Early Quaker Christology

Creasey argues that the concept of the ‘inner light’ must be understood in Christological terms, but also that traditional Christological formulas are less valuable than knowing Christ experimentally; and that Christ the Light is redemptively active throughout creation: the Incarnation embodies and makes fuller and more explicit universal truths. He describes the roots of these principles in 17th century Quakerism, especially in Isaac Penington, whose emphasis on knowing Christ experimentally avoided the pitfalls associated with the evangelical and rationalist streams of Quakerism alike – streams which are, for Creasey, strangely alike in their errors – as well as the abstract and ethically detached, even distorted, emphasis on Christological orthodoxy and schemes of atonement and justification in the Protestantism of the time.

Keywords: 17th Century Quakerism, doctrine and theology of; Isaac Penington; Christ/Christology, soteriology (doctrine of salvation), Inner Light, Trinity, inward and outward, Spirit/pneumatology (study of the Spirit), relationship of doctrine and practice, ecumenism (relations between churches or denominations), Biblical theology.

Who it would be useful for: Theologians and historians of doctrine, and ecumenists.