Yearly meetings, monthly meetings and gospel order

July 31, 2011 § 4 Comments

In a recent post on Earlham School of Religion’s blog, Valerie Hurwitz, Director of Recruitment and Admissions, invited thoughts about ways forward for Indiana Yearly Meeting in its recent struggle with the course of its eldership of West Richmond Meeting, which had approved a welcoming and affirming minute dedicating the meeting to apply the same standards to all persons regardless of “race, religious affiliation, age, socio-economic status, nationality, ethnic background, gender, sexual orientation or mental/physical ability.” Sexual orientation was the sticking point, for it runs counter to the yearly meeting’s minutes condemning homosexuality as a sin.

Bill Samuels commented on that post that “the key question may be, What is God’s purpose for Indiana YM?” I commented, as well, agreeing in part to Bill’s comment that, behind hot-point questions like homosexuality lie meta-questions like the ‘purpose’ of the yearly meeting. Another of these ‘meta-questions’ that lie behind this particular controversy is how you define and practice your culture of eldership. I wrote in my comment about how the yearly meeting might approach its role as elder of the monthly meeting in gospel order.

It turned out that Earlham’s comment text box has a character limit that prevented me from posting my entire comment. So I am posting a revised version of my original full post here because I think the problem of corporate discipline in gospel order deserves more searching attention than we often give it. By ‘corporate discipline’ I mean how yearly meetings discipline monthly meetings in gospel order.

 

How does a yearly meeting exercise eldership over a monthly meeting?

Eldership has two sides, that of nurture and that of discipline. In its role as elder, any meeting has a responsibility to nurture its members and their gifts and a responsibility to protect the meeting’s worship and fellowship from behavior that threatens either one. For the monthly meeting, this is difficult because you are face to face with each other, week in and week out, and it’s personal, even intimate. You really have to know your members to nurture their ministry and spiritual life. And discipline is difficult because real people can be hurt. We’re talking about real relationships between people. Difficult as it may be, though, it’s still rather direct and, in a way, straightforward in a monthly meeting. It is immediately obvious when the worship or the fellowship is suffering, and how, though our culture of deference and silence sometimes confuse things.

Things are more abstract for the yearly meeting. The members are meetings, not individuals. Nurturing their spiritual life is of a different order than nurturing individuals, requiring different tools and gifts. The yearly meeting’s ‘worship’ is perforce limited to the body’s worship when in session, or it’s viewed in the abstract. The yearly meeting’s ‘fellowship’, beyond the fellowship of Friends in session, is a fellowship of meetings, which we also must treat in the abstract. Given the abstract nature of corporate worship and fellowship in the context of the yearly meeting, how do you perceive threat to either one in the actions of a monthly meeting? And how do you practice discipline?

Suppose we use the monthly meeting’s eldership of individuals as an analogy. Then, a monthly meeting’s decision is somewhat analogous to an individual’s vocal ministry in meeting for worship.

A monthly meeting’s behavior, when minuted, as West Richmond Friends’ decision has been, represents ‘vocal ministry’ within the larger body. Presumably, that decision has been tested corporately in the light of Christ’s spirit (that’s what their minute says), much as, in theory, an individual’s prophetic vocal ministry in meeting for worship is assumed to have been prompted by the Holy Spirit. We would, on this analogy, start by assuming that West Richmond’s ministry is Spirit-led. If we perceive a threat in this behavior to either the yearly meeting’s worship or its fellowship (I think we’re talking about worship here), we are really questioning whether the decision is Spirit-led. We are then called to exercise a corporate gift of the spirit—the gift of discerning spirits—to determine whether the meeting’s prophetic ministry is of God, or (I suppose) of Satan.

How does the yearly meeting exercise the gift of discerning spirits in such a case? Do you interview those who were present at the meeting when the minute was discussed and approved, to try to determine whether the meeting really was gathered in the Spirit? Do you simply assume that a meeting that reaches a decision contrary to the testimony given the yearly meeting in the past (in this case, minutes condemning homosexuality) must of necessity have been out of the Spirit? Do you assume that the yearly meeting’s past testimonies do not need testing anew? If you acknowledge that a monthly meeting’s decision might be prophetic witness, how do you test that witness in discernment?

