[A version of this message was given during Barclay College's Spiritual Emphasis Week]
In this post and the next one I want to mine theological resources from the Quaker tradition and interpret them for our day and age, for the spiritual power and hope God has called us to embody. I want to think about time, and the ways in which the future time of God’s fulfillment is already a present reality. Our faith traditions can be a teacher, an encourager, and a partner in our spiritual walk. My tradition, the Friends, have been that for me and have taught me ways for faithful living I have found meaningful. We look to the cloud of witnesses that have preceded us to relativize and deprioritize our self-obsessions and the the idols of our own day. We look to the past for perspective, to be educated in a different way of thinking, and to be shown the varieties of God’s mercy.
And for me, no one since the time of the bible has knocked me out of my self-absorption like the eighteenth century Quaker, John Woolman.
Woolman's Legacy
John Woolman has been called the Quaker Saint and if Quakers did canonize people he would be the one. He was born in 1720 on small farm near Mount Holly, New Jersey. He was raised by a devout Quaker family and recounted how as a boy his family spent Sunday afternoons and evening reading spiritual texts. During his life he worked as a shop-keeper and proprietor of a successful store, Wool-mart, before he curtailed his retail business in order to expand his ministry. He worked as a tailor, he wrote legal documents, he had a farm, grafted fruit trees, and spent some years as a school teacher. He is known for leading the Quakers to a corporate antislavery stance, for travelling thousands of miles as an itinerant minister.
He is known for pressing his fellow Quakers to greater faithfulness. His Journal is considered one of the classics of American spirituality. He challenged manners of living and consumption that served only to increased material possessions, but that had negative effects on the soul. He challenged parents who pushed their children into occupations that were lucrative but that ultimately damaged their spirits. In his 52 years he left a legacy of witness that has led some to call him the “quintessential Quaker.”
Fifty years after Woolman's death, the English writer Charles Lamb said “The only American book I ever read twice was the Journal of John Woolman... Get the writings of John Woolman by heart."
The British poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said, “I should almost despair of that man who could peruse the life of John Woolman without an amelioration of heart." And when I looked the word “amelioration” up in the dictionary I learned that Coleridge was being very nice to Woolman and saying that his writings made a person more sensitive to God. Coleridge reflected the experience that many readers of Woolman have: reading Woolman sensitizes your heart and soul and increases one’s desire to be a better person.
John Greenleaf Whittier credited Woolman with founding the abolitionist movement. And indeed, Woolman's Journal influenced the abolitionism of Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Tsar Alexander II's emancipation of Russian serfs in 1861.
Perhaps the highest praise of all came from the proslavery governor of Missouri and confederate army General who, in 1853, unknowingly paid Woolman a compliment when he blamed Woolman personally for the “evils” of the trans-Atlantic abolitionist movement.
Willard Sperry, dean of Harvard from 1925-1953, said of Woolman: “If I were asked to date the birth of social conscience in its present-day form, I think I should put it on... the day John Woolman in a public meeting verbally denounced Negro slavery.”
More recently, Philips Moulton declared that Woolman “deserves to be ranked among the great spiritual leaders of mankind... comparable to such better known figures as Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi.”
For these quotes and others, see Thomas Slaughter's The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition and Philips P. Moulton's The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman.
But I don’t write all this so that we will think too highly of Woolman, so that we will venerate him and make him an idol or an icon. Woolman was just a man. I say all this to show that Woolman’s legacy lives on and that the testimony of his life continues to minister to people almost 250 years after his death. I say all this to prove that Truth reaches across the expanse of generations and finds fertile soil in sensitive hearts.
Woolman's Spiritual Struggle
But Woolman had his spiritual struggles, just like we all do. As a young man he said he was tempted by friends whose influence was not good. He said he was tempted by “mirth”. A dictionary definition of “mirth” is simply joy and laughter. If “mirth” was his great sin you can already get the picture of Woolman as an overly serious and austere person. But I think Woolman meant more than simply laughter when he said he struggled against “mirth.” I think it went far deeper than that.
