Several passages of the New Testament can be interpreted to say that Jesus was coming back in the lifetime of the apostles including Paul.

That obviously didn’t happen.

Since then, there has been hundreds of times when people thought they knew that Jesus was returning.  The Wikipedia listing is long.

But what isn’t well known is the beliefs of the early Quakers, who believed that instead of the second coming of Christ as a physical manifestation, instead believed that Jesus would come back inside each one of us.

Many Quakers had been Puritans before they converted.  They had recently been through a harrowing experience of a religious civil war.  The Puritans had fought believing that by purifying the Church of England of the trappings of the Roman Catholic Church, that they could hasten the return of Jesus. But after a decade of civil war, things got worse, not better.

Quakers conceived of the fact that Jesus wouldn’t come back in the flesh but rather in spirit and that they could (and did) experience the presence of God in their lives in silent worship.

They called that experience the Inward Light, of the Light of Christ within, or many other names. They were deeply steeped in the Bible, referring to Bible versus to support their use of the idea of Christ being the Light, using verses such as John 1:9 and John 8:12. Another name, the one I like the most, is the Seed of God, because it implies we have the potential to access that of God within us, but we have a choice whether to or not.  For this they referenced faith like a mustard seed. I also like that the first Quaker systematic theologian, Robert Barclay, also named that each person also has the Seed of Man, which helps to explain the persistence of evil.

Believing in the Seed of God also meant that the Bible was not the only source of inspiration, that the canon (i.e., the Bible) wasn’t closed, and that God continues to speak to us. Theologians call this belief “continuing revelation”.   

This controversial idea waxed and waned in the beliefs of Quakers throughout the centuries, leading the schisms between those who believed in the preeminence of the Inward Light and those who believed in the preeminence of Scripture. Generally, most groups believed in both, but which one to emphasize was the issue. This led to the first major Quaker schism in 1827. 

Continuing revelation has many other implications, which I will address in future posts.

You may have heard me speak about this on the recent Heretic Happy Hour podcast with my fellow Quakers (May 5, 2026). I’ll be writing about Quaker beliefs in the Quollective in the future, so stay tuned.