The terms Old Lights and New Lights (among others) are used in Protestant Christian circles to distinguish between two groups who were initially the same, but have come to a disagreement. These terms originated in the early 18th century from a split in theological approach among Calvinist denominations concerning the nature of conversion and salvation. Since then, they have been applied in a wide variety of ways, and the meaning must be determined from each context. Typically, if a denomination is changing, and some refuse to change, and the denomination splits, those who did not change are referred to as the "Old Lights" and the ones who changed are referred to as the "New Lights".
The terms were first used during the First Great Awakening (1730s–40s), which expanded through the British North American colonies in the middle of the 18th century.[1] In A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), Jonathan Edwards, a leader in the Awakening, describes his congregants' vivid experiences with grace as causing a "new light" in their perspective on sin and atonement.[2] Old Lights and New Lights generally referred to Congregationalists and Baptists in New England and Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and further south. who took different positions on the Awakening from the traditional branches of their denominations. New Lights embraced the revivals that spread through the colonies, while Old Lights were suspicious of the revivals (and their seeming threat to authority). The historian Richard Bushman credits the division between Old Lights and New Lights for the creation of political factionalism in Connecticut in the mid-eighteenth century.[3] Often many "new light" Congregationalists who had been converted under the preaching of George Whitefield left that connection to become "new light" Baptists when they found no evidence of infant baptism in the apostolic church. When told of this development, Whitefield famously quipped that he was glad to hear about the fervent faith of his followers but regretted that "so many of his chickens had become ducks."[4] In the Presbyterian Church those elements embracing the revivals of the Great Awakening were sometimes called "New Side" and those opposed to the revivals were called "Old Side".[5]
In the Church of Scotland in the 1790s the "Old Lights" followed the principles of the Covenanters, while the "New Lights" were more focused on personal salvation and considered the strictures of the Covenants as less binding moral enormities."[6]
The terms were also used in 1833, when a debate over swearing allegiance to the US Constitution split the Reformed Presbyterians. The "Old Light" Reformed Presbyterians, in keeping with their Covenanter heritage, refused to swear allegiance to the constitution, and thus to become citizens, because the constitution made no mention of the Lordship of Christ, whereas the "New Light" Reformed Presbyterians allowed for it. Following the split, the Old Lights eventually formed the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America and the New Lights formed the Reformed Presbyterian Church, General Synod.
^Ava Chamberlain, "Self-Deception as a Theological Problem in Jonathan Edwards's 'Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,"' Church History, (1994) 63#4 pp. 541-556 in JSTOR
This book is about “the meaning of life” or “the spiritual quest”. It offers a selective and critical evaluation of some central strands of Western religious and philosophical thought over two and a half thousand years. It starts with Socrates’ philosophy of life, and the Greek tradition of philosophy that he initiated. It gives its own “take” on the teaching of Jesus, and on the long and controversial history of Christianity. There is a chapter devoted to George Fox and the beginning of the Quaker movement, suggesting some surprising parallels between the undogmatic spirituality of the Quakers and the heavyweight philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It recommends a non-literal interpretation of language about God, with some reference to Austin Farrer on “poetic truth”. The book is intended for the intelligent general reader – it is accessible but not “dumbed down”, knowledgeable but not overburdened with detail, critically argumentative but not prejudiced.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Stevenson usefully argues that to believe in God is better framed as asking whether theistic figures of speech illuminate our understanding of our spiritual journey."--Pink Dandelion"Modern Believing" (04/01/2014)
About the Author
Leslie Stevenson was Lecturer, then Reader, in Philosophy at the University of St.Andrews 1968-2000 now Honorary Reader (retired). Author of Ten Theories of Human Nature (OUP), and The Many Faces of Science (Westview).
You’ve seen a Tweet, TikTok, or other social media post about Quakers, and they sound great. Or you’ve read a Wikipedia article or a blog post or you’re just curious… you want to know more about Quakers. Where can you go?
