Quakers and Anabaptists

Christian ethics and theology with an Anabaptist perspective
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temporal1
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by temporal1 »

Numbers 11:29 (typo?) ..
http://biblehub.com/numbers/11-29.htm
And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake?
would God that all the LORD'S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!
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Bill Rushby
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by Bill Rushby »

Josh wrote: "But the only Conservative Quaker meeting in Salem, Ohio, near me, is a tiny group of less than a hundred people. The last time my mother went to visit, there was no meeting, and she and my sister showed up, waited, and left disappointed. They weren't able to reach anyone to find out more."

Actually, the Salem Conservative meeting is one of three in the area. At least once a month, the three groups meet together, rotating the location. Your relatives may have tried to attend on one of those Sundays, but obviously not where the joint meeting was being held. If coming from a distance, I recommend making contact with a member of the meeting in question before attempting to attend. I also recommend attending when the three groups are meeting together. I think they usually have a fellowship meal together, making it possible to get to know them better.

Look up Ohio Yearly Meeting's website to find local contacts. If that doesn't do the job, I can provide contact information, even though I am not at present a member of Ohio Yearly Meeting.

By the way, my mother-in-law's family left northern Virginia before the Civil War; they did not want to live in a slave state.
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Bill Rushby
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by Bill Rushby »

Temporal wrote: "at that time (most?) were coming from Puritan roots? with Anabaptist influences? .. Puritans, Anabaptists, Protestants..."

I don't think the first Friends had any demonstrated contact with "Anabaptists", as we would think of them, in the British Isles. They did have contact with other sectarians with Anabaptist ideas.

The first Friends came mostly from Puritan (low church ex-Anglicans) and General Baptist groups, as well as from various more exotic British sectarian groups. Their contact with Mennonites came later as Friends missionized in the Netherlands and German areas. Some early Friends also came from the Church of England and Catholic churches.
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temporal1
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by temporal1 »

Bill Rushby wrote:
Temporal wrote: "at that time (most?) were coming from Puritan roots? with Anabaptist influences? .. Puritans, Anabaptists, Protestants..."
I don't think the first Friends had any demonstrated contact with "Anabaptists", as we would think of them, in the British Isles. They did have contact with other sectarians with Anabaptist ideas.

The first Friends came mostly from Puritan (low church ex-Anglicans) and General Baptist groups, as well as from various more exotic British sectarian groups. Their contact with Mennonites came later as Friends missionized in the Netherlands and German areas. Some early Friends also came from the Church of England and Catholic churches.
hi Bill .. :D
when i began this thread, i had no idea about possible Quaker-Anabaptist interactions .. did you read in this thread, Page 3, posts by Neto and PeterG? .. these are what i had in mind.
Bill wrote:
By the way, my mother-in-law's family left northern Virginia before the Civil War; they did not want to live in a slave state.
this happened in my family; from what i've read, many Quakers moved to be north of the Mason-Dixon Line at or near the time of the U.S. Civil War for this reason.

i've just recently read, Quakers did not have an official ban against slavery until after John Woolman's treatise on slavery was published, 1754. i see on a timeline that John Woolman was at Hopewell in 1746, no other details. after the ban, though, it was cause for (disownment.)

did the original Quakers in England have slaves? i do not know.
did Puritans in England? i do not know.

Quakers are so well known for the underground railroad, even moving from the south to distance themselves from slavery, i was a bit shocked to read there was ever a time when ownership of slaves was allowed. the ban was in place approximately 100 years prior to the Civil War, so, the ban was well-established before the Civil War (?)

i'm much more asking than attempting to state fact. :)
in case my words aren't clear.
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Bill Rushby
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by Bill Rushby »

The first protest by a colonial church body against the keeping of slaves took place at Germantown (Philadelphia) in 1688. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1688_Germ ... st_Slavery Note that this Quaker group consisted of ex-Krefeld Mennonites who had joined the Quaker church in colonial Pennsylvania. I believed that they returned to the Mennonite fold when that denomination became sufficiently numerous in colonial Pennsylvania.
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temporal1
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by temporal1 »

Bill Rushby wrote:The first protest by a colonial church body against the keeping of slaves took place at Germantown (Philadelphia) in 1688. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1688_Germ ... st_Slavery

Note that this Quaker group consisted of ex-Krefeld Mennonites who had joined the Quaker church in colonial Pennsylvania. I believed that they returned to the Mennonite fold when that denomination became sufficiently numerous in colonial Pennsylvania.
great reading.
i appreciate the world context and history included, too often ignored in youthful U.S. context.

i had no idea Quakers were held as slaves.
interesting about document restoration and preservation, too.

it makes sense that by the time the Woolman treatise was published, years of thinking+discussion preceeded. i think this is typically how things work ..

there is an (anthropological?) phrase for this i wish i could recall.
Neto, if you read this, do you know the phrase i'm thinking of?! -
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temporal1
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by temporal1 »

