Rejection of outward sacraments

Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends) characteristically affirm the rejection of outward sacraments, dispensing with water baptism and the physical bread and cup of communion. They hold that the realities these signs point to, inward cleansing, and communion with Christ, are received directly and spiritually, and that to insist on the outward rite is to mistake the sign for the substance. All of life, rightly lived, is held to be sacramental, so no ceremony is singled out; worship classically proceeds in expectant silence rather than through prescribed rites.

Not all modern Quakers hold this position uniformly. Classical, unprogrammed worship, silent and without pastor or planned liturgy, remains the practice of Liberal and Conservative Friends, chiefly in Britain and parts of the United States, and continues the original seventeenth-century rejection of outward rites. Programmed or Evangelical Friends, however, a majority of Quakers worldwide today, especially in Kenya, which has the largest Yearly Meeting of any country, worship with hymns, sermons, and a pastor in a service closer to other Protestant churches, and some Evangelical Friends churches have reintroduced water baptism or a form of communion, a development that unprogrammed Friends generally regard as a departure from the tradition's founding testimony.

This affirmation sets Quakerism apart from almost all other Christian traditions, which observe baptism and the Lord's Supper as central ordinances or sacraments; even the traditions most sparing of ceremony retain these two. It follows from the Quaker conviction that God is known immediately within, expressed in the doctrine of the Inner Light, and from the early Friends' protest against forms they judged empty. The belief gives Quaker worship and community their distinctive simplicity and inwardness.

The rejection of outward sacraments was one of several early Quaker positions, including refusal to swear oaths, pay tithes to the state church, or use honorific titles, that brought severe persecution under the Quaker Act (1662) and the Conventicle Act (1664) in Restoration England; thousands of Friends were imprisoned, and the early movement's most notorious internal crisis, the 1656 case of James Nayler, who reenacted Christ's entry into Jerusalem and was convicted of blasphemy and mutilated by order of Parliament, illustrated both the radicalism the doctrine of inward guidance could produce and the movement's own subsequent efforts to discipline and moderate it. William Penn, a convert of 1667, later built the doctrine into the civil institutions of Pennsylvania, founded in 1681, extending Quaker testimony against outward compulsion into a policy of religious toleration unusual for its time.