When the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
(Acts 8:14-17, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
How did Samaria come to accept the word of God in the first place?
If we go back to Acts, we find this scene takes place soon after an anti-Christian crackdown in Jerusalem after which “all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside.” Philip, one of the first deacons in the early church, made his way to Samaria, where he won a great many people over—not just by telling them about Christ but by healing several sick and wounded people and even exorcising a number of demons. But Peter and John had to come out to Samaria because Philip couldn’t give the people everything they wanted after he shared the word of God with them and baptized them “in the name of the Lord Jesus.”
Micah Bales, a Quaker pastor in California, explained the Samaritans’ situation neatly in a sermon a few years back:
“These folks had already received water baptism, but they hadn’t received the Holy Spirit yet. They knew about God. They wanted to be friends of Jesus. They longed for him. But the Spirit hadn’t come to them yet, hadn’t filled them yet.”
“I know what that’s like,” Micah continued. “I know what it’s like to go for years, longing to really know Jesus. Not just words about Jesus. Not just an ideology about Jesus, not just a religion. But to be intimately connected with him. To be one with him, and with his father. To be united with him in love and joy.”
Water can’t make that happen, not even in combination with prayer.
Some Christians might receive the Holy Spirit in the moment of baptism, but the true source of that experience lies outside the act of baptism. The earliest Quakers felt strongly about that, ultimately rejecting the sacrament as unnecessary to participation in the beloved community.
That attitude has survived, for the most part, among Christ-centered Friends today. (You can find exceptions; Andy Stanton-Henry recently wrote for Friends Journal about receiving baptism in a Friends church at the age of 13.) And, as you might imagine, Friends who no longer regard Jesus as our one true spiritual center of gravity feel little need for an explicitly Christian ritual.
But we do all want to connect with something, even if we don’t call it Christ, even if we don’t have any firm idea what we want to call it. We want what the earliest Christians—the ones who hadn’t even thought yet to call themselves Christians—experienced in giving themselves over completely to God, a state of mind identified in New Testament Greek as makarios. Most translators interpret the word as blessed, some as happy. Nearly a decade ago, the theologian David Bentley Hart proposed to render it as blissful, believing that it connoted “a special intensity of delight and freedom from care.”
That condition of bliss set first-century Christians apart from their peers.
Nijay K. Gupta writes, in Strange Religion, about the characteristics that made Christian faith unique in the context of the Roman Empire. Participants in imperial civic religion did not see themselves as trying to connect with their deities—quite the opposite. “The goal was to placate the gods and secure their blessing,” he writes. Ritual, properly done, served to keep the gods from interfering in human affairs as much as, if not more than, it solicited divine assistance. It maintained the empire’s rigid social order.
The Christians offered an alternative vision. “Each person is made in the image of God,” Gupta summarizes. “God does not play ‘favorites’… and all have equal access to divine grace and mercy.” And one gained that access by following the example set by Jesus in his life and in his teachings.
Sixteen centuries later, the first generation of Quakers believed that Christian institutions had become as spiritually hollow as the civic religion of ancient Rome, and declared themselves to have recovered the true faith after finding their way to experiencing that bliss. William Penn wrote a book, Primitive Christianity Revived, to explain how the Religious Society of Friends had gone back to the basics—including the belief that everyone was capable, if they put in a sincere effort, of receiving the Holy Spirit—of cultivating the spiritual seed God had placed within them.
Sometimes we need an evangelist like Philip to lead us there. We might even require someone possessing the spiritual weightiness of a Peter or John. In the end, though, it comes down to our readiness to accept what God offers.
What great insight into the complex evolution of RSF theology out of its Judeo/Christian roots. As Quakers, we all seek to find that “inner light,” “spirit”, and the element of love, wonder and miracle of life that ties us, that we share and treasure in each other. As a non-theist Quaker, I find that I have to distill my search for, and understanding of, the “Light” by avoiding anthropomorphism that often is present in many traditional and ancient religious perspectives. This essay explains some of the origin and development of concepts of God, and our relationship to God, and the leap that Quakerism allows to make to connecting to that essence, and living, guided by it.
Speaking of the Holy Spirit as external, missing from many Christian believers’ lives, and necessarily transmitted by spiritually weighty people touching those yearning to connect to God in a transcendent sense of being filled from outside — I don’t recognize this as speaking to my Quaker experience of grace so much as it evokes memories of my spiritual search and blessings received as a child and teenager in Assembly of God churches and camp meetings. In Quaker practices, I have been blessed by discovering the Source is always and already there; I only need to return again to where the Spirit of Wholeness and Holiness, is sensed. The feelings are not always happiness.
Together we are in the process of being born, and reborn, and reborn again and again. I think it is Meister Eckhart who said it so well: “We are all mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” This metaphor of birthing captures for me the messy and laborious activity of letting the new life within come forth. Those Friends who have. midwifed me in my post-Pentecostal spiritual journey have done so altogether more gracefully than the traveling evangelists who, imagining themselves to be like Peter or John, came from afar to lay spiritually weighty hands upon us, hungry seekers for the joy unspeakable and full of glory..
Hi Beth! I very carefully chose to use words like “sometimes” and “might,” and to be clear that “some Christians might receive the Holy Spirit in the moment of baptism, but the true source of that experience lies outside the act of baptism.”
So I don’t think I’m suggesting that communion with the Holy Spirit is *necessarily* conferred upon us by a spiritual authority. Certainly George Fox was able to get there on his own, after all! But what did he do after that? He wandered the land, and crossed the ocean, doing what he could to help others who for whatever reason could not find what he had found on their own as he had. I do agree with you that there are people out there willing to exploit our desire to connect with something beyond ourselves—that, however, does not impugn everyone willing, if I can riff off your metaphor, to act as our doulas as we give birth to God within us. (Or, as early Friends might understand it, as we allow the Seed within us to grow.)
Thank you for this article, Ron! I think that what has drawn me back to Quaker teaching after I fell in love with George Fox’s journal and letters over twenty years ago is exactly what Beth said: the discovery that the Spirit is already and always there. Since I was a teenager, I have longed for the experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. What I came to realize (speaking only for myself and from my own experience) is that whenever I have approached God to try to receive from him something that I viewed myself as lacking, it has always been a dead end. Finally, I perceived that there was already a wellspring deep inside, rising from the creative Love that not only gave, but is presently giving me being, and that all God was asking me to do was to attend to it. It was then that I remembered George Fox, and realized that I was already a Quaker at heart.
Great points, from you and Beth both! I’m starting to think the last line of this article should have been “…it comes down to our readiness to accept what God has already given to us.”