Madeleine Pennington's Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment is a compelling volume of history and historiography, combining textual detail, scholarly rigor, and theoretical skill. The study sparkles with a judicious examination of sources, combined with a careful repudiation of straw men of all kinds. At the heart of the book is a call to reassess the interpretation of the early Quaker past. Evidently conscious of the specter of Max Weber, Pennington contends that too many interpretations of the early Quaker movement have been excessively concerned with socioeconomic context, to the manifest neglect of the beliefs of Friends themselves. Quaker postures have been framed as so many expediencies, rather than the outworking of conviction.
As Pennington notes, this over-economization of Quaker beginnings has tended to produce reductive readings of early Friends as either unwitting agents of bourgeois consciousness (Hill) or fiery prophets soon tamed by the imperatives of post-confessional capitalism (Gwyn). In a measured rejection of both readings, Pennington notes that “the major cultural shifts within Quakerism did not correspond to particular political or economic events so much as reflect intellectual changes within the religious milieu of the early Friends” (xvi). Neither class stooges nor tragic religious sellouts, early Friends appear in Pennington as a dynamic, conflicted pilgrim people, forcefully interrogating the meaning of their principles in a constantly moving situation. For Pennington, an excessive hermeneutic of suspicion is roundly rejected in favor of a generous attention to theological particularities within early Quaker culture.
At the center of this recovery of particularity is a vivid analysis of the formation and evolution of Quaker Christology. As Pennington shows, Christ and the immediacy of his saving work constituted the central early Quaker theological preoccupation, shaping their feelings toward coreligionists, framing the character of their public actions, as well as structuring their attitudes toward non-Quaker outsiders. Indeed, as Pennington suggests, early Quakerism sprung “from the assertion that the risen Christ was immanent as a teacher, which necessitated a tangible change in the life of the believer, as opposed to reliance on worldly learning or propositional knowledge of God” (8).
For Pennington, it is the changing attitude of early Friends to Christ's immanence, not socioeconomic factors, that accounts for the rapid internal mutations of the early Quaker movement. In an effort to prove the worth of this Christological emphasis, Pennington illustrates the ways in which changes in core theological grammars of inwardness and incarnation “necessitated an increasing respect for outward reality” (110) and augmented a stress upon practical tasks of communal and doctrinal organization. But as the study is keen to demonstrate, Quaker Christological reflection did not constitute a single road toward capitalist docility or spiritual domestication. Rather, the Quaker vision of Christ pulled first-generation Friends in all manner of conflicting directions, generating unruly charismatic experiences and eschatological protest alongside templates for spiritual authority and communal order. Indeed, “the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism cannot be characterized in terms of a straightforward, linear progression toward social respectability” (55).
Given the wide-ranging implications of this task, where then might this work sit in the burgeoning discipline of Quaker studies? John Maynard Keynes once wisely observed: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones” (cited in Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital [2019], 309). Herein lies the value of Pennington's project for a new generation of scholars. In its abject refusal to contain early Friends within tiresome conceptual straitjackets (either as unknowing capitalist moderns or failed spiritual revolutionaries), new questions can be asked of the historical evidence. Instead of preempting what might be found, Pennington delights in the sheer complexity of her subject, finding in early Quakers “a dynamic faith in a constantly changing situation” (125). From this vantage point, one can forge a new case for the endurance and coherence of early Quaker theological culture, despite substantial transformations of presentation, emphasis, and strategy. With its invigorating irreverence toward stale polarities and tired debates, and its willingness to break new ground, this work will be invaluable not merely to scholars of Quakerism but to early modern historians, religious studies specialists, and theologians.