I think what he described as “mirth” was really the propensity to take life for granted, to be flippant with our words and our lives, to overlook the connection that exists amidst all of life and the sacred will of God.
When he struggled against “mirth,” I think Woolman was coming round to the fact that what is done in the days we have to walk upon this earth is not trivial, it is not cheap, because it is a part of a grand drama in which Christ comes to reign on earth.
As a young man Woolman followed the pattern that many people follow, he would experience a spiritual breakthrough, followed by back-sliding and repentance, breakthrough and repentance, breakthrough and repentance. The constant see-sawing of his spiritual life was, for him, a symptom of a larger and more fundamental state of alienation to God, so that any ground he gained over sin was only sustained by his own strength and was destined to fail over the long haul.
And here is the kicker. Woolman could have remained in that state of alienation from God and still been a good Quaker, esteemed by his peers and considered as a faithful Christian. He could have ridden that see-saw for the rest of his life and been venerated by his peers. In the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of his day, many Quakers, by no means all, had made a subtle, yet crucial spiritual mistake. They had separated the ethics of the meetinghouse from the realms of business, politics, and society. What was necessary to be seen as a good Quaker in the meetinghouse had little bearing on what was required to be a successful business owner or a good neighbor.
Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers and because of this they had the most opportunity to do well, to shape the laws, and to form trade networks. And Quakers tasted success over the first 75 years of Pennsylvania’s existence. Some have joked that the Quakers came to Pennsylvania to do good, and they did very well. Others have said that Quakers hoped that the world would become like Philadelphia, instead Philadelphia became worldly.
The Quaker Tradition
We think of Quakers as being deeply involved in the abolition of slavery, and that is true, but during the time that Woolman was a young man, the slave ownership rate in Philadelphia was slightly higher among Quakers than it was among the city’s population as a whole. One of the most prolific slave importers in early Pennsylvania was also selected as a leader in the Quaker-run Pennsylvania Assembly and clerk of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Quakers were diverse and were suffering from something of an identity crisis as they struggled to discern how they could live faithfully while they wielded considerable power and prosperity.
Woolman’s youthful struggles between the spiritual breakthroughs he thought God held out to everyone and the apathy he sensed around him and within him was the beginnings of a new and revitalized Quaker faith. A faith that recaptured the zeal and power of the first generation of Quakers in England a hundred years before Woolman. Quakers like George Fox, Margaret Fell and William Dewsbury. People who saw the Quaker movement grow from a small band of apostles in the late 1740s to over 60,000 members a decade later.
It was the revolutionary spiritual experience of this first generation of Quakers that shook them from their nominally Christian profession into a living experience of Christ. It was the experience of the first generation of Quaker that the indwelling Christ conquered their apathy with an inward incarnation in the heart so that they could no longer live according to the old ways, because Jesus had returned spiritually, and a new age of the Spirit was upon them. For these early Quaker, Christ’s spiritual and inward return was incarnated in them with such power and reality that they could no longer mindlessly follow the customs of the day, which only served to obscure the reality of the direct reign of Christ in the world. They could not doff their hats to nobles and elites as a sign of deference, because all people were equally in need of God’s grace and all people needed to be searched to the core by the shining Light of Christ in their hearts. They could not prohibit women from preaching the Gospel because the Spirit had been poured upon them and they could not help but testify. They could not support a church hierarchy that preached that people were dead in their sins with no hope of overcoming, and priests that claimed that the cycle of sin and repentance was the most people could aspire to. It was one of the early leaders of the Quakers, William Dewsbury, who wrote of the inward and spiritual return of Christ in a way that was so real that it could be known with certainty, and felt and tasted. Dewsbury wrote:
"Therefore all in the Light behold him, behold Him, who ascended over all the power of Hell, and Death, and Darkness, who now in like manner is descended, whose coming we behold in the Clouds with Power and great Glory... For as the Lightning is from the East unto the West, so is the Appearance of the Son of Man... O let your Eyes be all fixed on him..."