Josh Brown once wrote a great little essay defining the things Friends use to test a new leading. If I remember correctly, there were four: Scripture, tradition, common sense or reason, and the discernment of the body gathered in the Spirit. I would add a fifth: the testimony of experience, the testimony of the lives of those Friends (or meetings) who are already living in the light of the new testimony: what are their fruits?

For many Friends, of course, their interpretation of biblical testimony stands as the ultimate touchstone for discernment, so that ministry contrary to that interpretation can reliably be deemed out of the Life and contrary to Truth without further ado. (I say ‘interpretation’ because that is, of course, all we are ever working with, even when we interpret Scripture in the spirit in which it was given forth. Friends have, of course, famously reinterpreted Scripture in some cases contrary to the wider Christian tradition, laying down the outward forms of baptism and the Eucharist, inviting women to participate fully in the meeting’s ministry, and abandoning Scripture’s apparent sanction of slavery.)

Finally, our tradition once was to use Matthew 18:15-20 as a guide for bringing gospel order to individuals thought to be walking disorderly. Does this simple but elegant 3-step model still work for us, and, if so, can it not be applied corporately to the discipline of a meeting? This would at least provide a framework for action that might help prevent some hurt and disorder in the course of the discipline. (It’s worth reminding ourselves that, in Matthew’s presentation, once a decision for expulsion had been made, the expelled party was to be “as tax collectors and sinners” to the saints—that is, they are the people on whom your own evangelism focuses most intensely, just as Jesus focused on tax collectors and sinners with special attention himself. They are not pariahs to be cut off and shunned, but lost sheep to be wooed back into the fold. If they then reject your gospel, perhaps you would then leave town, shaking their dust off your feet.)

So meta-tasks involved in a process of corporate discerning of spirits regarding a monthly meeting’s prophetic ministry seem to me to be:

  1. Try to determine, if possible, whether the meeting was in the Life when it made its decision, taking seriously it’s own claim to that effect.
  2. Clarify whether testimony given the yearly meeting in the past should ever be tested anew.
  3. Clarify what touchstones you would use to test a new leading that seems contrary to previous testimony, and clarify their relative importance.
  4. Once you are clear about these questions, test the testimony of the meeting as potential prophetic witness. That is, exercise the gift of discerning spirits regarding the decision, rather than putting the meeting’s defiance of the yearly meeting on trial.
  5. Once your discerning has named the spirit behind the meeting’s decision, apply (if necessary) gospel order according to Christ’s teaching in Matthew 18.

Tradition and Religious Experience

July 25, 2011 § 8 Comments

Note: This post began as a reply to a comment on a previous post by George Amoss Jr, but it got so long and felt so important that I decided to make it its own post. Here is George’s original comment, for context:

Steven, it’s not clear to me in the preceding material that you take this view, but I read your final paragraph as implying that the experience of the light or that of God within is primary, the interpretation being secondary. That’s a place of possible difference for you and me, and so, as an offer of a little food for thought, I’ll share my thinking very briefly.

What if the interpretation were, in a sense, to come first, to be the necessary matrix in which the experience takes place? That is, might the experience be the imaginative playing-out of the “narrative” that Fox and others developed from a particular reading of scripture? That’s how it looks to me as I read Fox’s Journal — for example, his famous auditory experience appears to happen well into his development of a radical hermeneutic — and as I compare the Quakerisms of various periods. And if that’s the case, then does the loss of the narrative mean the loss of the original experience, and the substitution of experience shaped by some other narrative? Also, could it be that liberal Quakers can’t explain their experience well because of the incoherent nature of the “narrative” that gives it shape; i.e., because the experience is of the same nature as its parent?

Again, just food for thought.

