Robert Barclay: The Apologist of the Quakers

This series has kept company so far with George Fox, who under God gathered a scattering of seekers into the Religious Society of Friends; with Margaret Fell Fox, the movement's administrator and advocate; and with John Woolman.

There is one more kind of person a movement needs. Somebody preaches. Somebody organizes. Somebody's conscience will not let a matter rest. But eventually a people accused of nearly everything must sit down and say, plainly and in order, what they believe and why. Among the early Friends, that man was a young Scot named Robert Barclay.

The Edinburgh boy who came in after his father

Barclay was born in Edinburgh in 1648 and educated in France. He came to Friends after his father, a detail I never pass by quickly: here is a father whose son watched him and followed him in.

The editor of Fox's Journal, under no obligation to gush, calls Barclay bold in defending the truth, strong in argument, and learned, then ends with kind neighbor and friend. The man who could take an opponent's position apart in Latin was also, apparently, pleasant to live next door to.

He bore imprisonment and ill-treatment with patience, and whatever else the Apology is, it was not written from a comfortable distance.

The year he sailed with Fox

His most important appearance in Fox's Journal is the European ministry of 1677, when he sailed with Fox to the Netherlands alongside William Penn and George Keith. Fox records him simply as a trusted companion in ministry, which, coming from Fox, is not nothing.

The detail I love comes near Brielle. Barclay and Penn went ashore ahead of the rest to meet Benjamin Furly, found the city gates closed against them, and spent the night in a fisherman's boat. I think of that boat whenever someone calls the Apology a piece of cold system. The man who wrote it slept in a fishing boat because he could not get through a gate. The same journey brought them to Elizabeth of the Palatinate, whose welcome later helped shield Quakers in her territories. God seems to like using hospitality.

Then the peace negotiations at Nijmegen gathered Europe's ambassadors into one place, and Barclay put a Latin treatise and a copy of the Apology into the hands of each, urging them to pursue genuine peace. Peace was concluded before the year was out, though Fox's editor declines to claim Barclay's writings were the cause, and neither will I. Friends have carried that peace testimony from the beginning; sincere Christians have landed in different places on it, and I will not settle it here. But notice what he did with the moment. He asked the men with the armies to consider Christ.

Why he called it an Apology

The book appeared in 1678, and the word has drifted since. Barclay was not saying sorry. An apology is a defense, a reasoned answer. Peter told believers under suspicion to "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15). Barclay took the assignment seriously enough to spend 333 pages on it, writing first in Latin because he was not content to be understood only at home.

A long dedication to King Charles II insists that Quakers had refused violence and obeyed civil government while keeping their obedience to God. Then, respectfully, he exhorts the king to submit personally to Christ. A preface follows, in which he rejects scholastic speculation for personal experience of Christ. Here is a man who argues like a lawyer for 333 pages in order to tell you that argument alone will never bring you to God.

The center of the book: God still speaks

Fifteen concise theses follow, each defended like a university disputation, beginning not with a claim but a question: how can anyone truly know God? Our Lord had prayed the answer already: "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John 17:3). Barclay would not let that verse stay decorative.

The second proposition is the center of the book: immediate revelation. God still reveals Himself directly, by the Holy Spirit. Scripture itself originated in revelation, and the same Spirit goes on teaching believers. And, crucially, true revelation never contradicts Scripture. The third keeps that from running loose: Scripture is inspired and a secondary rule, the Spirit the primary rule, because the Spirit produced Scripture.

That became one of the defining differences between Friends and most other Protestants, and it remains a point where serious Christians who love the same Bible differ. Some hear a needed rescue of the Spirit from the printed page. Others hear an ordering that rests too much weight on inward impression. I am telling you what he taught, not handing you my verdict.

Grace, holiness, and the gathered life

On the Fall, Barclay is more traditional than his critics expected: universal corruption, the necessity of grace, Pelagianism rejected. Then come the propositions people remember: Christ died for everyone. Every person receives some measure of divine Light that calls all toward salvation, though grace may be resisted, and some who never hear the Gospel may yet respond to Christ's inward Light. Christians may overcome known sin and know real holiness, though he fences that at once: growth continues, vigilance remains, and he is not claiming absolute sinlessness. He rejects unconditional eternal security, since believers may fall away.

The gathered life grows from the same root. The true minister is called by Christ and need not hold a university education or preach for a salary. Worship is inward, may include silence, and begins only as God Himself leads. Baptism and communion he takes inwardly: spiritual baptism fulfills water baptism, and the Lord's Supper is a continual participation in Christ Himself, the outward signs temporary.

Christians have argued every one of these for three centuries with the Scriptures open on every side, and Friends themselves have not all stayed in one place on the ordinances. Those differences are old, and held by people I love and respect on more than one side. My task is to tell you what Barclay wrote in 1678, not to adjudicate it. I will only say he deserves to be disagreed with accurately rather than by rumor.

Liberty of conscience, and the plain coat

Barclay then distinguishes civil authority from authority over conscience. Government may punish crime; it may not compel belief or force worship. Remember that he had himself been jailed and ill-used. His argument stands as one of the great early defenses of religious liberty, and those of us who worship unmolested live downstream of it.

The last proposition turns to conduct: plain speech, simplicity, modest dress, refusal of flattery. They are the fruit of inward transformation, not ends in themselves. The plain coat was never the point. The plain coat was meant to be evidence.

"God is good still"

Robert Barclay died in 1690 at forty-two, which means he was about thirty when the Apology was published. I would like every discouraged young person in ministry to sit with that for a minute.

Seriously ill, he sent a message of affection to George Fox, and the Journal preserves it: "God is good still... my peace flows."

That is the whole man in seven words. The able controversialist comes to the end of his strength and reaches not for an argument but for God's goodness, in the present tense. Still. After the prisons, after the ambassadors and the 333 pages, still. And peace, not a conclusion he reasoned toward but a current beneath him while his body failed.

Why I commend him to you

The Apology remains the classic doctrinal statement of historic Quakerism. Barclay meant to show that Quaker convictions were no novelty but were rooted in Scripture, the early church, and sound reason. Whether he proved it, readers have answered differently for three hundred years. Barclay was the theologian, the man who could sit before Europe's scholars and its king and say, here is what we believe, and here is where you may check my work.

In earlier articles I commended George Fox and Margaret Fell Fox as a brother and a sister worth knowing. Let me commend Robert Barclay the same way. Read him if you can, and disagree with him where you must. But do not miss what he was finally after, because it was not a system at all. Behind those fifteen propositions is a young Scot insisting that God is not far off, that the Spirit who breathed out the Scriptures is still teaching, and that Christ may be known. He staked his short life on it, and at the end, with his strength gone and his arguments behind him, what he found was that God is good still.