Dewsbury was writing with prophetic vigor of what can happen in the heart that is seized by Christ’s presence. This was not a theology that believes the cycle of sin and repentance was inevitable, inescapable, or inexorable. This is a theology some Quaker scholars call a realizing eschatology, it is the emergence within time of the fulfillment of all things beyond time. A realizing eschatology overcomes the barriers between present realities and future possibilities, between the uncertainty of human capabilities and the certainty of divine reconciliation, between the world that is and the world under God’s reign that is already becoming.
And so, 100 years later, in a new land and in a new situation of influence, prestige and power, Quakers had turned their back on the need for conversion and the realizing eschatology that testified to the immediacy of Christ in them. But as a young man struggling with his own apathy and his own propensity to religious accommodation at the expense of a transformation of the human will into conformity to God’s will that Woolman was seized by God and a spiritual vibrancy was formed in him that shattered the apathy and alienation that had controlled him. John Woolman tapped into his Quaker theological legacy when he was no longer satisfied with going through the motions and never quite giving himself completely into God’s hands. He revitalized a realizing eschatology that claimed God’s power could be felt with such immediacy that he could be redeemed from the corruptions others took for granted.
The Apocalypse of the Heart
Woolman’s own description of his conversion is instructive to us. Like I said, Woolman was a birthright Quaker, he was already in good standing with his faith community, so we might ask why a conversion would be necessary. But in his early twenties he experienced a spiritual shifting in which he became attuned to the voice of the Spirit in his life and in the world, and he felt himself renewed in Christ’s presence so that a life of complete faithfulness was opened to him. He wrote in his journal that God had revealed to him that a new life was available, a life lived within God’s will. Looking back on those days, Woolman wrote:
“if I would live in the life which the faithful servant of God lived in, I must not go into company as heretofore in my own will, but all the cravings of sense must be governed by a divine principle… and I felt the power of Christ prevail over selfish desires.”
Woolman felt that this transforming experience placed him in a new spiritual state, a state that was continually “under the cross” and so in a state within God’s will that experienced redemption not as an abstract idea nor as a future hope, but as a new state in Christ that changed the way he viewed the world around him and opened his eyes to see heaven and earth with new eyes. Woolman was a new creature, a harbinger of the world God was bringing about, called to testify to the contours of a world under Christ that was not apparent to many of those around him.
Woolman said of the change in his spiritual state he experienced in those days,
“I find no language equal to it nor any means to convey to another a clear idea of it. I looked upon the works of God in this visible creation and an awfulness covered me; my heart was tender and often contrite, and a universal love to my fellow creatures increased in me. This will be understood by such who have trodden in the same path…”
What happened in him and to him was something beyond words, beyond language. It was an experience so orchestrated by eternal forces that it could not be expressed fully in human communication, it must be felt. It must be experienced. It was a correlation, communion and cooperation between God and humanity that defied human categorizations, an incarnation of divine purposes that transcended human limitations. What was opened to Woolman in his conversion was a revelation of God’s power and purposes realizing on earth through human faithfulness.
Immediately following Woolman’s experience of God’s victory over sin, Woolman wrote that he came to see things differently. He came to embody a universal love that changed his relationships with God and the world in which he lived and that recognized for the first time the integration of faith and action that would come to typify his ministry.
Woolman wrote,
"that as the mind was moved on an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible being, on the same principle it was moved to love him in all his manifestation in the visible world; that as by his breath the flame of life was kindled in all animal and sensitive creatures, to say we love God as unseen and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by his life, or by life derived from him, was a contradiction in itself."
Woolman pursued this integration of faith and life and sought to be harmonized with God’s will at work in the world. Not only did Woolman feel liberated from the power of sin in his life, as Woolman walked through the fields and farms of colonial New Jersey, he saw the manifestations of God’s hand at work.
And it is in this victory over mirth as a young man, and in this opening of God’s will for human existence, that we see the beginning stages of the apocalypse of the heart.
In contemporary pop culture, the word apocalypse is tied to a future, destructive event that will usher in the end of the world. It is a word that we have tied to destruction and desolation from extreme weather events, war, pandemic disease, and Zombies. While apocalypse does entail a destruction, there is a long tradition within Christianity of a positive vision of apocalyptic. The word literally means, an “unveiling, a revelation, a sudden breakthrough.”
