The Interpretation of Quakerism: Rufus Jones and His Critics

Abstract

THE INTERPRETATION OF QUAKERISM: RUFUS JONES AND HIS CRITICS By Melvin B. Endy, Jr.* It has now been about forty-five years since Perry Miller and William Haller, among others, began the most recent renaissance in Puritan studies. The resultant scholarship has produced a significant modification of the reigning view of the Puritans as "joyless , dark-minded petty entrepreneurs who believed in human depravity and a predestined elect" and has made Puritanism, in the words of Sydney Ahlstrom, "the area of American historical work where the greatest sophistication has been achieved; . . Z'1 In the course of this revival the Puritan preoccupation with personal religious experience and religious affections and especially with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit have been increasingly emphasized, as in the influential works of Alan Simpson and Geoffrey Nuttall.2 This, in turn, has yielded an ever broader definition of Puritanism that includes at least the Quakers and often other Interregnum enthusiasts under its mantle. Emboldened by the widespread conclusion of Puritan scholars that it is most accurate to view "the broad spectrum from Presbyterians to Quakers as one continuous whole," Quaker scholarship of the last thirty years, following especially the lead of Nuttall, has concluded, with Frederick Tolles, that "Quakerism as it arose in the middle of the seventeenth century cannot be understood unless it is seen as one *Department of Religion, Hamilton College. 1.Leonard W. Levy and Alfred Young, Foreword, in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideas (New York, 1965), v. The Ahlstrom judgment, expressed in a letter to Michael McGiffert, is quoted in McGiffert, "American Puritan Studies in the 1960's," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., xxvii (1970), 37. A similar judgment is expressed by Edmund Morgan in "The Historians of Early New England," in Ray Allen Billington, ed., The Reinterpretation of American History (San Marino, California, 1966), 41. 2.See Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), among other works, and Simpson, Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago, 1955). 4 Quaker History of the variant expressions of the dominant and all-pervading Puritanism of the age."3 As Richard Vann has reminded us, the renewed appreciation of Puritanism came about "in a theological climate of revived Calvinism ," and it is surely the case that the recent insistence on the Puritan and hence mainstream Christian roots of the Friends was not unaffected by the intellectual respectability brought to Reformation theology by Protestant Neo-orthodoxy and by the Friends' desire to participate in an ecumenical movement pervaded by Neoorthodox themes.4 Moreover, just as Neo-orthodoxy was itself a reaction against a general cultural optimism and specific theological liberalism that had been brought up short by world events, so also the Quaker scholarship of the last thirty years has represented itself as an antagonist of the liberal interpretation of Quakerism that had become widespread by the 1930's, especially under the impact of Rufus Jones. As Christine Downing has written of the recent generation of Quaker scholars, ". . . we cannot understand who we are unless ... we realize how much the way we put things today is colored by our reaction to Rufus Jones and to his generation."5 Even those Quaker scholars who have not joined the Puritan school, such as Lewis Benson, in many cases view their 3.Tolles, Meetinghouse and Countinghouse: the Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (Chapel Hill, 1948; rpt., New York, 1963), 52. See also Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York, 1960), 10-11, 59-60, 74-75, and Introduction, in William Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, rev. edn. by Henry J. Cadbury (Cambridge, 1961), xxvii; Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven, 1964); Hugh Barbour and Arthur Roberts, Early Quaker Writings 1650-1700 (Grand Rapids, 1973), 15-16, 21-22, 155; J. William Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait of the Society of Friends (New York, 1973), chap. 1; Henry J. Cadbury, Notes, in William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism, rev. edn. by Henry J. Cadbury (Cambridge, 1955), 544; James L. Ash, Jr., " 'Oh No, It is Not the Scriptures!' : The Bible and the Spirit in George Fox," Quaker History LXIII...

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