"is" the English
word "in," e.g.:Quaker Heritage Press > Online Texts > Bunyan-Burrough Debate > Kuenning dissertation, chapter 3
None of the participants in the debate had any formal theological education, and all of them gloried in that fact. On Bunyan's side, John Burton's epistle to the reader celebrates Bunyan's spiritual qualifications, which more than compensate for his lack of academic training:
This man is not chosen out of an earthly, but out of the heavenly university, the church of Christ, which church, as furnished with the Spirit, gifts, and graces of Christ, was in the beginning, and still is, and will be to the end of the world, that out of which the word of the Lord, and so all true gospel ministers, must proceed, (1 Cor. xii.27,28,) whether learned or unlearned as to human learning. And though this man hath not the learning or wisdom of man, yet through grace he hath received the teaching of God, and the learning of the Spirit of Christ, which is the thing that makes a man both a Christian and a minister of the gospel. "The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned," &c., (Isa. l.4, compared with Luke iv.18;) where Christ, as man, saith, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor," &c. He hath, through grace, taken these three heavenly degrees, to wit, union with Christ, the anointing of the Spirit, and experience of the temptations of Satan, which do more fit a man for that weighty work of preaching the gospel, than all university learning and degrees that can be had.1
Burton here does not go so far as to reject the usefulness of university learning for Christian ministry, though he renders it merely optional while insisting that the "heavenly degrees" are indispensable. The amount of rhetorical flourish with which Burton makes this point indicates that he believes some of his potential readers will be biased against Bunyan as an uneducated preacher; it may also indicate that he expects other readers to enjoy this relative disparagement of the academic elite, or at least of the unspiritual among them.
In one well-known passage Fox appears to go no further than Burton on this point:
At another time, as I was walking in a field on a First-day morning, the Lord opened unto me that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ; and I stranged at it because it was the common belief of people. But I saw clearly, as the Lord opened it to me, and was satisfied, and admired the goodness of the Lord who had opened this thing unto me that morning, which struck at Priest Stephens's ministry, namely, that to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to make a man fit to be a minister of Christ. So that which opened in me, I saw, struck at the priest's ministry.2
Elsewhere, however, Fox takes the matter several steps further.
First we may note that he actively discouraged the founding of a university at Durham. His reasons, when urged for this end, show that he believed university learning was not merely insufficient and unnecessary as a qualification for ministers but was not even a worthwhile supplement to spiritual qualifications and was indeed a possible hindrance:
And so from thence we came to Durham, and there was a man come down from London to set up a college there to make ministers of Christ, as they said. And so I and some others went to the man and reasoned with him and let him see that was not the way to make them Christ's ministers by Hebrew, Greek, and Latin and the Seven Arts, which all were but the teachings of the natural man. For the many languages began at Babel, and to the Greeks that spoke the natural Greek, the preaching of the cross of Christ was foolishness to them; and to the Jews that spoke natural Hebrew, Christ was a stumbling block to them, and as for the Romans that had Italian and Latin, they persecuted the Christians; and Pilate, one of the Roman magistrates, could set Hebrew, Greek, and Latin a-top of Christ when he crucified him.
Fox here argues that the knowledge of specific natural languages such as Hebrew, Latin, and Greek is no guarantee of being spiritually on the right side. But this in itself rather trivial observation is only a part of Fox's reasoning. He continues:
So he might see the many languages began at Babel and they set them a-top of Christ the Word when they crucified him. And John the divine, who preached the Word that was in the beginning, said that the beast and the whore have power over tongues and languages, and they are as waters. So here he might see the whore and the beast have power over the tongues and many languages which are in mystery Babylon, for they began at Babel; and how the persecutor of Christ Jesus set them over Christ when he crucified him, but he is risen over them all, who was before they were. And did he think to make ministers of Christ by these natural, confused languages, at Babel and in Babylon, set a-top of Christ the life, by a persecutor? Oh no! And Peter and John, that could not read letters, preached the word, Christ Jesus, which was in the beginning before Babel was.3
In his typical style of alluding to multiple biblical texts, Fox argues that since the multiplicity of natural languages "began at Babel" they are therefore "confused" (Gen 11:7,9). Rightly identifying Babel with Babylon, he jumps to "mystery Babylon" of Rev 17:5. Since the whore in the vision of Rev 17 "sitteth upon many waters" (17:1) which are identified as "peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues" (17:15), it follows for Fox that she and the beast on which she sits (17:3) "have power over the tongues." These he detaches from John's synonymous parallelism with "peoples, and multitudes, and nations" to argue that the languages as such (and not merely as symbolic of the many nations) are subject to the power of evil. In their role as tools of evil the many languages (and especially those most used in theological study) were "set a-top of Christ" at his crucifixion (John 19:19-20); at his resurrection, therefore, Christ "is risen over them all." This does not mean that he purifies the languages themselves from the taint of Babel, but that he enables his saints to surmount the confusion of Babel by returning to a pre-fall situation in which they can perceive spiritual truth directly without reliance on the natural languages. For the pre-Babel original tongue to which Fox wants to return is no ordinary outward language; it is "Christ the Word . . . that was in the beginning," preached in John 1:1ff by the same apostle who wrote the Revelation.
The pre-Babel Christ-speech was for Fox the bearer of spiritual power. For those who came to this original tongue, the names of things were directly connected to their natures. Fox recounts his own experience:
Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue. And I was at a stand in my mind whether I should practise physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord.4
Fox's belief that this experience could have qualified him to practice medicine illustrates how literally he took the idea that "all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue"; the idea probably derives from Adam's declaration, "She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man" (Gen 1:23), combined with Adam's divinely appointed task of naming the animals (Gen 2:19). In the innocent state before the fall, a thing's name was its nature. Since Fox himself had come into this state, he too can use words definitively, and as we shall see he can authoritatively inform an opponent not merely of what a word "means" but of what it "is."