In this blog post, I’ll run through three basic options for finding out more, depending what you want to know. In short, these are: the practical method, where you meet Quakers and try out Quaker worship; the more information method, where you learn more about Quakers in theory; and the historical approach, where you explore Quakers as they have been in the past. Of course, you don’t have to pick just one.
Practical. If you want to try out Quaker worship, what can you do? You can start on your own, right now, by looking for ways to be calm and quiet, and listen for an inner voice that helps you to understand things better and make good choices. Most Quakers find that our method works better in company, and you have options for that as well. Since you’ve found Quakers on the internet, you might want to try a Quaker meeting for worship online. There are some which are public, and you can just turn up: Woodbrooke and Ben Lomond Quaker Centre, for example. Many Quaker communities which meet in person also have an online element – to get the details for these, you usually need to contact the specific community you want to join. A selection are listed by the Friends World Committee for Consultation. And you can find an in person meeting by searching online: Friends Around the World is a good starting place, or there may be a more local database such as Britain Yearly Meeting’s Find a Meeting.
Theoretical. If you want to know more about Quakers in theory, you have lots of choices depending how you’d like to get your information. There are probably the widest range of choices for people who like to read: free leaflets to download, websites to explore, and books such as my Quakers Do What! Why?. If you’d like to see videos, QuakerSpeak is the big one, and check out srekauq on YouTube. For shorter bites, you could explore the TikTok channels run by Makenzie Morgan, Rory Kennison, and me. There are also some Quaker podcasts if you prefer to listen: you could start with A Quaker Take and Quaker Faith & Podcast. Lots more resources for this approach are linked from Wess Daniels’ Quakerism 101 page.
Historical. Perhaps you’ve interested in Quakers because you have Quaker family or ancestors, or because they’ve come up in relation to another area of history you’re interested in – the founding of America and especially Pennsylvania; the Civil War and Commonwealth in 17th Century England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; or lots of other times and places. Finding out about Quakers today, through either of the methods above, might not answer your questions. In fact, because Quakers have changed a lot in some ways, it might just leave you more confused – if you want to know about Quakerplain dress, and you visit a Quaker meeting today, you’re unlikely to come away much clearer, because very few Quakers wear plain dress now. For a very quick starting point (5 minutes), this video by Young Friends in Richmond is good. You could also try the free three-week course from FutureLearn, Radical Spirituality or Pink Dandelion’s book An Introduction to Quakerism. If you want to dive deeper, you could start with this research guide from the TriCollege libraries, or contact the Library of the Society of Friends or the Friends Historical Library. To search for an individual, the family history website Ancestry has lots of Quaker records digitised and the Quaker Family History Society may be able to help.
What do you want to learn about Quakers? What resources have helped you? Please comment below with questions and suggestions.
The other day I was teaching a Woodbrooke Where You Are session about Quaker worship and spoken ministry, and someone asked an excellent question which I think is worth exploring further. We were talking about reasons why Quaker meetings introduce a practice like afterwords, in which there is a space at the end of the unprogrammed worship when people are encouraged to share things they were considering during meeting – things which weren’t quite ministry but might be usefully shared, or which didn’t quite get spoken but might have been ministry. When I was researching this, one of the reasons meetings gave for introducing afterwords was to try and increase the amount of spoken ministry given during worship, by building up people’s confidence that what they have to share is valuable, is real ministry, and can rightly be shared with the whole community. But in my session someone asked: why would we want to do that? Why are we worried if there’s no spoken ministry? Can’t we just let things be and accept what spoken ministry we are given – or not given?
On the one hand, there’s a lot to be said for not worrying about spoken ministry. An hour’s silence can be a deep and rich experience of unprogrammed worship. Trying to encourage spoken ministry can also lead to practices like preparing or semi-preparing ministry – which changes our tradition of spoken ministry in a different way and can lead to trying to take too much control rather than trusting our unprogrammed method. Furthermore, our tradition has changed in the past and it can change again. If speaking during worship went the way of shaking and crying out in worship, as things once done but no longer part of our tradition, perhaps that would simply be where we are now being led to go.
