The Peace Testimony of 1660: A Declaration and Its Long Echo

In the earlier articles of this series I introduced you to George Fox, Margaret Fell Fox, and John Woolman. Last time I stepped back to weigh the Society's record of social reform, and gave the Peace Testimony of 1660 a single paragraph. One paragraph is not enough. It is the conviction the world knows Friends by, and the one most often described secondhand by people who have never read it.

So let me say at the outset what I am not doing. Christians who love the same Lord and search the same Scriptures have reached different conclusions about war, and many of you reading this are not pacifists. I am not writing to move you, but to let a seventeenth-century document speak in its own voice, so that you meet the real thing and not a rumor of it.

A king comes back, and a people must answer

The 1650s in England were not calm years: civil war, the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Religious movements sprang up in every direction, the Friends among them.

Then in 1660 Charles II returned to the throne, and the new government wondered which of those groups might launch another rebellion. Friends were an obvious suspect. They were new, they were growing, and they would not conform.

Sit for a moment with the position they were in. They had already suffered imprisonment and persecution. They had not advocated armed revolt, not once. But suspicion has never required evidence, and a people with no army and no patron had only one thing to offer a nervous king: their word, in writing, in public. Twelve leading Friends signed a declaration addressed to him.

The title was half the argument

The declaration is formally titled A Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers, against all Plotters and Fighters in the World.

Read that slowly, because titles in that century did the work our subtitles do now. "Harmless and Innocent" answers the charge of sedition, "People of God" refuses to be filed away as a political faction, and "against all Plotters and Fighters in the World" makes the disclaimer universal rather than convenient.

Then comes the sentence everyone remembers:

"We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever."

Notice what is missing. There is no exception clause. No just cause, no righteous king, no last resort. A policy can be revised when circumstances change. A testimony is a thing you say you will still be saying when they do.

Not one proof text but a pattern

The first theme is the plain teaching of Jesus, which Friends understood literally. "Blessed are the peacemakers," He said, "for they shall be called the children of God" (Matthew 5:9). In the same sermon, in the passage from Matthew 5:38 to 5:48 on which Friends leaned most heavily, He set aside the old measure of eye for eye: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you" (verse 44). And in the garden, when a friend drew a sword in what must have felt like the most defensible cause in history, He said, "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matthew 26:52).

The second is the nature of Christ's kingdom. Standing before Pilate, Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Friends took that as a statement about method as much as location: Christ's kingdom advances by spiritual transformation, not military force, and a King who reigns now is obeyed now, even when governments encourage warfare. Not a low view of the state. A very high view of the throne above it.

The third is the new covenant, and it is the one most often missed. Christ changes human hearts, the testimony argues, so believers no longer seek revenge or violence. The claim is not first a rule but a promise, and the prohibition follows from something Friends believed God actually does inside a person. What follows daily is discipleship: loving enemies, forgiving injuries, overcoming evil with good. That last phrase is Paul's, not Quaker vocabulary: "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21). Friends simply took him to mean it.

Underneath all three lies the conviction Friends are named for. They believed Christ speaks directly to every person through the Inward Light. Notice where that puts the weight. The argument against harming a man does not rest chiefly on his innocence. It rests on what God may be doing in him.

What the declaration did not say

Here I have to slow down, because the Peace Testimony is misunderstood about as often by its admirers as by its critics.

The declaration does not say that governments have no authority, that police are illegitimate, or that civil government should disappear. Friends were not anarchists. What they drew instead was a distinction. The magistrate has his office. The disciple has his Master. Friends did not deny the first in order to affirm the second.

And here is the seam in the garment. What does a civil ruler owe the innocent who are being harmed, and what follows from that for the Christian who is not himself a ruler? Friends have not answered with one voice, and neither has the wider Church.

What it cost, and what it built

Convictions are cheap until somebody itemizes them. For Friends this one meant refusing military service, declining commissions, and staying out of violent rebellion, in a century when they were themselves imprisoned and persecuted.

But refusals are not a life. What they would not do made room for what they did, for generations: William Penn's peaceful relations with many Native American groups in Pennsylvania, relief work through the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and both World Wars, mediation through the American Friends Service Committee, and humanitarian assistance to civilians regardless of nationality, which in wartime is a sentence with teeth in it.

A document written to calm a suspicious king contributed to the legal recognition of conscientious objection in several countries, enlarging liberty of conscience for people who never sat in a Friends meeting. I find that worth pausing over.

I do not want to make the record tidier than it was. Some Friends have served in the military, especially during major wars, while others have maintained a strict commitment to nonviolence. And yet it has remained one of the defining characteristics of Quaker identity for more than three and a half centuries, which is a long time to keep saying a hard thing.

Where I stop, and where you go on

I have tried to set the Peace Testimony out at its strongest, because a conviction that has cost people their liberty for that long deserves to be met there rather than at its weakest. But I am not going to tell you it settles the question. Historians continue to debate the practical implications of Christian pacifism, especially in times of national crisis, and so do Christians who love God and read their Bibles with care. That debate is not a scandal. It is the honest condition of the question.

Where Christians have answered differently, the difference is very seldom a difference of sincerity. If you have landed somewhere other than where Friends landed, you have not thereby become a lesser reader of the Gospels. Where the Church has not reached unity, I will not pretend that an article of mine has.

One thread in a whole cloth

One last thing, and it is what most changed how I read this document. The Peace Testimony does not stand by itself. It is woven in with the other historic testimonies of Friends: integrity, equality, simplicity, community, and stewardship that uses resources to serve life rather than destroy it.

Read by itself, the declaration of 1660 sounds like a rule about weapons. Read alongside its companions, it is the Quaker conviction that the transforming work of Christ produces a life characterized by love, truthfulness, justice, and reconciliation, and that violence is inconsistent with such a life.

Whether that conviction is right is a question I have left open on purpose, and you may not follow Friends where they went. I have not asked you to. But twelve of them, with no army, once told a king who could have crushed them that they would not fight him, or anyone, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever, and then spent three and a half centuries trying to live like people who meant it. I have commended George Fox to you as a brother worth knowing and Margaret Fell Fox as a sister worth knowing. Let me commend this old declaration as a document worth reading, and the Lord it was written to honor as the One who is Himself our peace.