In another version of his argument about the whore's power over tongues, Fox contrasts the original Christ-Word to an error he attributes to "the world," namely that the tongues which began at Babel are "the original":
The Original of Sin is the Devil, which Christ destroyes: The Original of Righteousness is God, and Christ the Righteousness of God, which last for ever; And the Worlds Original, which is the Tongues, the beginning of which is Babel, which makes Divines, as they say; which Pilate set over Christ; and the Whore sits upon the Waters, as in the Revelations, and John saith, the Waters are Nations, Multitudes, Peoples, and Tongues, which Tongues the World calls Original, to whom the Gospel must be Preached before they are established.
And ye must be Redeemed from Tongues [Rev 5:9], and Tongues shall cease saith the Apostle [1 Cor 13:8], and so from the Worlds Original, (which Babel is the beginning of, which keeps in Babylon,) are the Saints Redeemed.
And this hath been set up for the Original among them which are inwardly Ravened from the Spirit of God in Babylon, which the beginning of Tongues were at Babel, in Nimrod that Heriticks time, who did begin to build Babel [Gen 10:8-10].
So Tongues make no Divines, nor no Ministers of Christ; for that which makes a Divine is the Word, which Redeems out of Tongues which was before Babel was, in the beginning before the Fall, which hammers down that which hath corruppted Mans Nature [Jer 23:29], and brings up again into the Divine Nature [2 Pet 1:4].
And who are Ministers of the Word and Preachers of the Gospel, are in the Power and Word which was before Tongues were; and thus brings into Church-Fellowship that is in God, which them with their Original, called Tongues, do not; which must cease and be Redeemed from; such bring not into the Fellowship of God, nor Worship of God, nor beyond Babel; for there ends the Tongues.
But who come to the Word of God, and the Gospel, come before they were, the many Tongues were, and stand when they are gone. This is the Word of the Lord God to you all.5
Fox here conflates two quite different usages in which a language may be called "original": the original language of the human race spoken before Babel, and the original language of a particular document, e.g. the documents of scripture which were first written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The latter usage appears, for instance, on the title page of the King James Version, which is described as "translated out of the original tongues." For Fox this description is completely inappropriate, because it gives to natural languages such as Hebrew and Greek a title which rightly belongs only to Christ.
Fox's unique usage of "original" must be
carefully understood. We must not infer that in deriding "the world's original, which is the
tongues" Fox is unaware that the Bible was translated into English from other languages in
which it was first written. Indeed at the end of The Great Mystery Fox provides a list of
"Several scriptures corrupted by the translators," many of which are based on an
insistence that the Greek word "is" the English
word "in," e.g.:
Jude 14. 'Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints;' in the Greek it is 'in ten thousands,'.6
But despite recognizing that the English ought to represent accurately the Greek in which the New Testament was written, Fox finds it offensive to apply the word "original" to the Greek text; indeed it is not so much the Greek text of the New Testament as the Greek language which he thinks is being called "the original."
This is not just a pedantic quarrel over words. For Fox, the expression "the original tongues" is not merely mistaken but is a deliberate propaganda ploy by the agents of mystery Babylon. But before we can understand the passage in which he asserts this, we must learn his idiosyncratic usage of another word, in this case "tolerate." This appears in his refutation of the principles of the national church of Scotland:
And in the catechism which is tolerated by the general assembly, and in the catechism of Scotland, called a short catechism, they say, that the word of God is contained in the scriptures.7
"Tolerated" here can only mean "endorsed." The likely explanation is that Fox knew the word only by usage, not by definition, and in a social order in which only one religion at a time was tolerated, there was no practical difference between a government's toleration of a religion and its endorsement of the same. This does not of course mean that Fox had no concept of what the rest of us call toleration; his frequent diatribes against religious persecution of all types (and not only when directed against Quakers) are enough to prove that he did. But he does not associate this concept with the word "tolerate." In Fox's dictionary, to "tolerate" something is to endorse it.
With that usage in mind, we can now examine Fox's response to John Stalham, of Terling in Essex, whose "principles" include "let learning be advanced among pious men, for God hath his witty and learned ones." To this Fox replies:
And the learned ones upon earth never know Christ with all their natural learning. And if one get all the naturals upon the earth, and the scriptures in all the natural languages, and one supreme power of a nation tolerate all these languages to be the original, and they have the scriptures in all these languages, these are 'witty ones;' but these know not God nor Christ by all this, though they have all the scriptures, while they are from the spirit of God that gave forth scriptures. For that which brings to know God, is the revelation of the spirit of God, the light which doth not deceive the mind; but their minds are deceived that are from the light.8
Fox here proposes a hypothetical situation in which academic learning is advanced to the greatest degree imaginable. One is to "get all the naturals upon the earth, and the scriptures in all the natural languages"; even so they will "know not God nor Christ by all this." But as part of this imaginary situation, Fox asks us to envision that "one supreme power of a nation" might "tolerate all these languages to be the original." In ordinary English "tolerate . . . to be the original" makes no sense, but in Fox's vocabulary this means "endorse all these languages to be the original," and "the original" means the language that was spoken before Babel and in Eden.
The situation Fox describes is hypothetical, but he describes it because he believes it to be the real situation carried to its ideal extremity. Oxford and Cambridge might not yet have "all the naturals upon the earth, and the scriptures in all the natural languages," but academics would no doubt like to achieve this goal. Another of their goals, as Fox sees it, is to get a natural government to perpetrate the fraud that all the languages studied in the universities are "the original," the pre-Babel language that confers spiritual truth. If we ask how Fox could imagine that a government would be persuaded to undertake this absurd propaganda, the answer is not far to seek. Turning once again to the title page of the King James Version, we find that the Bible is there said to be "translated out of the original tongues . . . by His Majesty's special command." In Fox's mind this shows that the king is already implicated in the fraud of calling Hebrew and Greek "the original tongues." Endorsing or "tolerating" natural languages to be "the original" is standard operating procedure for the world's governments. To imagine that they might do this for all natural languages instead of only a select few is merely to imagine, as Fox is asking us to do here, that academics might be granted the most extreme form they could desire of the privileges they already have.