On the other hand, spoken ministry given in worship is an important part of our tradition. There are reasons why we expect it to happen at least sometimes. I think it’s right for meetings where it’s becoming less common or almost unknown to at least ask why, and to consider whether they are led to do anything about it.
To put this in context, we could start by asking some questions about previous changes.
Why are Quakers no longer led to go around ‘naked for a sign’, wearing only their underwear in the marketplace? Perhaps because it’s no longer an effective way of getting our message across – modern equivalents might include behaviour like holding meeting for worship outside a military base or blocking roads during a climate protest, both things which are outside the range of ‘normal’ behaviour in today’s society but can be read as sending a message to the wider community.
Why do we no longer shake and cry out during unprogrammed worship? Perhaps because we want to be seen as calm and respectable; perhaps because our religious feelings are no longer so intense; perhaps because we express our emotions in other ways; perhaps because we have lost touch with our bodies and over-intellectualised our worship. This gives a good example of the way in which, depending why we think something has changed, we might want to revisit it. At least some Quakers now think that a deeper embodiment might enrich our worship, and things like Meeting for Worship for Dance are bringing some of this back.
So, if a meeting has little or no spoken ministry, over a matter of months, what questions arise?
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Do the people attending meeting for worship know that offering ministry in words as well as silence is an option? Is everyone present clear that what’s happening is meeting for worship rather than, for example, a silent meditation session? (Too many spoken messages can raise a similar but opposite question: does everyone present understand what it means to say that this is a meeting for worship rather than, for example, a discussion?)
Is someone who is being led to give ministry not following that leading, at all or in the right way, for some reason? Quaker faith & practice gives some examples of this, and we can think of lots of possibilities – not feeling confident to speak, not feeling adequate to the message, not knowing whether it will be welcome, knowing that it is unconventional in content or delivery method and worrying about the response… Just as it would be wrong to try and get someone to offer spoken ministry without a true leading to do so, it seems wrong to me to fail to support someone who has a leading but struggles to follow it for whatever reason.
Are we truly not being given ministry to share in words, or are we not really listening? In my own life I know that I can be distracted, even during meeting for worship, and not focus on the Light. The movement of the Spirit can be subtle; what if we are missing it? This isn’t something I would want to judge in others, but I think it’s a question worth asking ourselves if meeting for worship is changing dramatically. For a long time, God’s words have come to Quaker communities through individuals who offered spoken ministry. If that isn’t happening for some of us now, that could be God changing Their approach to us – or it could be us.
Are we being given a rich ministry which arrives in some other form? If we each go from meeting for worship as we came to it and are no better for our coming (as Anne Wilson said to Samuel Bownas in spoken ministry), are we at least being changed outside the worship? If a community has a strong tradition of sharing spiritual experience and insight in discussion, there might be less need of spoken ministry; if the ministry arrives as dance or movement or knitting, the question of speaking might be unimportant.
If all these many questions point in a single direction, it’s to a need for radical openness to different leadings. A leading to entirely silent worship, a leading to offer ministry in worship through screaming rather than speaking, and a leading to offer ministry over coffee instead of during worship should all be tested in the same way – has this come from me and my wishes or wants, or through me from Love? – and taken equally seriously.
What changes might we see in Quaker language in the future? It’s impossible to know, of course, but I’ve been thinking about the trends we have seen in recent decades, and after a quick look into my crystal ball, I’m willing to make some predictions. I will discuss four specific trends and where I think they might be going, and then share some thoughts on how and when changes might take place.
