New Foundation Fellowship

Reproclaiming the Everlasting Gospel

A New Foundation to Build On: Introduction to “The Power of the Gospel”

The Quaker’s revolution was a movement to recover the experience of the power of God through the recovery of that gospel of power which had been lost “since the Apostles’ days.” -- Lewis Benson

In August 1976 at Haverford College, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lewis Benson gave a series of five lectures titled “A New Foundation to Build On.” The second lecture in this series is called “The Power of the Gospel.” It begins with a brief history of George Fox’s early life at the time he felt near despair of finding a way to live a right and true life, a crisis that was resolved when he was given to know Christ experientially. In this essay, Benson alludes to the same stultifying difficulty early in his own life. As a result of having passed from darkness to light, both Fox and Benson, for the remainder of their lives, made their first concern the presentation of the gospel and its message, for the gospel conveyed the power to overcome the human condition of alienation from God.

Though Scriptures bear witness to the availability of and necessity for coming into the gospel, the church of Fox’s time no longer taught this message, and it was no longer known. Though isolated groups throughout the centuries had known and practiced this faith, it had been absent from the church for 1600 years. It was the Quaker mission to recover the gospel and present it to the world.

Benson spends a major portion of the lecture describing the content of the gospel message that Quakers preached; it was most briefly formulated in the statement “Christ is come to teach his people himself.” In the seventeenth century, this summary expressed a unique understanding of Christ’s salvific work: his being present and active, with particular emphasis on his prophetic office or function as the teacher of righteousness.

Whenever [Fox] preached the gospel, he preached the “offices of Christ,” and especially the office of prophet, because it is by hearing Christ the prophet that the knowledge of God’s righteousness is received and the power to obey is given (Benson).

The essay concludes by referring to the 1945 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a discovery that confirmed seventeenth-century Friends’ assertion that the gospel they preached was the same that was held by the Jewish Christians of the first century. Though it was a significant discovery, it had little impact on Quakers then or since, nor on Christians in general, for an apostasy is overcome not through gospel-corroborating scholarship but through the gospel itself.

This lecture series can be found under the Resources tab and Lewis Benson’s writings.

 

 

 

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Comment by Ellis Hein on 8thMo. 15, 2018 at 12:19

Thank you, Pat. for this introduction. Your comment:

In the seventeenth century, this summary expressed a unique understanding of Christ’s salvific work: his being present and active, with particular emphasis on his prophetic office or function as the teacher of righteousness.


strikes me as particularly relevant. I find that Fox's understanding of the salvific work of Christ is just as foreign to the bulk of Christendom today as it was in the 17th century. The man-made schemes for salvation seem to be never ending.

I have always appreciated Fox's comment in Vol. IV, p. 228:

And the marriage of the Lamb is come, and the everlasting gospel shall be preached again, to all that dwell upon the earth, to all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people. [Now mark,] the tongues may say, (who have told the world they have been the orthodox men, and have had the original) what, have we not had the gospel all this while ? I say no, they that went from the spirit of the Lord, and ravened from the spirit of God, they went from the power of God, which is the gospel,...

Thanks again for this.

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