We are looking, in fact, at a conspiracy theory. National governments, as Fox sees it, "tolerate" (endorse) certain languages studied in universities "to be the original" in order to confer power and privilege upon the academics who study those languages. The theologians with their Hebrew and Greek, and the lawyers and physicians with their Latin, are thereby enabled to overawe the uneducated masses with their claim to a specialized knowledge open only to those who know "the original." Whether we regard this as mere paranoia or as a mythicized perception of the fact that academic elites do at times engage in mystification, we should see that for Fox it bolsters the radical social criticism that he expresses in these words:
While I was there, the Lord opened to me three things relating to those three great professions in the world, physic, divinity (so called), and law. And he showed me that the physicians were out of the wisdom of God by which the creatures were made, and so knew not the virtues of the creatures, because they were out of the Word of wisdom by which they were made. And he showed me that the priests were out of the true faith which Christ is the author of, the faith which purifies and gives victory and brings people to have access to God, by which they please God, which mystery of faith is held in a pure conscience. He showed me also, that the lawyers were out of the equity and out of the true justice, and out of the law of God, which went over the first transgression and over all sin, and answered the spirit of God that was grieved and transgressed in man. And that these three, the physicians, the priests, and the lawyers, ruled the world out of the wisdom, out of the faith and out of the equity and law of God, the one pretending the cure of the body, the other the cure of the soul, and the third the property of the people. But I saw they were all out, out of the wisdom, out of the faith, out of the equity and perfect law of God.9
The great professions can only "pretend" to care for body, soul, and property because their specialized knowledge is a sham. But those who come to Christ the Word of wisdom come to the real "original" and thereby, like Fox, perceive the virtues of the creatures as God made them and Adam named them, as well as the true faith and the true righteousness.
Conspiracy theories, we must suppose, came naturally enough to many of the common people of the 1650s. Bunyan mentions one less elaborate conspiracy theory as the first of several reasons why some people disregard the scriptures:
1. Because they do not believe that they are the word of God, but rather suppose them to be the inventions of men, written by some politicians, on purpose to make poor ignorant people to submit to some religion and government.10
Though the content of the fraud here is different from that in Fox's theory (Fox did not believe the Bible to be "the inventions of men"), its aim is the same: it is done "on purpose to make poor ignorant people to submit." In the 1650s many of the "poor ignorant people" were minded to submit no longer. The elite had by this time quarreled among themselves and changed the official religion often enough to show that as a class they were no wiser than the average. Any claim they made to specialized knowledge was probably only mystification.
Under the influence of Fox's views on language, Quakers in the 1650s developed a specialized religious vocabulary which was impermeable to educated criticism. Those who had institutional credentials as "witty and learned ones" were automatically suspect as being "out of the wisdom of God." If they used words in a sense different from Fox's, this immediately proved them ignorant in the things of God. For it was not even recognized that words were being used in different senses; it was simply that each side said things which, when deciphered with the other side's dictionary, came out as utter nonsense. The real nature of theological disagreements, such as that between Bunyan and Burrough, was therefore often masked by an inability to understand one another's language. Further, modern scholarship on Quaker writings of the 1650s is also too often hampered by a failure to recognize the unique linguistic usages of early Quakerism. We must therefore learn some of this vocabulary as a preliminary to analyzing the Bunyan-Burrough debate.
A convenient place to begin is provided by Fox's reply to Burton's encomium of Bunyan:
Pr. John Burton saith, 'John Bunyan is furnished with spiritual gifts, which gifts the ministers of Christ must have, whether learned or unlearned as to human. And John Bunyan's preaching, he saith, is not by human art; yet he saith Christ is human.'
Ans. The scripture hath neither taught John Burton nor John Bunyan this language, to say this knowledge is not human, and yet to affirm Christ is human, is to say thy knowledge is not from Christ. But we shall try his gifts whether they be from God, and whether or no he divides the word aright, and whether they be agreeable to the scripture, who fills up his book with mentioning the word human twenty times over. Which human is from the earth; to say Christ is human, thy knowledge is from the ground, earthy, and he hath no scripture for it.11
Fox here agrees that the true preaching "is not by human art." Though he does not believe Burton is correct in attributing this kind of gift to Bunyan, he accepts it for the moment in order to show what he believes is a contradiction in Burton's and Bunyan's position. Were it true, says Fox, that Christ is human (as Bunyan holds) and also that Bunyan's preaching is not human (as Burton holds), it would follow that Bunyan's preaching is not from Christ. This, however, is only a preliminary. Fox's real aim here is to reach the same conclusion (that Bunyan's preaching is not from Christ) from his own premises, not from Bunyan's and Burton's. Indeed this preliminary attempt to wring a contradiction from Burton's and Bunyan's use of "human" would probably never occur to anyone who did not, like Fox, see the word "human" as pejorative. For as the placement of this section in Fox's reply to Some Gospel Truths Opened shows, it is Bunyan's statement and not Burton's which has triggered this response.
Fox is here objecting to Bunyan's statement: "That is, the Spirit shall convince men and women of the sufficiency of that righteousness that Christ, in his human nature, hath fulfilled; so that they need not run to the law for righteousness."12 What bothers him is the word "human," and he claims that Bunyan "hath no scripture for it." This claim can easily appear absurd, in that there is obviously a vast amount of scriptural support for speaking of Christ as man. But we must carefully note that Fox's objection is to the word "human," and as it happens this exact word occurs nowhere in the King James Version. In an earlier passage in The Great Mystery he has already explained:
Where doth the scripture speak of human? where is the word human written? tell us that we may search for it. Now, we do not deny that Christ, according to the flesh, was of Abraham, but deny the word human. Christ's nature is not human, which is earthly, for that is the first Adam.13
The proposition which Fox says "we do not deny" is a conflation of Rom 1:3 ("made of the seed of David according to the flesh") with Heb 2:16 ("he took on him the seed of Abraham"). This is his way of affirming that Christ is what others perversely call "human." Rarely if ever does Fox come closer than this to admitting that his usage of a word is nonstandard and that it might be his responsibility to distinguish his definition from the one his readers would normally expect.
