Early Quakers were radicalized by the Spirit’s confrontation.

They may have stumbled into a meeting for worship and experienced the tangible presence of God stirring up holy chaos, causing trembling, shouting, prophecy, and healing. In the thrill of communal silence, they would encounter the living God shining upon their heart – exposing their sin and imbuing intoxicating love.

Or perhaps they encountered Quakers in public, when proclaiming the good news for the poor and doom for the powerful with Spirit-induced confidence. As these hearers were struck by the living Word of God, they found themselves hungry for the kin-dom they glimpsed. With joy, they committed to the same struggle against power waged by the earliest Christians. They found themselves living in the same Spirit of the apostles. They found themselves in the stories of the people of Israel, and all those in desperate need for the eternal year of jubilee.

They found their story and language in the bible. And even more than that, they found themselves participating in Christ’s apocalypse.

These Friends, many of which were poor and regarded as lower class, shamelessly proclaimed the coming end of the world. This was good news for them, and they were happy about it. They prophesied to strengthen and encourage the saints, but also in the public square, calling out the wickedness and cruelty of the rich and powerful. They went into town squares, butt-naked, or in sack-cloth, prophesying the coming destruction of the rich and powerful. They even went into churches, prophesying God’s judgment on the Spirit-less steeplehouses. They prophesied over the priests’ homilies, and plead with the congregants to meet the living God, who tears down the mighty and lifts up the oppressed.

Their prophecies were deeply biblical, fluidly stringing together hundreds of passages. But to them, the bible wasn’t the Word of God. To these Friends, declaring the bible to be the word of God would be idolatrous. To them, the Word of God was bigger than a book—it was the living Christ.

The established Church found these wild prophets as resoundingly annoying. They would not stop interrupting mass, or confronting clergy. They couldn’t be shut up. They knew the bible just as well as the learned priests, and broke the logic of orthodoxy to reveal a truer way to follow Christ, and a more faithful hermeneutic for the bible. Their declarations that God was not confined to tradition, to rituals, to inherited liturgies, or even the bible, but rather made their temple within all people, angered the Church of power. These Friends knew a God of justice – whose transformative judgment would lead all creation into harmony – who was close to those on the margins, companions in their liberation. This God stood against the Church, and sought its end. The Church knew it, and sought to destroy the rapidly growing Quaker movement.

Friends were heretics, but such accusations and even its legal consequences didn’t bother them. Their allegiance wasn’t to the status quo, to orthodoxy, to the authorities of this world. Their allegiance was to the lowly, the subjugated, in whom Christ lived. Their allegiance was to the living God, the Holy Spirit, who was their companion, even as thousands of them were jailed and tortured. In their suffering, they rejoiced, seeing persecution and tribulations as the baptism of the Spirit—God revealing their power. Under such persecution, their communities continued to grow and disrupt.

I want the kind of faith that these Friends demonstrated – fearless, not giving a shit about what the powerful think. I want the kind of faith that knows abundant life even in the midst of persecution. I want the kind of faith that would allow me to be the heretic needed to wage this war against empire, and usher in the kin-dom.

My political radicalization was a new Spirit-baptism for me. When I saw the connections between imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, anti-blackness, patriarchy, anti-queerness, I saw systemic sin. I saw demons, the body of Satan. I saw that following the Way of Christ demanded me to enter the struggle against these things, even if it got messy, even if it meant sacrificing my piety. I heard the Spirit of God call me towards revolution, and my fellowship could not accept it. They saw me as naive and deceived – a false teacher of damnable violence. A heretic.

The Church will never be what the world, let alone the revolution, needs. The ecclesial structure, theology, liturgy and practices of the Church have been formed by 2000 years of a tense, complex, but often synergistic relationship with empire and society’s dominant classes. These institutions were formed by those seeking domination, and are rotten to the core. Like those early Friends, I was called not just out of the church, but to combat the church. And I’m finding others also being called to betray orthodoxy, tradition, and follow the Spirit of God into dethroning the powers of this world and fighting for our liberation. I pray that we would have even greater faith than those early Friends, and even the apostles. That we would not lose sight of the Day of Judgment – and that we would draw it closer. May we be the Spirit’s confrontation – the tangible presence of God.