Actividades que se realizan en el diseño e implementación de un módulo

Reynolds’ characterisation of Fox’s view of creation is incompatible with Fox’s belief in the potential and actual transformation of the creation as a whole as human beings were restored in Christ. Indeed, other differences of emphasis and ambiguities were resolved when the creation was seen under the guidance of the divine inward light.

Rex Ambler writes of Fox that ‘seeing creation in the light one can see that evil and destruction are not primary: fundamentally all things are “blessed”’.¹⁰⁸ Isaac

Penington described how to the ‘creaturely eye’, ‘every thing’ was ‘unlovely’; viewed by the ‘true eye’, however, the created world ‘you shall see [things] all new’ and ‘an excellency appear’.¹⁰⁹ Corruption and evil were not denied, but ‘seen to be based on deceit, the denial of truth’:¹¹⁰ the world as fallen humanity knows it was a travesty based on selfish human ends that were ultimately an illusion. Fox compared the state of spiritual knowledge that made this possible with that of Christ’s apostles:

Therefore now you that are come to know the gospel preached again which was amongst the apostles, in this power of God you will feel before the fall of Adam and Eve, where all things were good and blessed before the fall… ¹¹¹

108 Rex Ambler, ed., Truth of the Heart: an anthology of George Fox 1624-1691 (London: Quaker Books, 2001), 195.

109 Isaac Penington, Light or Darknesse, Displaying or Hiding itself, as it pleaseth, and from whom or to whom it pleaseth…(London: John Madock, 1650), 4.

110 Ambler, Truth of the Heart, 195.

111 Fox, Works 7: 264.

The ‘New Creation’

According to Fox, ‘Christ came to set at liberty the captive…for liberty is a natural right, and every natural creature would have its natural right, its liberty…and where the spirit of the Lord rules, there is liberty.¹¹² Christ was come to set not only human beings, but also the rest of the living creation, at liberty through the restoration of God’s order. As men and women were renewed in Christ, they not only saw the creation anew, but the whole of creation was itself transformed as a consequence, involving ‘the restoration of all things to God’s order and kingdom’.¹¹³ In this ‘new creation’, relationships between God and humanity, and between humanity and the rest of creation, were transformed as God, humanity and the creation were restored to their original state of unity. This belief, which seems to have been shared by other radical groups (see 2.6.3), was widely expressed by the first Quaker leaders, including Fox, Nayler, Burrough and Howgill and also James Parnell, Richard Farnworth and William Dewsbury.¹¹⁴ Using the metaphor of ‘the seed’ to refer to the potential growth of the new spirituality, James Nayler described the process as follows:

and as man beholds the Seed growing, so he comes to see the new Creation, and what he lost in the Fall, and so is restored by the power of the Word in the Son of God, into his Dominion, power and purity…so comes man to be reconciled to his Maker, in the eternal Unity beyond what is to be expressed.¹¹⁵

James Parnell (1636-56) described Christ’s coming in spirit, and the ‘new creation’ as actual or imminent realities: ‘Christ was come, even to destroy the Old Creation, and create New Heavens and New Earth… and those are they that are the New Creatures,

112 Fox, Works 4: 320.

113 Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word, 200.

114 Adams, ‘Early Friends and Creation’, 147-8. Moore also notes that both Farnworth and Dewsbury appear to have come to uphold ‘Quaker-type’ beliefs independently of Fox (Moore, Light in Their Consciences, 12).

115 James Nayler, Love to the Lost, and a Hand held forth to the Helpless, to Lead out of the Dark (London: Giles Calvert, 1656), 3.

in whom this New Work is witnessed’.¹¹⁶ However, the extent to which early

Quakers saw the restoration of a perfect creation as an objective reality as opposed to a metaphorical expression of spiritual transformation is, however, not altogether clear.

Gwyn has suggested that the order that Fox saw may have been primarily

protological/eschatological,¹¹⁷ and Melvin Keiser has described the ‘new creation’

being as ‘one with the primordial and eschatological creation’.¹¹⁸ Gwyn contends that Fox was searching ‘to find the inward and new revealed in counterpart to the outward and old’, rather than reducing the outward merely to the status of an allegory of the inward world’.¹¹⁹ Whilst Fox did not always recognise distinctions between the natural and the miraculous, the detail contained in his vision of the renewed creation, his concern for animal welfare, and his knowledge of natural medicine suggest that he did, at least to some extent, see the creation as an objective reality.

Keiser argues that ‘this intimate indwelling of the New Creation’ is

fundamental to Fox’s mature spirituality. ‘Not only is he centred in the Light, he is situated in the world in its original vitality…our present ordinary world but as experienced in depth, illuminated by the divine Light’.¹²⁰ He describes the ‘ongoing movement between formlessness and form’, between Fox’s ‘convincement of the light within and experience of the new creation’ as typical of the Quaker position on creation.¹²¹ Dean Freiday commented that it was ‘obvious that Fox did not see creation as a one-week job from which God rested on the seventh day, and then abandoned it to fend for itself.’ Freiday wrote:

116 James Parnell, ‘The Watcher, or the Stone cut out of the Mountain Without Hands, Striking at the Feet of the Image…’, in A Collection of the Several writings Given forth from the Spirit of the Lord, through that Meek, Patient and Suffering Servant of God, James Parnell…(n.p. 1675), 173-4.

117 Douglas Gwyn (pers. comm.)

118 Keiser, Inward Light, 13.

119 Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word, 115.

120 Keiser, Inward Light, 8.

121 Ibid., 11.

As it was for the early Church Fathers, creation for Fox is a continuing

process. He sees God’s creative purpose as extending through redemption and the continuing transformation of humankind to its ultimate perfection in the pattern set by our Redeemer as the second or final Adam, and summed up in his preaching about the Kingdom or Reign of God.¹²²

Keiser also argues that Isaac Penington, in particular, was ‘explicit about the unfinished nature of the world; the redeemed life shares in divine creativity’.¹²³ Penington wrote that ‘When the creation of God is finished, when the child is formed in the light, and the life breathed into him, then God brings him into his holy Land, where he keeps his Sabbath’.¹²⁴