As the reference to "the first Adam" indicates, Fox's special definition of "human" (based on an etymology deriving it from "humus") is important to him because he connects it with his exegesis of 1 Cor 15:47, "The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven." It is because Christ is the second man that Fox refuses to call him earthly, or in his words "human." His ideas on this point, sporadically referred to in The Great Mystery, are more systematically explained in the Appendix to his 1676 book A Testimony of what we Believe of Christ, Before he was Manifest in the Flesh; and of his Birth and Preaching, and what he Saith he is Himself: as also of his Sufferings, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension; both as he was God, and as he was Man.14 This ends with an exegesis of 1 Cor 15:34-53, which we shall examine more closely in connection with the Quaker concept of the heavenly flesh of Christ. For the moment it is sufficient to note how, as late as 1676, Fox is still aggressively insisting on his own definition:
Cannot ye read this? are not ye awake? doth not the apostle bid you awake, that ye may read and see? 'the first man is of the earth, earthly; (mark, the first man,) the second man is the Lord from heaven.' (Mark, the second man, to wit, Christ.)
And is the first man humane, and the second man the Lord from heaven, humane also? will ye give them both the name humane? where had ye such words to call the second man withal? not from the scriptures, for they give him no such by-names.
And the apostle further tells you, 'as is the earthly so such are the earthly, (like itself and will call other things like itself,) and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly, like itself again. . . .'15
The ad hominem insinuations that Fox's readers are not awake, and that they call Christ earthly ("human") because they themselves are earthly, show that as late as 1676 he believes not only that his definition is correct but that accepting it is a mark distinguishing the heavenly-minded from the earthly-minded.
Interestingly, Burrough, writing in 1656, has not yet adopted Fox's definition of "human." Burton's introductory epistle to Some Gospel Truths Opened gives him an opportunity to decry the use of this term should he care to do so:
And this is also quite contrary to those commonly called Familists, Ranters, Quakers, or others, who on the other hand either deny Christ to be a real man without them, blasphemously fancying him to be only God manifest in their flesh; or else make his human nature, with the fulness of the Godhead in it, to be but a type of God, to be manifest in the saints; and so, according to their wicked imagination, his human nature was to be laid aside after he had offered it up on the cross without the gate at Jerusalem. . . .16
But instead of attacking Burton's references to Christ's "human nature," Burrough in The True Faith calls this charge a slander, and offers to rebut it if Burton will first drop the identification of Quakers with Ranters, Familists, and others:
But yet further I say, If thou darest lay thy charge only upon the Quakers, write thy meaning in plainness, and bring testimony of thy accusation, and thou mayst receive a further Answer; and cease to smite with secret Slanders in the dark, lest thou be condemned in the Light with the guilty, for numbring the Innocent with Transgressors, and charging the Guiltless with the Guilty.17
In Truth the Strongest Burrough repeats this challenge, with a marginal note specifically identifying which charges he considers slanderous:
Viz. That the Quakers deny Christ to be a real Man: Secondly, that they fancy him to be God, manifest in their flesh: Thirdly, that they make his humane nature with the fulness of the Godhead, to be but a type of God: these things were charged upon us.18
Nowhere in his 1656 replies to Bunyan does Burrough anticipate Fox's 1659 charge that Bunyan "fills up his book with mentioning the word human twenty times over"; apparently it does not yet occur to him that this word is improper.
By 1661, however, replying to an attack by Joseph Wright, Burrough co-authors with George Whitehead The Son of Perdition Revealed, containing this attack on a reference to Christ's "human nature":
Did you ever hear such Doctrines as these, which are all one as if he had said that the Spirit of Holinesse and humane nature are both one, or that Divine and humane are both one, whenas they are two distinct things, that which is humane is of the earth, as the first man was, as Humane is of Homo, which comes of Humus the ground, of which man was made, (as, i.e. Humanus,
,
, Terra, aut Humus,) but that which is Divine is from above, as Christ is, who is Lord from Heaven; Now though this Christ in time took part of that which the Children had, viz. flesh and bloud, Heb. 2.14. yet we never read that Humane nature is Christ, nor that the flesh and bloud is Christ by temporal generation. . . .19
This passage shows Fox's influence without managing to reproduce his doctrine exactly. The attempt to flaunt a bit of scholarship here forces a recognition that the etymological path from humus to humanus must go by way of homo, thereby vitiating Fox's attempt to make "human" a mere synonym for "earthly" devoid of implications about manhood. The paired opposition of "Divine" and "humane" is also foreign to Fox's usage and again betrays a mind not quite able to cast off an educated vocabulary.20 This represents an early, and not yet very sophisticated, stage on the way to the later attempts of Barclay, Keith, Penn, and Penington to express a Quaker Christology in more educated terms.
If Fox's usage of "human" was difficult for some of his fellow Quakers, it was of course more so for his opponents, and has caused misunderstandings as well for modern scholars. T. L. Underwood, for instance, writes:
The two groups further agreed that the Word was eternal, but Baptists, stressing Christ's humanity, considered only the incarnate Word to be Christ, whereas Quakers, maintaining that Christ was not human, held that he was both the pre-incarnate and the incarnate Word.21
To write, in ordinary English, that the Quakers maintained "that Christ was not human" is to ignore that "human" is not the same word in ordinary English that it is in Fox and in at least some of his followers. This type of mistake will claim our attention in the chapter on the heavenly flesh of Christ.
