George Fox in Barbados: With the Complete Text of the Letter to the Governor of Barbados by Webb Simon

Author:Webb, Simon [Webb, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Langley Press
Published: 2013-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

9. Conclusion: A Personal View

Life in seventeenth century Britain, and the colonies thereof, was very different from life as it is lived today. Few people travelled as far as George Fox did – most lived within rigid social and geographical boundaries. Life in those small towns and villages would seem unbearably narrow to many modern people. Life revolved around home, church and work, all of which were usually within walking distance. As we have seen, what happened in church was particularly tightly controlled in the Church of England, in which George Fox and many of his followers grew up.

Against this background of social and religious conservatism, George Fox’s radical new message seems even more remarkable. Fox set his face against the clergy, the military, the justice system and the routine ‘courtesy’ shown to social superiors at that time. The importance of this system of etiquette should not be underestimated: it was an outward and visible sign of the inner structure of English society.

Fox abandoned what might have been a life of obscure rural contentment for a life of harassment, imprisonment and notoriety. He travelled far and wide with his message, and under some very harsh conditions, especially in the New World.

Fox wisely eschewed much formal theology, preferring to describe his experiences in mystical, symbolic and metaphorical phrases. He refers to ‘the Seed’, ‘the Light’, ‘the Lord’s blessed power’, ‘that of God’, and of ‘that which is eternal’. Much of this terminology might be said to refer to the Holy Spirit and to the human conscience, both familiar concepts for conventional Christians. For some modern British Quakers, the apparent vagueness of Fox’s homespun terminology allows for a wider interpretation, but to my mind the Barbados Letter seems to suggest that these familiar Christian ideas, among others, were precisely what Fox had in mind. Fox refers to Christ enough times to make it clear that he was not, for instance, someone who was leaning towards Unitarianism, or some abstract or universalist notion of the divine.

I believe that Fox’s personal theology stuck closely to the Christianity he learned at his mother’s knee. His extraordinary new message preached a change of method and emphasis, not of belief. The method involved taking worship out of the hands of a priestly elite and giving it back to the people. His emphasis was on the potential for the Holy Spirit to change things in the here and now.

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