George, you’ve touched on a subject that I find truly fascinating and I think it’s really important, too: the dynamic relationship between our tradition and our experience—how they shape each other and depend on each other. Behind this issue lies an even deeper question: where do religious experiences come from?

You are right about me: I do think experience is primary. I don’t think religious experience is an “imaginary playing-out of the ‘narrative'”, as you put it. Well, sometimes I suppose it is. But not the profound, life-changing experiences, like those of George Fox and other Friends who have given us our tradition—and not my own formative spiritual experience, either. My own experience encourages me to act as though God is the source, not me or my narrative.

There are all kinds of spiritual and religious experiences, of course, (* see note below), but, like Fox, I have experienced my experience as coming from somewhere outside of myself. My formative spiritual experience, and many of its aftershocks (less powerful experiences that seemed to grow out of the first and helped to develop its meaning and importance for me) came with—or as—a sense of presence, a presence distinct and personal, a ‘personality’ who made an offer of relationship that was covenantal in character. I experienced this ‘angel’, for want of a better word, as Other than me.

Nor was it ‘imaginary’. It was real. The changes it wrought in me testify to its reality. However, by ‘imaginary’ perhaps you mean, not something that isn’t real but something that has been produced by the imagination—not quite the same thing. Well, I could easily explain it all as a projection of my unconscious or my imagination. Or, to turn Jungian for a moment (and I think I am a Jungian), I could say the experience was my own unconscious tapping archetypes in the collective unconscious to project an experience that plays out my own inner narrative in the garb of a cultural narrative. It happens that the ‘narrative’ in my case was Native American, the situation was a sweat lodge ceremony, and the whole thing was animistic in its essential elements. In fact, I have done a lot of thinking along these psychological lines, and this speculation is rather satisfying to me intellectually. But that’s NOT how I experienced it. I had an encounter with an Other and nothing has ever been the same since.

And, I refuse to redefine my own experience just because an elegant social science gives me the tools to ‘make sense’ of an otherwise almost ineffable experience and because my primary cultural (that is, scientific and secular) milieu encourages me to do so. Rather, I choose to honor my own experience by owning it as it came to me. Just so, I refuse to redefine other people’s experience for them. I refuse to say that George Fox was playing out a narrative built on his interpretation of scripture rather than experiencing the living Christ. It seems deeply disrespectful to me to do that. I don’t want anybody telling me what my experience really means, and I try to return the favor.

This is not for me just a kind of respectful tolerance, with which I keep my mouth shut but still inwardly translate the other person’s experience into something that works for me. These testimonies, these witnesses to the Truth lay upon me the responsibility I have in meeting for worship: not just to listen respectfully to someone’s vocal ministry, but to try to actually HEAR the Truth inside the message. So I take their experience at face value: if George Fox says it was Christ, then it WAS Christ who spoke to his condition. Nor is he alone. Millions of people have experienced Christ; dozens—hundreds—of his Quaker contemporaries shared his experience. I take that to mean that their Christ exists, even though I have no experience of him myself. This makes me a polytheist, I suppose, because I take everyone’s account of their experience at face value, meaning that whatever they experienced really exists. One way to put this, I suppose, is that we do not have spiritual or religious experiences—they have us. This is not to say, however, that interpretation does not have a role to play.

I first started thinking about this when reading a great book by Alan F. Segal titled Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee. Among other things, Segal uses studies in the sociology of religion, and especially of conversion experiences, to look at Paul, and Paul is a good case study in how it goes: You have a life-changing experience—you’re changed for sure, but at first it’s all power and little content—you’re dazzled and blind and all you’ve got to go on is one or two short sentences. You can’t really see how you’re changed right away for all the light, or what it means, or where you fit in the larger tradition that seems to be the context for the little bit of content you do have to work with. (This is exactly how it was for me in my own formative visionary experience: all I had was an overwhelming sense of presence and some indecipherable auditory data, a voice I could not understand.) If you are lucky, someone—Ananias, in Paul’s case—is there to teach you what your experience means, to guide you in reordering your life according to your vision, to help you with the interpretation.