An apocalypse is the sudden unveiling of reality in a way that was previously unknown. When the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:17 that in the “Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed,” the Greek word translated “revealed” is the Greek word “apokolupsis.” In the gospel, God’s righteousness breaks through out of nowhere, it is unveiled, it is revealed by God and brings about a new life by the Spirit. Yes, the old passes away, but the emphasis is on the sudden unveiling of a new reality that makes a new world possible.
The apocalypse of the heart is the inward and spiritual unveiling of God’s eschatological purposes, in perfect fulfillment, within the hearts of the faithful so that God’s kingdom is enacted on earth as it is in Heaven.
When Woolman felt the power of God prevail over his fallenness, when he was so transformed of his mind to see the integration of divine love directed toward all living creatures, he was describing the creation of a new world where the Lion and Lamb lay down together and where the promises of the eschaton would be enacted on earth. In this new world, sin would be no more and people would live their lives moment by moment in communion with the will of God.
That is the apocalypse of the heart: It is a vision of the faithful so attuned to the will of God, and so recreated to see the world from God’s perspective that eternity overlaps temporality and dualistic views of time and spirituality are washed away in an overwhelming experience of Christ’s spiritual presence.
Later in life, Woolman would describe the creation of a new world in God on earth in which all people experienced this apocalypse of the heart, this revelation of God’s will made manifest through human faithfulness. However, he was aware that receiving these “openings” from God was not a done deal, it required surrender to God, what he called “resignation.” In a state of “resignation” the tender heart goes beyond words and strivings and human efforts to set the agenda for God, and becomes fertile ground for a new life in the Spirit on earth. A life that foreshadows, in the present, the completion of God’s purposes in the eschatological future.
Surrender
Woolman wrote in his journal in 1772, on a ministry journey to England, just months before his death:
"as long as [the] natural will remains unsubjected, so long there remains an obstruction against the clearness of divine light operating in us; but when we love God with all our heart and with all our strength, then in this love we love our neighbours as ourselves, and a tenderness of heart is felt toward all people … In this love we can say that Jesus is the Lord, and the reformation in our souls [is] manifested in a full reformation of our lives, wherein all things are new and all things are of God [2 Cor. 5:17-18] – in this the desire of gain is subjected…"For Woolman, those who were resigned to God and sensitive to God’s opening in their hearts were reformed and remade so that God’s ultimate will for human community was enacted. The love of God was integrated with the love of neighbor and the world itself took on a new appearance in the light of Christ’s presence in their hearts. Sin and materialism no longer held sway over the faithful because as new creatures old ways were no longer possible. If all things were really new, then it made no sense to act in old ways. In his realizing eschatology, the old eon of sin and spiritual alienation was already finished in his experience, and had given way to the kingdom.
Recreated by God as God's agents, those who were transformed by God’s revelation in Christ became participants in the full apocalypse of God's purposes on earth, the unveiling of God’s will for human affairs. This new creation, this new state in God’s will was such that Woolman believed the faithful could perfectly embody God's global and eschatological vision.
I don’t use the word “perfect” lightly. Perfectionism is linked to the way Woolman’s eschatology functioned. Perfectionism makes sense if God’s eternal purposes were invading historical time. Perfection was an outgrowth of the real presence of Christ in the heart.
Woolman never equated perfection with anything that he did, he reserved it for the spiritual power of God he saw being unleashed in the faithful.
When God’s perfect fulfillment of all things is unchained from a purely futurist theology, but is seen as already invading time and space, earthly time, God’s time and human actions are filled with urgency and weight. Woolman could not limit God’s availability on earth, Woolman could not be lasseiz-faire about the new world in the midst of this world. And so he saw slavery for what it was: a blight of pride and self-love that corrupted the human-divine relationship. He saw materialism and greed for what it was, the acting out of human alienation to God, the human tendency to replace God with self.