1. More Nontheist Language
It’s easy to predict that Quaker language for discussing the Divine will change, because Quakers have been coining new terms and bringing new life to old images all along. It’s harder to predict which direction this will go. However, this is my guess: Liberal Quaker communities will continue to see an increase in ways of talking about spiritual experience and what happens in worship that do not assume that God is “out there,” or an external, all-powerful, or all-knowing deity. I expect that will include new ways of using old words, even “Spirit” and “God,” but there will be a need to find other images and create new metaphors. Possibilities include “heart,” “body-soul” (like “body-mind,” rejecting dualist approaches that split the human being into bits), and a revitalization of terms for “God within,” like “seed.” Hopefully, there are nontheist Quaker poets and prophets out there coining other beautiful and moving ways to express their perspectives.
I don’t think this trend toward nontheist possibilities will ever result in a complete loss of explicitly monotheistic language from our collective texts. We have already seen moves away from problematic language about God: “the Light,” “Love,” or whatever you call it have reduced the use of masculine and power-based terms but not entirely removed them. “Lord” and “Father” may not be the modern preference in new writing (especially corporate work), but they still appear regularly, used by some individuals and in much-loved quotations from earlier writers. One way in which Quakers handle this diversity is a list of terms: “God, Love, Light, Spirit, Mother, Father, Parent, Child, Beloved, Allah, Heart, Comforter, Buddha-nature” with space left to add your own. If that trend continues, we may see both more and longer lists, and a change of the most common terms that appear there. (I explored lists of words for the Divine in my book Telling the Truth about God.)
2. Social Justice
Again, it’s easy to say that Quakers will continue to try to develop language that treats everyone as equals, and much harder to say what that will actually look like in the future. Sometimes our surrounding cultures get to this ahead of us, or by a different route (like using “you” rather than the early Quaker preference for “thou” for one person). It can also look different and proceed at different speeds in different places. Readers in the United States, where many Quaker communities dropped the word “overseer” in recent decades because of its association with the enslavement of people, may rightly be puzzled by the situation in Britain Yearly Meeting, where we are now in the middle of discussing what alternatives we might use. So I think Quakers everywhere will eventually stop using “overseer” and “elder,” and after a proliferation of other terms—ministry and counsel committee, pastoral care team, community development, etc.—we will eventually return to our biblical and Greek roots and call all these roles in our community “episcopal.” I’m joking about that bit, mostly. It’s more likely that the flowering of many terms will continue, with new phrases emerging as the sharing of responsibility changes in different communities, and that those of us who travel between Quaker groups, physically or online, will accept and often enjoy a process of constant learning.
As other issues come to the fore over time, our traditional language and widely used phrases can incorporate prejudices and social assumptions that are not true. There are many areas in which we still need to improve. The social implications of focusing on “Light” in a society that still privileges people with White skin and oppresses Black people and others with darker skin have been raised but not yet worked through in the Quaker community. The image of the “Inward Light” also draws on the experience of sighted people; it can be productive to work through metaphors that relate to other senses. Historically, Quakers have spoken about hearing, but thinking about how our spiritual lives involve touch, taste, proprioception (kinaesthesia), and other senses may provide interesting new ways of speaking. Similarly, we will need to think about how word choices and style of speaking and writing in Quaker contexts can be marked by social class, educational background, assumptions of monolingualism, and many other factors which contribute to social inequality.
3. Internationalization
Some Quakers have always communicated and traveled internationally. In recent years, the rise of Internet access (and most recently, the need to move more activities online because of the pandemic) has meant that contact with Quakers in other countries has become quicker and cheaper for many people. Quaker Facebook groups and Twitter hashtags are international, books of faith and practiceand other documents from around the world can be found through a quick search, and visiting a meeting thousands of miles away is dramatically easier on Zoom. Not everyone chooses to engage in these ways, but the possibility is there for many more people, without needing to ask a meeting for help with funds or find time off work, etc. Internet tools help people find Quakers but aren’t necessarily geographically specific. Do you remember that Beliefnet quiz that told you what religion you should join? Quakers are actually my second result, below Unitarian Universalist, but although we have Unitarians in the UK, they are not identical to the Unitarian Universalists in the United States. This increases the potential for confusion when we have different terminology. It also increases opportunities for words or phrases commonly used in one community to be shared with another. For example, the phrase “way opens” is becoming more common among British Quakers due to increased contact with North American Quakers.
