The name ‘Jesus’ appears about seventy-five times in the fifth edition of Quaker faith & practice. We can easily compare this to the 1883 Book of Christian Discipline, searchable online, in which that name appears forty-eight times. A search for ‘Christ’ produces 154 hits in the 1883 book, and sixty-seven in the current red book. ‘Christ’ has thirty entries in the index of the 1960s’ blue book. Using this very crude measure, it is not obvious that the Society has rushed to abandon its undoubted Christian roots.

The 1883 book of discipline describes our Society in terms that might be familiar to evangelical Friends in East Africa or South America today, what US Friends would call ‘Gurneyite’ Quaker faith. But it’s now been almost 130 years since the younger Rowntrees and Braithwaites (no relation!) set our Yearly Meeting on its present course, one heavily influenced by Rufus Jones’ mystical interpretation of Quaker faith. Maybe that experiment has run its course. If so, what is the result? 

Some Christian Friends – and Christians are still a majority of our membership, I think – see the vigour of the evangelical branches as pointing the way back to a Society in which we are all very firmly Christians. But what kind of Christian? That evangelical Society of 1883 was itself a phase, perhaps owing at least as much to John Wesley as to George Fox. 

There’s a good case to be made that the earliest Friends were not Protestant Christians, at least not in the same sense as were the Congregationalists who dominated the Commonwealth parliament and the New Model Army at the time. And very much not as the Anglicans who returned to power with the restoration.

Friends were not preparing souls to be saved from hellfire and damnation come judgement day when Christ returned in some unknowable future. And maintaining social niceties in the meantime. Unknowable but soon, always soon, soon for 1,600 years and the wars of the Three Kingdoms disappointed the Puritans by turning out not to be it. 

The earliest Friends believed that Christ had returned, already; it was an accomplished fact, the kingdom had come. Now. Here it is. Christ had returned to teach his people himself – in 1652. 

What kind of ‘Christians’ might we Quakers be today if we all believed that proposition? A proposition thoroughly uncredal, entirely heretical, socially outrageous, politically dangerous, and completely unorthodox; one entirely condemned by every other church