The Benedict Option, Pages 6+7 .. bunny trails:
http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php ... 1&start=50
by temporal1 » Mon Jun 05, 2017 9:39 am
Bill Rushby wrote:
Probably neither of these narratives is wholly accurate, but I thought this thread was about *The Benedict Option*!? I apologize if I got us onto a bunny trail!
o.no. now i'm getting confused! lol
i need a break. :mrgreen:
i was hoping for your thoughts on my Quaker questions. :D
Page 7
Josh asks:
Bill, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Quakerism really ever depended on "marrying inside the faith" and wasn't an isolated ethnic sect. My own family history has more mixed Quaker-non Quaker marriages than it does Quaker-Quaker marriages (in fact, I'm not aware of any that fit the latter category)
sure, and my understanding comes from reading Quaker Meeting records that clearly indicate those marrying outside the group were formally "disowned" .. a word that Bill described to be "naughty" today (this thread, Page 4.) the records i've read are from earlier times.

personally, i have no problem with either/both being true or false, or partially so (as Bill may have suggested?) .. i'm just interested in learning. :)

i'm glad you are interested in learning more about Quakers, early in this thread, that did not appear to be the case. in my small experience, Quakers and Anabaptists have crossed paths, from early on.

possibly less so presently? .. but, i suspect rifts result more from "liberal" vs "conservative" believers than anything else. which is happening almost universally right now, no matter group label.
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Bill Rushby
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by Bill Rushby »

Hello, Temporal and Josh!

As I recall, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (*The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy*) claimed that one in four in the American colonies were "affiliated" with the Society of Friends. Today, in the U.S., the number is a fraction of a percent. What happened and when??

There was no formal membership back in colonial days, and no rite of water baptism to serve as an objective marker of who was in and who was out. The plain garb, "plain language," and other religious and cultural markers defined the boundaries of the Quaker community. Need I say that that approach only worked for a time. Eventually, the discipline was relaxed and there developed a large number of "free riders," Friends who didn't act like Friends.

Some of these lukewarm folks were wealthy and power-oriented. They formed the Quaker elite which ran the government in colonial Pennslyvania and, no doubt, some other colonies too. In the mid-1750s (?), the Quaker-inspired and Anabaptist-supported nonresistance of the Pennsylvania government got challenged in response to Indian raids and security concerns on the frontier, etc. The government decided on a military response, and the Philadelphia yearly meeting decided that the Quaker faithful could no longer participate in civil government. At this point, large numbers of free riders left Friends and became Episcopalians, etc. There was a severe tightening of boundaries and of discipline, and the membership shrank. I believe that formal membership was introduced at this time.

All along, Friends were not allowed to marry outside the Quaker community. Doing so was a disownable offense. This also resulted in many membership losses, and was only changed in the mid-1800s.

The conclusion of this part of the story is that the membership shrank in a major way before opposition to slavery and movement out of the South were serious issues. I may have some of the dates and details wrong, but I think this is the general picture.

Moving out of the slave states to free states wreaked major demographic damage to the Society of Friends in North Carolina and Virginia. Whether it reduced the overall membership in the U.S. I don't know--but I doubt that it did. On the other hand, outmigration from the South produced several large and dynamic new yearly meetings in the Midwest.

I think Temporal treated movement out the South as the pivotal even in her narrative, which ignores the fact that the large majority of Quaker communities at that time were in the Atlantic states and New York.

I'll comment on Josh's theory in a separate post.
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Bill Rushby
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uaker

Post by Bill Rushby »

During the 1820s a major schism occurred between the "Orthodox" and the "Hicksites." Prior to that time, the Bible was not widely available in American society, partly because of the cost. When the schism between the Hicksites and the Orthodox came to pass, the Orthodox Friends took advantage of the lower cost of Bibles to adopt a policy of a Bible in every Orthodox Quaker home. Bible reading became an important aspect of Orthodox Quaker piety. See Timothy Larsen's essay on Elizabeth Fry for a sample of this: a chapter in *A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians*. All of this prepared the soil for a major renewal movement among Orthodox Friends, particularly in the Midwest and in the British Isles.

Revivalism swept through the Midwest after the Civil War, and the Friends became an important part of this movement. Large numbers of new believers joined Friends at this time, many of them from outside the Quaker community. They became Christians, but often knew little or nothing about the Quaker faith. This played into the hands of those Friends who now saw themselves as evangelicals more than as Quakers. These folks were able to introduce innovations that flew in the face of traditional Quaker faith and practice, such as a stated ministry which was paid; no more of that plural free ministry stuff!! And no more plainness, except among the most ardently Holiness Friends and the Conservative "diehards."

Josh's contention that evangelicalism developed among indifferent, lukewarm "culture Quakers" fails to account for the fact that much of the growth came from outside of the Quaker community, and that evangelicalism was a widespread Protestant movement at that time; it was not in any way unique to the Society of Friends.

Did Josh's grandmother mislead him. I doubt it. There were probably plenty of lukewarm Friends to justify her account but, by and large, they are not why evangelicalism became such a major force among Friends in the Midwest and West. It is very easy to generalize from a specific setting and anecdotal evidence without warrant.
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temporal1
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Re: Quakers and Anabaptists

Post by temporal1 »

fascinating. Bill, you are a treasure. thank you.
keep posting! please!
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