Fox explicitly redefined "gospel," taking Romans 1:16 as if it were a dictionary definition, so that "gospel" becomes a synonym for "the power of God." In "Fox's Message was not About a Message,"22 Licia Kuenning explains Fox's concept:
The gospel, then, is a power which can be felt in oneself and others; it works to save believers; it is at one with the Cross of Christ. Fox . . . equates the gospel with Christ, and with the light, the seed, the truth, the image of God, the grace of God, the new covenant, and the substance. Students of Fox are familiar with the way he strings together spiritual terms, all roughly synonymous, as "light, life, spirit, grace and truth," "light, grace, truth, power, spirit, and gospel." The word "gospel" appears in such lists over 100 times, showing that for Fox "gospel," like the other terms, is one of his names for Christ within.23
Burrough's 1656 usage of "gospel" is the same as Fox's. To Bunyan's account of how a deluded soul "through ignorance of the gospel, claps in with these motions of his own conscience, which doth command to abstain from this evil, and to practise that good," Burrough replies:
And here thou hast shewed thy blindness and ignorance, more than can be uttered, as though the motions of the Light of Christ in the Conscience, which command to abstain from evil, and to practice good, were another thing then the Light of the Gospel: what, and how doth the Light of the Gospel work, if not in the Conscience, and to command from evil, and to practice good?24
Burrough here, in fact, either is unaware of the classic Protestant terminological opposition between "law" and "gospel" or chooses to ignore it. For him, as for Fox, "the gospel" means the power of God working within the conscience to discover the evil and direct to the good. Identifying this with "the word within the heart" of Rom 10:8 and Deut 30:14, he concludes that Bunyan's "gospel" (whatever it may be) is something quite else:
Surely thou preachest another Gospel then Paul preached: for his Doctrine was, Abstain from all evil, and follow that which is good, and listen to the word within in the heart; but this Gospel thou deniest, and so must needs preach another Gospel, and so art the accursed, as Paul saith.25
Though Burrough does not even state Fox's definition or quote its proof text, Bunyan manages briefly to sense that his difference with Burrough involves the content of the gospel; this is quickly swallowed up, however, in a preoccupation with the question whether it is given to all or only to the elect:
I answer, Though the light of the Spirit of God and the gospel be in the hearts of the elect of God; yet the gospel light is hid, and doth not shine so much as unto, much less into, the consciences of some of them that be lost, (2 Cor. iv.3,4:) that though the light of the gospel doth shine, and that gloriously too in the hearts of God's elect, yet it doth not follow, that the convictions of conscience are the gospel; no, nor the convictions of the law neither. And, again, though every one of God's elect have the light of the glorious gospel shining in them, what argument is this to prove all men have the light of the gospel shining in them?26
While Fox explicitly redefined some words such as "human" and "gospel," he gave other words his own meaning without showing any awareness that his usage differed from the ordinary. His usage of "distinct," for example, introduces a serious misunderstanding into one of his exchanges with Bunyan. In a marginal note Bunyan writes:
God hath a Christ own, distinct from all other things whatsoever that is called Christ, whether they be Spirit or body, or both Spirit and body, and this is signified, where he saith, the Lords Christ.27
In response to this Fox writes:
God's Christ is not distinct from his saints, nor his [their] bodies, for he is within them; nor distinct from their spirits, for their spirits witness him: and 'God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself,' who is the head of every creature. 'And there is not any creature but it's manifest in his sight;' and he is in the saints, and they eat his flesh, and sit with him in heavenly places.28
Bunyan, whose marginal note was concerned to distinguish the real historical Christ from an imaginary Christ present in the Quakers, would surely have been even more scandalized at the apparent implication that Christ was not even to be distinguished from the Quakers themselves. If this is Fox's meaning, however, his stated reasons why "Christ is not distinct from his saints" seem strangely unrelated to his proposition. The stated reasons for these paired denials have to do with Christ's presence in the saints and their close connection with him, but do not add up to reasons for saying that the saints are Christ himself. We must therefore investigate more closely what Fox meant by "distinct."
Further light is shed on Fox's usage by a section of The Great Mystery answering John Timpson's The Quakers' Apostacy, where Fox says:
P. He saith, 'The Quakers are deceivers,' because we say 'that Christ is not in outward observations and forms.' And John Bunyan saith, 'that he is distinct from the saints,' and would have him in the forms, &c. See page 13.
A. We say he hath triumphed over the ordinances, and blotted them out, and they are not to be touched; and the saints have Christ in them, who is the end of outward forms, and thou art deceived, who thinks to find the living among the dead; and Bunyan is deceived, who said, 'He is distinct from the saints;' and so you are a company of pitiful teachers.29
Of especial interest in this passage is Fox's pairing of his opponents' two errors, that Christ is "distinct from the saints" and that he is "in outward observations and forms." It appears that the question in Fox's mind is where Christ is to be found. According to Timpson and Bunyan (on Fox's reading), Christ is to be found in religious rites but not in Christians themselves; according to the Quakers, he is to be found in the saints but not in outward forms or ordinances. Fox does not accuse Timpson and Bunyan of thinking that Christ is the ordinances; his objection rather is that "thou art deceived, who thinks to find the living among the dead," i.e. that Timpson seeks Christ in the wrong place. Similarly he does not say that the saints are Christ, but that they "have Christ in them."
Further on in The Great Mystery, disputing with one "Priest Fergison . . . who is a teacher in Kent," Fox writes:
P. He said, 'that Christ, and the Father, and the holy ghost, are not one; but they are three, therfore distinct.'
A. This is the denying of Christ's doctrine, who said, 'I and my Father are one;' and the holy ghost proceeds from the Father and the son, and he was conceived by the holy ghost, and they are all one, and not distinct, but one in unity; that which comes out from him, leads the saints into all truth, (that ever was given forth from the spirit of truth,) and so up unto God the Father of truth, and so goes back again from whence it came.
P. 'It is blasphemy to say the son is one with the Father, and not distinct from him.'
A. The Father and the son are one, the son is in the Father, and the Father in the son, so that which is in him, is not distinct from him; and they blaspheme that say the son is not in the Father, and deny Christ's doctrine.
P. He said, 'The Father is a distinct incommunicable being from the son, and the son a distinct incommunicable being from the Father, and the holy Ghost a distinct incommunicable being from the son.'
A. The son is one, and in unity with the Father, and not distinct, but equal, and thought it not robbery. The holy ghost is in unity with the son and the Father, which proceeds from them, and they are one in unity, and not distinct. Thy doctrine is dross, and you priests are not fit to judge in such things as they are, they are too weighty, and too heavy for you.
P. He affirmed, 'that the scripture is the power of God, and that the scripture is the gospel.'
A. The power of God led them that spoke forth the scriptures; and the power of God is Christ, and the power of God endures for ever; but scripture is writing, and doth not; and the gospel is the power of God, say the scriptures, and they do not say that the scripture is the gospel; for many had that, and witnessed not the glad tidings. And so thou art here distinct from the ministers of the gospel, and art not a minister of it, which is the power of God, but puts writings for it; which power of God was before writings were.30
In the final paragraph, on the scriptures, Fox continues to use the word "distinct" that was central to the preceding discussion of the Trinity. This can hardly be accidental, but the word has here become a term of personal attack. In the logic of Fox's attack on Priest Fergison, the statement that "thou art here distinct from the ministers of the gospel" means that Fergison differs from the true ministers on the point in question ("here"); "distinct" therefore means something like "out of unity" or "in disagreement." The vehemence of Fox's attack would be trivialized if "distinct" meant to Fox merely that he (as a true minister) and Fergison (as a false one) were two different men. On the contrary, it is Fergison's disunity with the true ministers which proves he is not one of them.
