereas there are many thousands of men and women to whom the outward gospel was never preached. [30]
Thus Barclay nods to the usage of "gospel" with which we are all familiar, dismisses it as a figure of speech, and casts his vote as to the proper way of speaking, for Fox's usage, which he sets forth better than I could have done. Lewis Benson often asserts that Barclay did not fully reflect the teaching of Fox, but in the point of what the gospel is, Barclay's description accords perfectly with what I have found in my study of Fox's works. [31]

So Why Does It Matter?

First, let me summarize what I have been demonstrating in this paper. Fox's "gospel" is not the message that Christ has come to teach his people himself. It is not an outwardly spoken or written message at all, but is rather an inward power by which God works in the souls of men and women to free them from bondage to the power of sin. It is one of many names for Christ or his light within. When Fox says that "the gospel is the power of God" he is thus not asserting anything about the effectiveness of a vigorous strategy of evangelism. Rather, he is defining the term "gospel."

Now, what does it matter? Have we merely caught Fox in one of his notorious linguistic eccentricities? He certainly had his own way of using words. If, for example, he took it into his head that the word "human" meant "earthly," and therefore denied that Christ was human; [32] if he assumed that ravening wolves must have "ravened" from something; [33] if he thought hypocrites were people who were "hipt above the truth," [34] we surely are under no obligation to follow him such oddities. Is it any more important that he thought the gospel was the power of God? I think it is.

It is not that I object to anyone's using "gospel" in its more conventional sense. I use it so myself. The etymology of the word, as well as its use in the Bible, seem to me to justify the idea that the gospel is a message that was preached by Christ and his apostles. It is possible that when Paul said, "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth" (Romans 1:16), he meant something closer to what I would have thought he meant before discovering that George Fox took it a different way.

The catch is this: if we are going to talk about "Fox's gospel" -- and there is a great deal of talk about "Fox's gospel" these days -- we had better be clear whether we are using the term "gospel" in the popular sense or in Fox's sense. Either way might be a valid way of talking; but if we confound the two -- taking what Fox says about "the gospel" and applying it to the other meaning -- misunderstanding is inevitable. Just such a misunderstanding is in circulation today, and it has major practical consequences. To this misunderstanding I now turn.

"The Gospel" According to Lewis Benson

George Fox says extremely exalted things about the gospel. This is entirely appropriate when you realize that for him "the gospel" is another name for Christ, the power of God. If, however, you think that "the gospel" refers to propositions, outwardly and verbally preached, then the human activity of preaching is elevated to a kind of divinity which Fox never intended to accord it.

In his pamphlet, "A Revolutionary Gospel," [35] Lewis Benson sets forth a set of doctrines about Christ, and says, "This is the gospel message that Fox preached and which he so frequently proclaimed in its shortened form: 'Christ has come to teach his people himself.'" Benson calls this statement "a revolutionary message" and a "revolutionary gospel message." Again he refers to "The Quaker gospel preaching that 'Christ has come to teach his people himself,'" and says that "This message brings a new dimension to gospel preaching." Yet again, "The gospel that was preached by the Publishers of Truth was a message...." and "Behind the Quaker character was the gospel that they preached: 'Christ has come to teach his people himself.'" Quite clearly, Lewis Benson presents the gospel as a proposition. Yet at the very same time, he quotes Fox on the subject of "gospel," without the slightest hint that the subject has been changed.

The early Quaker movement was a new beginning on a new foundation. The new foundation is to be found in the Quakers' revolutionary gospel message. Fox says that this gospel "hath been lost for many generations. But that gospel again is to be preached" and "as for the gospel foundation, I say, it is to be laid again in the whole world." "The everlasting gospel will be preached again," and "so shall truth go over all nations, the power of God, the gospel, as it did in the days of the apostles." The announcement that "the gospel is being preached again" is repeated at least forty-two times in Fox's writings. [36]
Nobody would guess from this passage that "gospel" has changed its meaning in midstream. Lewis Benson wants to take what Fox says about the "gospel foundation" and "the power of God, the gospel" as if this foundation and this power were the preaching of the proposition that "Christ has come to teach his people himself."