Later in his life Woolman began calling this new reality, the “Government of Christ.” Woolman envisioned the apocalypse of the heart to be a spiritual Christocracy, an indwelling of Christ in the heart that would be the seat of Christ’s Kingdom and would reveal directly a new way of living in the world. This message of God’s will for human governance was clear and perceptible, it was capable of being heard and faithfully obeyed by his followers. Woolman does not explicitly say from where he derives his concept of the “Government of Christ.” But I think he is working out of Isaiah 9:6. In Isaiah, the prophet proclaims:
“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder. And His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
In Isaiah’s prophecy, the birth of the Messiah would inaugurate an era in which the government of all things would be united under the Messiah. Far from being reserved only for Christmas-time, Isaiah’s foreshadowing of the Messiah was a way to understand Christ’s activity in the world. Woolman says that the day of Christ’s reign has come to pass in the Second Coming of Christ in the hearts of the faithful. And through the lives of the faithful, the eschatological reign of Christ’s government is made incarnate. Woolman wrote,
“Now to those, in the present age, who truly know Christ, and feel the nature of his peaceable government opened in their understandings, how loud is that call wherewith we are called to faithfulness; that in following the pure Light of Life, 'we as workers together with him,' may labour in that great work for which he was offered as a Sacrifice on the Cross..."
In the “Government of Christ,” all people are commissioned as ministers and prophets who respond to the revelation of Christ in their hearts in ways that address the most challenging issues of their day. That experience of communion with the living and resurrected Christ in His Kingdom snaps people out of the mediocrity that passes for self-satisfied faith.
In pulling these biblical allusions together, in reaching back to the Prophets and forward to the Eschaton, Woolman destabilized the supposed inevitabilities of the present moment. These were social and political inevitabilities like the slavery of his day, like the French and Indian War, like the growth of a greed-based economy. Woolman rejected these supposed inevitabilities of his day because they were all built on the premise that God was not actually bringing Heaven to bear on Earth. Woolman rejected the sinful separation of God’s eschatological promises from the present reality and proclaimed that the present moment was already the day of the Lord.
And all of this is much more than what people thought back in the day. What I am trying to do is describe the way that an immediate, realizing, consuming experience of the present Christ changes the ground rules for what is possible in the lives we lead. Woolman proclaimed the gospel up and down colonial America and he attacked the social structures that hindered people in their lives of faith.
Sometimes he challenged the greed and materialism that allowed people to put their faith in something other than God, an idolatry that is alive and well in our consumer-oriented world. Sometimes he challenged slavery, which placed the slave-owner in eternal jeopardy for trying to usurp a mastery over others that is only safe in God’s hands. And, Woolman challenged the slave system that turned people into commodities and cogs in a profit-making machine. And this evil, too, is alive and well in our world. There are nearly 20 million often unseen and anonymous slaves in the world today - out of sight and out of mind - slave who make our clothes, shoes, and gadgets.
When Woolman uttered Jesus’ words, “your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven,” he meant something a lot more urgent, a lot more powerful, and a lot more expectant than I do. When Woolman described the presence of the Government of Christ spreading in the world and ruling in his heart, he meant something a lot more real than I do in all of my apathetic, comfortable, respectability. And in all this apathy, I fail the Friends’ tradition, I fail the transforming power of the Gospel, I fail the transforming promise of the apocalypse of the heart. The beauty of our Friends’ tradition and the spiritual theology we inherit is that Friends have always been God’s agents in the world to call a comfortable society to greater faithfulness and a heightened sensitivity to the ways of the Spirit in the world.
All of Woolman’s social reforms, all of his preaching, was focused like a laser on removing the barriers that prevent people from living fully in the life of the Spirit, that prevent people from donning every day the “mind of Christ” to lead them through a complex and changing world. He saw a deep and hurting world, alienated from the spiritual reality that could heal their hearts and bring them to a saving intimacy with Christ. And in his experience of the apocalypse of the heart, in his submission to the Government of Christ, he proclaimed a gospel message that cut through the layers of alienation and pointed his peers toward a deeper experience of Christ than they ever thought possible.
And this is it:
The essence of Woolman’s realizing eschatology was a full confrontation with the living presence of Christ, offered without qualification or reservation.
I want to cast a vision that when we pray “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” we actually believe it and we urgently enact it.
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