So most of the interpretation comes AFTER the experience. But still, religious experience rarely comes in a cultural vacuum. The little bit of content that comprises the experience (for Paul, the voice of Christ saying just a couple of sentences; for Jesus, just one sentence from heaven)—most of the time, the core of your experience has behind it a religious tradition, a context. Even when your experience launches you on a trajectory that diverges from the tradition that was its original context, as the experience of Paul and Jesus and George Fox did, still there is a meme, as it were, that comes from a tradition that forms the seed for your vision.

So tradition helps to shape experience up front, and then that tradition—or some other mutation of the tradition—helps to give it meaning afterward. And then some prophetic experiences have the power to reshape the tradition, to cause a mutation. It’s a feedback system constantly spiraling forward. Continuing revelation.

Which brings us to liberal Quakers and the radical erosion of tradition, of meaningful narrative, and the dearth of deep, transformative religious experience among liberal Friends. Many of us have abandoned the Christian and biblical traditions, not just intellectually, as a belief system, but more viscerally, as a deep spiritual disconnect; for some, it’s even a form of revulsion.

Ironically, that seems to be how George Fox felt. Like him, we feel that the tradition we inherited no longer works for us, that its memes are no longer available to us as seeds for religious experience. But salvation in Christ—the ur-meme of Christianity—did, in fact, seed his experience, and he gave that experience primacy. A religious genius, he was able to interpret it on his own, without the help of an Ananias. He did not so much interpret his experience in terms of scripture as he interpreted scripture in terms of his experience. The result was the major mutation known as Quakerism.

Meanwhile, we modern liberal Friends have no shared narrative to provide us with new seeds. Some of us, like me, come to Quakers from other traditions, formed by experiences already seeded and interpreted in those traditions. We share these experiences only very reluctantly, partly because that’s how you treat your own sacred experience, and partly because we don’t know how it fits in.

This is the dilemma of modern, post-Christian, post-traditional liberal Quakerism: no clear narrative context to support religious experience and, much more importantly, no coherent culture of eldership: We often don’t know people who have had religious experience, whose experience could inspire our own. Or we don’t know people whose religious experience corresponds to our own, who could therefore help us understand and integrate our experience. We don’t have the scriptural tools Fox had and we don’t have an Ananias.

Well, this is a very long response. But as I said, I think this subject lies at the crux of our condition as liberal Friends. Where does religious experience come from? What role does tradition or narrative play in our experience? And what do you do as a community and as individual seekers when you don’t have a traditional narrative to work with?

I’m still exploring these questions, and your comment has been very fruitful for me to think about. I feel increasingly called to a ministry of exploration, seeking ways to support transformative religious experience among liberal Friends, given the incoherent nature of our ‘narrative’, as you have put it. Our narrative is ‘incoherent’ . . .

  • because so many convinced Friends bring experiences from other traditions, as I have, making for a diverse polyglot of experience that militates against any coherent collective experience or narrative;
  • because so many liberal Friends have not had transformative religious experiences yet themselves, in the first place;
  • because we wouldn’t know it if they did: our culture of silence prevents us from knowing each others’ experience, so we would not know that an elder sits next to us who could help us with our own experience; and
  • because we’ve laid down the narrative we inherited, leaving us meme-less and bereft.

* On ‘spiritual experience’ vs ‘religious experience’: I think of spiritual experience as personal experience that is both transcendental and transformational—it transcends the ken of the senses and of normal consciousness, and it changes you for the better. I think of ‘religious experience’ as spiritual experience that takes place in the context of one’s religious life, that is, life within a tradition and a community of the spirit.

The Meaning of ‘the Light’—Three Stages in the History of an Essential Quaker Insight

July 20, 2011 § 8 Comments

A Note:

George Amoss Jr. posted two very interesting pieces on basically the same topic as my post below at The Postmodern Quaker and on the same day. We’re on complementary paths and I hope you’ll take a look at what he has to say.

