ABSTRACT
Man is continually developing new forms of insight, which are clear up to a point and then tend to become unclear. As an historian of radical religious dissent and esoterism in the West, the author critically receive that tradition and integrate it into his own experience and aspirations. He reached seventeenth century Quakerism through study of Early Christian, Medieval and Reformation radical religious dissent. The nature of seventeenth-century disputation is foreign to the modern ecumenical mind. The majority of first-generation Quakers were not university-trained, though most were literate or semi-literate. The historical overview of the debate over immateriality sets the context for a more informed reading of the Christological debates between Quakers and their critics. Such an overview may also help suggest lines of continuity and discontinuity. The transmutability of seventeenth-century Quaker Christology implies a nonnormative Christology.