It appears therefore that in Fox's mind "distinct" means something like "distant." He cannot abide Bunyan's statement that Christ is "distinct from all other things" since he understands the words to mean that Christ is at a distance from all other things. Since Bunyan does in fact emphasize, elsewhere in Some Gospel Truths Opened, that Christ (as man) is distant from his saints on earth, Fox finds it natural to read this meaning into Bunyan's marginal note on Christ being "distinct from all other things," and when he later refers to this in answering John Timpson, he misquotes it as "distinct from the saints."
The word "person," traditionally a key technical term of Trinitarian discourse, causes special problems in texts by uneducated authors in the 17th century. In this case, as C. S. Lewis has noted, the uneducated usage of the term has persisted into the 20th century:
There are almost two languages in this country. The man who wishes to speak to the uneducated in English must learn their language. It is not enough that he should abstain from using what he regards as 'hard words'. He must discover empirically what words exist in the language of his audience and what they mean in that language: . . . personal sometimes means 'corporeal'. When an uneducated Englishman says that he believes 'in God, but not in a personal God,' he may mean simply and solely that he is not an Anthropomorphist in the strict and original sense of that word.31
In Burrough's replies to Bunyan, "person" always means "body." This is especially clear in his reply to an alleged oral statement by Bunyan:
He said, That by the Kingdom of Heaven, within the Pharisees, Luke 17. Christ speaks of himself there, as a personal man to be that Kingdom of Heaven; Mark here what the substance of this is; doth he mean that the person of Christ was in the Pharisees?
O horrid blindness! not to be parrelelled.32
Bunyan, if the quotation is accurate, probably meant that Christ was physically present
among the Pharisees. Burrough, who cannot understand the 
of Luke 17:21 as anything but a literal
"within you," is as scandalized that Christ should be physically within the Pharisees as
Bunyan is that he should be physically within the Quakers. Unlike Bunyan, as we shall see,
Burrough would not object to Christ's body being within the saints, but he cannot allow that the
heavenly flesh could be manifest within hypocrites.
The same usage may also underlie Fox's objection to its application to God. In the list of alleged mistranslations at the end of The Great Mystery he includes this:
In the first chapter of Heb. iii. in the new translation it is said, 'Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person.'
But in the old translation it reads thus: 'Being the brightness of his glory, and the very image of his substance.'33
The Father may be said to have a "substance" (reality, as opposed to "shadow") but not a "person" (physical body).
The meaning of "person" as "body" sometimes occurs in Bunyan as well; for example:
salvation was obtained for sinners by the Man that did hang on the cross on Mount Calvary between two thieves, called Jesus Christ: I say, by what he did then for sinners in his own person or body, which he took from the Virgin Mary, according to the word of God.34
The compound expression "person or body," being governed both by "his own" and "which he took," seems to be a pair of synonymous or nearly synonymous terms for the same thing. It is therefore quite possible that Bunyan's numerous references to what Christ did and suffered "in his own person" have a similar sense.
Burton, on the other hand, knows the more educated use of "person" as a technical term of Christology, as when he paraphrases Jesus' words in John 16:14:
For he shall take of mine (of my glorious things), and show them to you; he shall take my divine and human nature, my birth, my person and offices, my obedience, death, satisfaction, my resurrection, ascension and intercession, and of my second coming in the clouds with my mighty angels to judgment, and shall show them, or clear them up to you. . . .35
Here Christ's "person," contrastingly paired with his "offices," means something like his "individuality" or "who he is."
Interestingly, this same passage continues, "He shall take of my salvation, which I have wrought for you in my own person without you," which verbally overlaps Bunyan's habitual usage. This opens the possibility that the word's definition may have varied even among authors who used it to convey very similar propositional content. For if Burton's words mean "my salvation, which I have wrought for you in my own individual identity without you," and if Bunyan's mean "salvation was obtained for sinners . . . by what he did then for sinners in his own physical body," both are speaking of the same events and saying essentially the same thing about them. They might therefore go on indefinitely using the identical verbal formula "what he did in his own person" without discovering the difference in dictionary definition between the educated and uneducated uses of "person."
On the other hand the same failure to discover the difference in definitions might easily lead antagonists to speak at cross purposes. Such interference between the uneducated and the theological senses of "person" can be seen in Burrough's reply to a statement of the doctrine of the Trinity in a catechism by Samuel Eaton:
The Father, Son, and Spirit is one; this we believe and know, according to the Scriptures: but as for thy word, Person, that is carnal and too low a word to denominate God by, who is Infinite; for God and the Spirit hath no Person, nor cannot truly be distinguished into Persons; for a person has relation to Place, Time and Change, and is not in all places at all times at once; and the Scriptures know no such distinction; for God is a Spirit, and hath no relation to one Time, Place or Alteration more then another; but filleth Heaven and Earth, and his Presence is in all, and over all, who is blessed forever, and is infinite, and without Person, or confined Beeing; and the Scripture no where, in true Translation, doth denominate God, Christ and the Spirit by Persons, and Personal Beeings, nor doth distinguish them into three Persons; for Persons are related to carnal, as I have said; and Persons is too low to denominate God, and Christ, and the Spirit by. So thy Principles are unsound, and not agreeing to the Spirit of God, and the Scriptures; and therefore not to be believed, nor received.36
Eaton obviously uses the Trinitarian sense of "persons," but for Burrough "person" is equivalent to "confined being" and "has relation to place, time and change." It does not of course follow that the disagreement on this point would have been ended had the difference in usage been explained to the parties, for each was convinced that his own group's terms were the correct ones, Eaton following the terminology of the creeds and Burrough insisting on limiting theological discourse to "scripture language."