Everything that was great about Quakerism, Lewis Benson attributes to the preached message. The message is the "foundation." (Fox said the foundation was Christ; and Lewis quotes him in this, but without seeing the inconsistency with his own idea that the foundation is a message.) The message is "revolutionary." The message has "saving power" which was to be "released into the world" by the strenuous efforts of the Quaker missioners, who were "wearing themselves out" to bring in "the beginning of a new era." [37] The message "brings a new dimension to faith" such that "righteousness is remarried to faith." [38] The message "had a powerful effect" and was "a real breakthrough" for people who had found the teaching of the churches inadequate; through the publishing of the message they "came to know a place to stand in." [39]

Preaching the message, Lewis Benson tells us, is the thing that produced "a new kind of Christian and a new kind of church." [40] The message is what lay behind "the Quaker character" which "was soon recognizable by its moral probity." The message is what gave the Quakers their "moral certainty which was accompanied by the gift of moral energies which were sufficient to give them a moral strength that they knew was beyond their human capacities." [41] It "gave them a faith that overcomes the world, and gives victory over that which separates from God." [42] Not only that, but the message "led to corporate obedience in righteousness." It "produced a new kind of Christian community" [43] which is "taught by Christ the righteousness of God so that it can learn together, obey together, and suffer together in a corporate witness for God's righteousness." All this is the "fruit" of "preaching the revolutionary gospel." [44] "Because the gospel had first been preached ... God was able to 'raise up' a new kind of Christian community in the seventeenth century." [45]

This is quite a dazzling list of accomplishments to be accorded solely and simply to the missioners "wearing themselves out" in the outward and verbal preaching of a propositional message centered on the statement that "Christ has come to teach his people himself." Apparently, when George Fox says that "the gospel is the power of God," Lewis Benson thinks he means that God's ability to accomplish his purposes in this world is a direct function of how much energy human beings pour into the publication of correct doctrines. If anyone thinks I have exaggerated the power that Lewis Benson attributes to propositional preaching, let them read this 15-page pamphlet.

Lewis Benson's Cause

If one believes that the remarkable moral and social achievements of the early Quaker movement were a function of the doctrines preached and the energy put into preaching them, then it is a natural step to trying to produce the same results in the present day by means of preaching the same doctrines. And that is exactly the program that Lewis Benson has launched.

In a talk entitled "The Greatness of Our Cause," [46] Lewis Benson stated that:

The threefold task of the New Foundation Fellowship is to confront the Society of Friends with Fox's gospel message, to seek the renewal of Quaker life by the power of this gospel, and to proclaim the message to everyone, both Christians and non-Christians.
. . . .
If this apostolic gospel is the power of God, and the greatest resource that the early Quakers had (and they believed it was, and I believe it was), they couldn't see how there could be any really vital Christian life in the absence of that gospel. The church that does not have this gospel at its center doesn't have the power to gather people into an invincible community under the leadership of Christ, a fellowship which learns together, obeys together, and suffers together
. . . .
People are constantly asking us why we feel it necessary to put Fox in the spotlight after centuries of neglect. The reason is that Fox is the man who recovered this everlasting gospel and began to preach it again after it had gone into eclipse for sixteen hundred years. It is not that Fox is the best source of information on this matter; he is the only source of information.
. . . .
We who are called the new Foundation Fellowship have made a new beginning from this starting point.... If we are faithful and keep to the simplicity of the everlasting gospel of Jesus Christ, I believe we will be enabled to do great things for god in our generation. We have a great cause, and it is deserving of our enthusiastic support.
In accordance with this understanding of the greatness of their cause, Lewis Benson and his followers have invested great efforts in publishing pamphlets and periodicals, traveling to present their message orally to various groups, and organizing seminars. At the seminars, speakers present the teachings of George Fox as interpreted by Lewis, and invite hearers to join in the work of publishing the message. The audience is told that "the New Foundation Fellowship" is a "task-oriented fellowship" dedicated to preaching the gospel. No inquiry is made into whether the recruits' personal lives are of such a character as to testify that Christ has indeed taught them righteousness; and there is no attempt to maintain corporate moral testimonies of the sort that characterized the Quaker movement. These things are not emphasized because it is thought that personal and corporate righteousness are fruits of the preached message; so the important thing is to preach the message now and let the fruits come later. The logic of these priorities is contained in Lewis Benson's understanding of "the gospel is the power of God."