The worldwide Quaker family is more diverse than members of a particular yearly meeting sometimes realize, and first impressions (“They’re so different! Are they really Quakers?”) can be challenging and hurtful. Knowing more about another tradition brings disagreements to the fore, as well as increasing opportunities to share. Some words or phrases may not transfer well between cultures. Whatever direction this process moves in, however, increasing international contact online will likely shape changes in Quaker language in the next few decades.
4. Collective Pronouns
Individual third-person pronouns have been the focus of much media attention lately, as discussions about the use of singular “they” for nonbinary people and the need to respect pronoun changes for trans people have been normalized among welcoming and affirming communities, and contested by others. Quakers have historically wanted to use second-person pronouns more equally, too, although society as a whole settled on “you” for everyone rather than “thou.” But the pronouns I have in mind here are the first-person singular “I” and the plural “we.” Quakers traditionally write minutes and epistles in the first-person plural: we, the meeting, heard this, did that, decided the other. It’s also a convenient way for an individual to write about a group to which they belong, and if you look back through this article, you’ll see that I’ve done that. At Britain Yearly Meeting this year, though, we struggled with that, especially when we wanted to talk about issues that divide our community.
As a community that is mainly White, our communal body contains many people who need to reckon with White privilege, but we as a whole Quaker group cannot say, “We need to reckon with White privilege” without excluding the Friends of Color in our community who absolutely do not need to deal with White privilege any more. As different groups within Quaker communities continue to wrestle with these issues, I predict that we will need different approaches to gathering and to naming groups and subgroups in our records so that we can be honest and transparent about who we are, our collective failings and responsibilities, and the work we—as a whole or part of the community or as individuals—need to do.
When and how might these changes take place? In all of these areas, there is space for fresh and creative writing. Within specific Quaker communities, there is often a process of testing and gradually formalizing changes to language. We can see this by looking back a hundred years or so. I remember reading Rufus Jones for the first time, and not seeing anything special or different about his writing. But I was a century late to the conversation; things that were different and surprising when they were written had been taken up and made part of the canon. This happens in any community, but in a Quaker context in which a book of discipline or book of faith and practice is revised periodically, it is particularly apparent. So, as I’ve done in this article, we can look for clues for what is happening in individuals’ writing and in small groups, and guess what might happen in the future.
We may also want to take specific action. Language change can happen in such an organic way that it seems to be inevitable, and perhaps some of it is. It’s not clear to me that vowel shifts over time, for example, have a moral dimension. However, change in language can be deliberate, and many of the potential changes I’ve discussed do have moral aspects. Telling the truth (as we understand it) about ourselves and our spiritual experiences, creating a just society, learning from one another: how should we speak to these aims? Alongside other actions we need to take—for climate change, to end injustice, to build peace—we will need to explain our actions and reasons to people outside and inside our communities, and finding the words to do that is part of the process.
If you tell the whole truth about your experience of spirituality, of gender or race or disability, of being who you are in the world, what reactions do you get or fear you will get? Do you feel included in the Quaker “we” when your community, yearly meeting, or someone in Friends Journal writes in first-person plural? What could you learn from the way others speak, whether they are in another Quaker community or in the wider world? The social media practice of sharing or retweeting to amplify perspectives that might not otherwise be heard may be worth considering here. In Quaker decision-making processes, we aim to listen well enough not to need repetition, but in more general conversation, this sort of change to the way we communicate, as well as the language we use, could be the right move.
Rhiannon Grant worships at Bournville Local Meeting in Central England Area Meeting. She teaches for Woodbrooke and writes about Quaker theology and practice. Her latest book is Hearing the Light: The Core of Quaker Theology. Please send examples of interesting changes in Quaker language to rhiannon.grant@woodbrooke.org.uk.