Some background

I have for many years campaigned against the claim that the phrase ‘there is that of God in everyone’ is the essential tenet of Quakerism, feeling very strongly that modern liberal Friends are

  • dumbing down the content of our rich tradition to this one sound bite,
  • saying something with it that George Fox never intended and would never have agreed with and which we ourselves cannot—or at least do not—clearly articulate, and
  • making claims for its authority that simply are not true—that, for instance, it’s the foundation of our inward listening spirituality and of our testimonies (it’s especially common to hear it used to explain the peace testimony).

Some time ago, I was writing one of my rants against the way we use the phrase when I realized that I wasn’t completely sure about some of my claims, so I decided to do some research. I am just now finishing this research and the results have astounded me. I have not changed my mind about most of my concerns about this ubiquitous phrase and I plan to return to these concerns in subsequent posts, but about one thing I found I was completely wrong.

I had always believed that Fox would never have countenanced the vaguely neo-Gnostic meaning for ‘that of God’ that is so common among us nowadays—namely, that there is some aspect of the divine in the human, a divine spark, as the neo-Platonists put it. Now it seems that George Fox was some kind of ‘Gnostic’, after all. That he did believe—or rather, that he had experienced in his visions of 1647 (“There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition”) and 1648 (“I was brought up in the spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God”)—that he had experienced his own nature to be the “flesh and blood” of Christ, not separate or distinct from the substance of God, that “the light”, the “seed”, which all humans possessed, was “of God”, that is, the very substance of Christ’s heavenly body. That “the light” was not just a teacher or revealer or convincer/convictor, but that it was ‘metaphysical’ in its effect, raising up “the first body”, the paradisiacal body that was before the fall. That this was the nature of salvation in Christ: to shed the inner, ‘carnal’ body that could sin, and to be inhabited instead, body and spirit, by the immaterial, heavenly body of Christ himself, so as to partake of his power and authority and even perfection. That this indeed was the original foundation for Quaker ‘perfectionism’, the belief that one could live without sin. The authors and the works that make these assertions (Glen D. Reynolds, Richard Bailey, Rosemary Moore) are listed at the end of this post.

I could feel a little better about my ignorance of Fox’s understanding of the light because these authors and a couple of others seem to have uncovered a deliberate effort on the part of early Friends to excise this aspect of Fox’s and early Friends’ theology from public record. They name, especially, Thomas Ellwood, the first editor of Fox’s journal, and William Penn, but even including Fox himself, to some degree. Soon after the Naylor affair in 1656, but especially after the Restoration, these editors did what they could to hide, deny, recast or otherwise explain away this Gnostic bent in order to avoid charges of blasphemy and tone down Quaker rhetoric in the face of the persecutions. Fox himself never actually changed his mind about the divine character of the “soul”, nor about his own ‘divination’ through perfect union with Christ, though he voiced these claims less often and more cleverly later in life. So Ellwood and Penn did it for him posthumously.

I am swayed by these writers’ arguments. So now it seems to me that the doctrine of “the light” has gone through three phases in our history.

  • First, Fox and many early Friends apparently did believe in a divine element in the human, which they often called “the seed”, and in salvation as a complete union with Christ as the light.
  • Then this was replaced fairly soon (beginning in the aftermath of the Naylor affair in 1656 and gaining momentum during the persecutions after the Restoration in 1661) with a spiritualizing theology of the Inward Light, the recasting of “the seed” as a capacity for Christ’s spiritual inhabitation rather than an inherent sharing of the divine substance, and a partial restoration of the Puritan gulf between God and his creature.
  • Finally, beginning with Rufus Jones and gaining momentum among liberal Friends since the 1960s, a return to a vaguely neo-Gnostic, neo-Platonic mysticism of the Light, in which “that of God” is some kind of divine spark inherent in all humans, and a new emphasis on the Inner Light as a universal divine principle in the human, replacing the Inward Light of Christ that had prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

The first understanding of the light—“the light” and “the Seed”.

