Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 09 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter explores such topics as the Quaker doctrine of the Light, and their views on Christology, the Doctrine of God, and trinitarianism more generally. Among Christians, Quakers are relatively unusual in the extent to which their Christology depends on the relatively impersonal and universalist-tending conception of the Light. The early Quaker view of the Trinity, according to Penn, was not Nicene but Sabellian. Organized in chronological fashion, the chapter emphasizes the diversity that developed in Quaker interpretations of the Light and Christ, from the nineteenth-century forwards. The doctrine of God also varied widely between relatively classical and orthodox views to the non-theist views held by some Quakers in the early twenty-first century. Quakers in the Global South, however, maintain strong theist and Christocentric views, as do most Quakers in North America.

Keywords: God, Light of Christ, inner light, Christ, Holy Spirit, trinity, seed, measure, atonement, universalism, covenant, non-theism

Stephen W. Angell

Stephen W. Angell is the Leatherock Professor of Quaker Studies at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana. He is co-editor with Paul Buckley of The Quaker Bible Reader (Earlham School of Religion Press, 2006); co-editor with Hal Weaver and Paul Kriese of Black Fire: African-American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights (Quaker Press of FGC, 2011); and author of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South (University of Tennessee Press, 1992). He is an Associate Editor of the journals Quaker Studies and Quaker Theology, and he is on the editorial boards of Quaker Religious Thought and the Journal of Africana Religions.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.