None but Christ, none but Christ, saith my soul, from the sense of my continual need of him, and from the deep love of my heart unto him. –Isaac Penington
Last autumn, Madeleine Vaché and I began inviting some Friends to a discussion group on the writing of early Friend Isaac Penington. “Some of the Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Glanced At” is the tract that we chose to study. It can be found in volume 2, page 332, of the four-volume set published by Quaker Heritage Press (QHP), titled The Works of Isaac Penington. It can also be found online at QHP’s website here. This tract uses a question-and-answer format to examine the meaning of words that we most frequently use when speaking of matters of faith: Christ, repentance, faith, hope, love, obedience, peace, joy, liberty, prayer, justification, and sanctification are some of the many topics that Penington delves into in this tract.
It is the preface to the writing, though, that provides the context for this study. It is there that Penington distinguishes between the “two-fold way of knowing Christ”: the “literal” and the “spiritual.” The literal, he writes, “is according to a description of him received into the understanding; the other [the spiritual] is according to the revelation or unveiling of him in the heart,” which, Penington goes on to say, entails “spiritual submission and obedience of the gospel.” Though not entirely dismissing the literal way, Penington (Quaker that he is) firmly asserts “the main thing now to be minded is the heavenly birth, with God’s dispensation of life to it, and its separation from the earthly birth, and its way of feeding on the heavenly things.” To that end, Penington’s descriptive answers throughout this writing convey his inward, experiential (“spiritual”) knowledge of whatever topic is in question.
Our discussion group meets every other Wednesday evening for an hour, and attendance has settled into six or seven regulars. We read each question and answer out loud, and then we offer our thoughts and experience in response. We move slowly: both through the reading material and in our discussions. Perhaps some may attribute the ponderous pace to the fact that most of us are “of retirement age,” but it is, I believe, our accessing deep, personal understanding that has taken decades to form that sets and regulates that pace, inhibiting the talk that trots “trippingly on the tongue.”
As a result, I have taken the liberty of reducing some of the longer stretches of silence before making discussions public on our YouTube channel, Isaac Penington Study Group (here linked). There you can find the sixteen discussions that we have had since beginning in November, moving through questions, such as “What is Christ”? “What hinders union with Christ”? “How is faith received”? We are now considering Penington’s words on “hope,” which can be seen in the fifteenth and sixteenth sessions. Please feel welcome to leave a comment below any session’s recording.
The image that I’ve chosen for both the YouTube channel and this post is Rembrandt’s The Apostle Paul in Prison, painted in 1627. I find this painting appropriate for a channel featuring a study of Penington, because he spent time in prison where he thought and wrote, as Paul is shown to be doing in this painting. Each of these men’s lives were devoted to witnessing to the great inward illumination Christ had provided them, and Rembrandt, too, must be included among them, for his work also tells of the Light that is given.
Abiding Quaker 