Bible Question:
Some scholars hold that Quakerism is a third form of Christianity, distinct from catholicism and protestantism. Yet, Quakers have also been persecuted as heretics. Is Quakerism a legitimate form of Christianity? Please support thine answer with scripture. |
Bible Answer: Parable, I can't offer an answer to you question exactly as you requested and you may want to repost it. But I thought you might find this quote of interest on the topic as it touches on several points in which you seem to be interested. "The effects produced by Calvinism lead us to the same conclusion as does the study of its origins. The bareness, the rigorous austerity, of the forms of Calvinists worship in France, Holland, Scotland and New England can be taken as a sign of religious aridity only by the uncomprehending or the prejudiced. Calvinism as a living force, as seen working in these various countries, is clearly actuated by an admirable insistence on genuineness, on sincerety with regard to god, the true living God who has nothing in common with dumb idols. If we seek anywhere in Protestantism for a paralle to the most rigorous elements in the mystiscism of the Cistercians or the Carmelites (Catholic monastic orders), we can assert, without the least error or exaggeratio, that it is to be found in Calvinism itself or in the deepest and most lasting traces made by Calvin's great intuition even outside strict Calvinism. If this assertion sounds like a paradox to a number of Catholics as well as to Protestants, this is due entirely to a series of prejudices and misunderstandings. And if Catholics and Calvinists seem to agree in regarding Calvin as essentially anti-mystical, it is because as a rule, Calvinists are incredibly ill informed about Catholic mysticism, viewing it wholly on the surface, while Catholics know only the externals of Calvinism. Rather than embark on a long discussion, we propose simply to relate a most revealing conversation we once had with the minister Auguste Lecerf, certainly the person of our generation the most learned in Calvinism, as well as embodying in himself the highest type of strictly Calvinists spirituality. As he had said quite baldly, that a mystic in his view was just someone who held paradise to be a place of debauchery, we read to him, without comment some of the salient passages of Ascent of Mount Carmel, by St. John of the Cross. After listening with the closest attention, he answered in perfect sincerety and without hesitation: "If that is the real Catholic mysticism, it is precisely the religion for which Calvin fought all his life." Another most significant thing, surely, is the attitude of those Protestants who have undeniably carried to its logical conclusion the Calvinist idea of God's soverignty, his absolute trancendence. The idea itself was always balanced in the Calvinist system, by other elements irrelvant to us for the moment. But in sects such as the Quakers we see the outcome of these principles in their unrestricted application. Nothing is more striking in the disciples of George Fox than the wholeness of their acceptance and application of the typically Calvinist idea of the soverign God whose infinite greatness annihilates, by comparison, all else. Even those Protestants who are less radical, more faithful to Calvinism as a whole and so do not venture to such exteremes cannot escape a feeling of nostalgia for boldness; as if to them such radicalism constituted both a temptation difficult to resist and an attraction to something higher. If the bareness of a Calvinist church and the austerities of its worship seems carried to an excess, the Quakers do not even have churches or public worship in the strict sense. So imperious is their desire that God should be absolutely soverign, without rival, unique that, in their religion, he alone is there present and, besides him, nothing. In the last resort, the only praise worthy of him seems to them to be silence. Now, it is very remarkable that the Quakers, in throwing overboard all the impedimenta Calvinism itself despised without being able to eliminate, jetisoned also the Calvinists prejudices. They have no difficulty in admitting that the Christians who seem to have gotten closest to their ideal were those of the tradition of Tauler, Ruysbroek, St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence and so on. They even go so far as to bring out new editions of their works and introduce them to Protestants. More significant still, the author of the most remarkable study on the great Catholic mystics is an American Quaker, Rufus Jones." The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism by Louis Bouyer pg 86-87 first printed in France 1952 first English printing 1956, London currently in print by Scepter Press, Princeton, N.J. from which the above is quoted Emmaus |
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Parable | ||
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Truthfinder |