John Wesley on the difference between Quakerism and Christianity:
The Wesley Center Online: Wesley's Letters: 1748
A better-formatted version:
The Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. John Wesley
John Wesley was particularly right to challenge the Quakers, some of whom indeed did wind up rejecting Christianity, particularly in the UK. These groups are known sometimes as “liberal Friends”, “conservative Friends”, “traditional Friends” and by other titles that indicate a continuity in practice. Essentially, by stripping away all liturgies, creeds and confessions of faith and retaining only a vague orthopraxis, the result was the emergence of groups which were like a less liturgical version of the Unitarian Universalists. In my childhood I had a friend who was a vintner, who was a devout Quaker, and who was quite convinced that no Quakers anywhere held any fixed doctrine and regarded the idea of dogmatics as anathema.
Now there are some Quakers who are expressly Christian, known as “Evangelical Friends” and some of them even practice baptism and the Eucharist and are not substantially different from other Evangelical churches.
I suspect the reason why the Friends established a foothold was that the Church of England prior to Anglo-Catholicism was very noisy; it did not provide, at the time, much in terms of an outlet or guidance on the pursuit of sacred silence as had previously been accessible via the Roman Catholic Low Mass. So people used to worship with long periods of silence were inclined to pursue it. In Holy Orthodoxy, we would never need to seek this out, since we have Hesychasm, which facilitates quiet or silent worship but worship which is not devoid of words; and this extends even to the Oriental Orthodox, whose monks would use the prayer “Kyrie Eleison” or memorize the Psalms or both (we also have as an alternative to Athonite Hesychasm the Prayer Rule of St. Seraphim of Sarov, which features more instances of the Pater Noster and an abbreviated form of the Orthodox version of the Ave Maria which I now realize is the one that our Lutheran friend
@MarkRohfrietsch saw, in that he had seen an Orthodox Ave Maria that lacked a petition for intercessions, but it is not the standard Orthodox recension or the recension used by the Old Believers, but is rather an abbreviated form used by St Seraphim of Sarov.
The real tragedy of the Methodist church from which we both hail is the extend to which it disregarded John Wesley’s Orthodox-influenced teachings*; I never in my youth encountered a parish with a weekly Eucharist that promoted fasting on Wednesday and Friday in the manner of the early church (which all Eastern and Oriental Orthodox maintain, and also the Assyrian Church of the East and the Eastern Catholics, in North America at least; it has been my experience that the Greek Catholics in Europe are much more Latinized and have divergent practices, so whereas the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Eparchies in North America are in many cases identical to us in worship, this is not the case in Ukraine, and yet the extent to which Latinizations have been removed from their liturgy since Vatican II in 1969 has actually caused a schism, with a group called the Society of St. Josaphat which I believe has some sort of informal alliance with the SSPX (a group I feel has been viillainized much like TLM Catholics in general, but it is the case that TLM Catholics are less excited about ecumenical relations with the Orthodox, however, their worship looks a lot more like our worship than that of the Novus Ordo Missae in that the traditional Latin mass has the level of ornate detail and complexity that characterizes the ancient liturgies.
Now as a final point of clarification, lest it be said that I am minimizing the problems with Quakerism as a Christian denomination, this is not my intent. Indeed until recently I had not realized the severity of those problems; while reading a copy of the Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies on Quaker worship, I was surprised by how much worse things were than I had anticipated, and how opposed Quaker views on worship were to everything I believe in. That said I find myself seeking ways of undermining their system, to inject Orthodox ideas that might call them to repentence. At the same time, there are limits to what I would do; I would not, for example, disrupt the waiting worship of a Quaker meeting, in the same way that George Fox disrupted Anglican services in order to preach his erroneous doctrine. The overall doctrinal error of the Quakers is very similar to that of an ancient sect which I recall was referred to as the Euchites or Messalians, which rejected sacramental worship along similar lines - it is in the
Panarion of St. Epiphanios of Cyprus and epitomized in the Fount of Knowledge of St. John of Damascus.
* One particularly extreme example of this happened in British Methodism, rather than in the UMC in which we were baptized, different as it is from the UMC of today, to a church many Methodists regard as a sister church - the Salvation Army, which historically did not embrace baptism or the Eucharist, despite these being foundational Methodist doctrines. This was due to the influence of General William Booth’s wife Catharine, who had a Quaker upbringing. The Salvation Army did a lot of good, along with the Anglo Catholics, in the impoverished parts of London, but the Anglo Catholics were ironically much closer to Methodist doctrine, with some even, like John Wesley, obtaining clandestine ordinations from visiting Orthodox clergy, and they tended to celebrate a weekly Eucharist and observe various Patristic doctrines which John Wesley also arrived. They were persecuted, unlike the Salvation Amry, arrested and imprisoned for the crime of wearing a chasuble while being an Anglican priest, even though as had been pointed out, the Ornaments Rubric actually required this, since the vesture in use during the reign of King Edward VI generally included the Chasuble and other devices forbidden by the 19th century Anglican authorities.**
** Delightfully the Anglo Catholics in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney have evaded a ban on “the vestment” by which is meant chasuables by wearing copes, and it should be noted that while the Western cope has a different liturgical function than the Byzantine Phelonion or Syriac Orthodox Phayno, it is very similar in appearance, to the extent that most priests of the Assyrian Church of the East just buy Western copes, although some purchase copes from the same tailors in India used by the Syriac Orthodox. Syriac Orthodox vestments are almost identical to those of the Eastern Orthodox; one of the view differences being the stole worn by the priests, called the hamnikho, meaning “necklace”, does not consist of two halves permanently attached but with vestigial buttons, but rather one single piece of fabric, and in the Coptic Orthodox church this is the main vestment much of the time due to the high desert temperatures, but stoles do exist and are worn on occasion, but they tend to be more minimal than ours. Whereas Armenians wear a phelonion or chasuble which like that of the Athonite monks and the Russian, Ukrainian and Finnish clergy and many of those of the Orthodox Church in America, features a raised collar due to the cold temperatures in Armenia, but it attaches externally. The Armenians also have a custom of having their deacons wear mitres on the feast of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, which in their rite occurs in the Nativity Fast and not immediately after Christmas, since the Armenian Apostolic Church was the only ancient church which retained the ancient practice of celebrating the Nativity and Baptism of our Lord on the same day, since it never had a problem with Arianism, nor did it have various Pagan observances like the Saturnalia disrupting its fast, which created a natural reason for the churches in the Hellenic cities of Greece, Egypt and the Levant and especially Rome and the Western Empire to celebrate the Nativity on the very logical date indicated by adding nine months to the pre-existing Feast of the Annunciation.
The common heritage of the different Eastern liturgies is evident today, which in the Eastern Orthodox Church is the Sunday of the Last Judgement, and in the Syriac Orthodox Church is the Sunday of the Faithful Reposed (with content somewhere in between Soul Saturday yesterday and propers for today); next Sunday is Forgiveness Sunday for us, but for the Syriac Orthodox it is the first day of Lent, which lasts 50 days in their rite (albeit with less severe fasting), and the first day of their fast is the Sunday of the Wedding Feast at Cana.