Where Fox's mission called people out of all apostate churches to meet together and wait upon Christ's guidance, Lewis Benson's followers were warned at a business session, "We should beware of seeking fellowship apart from preaching or preparing ourselves for that." [47] Where Fox warned people not to go forth in the ministry without an immediate calling from God, Lewis Benson's group were told that "Preaching can't do harm." [48]

When an attender at a "New Foundation Seminar" in Ontario, in June 1983, suggested that the group seek Christ's light on some of the moral issues of our time, one of the speakers responded with some passion that "Preaching this gospel is the only responsible thing anyone can do!"


I have no objection to the historical study of George Fox's teaching or to communicating the results of research. I am engaged in such study and such communication in the present paper. I am not without respect for the efforts Lewis Benson has gone to in discovering and publishing George Fox's christology. So far as I can tell a very great deal of his research is sound, especially that published before 1974; he has provided a needed corrective to the conceptions of early Quakerism that focused excessively on mysticism and obscured the Christian roots of the Quaker movement. This is useful work.

I also have no objection to anyone's preaching -- within the limits of his gifts, his calling, and his measure of light -- whatever he or she knows of Jesus Christ, whether this is done with or without reference to George Fox. I readily believe that God requires this of some -- perhaps in degree of all of his children, and that he can make use of their obedience in such a matter, toward his work of redeeming the creation. I am not trying to suggest that either the early Christian church or the early Quaker church could have happened without plenty of outward preaching, or that the verbal content of the preaching was unimportant. I am not without empathy for the appeal of Lewis Benson's cause, which as I confessed in the opening pages of this paper, I have myself been at some time caught up in. The dynamic of the early Quaker movement is a mysterious and awe-inspiring thing; it is no wonder if someone who believes he has found the secret of it, and is prepared to devote his life to its renewal, can generate a certain amount of excitement.

The trouble is that Lewis Benson has not discovered the early Quaker dynamic. Whatever it took to produce that extraordinary explosion of personal and corporate holiness, it was something more than just getting the true doctrine and preaching it with might and main. You can declare unto exhaustion that "Christ has come to teach his people himself" without making a dent in 20th-century America. I know; and Lewis Benson should know: he has been at it for 50 years.

The trouble is, again, that Benson has misunderstood Fox's own account of where his power came from. Lewis Benson has stated, so often and so eloquently, that Fox's power came from his message, that we could easily forget that there is no evidence that Fox himself thought so. None, that is, if we exclude Lewis Benson's misinterpretation of "the gospel is the power of God." Fox said his power came immediately from God. No doubt this explanation is a bit frustrating to our achievement-oriented minds. We may wonder why God doesn't seem to be doing, in our time, the sort of thing he did in Fox's time, but there is little reason to think we can induce the Almighty to act by a self-willed frenzy of lecture tours and pamphleteering.

The trouble, third -- and to my mind the most dangerous thing about Lewis Benson's movement -- is that all Fox's warnings against professing more than one possesses have been disregarded. If ever there was a man who did not overvalue words it was George Fox. His pages ring with rebuke for those who are "sayers and not doers," "talkers and not walkers." In Fox's view there are two prerequisites for preaching Christ. The first is a life of obedience in righteousness:

For all the talkers of Christ and his gospel, that do not walk in him, dishonour him. [49]
all people may see by Christ's own words, that their saying and speaking of God and Christ ... signifies nothing, except they do his will; that is, practice it, and be obedient to what he commands and requires. [50]
Christ doth not give workers of iniquity a commission, or license to preach him, or his gospel. [51]
when they have departed from iniquity, then let them name the name of Christ, and then they will not take God and Christ's name in vain.... [52]
though you call Christ Lord, and say you have preached in the streets, yet if you be found workers of iniquity; though you may have preached Christ's death and resurrection, and prophesied in his name, yet, if ye be found workers of iniquity, Christ will say unto you, 'depart from me, I know ye not; go ye cursed into everlasting punishment.' [53]
The second prerequisite:
And friends, none speak abroad, but as ye are moved of God with the spirit of the Lord.... [54]
Nor any write, print, nor speak (for God,) but as ye are moved of the Lord God.... [55]
I have not heard these kinds of admonitions from the enthusiasts of the Benson cause.


