Religious Experience in Seventeenth-Century Quakerism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter traces the precise ways in which the actual religious, emotional, and cultural experience of Quakers changed from the origins of the movement to roughly 1700. Recovering this experience, it becomes clear that Quakerism itself emerged out of a particular response to an awareness of Christ’s presence, and that Friends’ commitment to belief in immediate revelation was continuously affirmed throughout this period of transformation. However, other important religious changes did occur—namely, an altered understanding of divine immanence, the emergence of a powerful group identity, the loss of a distinctive prophetic vocation, and a growing understanding of perfection as moral righteousness. These shifts do not indicate a process of mollification in the pursuit of socio-political respectability, but rather point to a process of theological transformation—as the next chapter will show