I Press On Toward the Heavenly Call

More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord…. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
(Philippians 3:8,10-14, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

The Religious Society of Friends began as a revival of Christian faith. 

George Fox understood his spiritual awakening as a reminder that “there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to your condition.” Once he had that experience, “my desires after the Lord grew stronger, and zeal in the pure knowledge of God, and of Christ alone, without the help of any man, book, or writing.”

James Nayler believed God had charged him with replicating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem upon a colt on the muddy road to Bristol. As Parliament sat in judgment of his alleged blasphemy for this act, Nayler said of Christ that “him alone I confess before men; for whose sake I have denied whatever was dear to me in this world… that in me he may be glorified, whether by life or death.”

When Margaret Fell wrote to King Charles III in 1660 on behalf of her fellow Quakers, she claimed that “the only ground and cause of our sufferings,” perpetrated upon them by English society, was that “we obeyed the command of Christ, the author of our eternal salvation… because we cannot bow to men’s wills and worships contrary to the command of Christ Jesus our everlasting priest, king, and prophet.” 

Roughly two and a half centuries later, in Social Law in the Spiritual World, Rufus Jones analyzed the experiences of early Quakers. Feeling “the tides of a larger sea flowing in their souls,” Jones wrote, Friends became convinced “this new power and illumination was the Eternal Christ come again to human consciousness.” And they made no distinction between this Eternal Christ and the historical Jesus: 

“The Christ who enlightened their souls was, they believed, the risen and ever-lasting Christ—the same Person, who healed the sick in Galilee, and preached the gospel to the poor under the Syrian sky, and who died for our sakes outside the gate of Jerusalem.”

The mystical and the material came together in the Quaker experience.

Robert Barclay could not make it any plainer: “As the capacity of a man or woman is not only in the child, but even in the very embryo, even so Jesus Christ himself, Christ within, is in every man and woman’s heart, as a little incorruptible seed.”

Friends do not always speak of such matters in such terms these days. Though Rufus Jones identified as Christian—his second book was, after all, called Practical Christianity—he examined the mystical experience of faith through the lens of early twentieth-century psychology. His approach helped other writers identify common aspects of mystical experiences across various traditions, contributing to the development of the idea of a “perennial philosophy” transcending all doctrinal differences. It became more acceptable, not just among some circles of Friends but in the broader religious landscape, to imagine attaining “the prize of the heavenly call,” as Paul called it, without “knowing Jesus Christ my Lord.”

I say “more acceptable” because Quakers had long recognized that while everybody had the little incorruptible seed of Christ in their heart, some people might come to notice and nurture that seed without explicitly recognizing it as Christ. 

This didn’t bother Friends all that much.

Paul had gone on to advise the Philippians, “Let those of us, then, who are mature think this way, and if you think differently about anything, this, too, God will reveal to you.” If you spent enough time listening to your Inward Teacher, the thinking ran, and allowing it to guide you away from the sins of your past (“forgetting what lies behind”) into a state of repentance (“straining forward to what lies ahead”), you would eventually recognize the Eternal Christ as the spur to your transformation. But even if someone were to tell you about the Eternal Christ, their statement wouldn’t have the same impact as experiencing that revelation yourself. It had to happen, as George Fox put it, “experimentally.”

These days, though, it doesn’t necessarily have to happen at all. Some Friends have come to the conclusion that recognizing the “Inward Teacher” or “Spirit” or “the Light” as the source of the heavenly call should suffice. They don’t mind so much if other Friends continue to center their faith in Christ; for their part, those other Friends often stick to the plan of letting everyone else’s convincement happen in God’s good time. As long as we avoid certain issues, and sometimes even when we don’t, we tend to get along.

Does it matter what we call the goal, if we all press toward it together?