The first time I ever saw Lewis Benson, he was speaking to a QTDG conference on "That of God in Every Man -- What Did George Fox Mean By It" I remember the delight I felt in the demythologizing of a modern Quaker shibboleth and the excitement of a new hope of getting in touch with the spiritual reality at the foundation of Quakerism, which I knew had to be something less tame than what I was hearing about in contemporary Friends meetings.

It is tragic if the old myth is simply to be replaced with a new one. When preaching a message becomes more important than living it; when verbal slogans are the basis of fellowship; when God's power is thought to depend on man's activity instead of vice versa; and when George Fox is said to be the "only source" of the everlasting gospel, something is seriously out of balance.

I don't suppose that the causes of this imbalance can be reduced to the misreading of "the gospel is the power of God" -- but the tempter always comes to God's people with a proof-text. To disarm the current proof-text may be as much as this paper can accomplish; to liberate those who have been snared with it is a job for the power of God.

NOTES

[1] The Journal of George Fox, Edited by John L. Nickalls (London: Religious Society of Friends, 1975), p. 174. Further citations from this book are indicated by Ni:page number.

[2] Ni:34-35.

[3] Ni:445.

[4] Martin Luther, Selections from his Writings, Edited by John Dillenberger (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 290, 16-17, 22.

[5] Works (Philadelphia, 1831), 3:39. Citations from this edition of Fox's Works will be represented by volume number:page number. Note that this volume (number 3) consists of Fox's answers to critics, which are presented in the form:
P. critic's principle
A. Fox's answer

[6] 4:20-21.

[7] 4:387-406.

[8] 4:134.

[9] 3:93 (emphasis mine).

[10] 3:96.

[11] 7:227-228.

[12] 4:47.

[13] 3:378-379.

[14] 3:141.

[15] 3:41.

[16] 3:141.

[17] 3:197.

[18] Ni:82-83.

[19] 7:12.

[20] 4:68.

[21] 6:399.

[22] Ni:115.

[23] See, e.g., 5:391, 8:183, 4:158, 4:230, 3:68, 3:102, 3:152, 3:253, 3:449, 3:305, 7:147.

[24] 3:441-442.

[25] 6:18.

[26] 8:31.

[27] 3:370-371.

[28] 8:104.

[29] 6:390-391.

[30] Barclay, Robert, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (Philadelphia: Friends Book-Store, 1850), p. 163.

[31] It is interesting that Dean Freiday, in his new book Nothing Without Christ (Newberg, Oregon: The Barclay Press, 1984), has discovered the same point elsewhere in Barclay: "'The tiny thing which reproves' people 'in their hearts is nothing less than the Gospel preached in them' [122] " (p. 2). Freiday, however, does not draw out the implications of this point, but reverts to propositional thinking, saying, "The 'everlasting Gospel,' spelled out in a little greater detail is that

In his obedience to the will of the Father and by the eternal Spirit, Jesus Christ offered up his earthly body as a propitiation...." (etc., p. 6)
Freiday is quoting Barclay in the indented material; but Barclay does not say that this propositional statement is the gospel. If I am right in the understanding of Barclay's and Fox's thought presented in this paper, neither of them would have considered the everlasting gospel to be the sort of thing that could be "spelled out."

[32] 3:139-140 and elsewhere, especially in The Great Mystery

[33] 4:178 and many other places.

[34] 4:37.

[35] Published by The Tract Association of Friends, reprinted from The Friend, Vol. 132, Nos. 16-18, April 19, 26, and May 3, 1974.

[36] Ibid., p. 5.

[37] Ibid., p. 6.

[38] Ibid., pp. 8-9.

[39] Ibid., p. 9.

[40] Ibid., p. 11.

[41] Ibid., p. 12.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid., p. 13.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid., p. 15. Emphasis in text.

[46] Excerpted in New Foundation Papers, No. 8, April 1982, pp. 6-7.

[47] New Foundation Newsletter, No. 9 (1981), p. 9.

[48] Ibid.

[49] 7:331.

[50] 8:122.

[51] 6:253.

[52] 5:337. Emphasis mine.

[53] 5:275.

[54] 7:64.

[55] 7:106.