The term "measure" shows a remarkable inversion in meaning. Bunyan uses it in the educated or philosophical sense:
true justifying faith is a good gift, and perfect in respect of the author, God, in respect of its object, Christ; and in respect of the nature, though not in respect of the degree and measure of it in us; even as a grain of gold is as perfect gold as a pound of gold, though not so much.37
Faith is here evaluated along several dimensions and found perfect in some but not all of them. One of these dimensions is "degree and measure," and in this dimension faith is not perfect. The analogy with two different quantities of pure gold makes the meaning as clear as could be desired.
However, where Bunyan writes "not [perfect] in respect of the degree and measure of it in us," Fox paraphrases this as "not perfect in the measure and degree," omitting "in respect of."38 This changes the meaning substantially, for as it happens, "in measure" is something of a technical term in early Quaker theology. A clue to its meaning is found in one of Burrough's marginal notes. Having asserted that "the Light of Christ spoken of John 1.9 . . . is of the likeness of the Spirit of Christ, and as good in its measure," he tries to explicate his meaning with the note, "The Witness is as good as the Judge; in measure."39 This clearly does not mean "in respect of measure," i.e. "evaluated along the dimension of measure." The witness who testifies against a defendant, and the judge who convicts and sentences him, are not equal in social power or legal authority. Burrough is arguing, rather, that the witness is of equal dignity with the judge insofar as his role permits. Thus "in measure" really means "allowing for the difference of degree." As another illustration of this usage we may take Nayler's statement that the scriptures "are true, and I witness them true, in measure fulfilled in me, as far as I am grown up."40
This early Quaker usage of "measure" receives an added impetus from a conflation of John 3:34 and Eph 4:7 with 1 Cor 12:7. The King James Version supplies an italicized "unto him" in John 3:34 ("for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him"), and the Geneva Bible makes a similar insertion. This allows the inference that to everyone but Jesus, God does give the Spirit by measure, and this is equated with "the measure of the gift of Christ" in Eph 4:7.41 Quakers therefore habitually substituted "measure" for "manifestation" in 1 Cor 12:7, so that Burrough writes, "yet is the measure of the Spirit given unto every man to profit withal, as the Scripture saith," correcting this to "the measure or manifestation of the Spirit" only after Bunyan has objected.42 We should thus refine the foregoing definition of "in measure"; the difference of degree to be allowed for is specifically the difference among individual measures of the Spirit. To be "perfect in measure" is therefore to be fully conformed to the measure or manifestation of the Spirit that one has been given. Fox states that "faith is perfect in the least measure and degree, the righteousness of faith, Rom. x."43 As Nayler's "as far as I am grown up" suggests, one who is "perfect in measure" in the Quaker sense might nevertheless press on to a greater degree of perfection as God grants a further measure or manifestation of the Spirit.
One could hardly ask for a more complete inversion of meaning. For Bunyan, true faith is not perfect in its measure, meaning that there is not as much of it as ideally there should be. For Fox, true faith is perfect in its measure, meaning that no matter how little of it there may be, it is a perfect response to the measure of the Spirit that has been given. Fox makes his presentation harder to understand, however, by beginning it with an ad hominem attack on Bunyan: "it is perfect in us in its measure and degree, though thy measure and degree is not perfect."44 The reader who has not yet come to the explanation that "faith is perfect in the least measure" is very likely to take this as meaning that the Quakers have the greatest amount of faith imaginable, while Bunyan has less. In fact, in view of the Quaker usage of "measure," Fox's attack on Bunyan is much more severe than this. The Quakers' faith is "perfect in measure" not because it is full-grown in all Quakers but because even where it is as small as a grain of mustard seed it is a perfect response to God's gift of the Spirit. Allowing for the difference in terminology, this is quite analogous to what Bunyan claims for his own faith, but Fox will not accede to any such claim on Bunyan's part. Bunyan's faith, for Fox, is not "perfect in measure" in that it does not match the manifestation of the Spirit in Bunyan's conscience: Bunyan does not believe what God is telling him. The charge is not that Bunyan has too little faith but that he has the wrong kind, a mere counterfeit faith. And because Fox cannot read Bunyan's words in any sense but his own, he believes Bunyan's own testimony is sufficient to convict him on this point: "here thou hast tried thy faith and thy gift, which is not perfect, for the gift of God is perfect," so that Bunyan's faith is not the gift of God.45
The sampling of alternate definitions studied here covers only a portion of the opportunities for misunderstanding between Bunyan and Burrough, or between them and their modern readers. Other linguistic obstacles, not reducible to the definition of a single word, will be noticed in subsequent chapters.
Given that Bunyan's usage is, in most of the cases examined, closer to standard educated English than that of Burrough or Fox, it may reasonably be asked whether this means that Bunyan's earthly education was more advanced than he chooses to advertise. However, whatever other reasons there may be to believe this,46 the present findings do not really contribute to such an argument. They are better explained on an alternate hypothesis: that both Bunyan and Burrough learned their styles of theological discourse in their respective religious communities.
As the usage of "person" illustrates, Bunyan can retain the popular or uneducated sense of a word even after being exposed to more technical theological usage. In this respect he and Burrough start at approximately the same level. Bunyan has moved slightly beyond the popular level by acquiring the phrase "in his own person" (which, however, he probably still understands in terms of "person" as "body"), but has not learned to speak of "three persons" of the Trinity or the "person and offices" of Christ (which require a non-physical understanding of the term). Burrough's usage of "person" remains strictly at the popular level because Quaker theology rejects the traditional terminology of theological metaphysics.
In the case of "human," on the other hand, the popular meaning and the educated meaning coincide, and it is only Fox's specialized meaning that differs. In this case, therefore, it is Burrough and not Bunyan who must move away from the base point. In 1656 he has not yet done so; in 1661 he can at any rate cosign a pamphlet in which the portion written by Whitehead insists on Fox's usage.
With "gospel" we find that both Bunyan and Burrough have moved beyond the likely unsophisticated meaning of the term (the first four books of the New Testament).47 Burrough has learned his new usage from Fox (who was speaking this way at least as early as 1651, before Burrough's convincement).48 Bunyan has learned his from Luther's Commentary on Galatians, to which he turned in his spiritual distress, or from the Bedford conventicle led by John Gifford, with its evangelical spiritual emphasis. Neither Bunyan nor Burrough is familiar with the other's usage.