For Fox and Naylor and many, if not most of the early Friends (according to Moore, Bailey and Reynolds), “the light” was both the agent of unity with God and the object of that unity as it acted upon an “unchangeable life and power, and seed of God” in us. (Reynolds, page 57, quoting Fox). Fox believed that Galatians 3:16* (see below) meant that all of Adam and Eve’s offspring had within them a “seed”, which was Christ: “I speak the same seed which is Christ…Jesus Christ the way, the truth and the life, he is the door that all must pass through, and he is the porter that opens it”.

To me, these writers are quite persuasive and comprehensive when discussing the role of the light and the seed in salvation, but much less clear about the nature of the soul and its relation to this divine principle—about what we appear to refer to when we say “that of God in everyone”. This is mostly, I think, because Fox himself was not particularly concerned with the metaphysics involved in the creation of the soul and hardly even interested in the metaphysics of the soul’s salvation. He was more interested in the effects of the light than its causes, in the “raising up” of the seed than in its planting at creation.

Fox uses the phrase “that of God” or its equivalent by my count roughly 720 times in his works, but almost always in the context of discussing ministry, rather than in theologizing about the nature of the human or the metaphysics of the soul (which I say again did not seem to interest him very much). He uses this phrase to denote something within us that yearns for God. This is the case in the quote most often cited, from a pastoral epistle in the Journal (Nickals edition, page 263):

Bring all into the worship of God. Plough up the fallow ground . . . And none are ploughed up but he who comes to the principle of God in him which he hath transgressed. Then he doth service to God; then the planting and the watering and the increase from God cometh. So the ministers of the Spirit must minister to the spirit that is transgressed and in prison, which hath been in captivity in every one; whereby with the same spirit people must be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits, and do service to him and have unity with him, with the Scriptures and one with another. And this is the word of the Lord God to you all, and a charge to you all in the presence of the living God, be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you. Then to the Lord God you will be a sweet savour and a blessing.

The “principle of God in him which he hath transgressed”, “the spirit that is transgressed and in prison”, “that of God in every one”, and “the witness of God in them” all seem in this light to refer to some divine element in the human, which is “the same spirit [whereby] people must be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits . . . and have unity with him”—that is, Christ. And the salvation of the soul—indeed, its perfection—is this unity with what Bailey calls Christ’s “celestial body”, the heavenly body of Christ.

 

The second understanding of the Light—the Inward Light of Christ.

The second phase in the meaning of the light comes with the retreat from the idea of salvation as divination through complete union with the light. According to Reynolds, the phrase “inner light” never occurs before 1700 and “inward light” is rare. But already with the publication of Barclay’s Apology in 1676, and then with the bowdlerized version of Fox’s journal that included Penn’s temporizing introduction in 1694, Friends began identifying the Light with the spirit of Christ, as something that came to us, rather than something already dwelling within us. The ‘seed’ became a capacity for receiving the Inward Light, rather than a sharing of the substance of the divine. Fox’s understanding of ‘ the seed’, the first body, was buried beneath a new theology that restored the Puritan gulf between God and his creature, a gulf which Christ crosses on the bridge of the Light to dwell within us spiritually. The Light became an ethical influence that could help us overcome sin as each impulse to sin arose, rather than a metaphysically transforming and substantial inhabitation of Christ’s heavenly body. Salvation and “the Light” became spiritualized.

 

The third understanding of the Light—the Inner Light and “that of God”.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, through his study of mysticism, Rufus Jones believed he saw a common theme that explained the universal character of mystical experience, and he applied this understanding to the Quaker insight of the Inner Light. This was the neo-Platonic idea of the divine spark: that there was within the human an element of the divine, which not only yearned for reunion with God, its source, but was also capable of experiencing the divine through mystical experience. In applying this insight to Fox’s phrase, “that of God” and the Inner Light, he redefined Quakerism as a mystical religion—not that it wasn’t ‘mystical’ all along, but that he taught us to think of ourselves this way.

