Free Study Guide IncludedRomans: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
Justification, the law written on the heart, and the Spirit's witness — Barclay built the Apology largely on Romans. The theological engine of Quaker doctrine, showing how Paul's letter became the systematic foundation of Friends' faith.
- 16 chapters · ~75,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2.7 hours
- Length38,487 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2.7 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 2.7 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 2.1 hours to 3.7 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 38,487 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 38,487 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
2.1 hours and 3.7 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2.7 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 110–154 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Robert Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Divinity — the most systematic and intellectually rigorous work of Quaker theology — draws more heavily on Romans than on any other biblical book. Barclay finds in Paul’s letter the framework for the Quaker understanding of grace: how the universal saving light of Christ operates even among those who have not heard the external gospel (Romans 2), what it means to have the Spirit as the first fruits and guarantee of final redemption (Romans 8), and how the gathered community constitutes a body in which different members have different gifts without any one gift constituting authority over others (Romans 12). This commentary traces Barclay’s argument and extends it through the writings of other Friends.
The commentary is attentive to the passages in Romans that have been most contested in Christian history — the doctrine of election in chapters 9–11, the relationship between faith and works throughout, and the nature of justification that divided Protestants and Catholics at the Reformation. Friends occupied a distinctive position in these debates, emphasizing transformation and sanctification alongside imputation. The free Group Study Guide helps readers engage with these theological questions at whatever level of background they bring.
