The Peace Testimony and Plain Living
As taught in the Quaker / Friends tradition
How Friends read Christ's words into a whole-life witness of peace and plainness.
The Religious Society of Friends — the Quakers — is known across the wider church for a cluster of convictions that touch the most ordinary acts of life: how a person speaks, what oaths a person will or will not swear, how a person dresses and addresses others, and above all whether a follower of Christ may bear arms. Friends call these convictions the testimonies. They are not a code imposed from outside but the practical overflow of an inward conviction: that the same Christ who taught the Sermon on the Mount speaks still in the conscience of every person, and that a life truly governed by his Spirit will look visibly different from the world's customs. This lesson follows the most public of those testimonies — the testimony against war and the testimony of plain, truthful living — into the founding documents of the movement.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain why Friends treat peace, plain speech, the refusal of oaths, and plain living as a single cluster of 'testimonies' flowing from an inward covenant of peace, rather than as separate rules.
- Trace George Fox's 1651 refusal of a captaincy and his claim to live 'in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars,' grounded in James' doctrine that war arises from the lusts.
- Summarize Robert Barclay's argument in Proposition XV of the Apology that 'it is not lawful for Christians to resist evil, or to war or fight in any case,' including his handling of the Old Testament wars, the soldier-converts, and John 18:36.
- State the Quaker reading of Matthew 5:33-37 and James 5:12 as a general prohibition of all oaths admitting no exception, and explain why the testimony of unsworn truthful speech belongs with the peace testimony.
- Distinguish the Quaker grounding of the peace witness in the inward leading of Christ's spirit from the confessional, two-kingdom grounding of the Anabaptist tradition, and state fairly where Friends part from the just-war majority of Christianity.
Scripture
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