Eye has received a rather perplexed message from a 'fairly basic Quaker' who is fascinated by James Nayler but was completely foxed by some parts of Ben Pink Dandelion's article on him (Friend 3 Nov). She says we need to put an 'academic article following' warning logo on such erudite pieces. The section which fazed our reader is:'‘It also made clear that Quakers then, unlike Liberal Friends today, did not maintain a doctrine of continuing revelation, but had received their dispensation which in and of itself brought unity. Only, as Doug Gwyn shows in his recently republished Covenant Crucified (Quaker Books, 2006), when covenant gave way to a more worldly sense of contract would the seeds of a more individualistic and rationally based Quakerism start to emerge'.

The A-level type questions our reader asks are:

1. What is meant by 'continuing revelation'?
2. What dispensation?
3. What covenant?



Eye asked our scholar if he could enlighten her (and us).

And he obligingly replied: 'Continuing revelation is the idea that we will know more of God's purposes for us over time. We take this for granted today but it is a twentieth century Liberal Quaker invention. George Fox rebuked some other early Friends for trying to change the early Quaker message on these grounds by claiming they had received their 'dispensation' - ie their sense of how the true Church was called to be. The covenant refers to the mutual and binding agreement, made without coercion, between God and humanity, which the first Quakers felt called into.'