Inward Light and the New Creation: A theological meditation on the center and circumference of Quakerism

The center of Quakerism is the Inward Light, its circumference the New Creation. To open to the Light – or Seed, Truth, Life, Inward Teacher, Christ within (we have used many metaphors for the indwelling presence of God) is to live within the world as originally created. Seventeenth-century Friends were not only responsive to the Light but related to a context, and this context was the world as the divinely created original matrix of being. From this underlying center and circumference flows early Friends’ way of being in the world, the peculiar nature of their spirituality, theology, and ethics.

What follows is a theological meditation upon history, drawing from Quaker origins to clarify and enrich contemporary Quaker spirituality and engagement in theology and ethics. In sharing this theological meditation, I want to make explicit what every historian and theologian does implicitly: to share not only what I see, but also the perspective from which I am looking.