“When many of his disciples heard [Jesus speak], they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’ But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, ‘Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe.’”
(John 6: 60-64, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
When we ask other Quakers to hold us or someone we care about “in the Light,” we tend to imagine a warm, soft incandescence surrounding us, sometimes with healing properties but always providing a sense of comfort, especially through hardship.
Early Friends believed in an Light that heals, too, but perhaps not as gently as our modern version. George Fox, for example, spoke of “that inward light, spirit, and grace, by which all might know their salvation, and their way to God,” and associated it directly with Christ.
Robert Barclay, one of the Quaker ministers who succeeded Fox, elaborated on the concept. If you “would be truly and well-groundedly religious,” Barclay wrote, you needed to prepare yourself for the Spirit’s inward light to penetrate you like a searchlight, bringing your sins into focus. The Spirit needed to “convince” you of those sins so you could consciously renounce the useless pleasures of the flesh and embrace the spirit that gives life, “turning the heart… unto the obedience of that righteousness which he makes manifest.”
Then, and only then, could that light burn your sins away, purifying your soul.
(“Sin” in this context refers only to such sins as you may have committed in your lifetime. “The whole strain of the Gospel,” Barclay argued, shows that “no man is ever threatened or judged for what iniquity he hath not actually wrought.” He went on to dismiss the very notion of original sin as an “unscriptural barbarism.”)
“When the light is received and turned to,” Barclay continued, “then the power begins to work, which slays the enemy in the heart; and that being done, there is no more war, but peace. Then the true peace, which passeth understanding, fills and refreshes the heart; whereas the peace which was in the soul before, was but the peace of the enemy, and will abide no longer than the enemy is suffered to keep possession quietly.”
I think about the unwavering character of Fox and Barclay’s messages in the same way I think about the “difficult” teaching that shook up the disciples at Capernaum. “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you,” Jesus told his listeners—and when they asked what sort of work he had in mind, he told them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
In today’s Religious Society of Friends, whether or not we choose to put Christ at the center of our faith, we still believe that Spirit—or whatever name we give it—offers a wisdom that can refresh our hearts and lead us to true peace. We call our living in accordance with that wisdom our “testimony,” and we strive to dedicate ourselves to simple lives of peace and integrity, doing our best to create loving communities grounded in equality. (In recent years, the line between such principles and the testimony of embodying them in thought and deed has become somewhat blurred in Quaker discourse, but we’ll save that discussion for another day.)
When we attempt to live a simple life of peace and integrity, though, or when we try loving God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves on top of that, some of us may find “the work of God” much harder than others—especially when we’re called upon to apply it consistently, across the board, to everyone.
I don’t want to set myself up as any great champion of Quaker virtue, by the way. I stumble at this work all the time. I understand why someone might choose to not believe in Spirit’s revelation, why they might embrace the pleasures of the materialist world, the world of dominance and authority, the world of ambition and indulgence, as a satisfying payoff for minimal or even nonexistent effort.
Yet I choose to accept the Quaker teachings, as do many others, no matter how difficult we may find it to follow them. I may not see those teachings as inextricably bound up with Jesus as George Fox and Robert Barclay and other early Friends did. Nevertheless, I believe in the possibility of the true peace, and I do what I can to turn my heart toward its light.
Like many other insights and teachings of the early Quakers, Robert Barclay was correcting an unfortunate misconception about human sin in order that its falsehood might not prevent us from living in the Light which Jesus brought to all humanity. The idea of Original sin was never to be understood as something which any individual could ever have caused, and in that sense be personally responsible for. We each, rather, suffer from the fact of it. Jesus frees us from it by giving us the Light — the way to live within the truth of human history, something that has a claim on all of us, and for which no human as a human can escape responsibility. In the Light, without ceasing to be historical humans, we are not bound by this original sin’s principles or blinded by its purposes, which always direct us to self-preservation — self-orientation — as individuals. The Light frees us from all of that in order that we may live in it and by it rather than by the “world outside,” and most importantly, it will let us see “that of the Light” in every one else, something the world cannot do.
Context matters. Jesus spoke to his listeners about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. They took it literally, so of course they said ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’. There are many places in the Bible where Jesus says things figuratively and his listeners take them literally. Jesus was quite often ambiguous, and his listeners were quite often unimaginative. Jesus and his listeners were simply talking past each other.
Would like to learn more about how Robert Barclay rejected the notion of original sin.
You can find Barclay’s argument against original sin in Section V of his “Apology for the True Christian Divinity,” which you can find online in a few different places.