Texted Authority: How Letters Helped Unify the Quakers in the Long Seventeenth Century

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionMy purpose is to examine the early Quaker movement in England during the second half of the seventeenth century in order to determine what role the production of Quaker letters played in helping the Quakers form a mechanism of balance between the individual worshipper's need for personal apprehension of religious experience and the corporate movement's need to maintain body unity.Three presuppositions underlie my eventual argument about the Quakers, and it would be best to foreground these presuppositions here. The first presupposition is that any religious movement, in order to be recognized as such, must embrace the idea of including some into, and of excluding others from, the movement.1 This is a simple matter of corporate definition and identity, but it entails the formation of a code of essential beliefs or actions that is placed over the individual members. The second presupposition is that many Western religious movements within the tradition of the Reformation have had to make room within their very centre for the primacy of individual faith. Here we see a grand shift away from a truly communal religious movement like medieval Catholicism, where duties of maintaining the (mostly) implied faith of the parishioners were meted out to various ecclesiastical groups,2 and toward a radical levying of responsibility upon each individual for the salvation and development of his or her own soul. The third presupposition is that these religious movements, because of the way they elevated the individual in matters of religious apprehension and conviction, had to ground their stabilization of identity (and their enforcement of that stabilization) in a locus of authority radically different from human will and intention. This is to say that the movements had to have a way not only to ensure that their constructed identity would be protected against challenges from individuals within the movement who carried their individualism too far, but also to guarantee that the individual's prerogative to grasp his or her own faith would remain relatively undiluted by the influence of an overbearing structure of discipline consciously fashioned by the ideas and desires of a single person or privileged coterie of priests, clergy, or so forth.A further word concerning the second and third presuppositions. I say many Western religious movements during and since the Reformation have had to make room for the individual because these movements allowed their laity direct access to their core content in its sacralized manifestation. With the phrase core content I mean the beliefs and experiences essentially associated with a particular religious movement, and with the phrase sacralized manifestation I am emphasizing the fact that almost always the core content of a religious movement is couched or publicly rendered in a privileged material form. For most movements in the Reformation tradition, the core content was a closed collection of propositions originating from certain Hebrew, aramaic, and Judeo-Greek authors, and the sacralized manifestation of this core content was the printed vernacular bible.3Seventeenth-Century Protestantism and the BibleThe physical bible, however, even though its own testimony claims that it can be viewed as a living word 'piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit',4 is, in a very pertinent sense, a passive object. It is passive because it is semantically subjugated to the hermeneutic method ingrained in or chosen by the reader who approaches it. For this reason, the reader is in a de facto position of authority over the text, regardless of how much the reader senses or thinks the situation to be otherwise. One example of this is John Bunyan's Grace Abounding, which is replete with passages wherein Bunyan asserts the bible to be a living text actively initiating meaningful encounters with Bunyan's soul,5 yet it is Bunyan himself who must first not only read the biblical text but also understand it. …