It took a while, but this idea caught on and, especially since the 1960s, this neo-Gnostic idea has become the dominant tenet of modern liberal Quakerism: that “there is that of God in everyone”, meaning that every person has within them a kind of divine spark, that humans partake of the divine in some way that accounts for our religious experience. In fact, this is now virtually the only tenet of liberal Quaker theology upon which we seem to agree.

So the Inner Light has replaced the Inward Light of Christ, which was dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries, which itself had replaced the light and the seed as a sharing of divine substance inherent in the human, which had been dominant from the 1640s through the 1660s. The Inner Light has become a thing unto itself, independent of Christ, or of any specifically Christian theology, or of any theology or religious tradition at all, for that matter. Most Friends probably do not recognize the connection with neo-Platonism that inspired Rufus Jones, for instance. “That of God” is universal, not just as something universally possessed by all humans, but also as a principle to be understood independently of any specific doctrine or tradition.

Without a tradition to give it meaning or context, and given that liberal Friends are inclined to see themselves as having ‘outgrown’ the limitations of Quakerism’s specifically Christian roots and tend to be a bit allergic to theologizing in the first place, we now are free to define the Light and “that of God” however we like—if we define it at all. We used to define the phrase using God as the starting point: “that of” derived its meaning and value from a shared understanding of who and what “God” was. Now we humans are the starting point—“that of” is the starting point. Now “God” derives its value and meaning from “that of”. We have reversed the direction of the metaphysical vector implied in the phrase “that of God”. We now define God in terms of ourselves, working from a more or less shared understanding of what “that of” is: “that of” God is the divine spark. “God”, as a consequence, has become a projection of the divine principle that all humans have within them.

And “the Light” has come to stand in for God, representing this whole metaphysical ecosystem in which all humans possess a divine principle that makes each individual life sacred and accounts for individual spiritual experience, and this principle somehow connects us all in a mysterious and sacred way, and this connection somehow accounts for our collective spiritual experience.

At least that’s how it looks to me. I’m speculating when I describe the third stage in our understanding of the Light in this way because we haven’t really come up with a theology about it; the modern liberal Quaker tendency to shy away from doctrine, creeds and theology in general has kept us from articulating what we think about the Light or “that of God in everyone” in any serious way. I’m just drawing inferences from how we use these phrases and ideas today and trying to make sense of them.

So we have come full circle, but in a spiral. We’ve returned to Fox’s belief in a divine substance in the human, but we hold the idea now in a completely new context. We’ve separated it from its foundation in Christian faith and Scripture. More importantly, we’ve separated it from experience. George Fox didn’t infer his ‘theology’ of the light from Scripture; he experienced the light personally, viscerally, as utter spiritual and physical transformation, and then adapted his Christian and scriptural tradition to explain his experience. Later Friends continued to experience the Inward Light, also, and they continued to find that their Christian and biblical tradition helped them articulate that experience.

What of us? We ‘believe’ in the Inner Light, in “that of God” within us, but have we experienced it? And, without the worldview, the vocabulary, and the theological infrastructure of Christian and biblical tradition to help us articulate whatever our experience is, how do we communicate it—to ourselves, to each other, to our children, to newcomers and seekers inquiring about Quakerism? What canst we say?

* Galatians 3:16 (KJV): “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, ‘And to seeds’, as of many; but as of one, ‘And to thy seed’, which is Christ.” Paul is apparently referring to Genesis 12:3 & 7; 13:15-16; 24:7; and especially, Genesis 17:7-10. Fox seems also to have had in mind Genesis 3:15 when talking about the “seed”: (God speaking to the serpent after the Fall) “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his seed.”

Books I’ve recently read on the how George Fox and early Friends understood “the light”:

  • Glen D. Reynolds, Was George Fox a Gnostic? An Examination of Foxian Theology from a Valentinian Gnostic Perspective; and “Was Seventeenth-century Quaker Christology Homogeneous?”, a chapter in The Creation of Quaker Theory: New Perspectives, Pink Dandelion, editor.
  • Richard Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God.
  • Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain 1646-1666.

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