To the modern reader Bunyan's theological usage appears more educated than Burrough's. But as far as the present findings are concerned, it is not that Bunyan has learned a greater number of specialized theological usages than Burrough but that he has learned a different set, and that he has done so in a church setting which is in greater continuity with the Protestant academic tradition. This same continuity, extended to the present day, has made it superfluous for this chapter to give Bunyan's technical terms (i.e. those of Reformed theology) the same special attention as those of the Quakers.
Burton is therefore, from his own viewpoint, quite justified in claiming that Bunyan "is not chosen out of an earthly, but out of the heavenly university," for he defines this university as "the church of Christ," naturally understood as including his own community. When he says that Bunyan's "three heavenly degrees . . . do more fit a man for that weighty work of preaching the gospel, than all university learning and degrees that can be had," his disparagement of university learning is only relative, not absolute as it would be for Fox. Bunyan lacks human arts such as the knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and he possesses spiritual experience that may be wanting in those whose theological training is merely formal, but the doctrinal content of the theology he has learned in his heavenly university is very much in the tradition of the Protestantism taught at Oxford and Cambridge. Only in that other, rival heavenly university where Burrough learned Fox's doctrines do we find a more radical discontinuity with the earthly academia of 17th-century England.
In the following chapter we will see how the different religious educations of Bunyan and Burrough have affected not only their technical vocabulary but the whole style in which they frame their theological discourse.
1. John Burton, "To the Reader," in Bunyan, Some Gospel Truths Opened, 11 (appendix, 249, col. 1).
5. George Fox, Some Principles of the Elect People of God Who in Scorn are called Quakers (London: Robert Wilson, 1661), 37-38. "Inwardly ravened from the Spirit" is Fox's exegesis of the "inwardly ravening wolves" of Matt 7:15.
8. Fox, The Great Mystery, in Works, 3:255.
10. John Bunyan, A Few Sighs from Hell (1658), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, 1, ed. T. L. Underwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 343.
12. Bunyan, Some Gospel Truths Opened, 62 (appendix, 322, col. 1).
16. Burton, "To the Reader," in Bunyan, Some Gospel Truths Opened, 7 (appendix, 244, col. 1).
17. Burrough, The True Faith, 4 (appendix, 244, col. 2).
18. Burrough, Truth the Strongest, 8 (appendix, 244, col. 4).
19. George Whitehead and Edward Burrough, The Son of Perdition Revealed, By the brightness and light of the Son of God in his Saints . . . (London: Thomas Simmons, 1661), 8.
20. The presence of Greek and Latin suggests that the educated mind behind this reasoning may well be that of Samuel Fisher, whose Rusticus ad Academicos has been quoted just previously (ibid., 2). The passage itself is probably by Whitehead rather than Burrough: Burrough's epistle to the reader indicates that "a dear friend of mine" (Whitehead) "begun the work for me" (ibid., unnumbered penultimate page of epistle to the reader), and as the main text of the pamphlet runs to p. 67, Whitehead's work probably extends well beyond p. 8.
21. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb's War, 49. Underwood, further, attributes directly to Burrough the Son of Perdition passage just quoted, without recognizing either Whitehead's joint authorship or the change from Burrough's 1656 usage of "human"; ibid., 41.
22. Lisa [Licia] Kuenning, "Fox's Message was not About a Message," Quaker Religious Thought, vol. 22 no. 3 (1987), 20-39. This article, condensed for publication, was based in part on the more extensive presentation of the same author's research in "'The Gospel is the Power of God': What did George Fox Mean by it?" (1984), available from http://www.voicenet.com/~ku enning/fot/foxongospel.html; Internet.
24. Burrough, The True Faith, 18 (appendix, 310-311, col. 2).
25. Ibid. (appendix, 311-312, col. 2).
26. Bunyan, Vindication, 173 (appendix, 311, col. 3). Emphasis added.
27. Bunyan, Some Gospel Truths Opened, p. 35. (This note is lacking in the Stebbing edition: appendix, 278, col. 1.)
28. Fox, Works, 3:340. The bracketed "their" in the first sentence, substituted by the 1831 Works for the "his" of the original printing, may be accepted as correcting a typographical error, since Fox immediately goes on to deny that Christ is "distinct from their spirits."
29. Ibid., 3:58. The Philadelphia 1831 editors, who as Orthodox Quakers had reason to be scandalized at the possible implications of the word "distinct," introduce "separate" in brackets after its final occurrence. It is not present in the 1659 original.
31. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 242-243.
32. Burrough, Truth the Strongest, 55-56 (appendix, 372, col. 4).
34. Bunyan, Vindication, 123 (appendix, 231, col. 3).
35. Burton, "To the Reader," in Bunyan, Some Gospel Truths Opened, 10 (appendix, 248, col. 1).
36. Burrough, Some False Principles and Errors Discovered and Refuted (1659), in Memorable Works, 484.
37. Bunyan, Some Gospel Truths Opened, 18 (appendix, 263, col. 1).
39. Burrough, Truth the Strongest, 17 (appendix, 257, col. 4).
40. Saul's Errand to Damascus, in Fox, Works, 3:611.
41. Burrough even understands "the gift of Christ" here as an objective genitive, so that Christ is given by measure: "Grace and Faith, and Truth, and Christ himself admitteth of Degrees, or Measures, which are one . . . for, Christ is made Wisdom, and Sanctification, and Salvation; and every one feels his Sanctification and his Justification, according to the Measure of the Gift of Christ . . . ." Some False Principles and Errors Discovered and Refuted (1659), in Memorable Works, 487.
42. Burrough, The True Faith, 26 (appendix, 354, col. 2); Truth the Strongest, 50 (appendix, 351, col. 4).
46. Richard L. Greaves, "A Tinker's Dissent, a Pilgrim's Conscience," Christian History 5, no. 3 (1987):8-13 argues that Bunyan exaggerated his lack of education.
47. At Aldingham in 1652, Fox says, "The priest told me Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the Gospel, I told him the Gospel was the power of God" (Journal, 115).