Distinct from his Saints?

Bunyan's margin and Fox's language

(an editorial note)

The 19th-century text of Some Gospel Truths Opened which is reproduced here omits this marginal note by Bunyan (see Miscellaneous Works, vol. 1, p. 35):

*God hath a Christ own, distinct from all other things whatsoever that is called Christ, whether they be Spirit or body, or both Spirit and body, and this is signified, where he saith, the Lords Christ.

It is in response to this that Fox writes, "God's Christ is not distinct from his saints." Bunyan, whose marginal note was concerned to distinguish the real historical Christ from an imaginary Christ present in the Quakers, would surely have been even more scandalized at the apparent implication that Christ was not even to be distinguished from the Quakers themselves. This would surely have brought to mind the notorious events of 1656 in which some Quakers were discovered to have identified James Nayler with Jesus.

It must be asked, however, whether Fox's meaning was quite what the words "not distinct from his saints" indicate in ordinary English. Certainly Fox was capable of using language in idiosyncratic ways; see, for instance, Licia Kuenning's paper on what Fox meant by the word "gospel." In the present case, Fox's stated reasons why "Christ is not distinct from his saints" seem strangely unrelated to his proposition:

God's Christ is not distinct from his saints, nor his [[their]] bodies, for he is within them; nor distinct from their spirits, for their spirits witness him: and 'God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself,' who is the head of every creature. 'And there is not any creature but it's manifest in his sight;' and he is in the saints, and they eat his flesh, and sit with him in heavenly places.

The bracketed "their" in the first sentence, substituted by the 1831 Works for the "his" of the original printing, may be accepted as correcting a typographical error, since Fox immediately goes on to deny that Christ is "distinct from their spirits." The stated reasons for these paired denials have to do with Christ's presence in the saints and their close connection with him, but do not add up to reasons for saying that the saints are Christ himself. This should raise some doubt as to what Fox meant by "distinct."

Further light is shed on Fox's usage by a section of The Great Mystery answering John Timpson's The Quakers' Apostacy, where Fox says:

P. He saith, 'The Quakers are deceivers,' because we say 'that Christ is not in outward observations and forms.' And John Bunyan saith, 'that he is distinct from the saints,' and would have him in the forms, &c. See page 13.

A. We say he hath triumphed over the ordinances, and blotted them out, and they are not to be touched; and the saints have Christ in them, who is the end of outward forms, and thou art deceived, who thinks to find the living among the dead; and Bunyan is deceived, who said, 'He is distinct [[separate]] from the saints;' and so you are a company of pitiful teachers.

(The bracketed word "separate" here is neither Fox's nor Bunyan's but is provided by the Philadelphia 1831 editors of Fox's Works (vol. 3, p. 58), who as Orthodox Quakers had reason to be scandalized at the possible implications of the word "distinct." Nevertheless they retained "distinct" as the original wording, and used brackets to indicate that "separate" was their interpretation.)

Of especial interest in this passage is Fox's pairing of his opponents' two errors, that Christ is "distinct from the saints" and that he is "in outward observations and forms." It appears that the question is Fox's mind is where Christ is to be found. According to Timpson and Bunyan (on Fox's reading), Christ is to be found in religious rites but not in Christians themselves; according to the Quakers, he is to be found in the saints but not in outward forms or ordinances. Fox does not accuse Timpson and Bunyan of thinking that Christ is the ordinances; his objection rather is that "thou art deceived, who thinks to find the living among the dead," i.e. that Timpson seeks Christ in the wrong place. Similarly he does not say that the saints are Christ, but that they "have Christ in them."

It appears therefore that in Fox's mind "distinct" meant something like "distant." He could not bear to hear that Christ was "distinct from all other things" since he understood the words to mean that Christ was at a distance from all other things. Oddly enough, Fox did in this respect capture one of Bunyan's beliefs (that Christ as man was contained in heaven and absent from his saints), even though he misunderstood both the meaning of the word "distinct" and the specific purport of Bunyan's marginal note, which was that the true Christ was distinct from imaginary so-called Christs.