Through the Flaming Sword

The testimony of community finds its way onto almost any list of Quaker testimonies these days, especially under the influence of the vexing anagram SPICES.

However: define for me the “testimony of community”. There’s no entry in the books of discipline of either New York Yearly Meeting or Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the two yearly meetings for which I have copies. It doesn’t appear in John Punshon’s pamphlet Testimony and Tradition, nor could I find anything in my own fairly extensive library on such a testimony, though our tradition is rich with discussion of community life.

I recently asked some Friends in my meeting to define it and they just looked at me. And I looked at them. We have no clear definition of this testimony. Nevertheless, they insisted that I include it in a list of our testimonies in a document we’re preparing for our meeting defining what membership means.

Oh, if asked we might come up with something. But it would be just our own ideas, not something clearly and corporately discerned by our meeting, or our yearly meeting.

What does the “testimony of community” mean? Where did this “testimony” come from? How did we come to espouse it without any apparent community discernment?

I suspect a process may be at work similar to the one that has made “that of God in everyone” the putative foundation of all our testimonies: an unselfconscious thought-drift in a culture increasingly impatient with intellectual/theological rigor, or even attention of any serious kind, not to mention care for the testimony of integrity. These ideas arise somehow, somewhere, and then get picked up and disseminated because they sound nice, they meet some need, and they don’t demand much. They apparently don’t require discernment, anyway.

For “that of God”, we know the point source—Rufus Jones. But for the “testimony of community”? Any ideas?

If Lewis Benson is correct about “that of God”, the disseminator of this idea that “that of God in everyone” is the foundation of our testimonies was AFSC. Not surprising, since Rufus Jones was a cofounder of AFSC. I suspect that AFSC may also have given us the testimony of community. It sort of sounds like them—to me, at least—if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I hereby call upon Friends to do some actual discernment, to decide, in our local meetings and our yearly meetings, whether the “testimony of community” really is one of our “testimonies”, and, in the process, tell us what it means. And if we can’t, then I suggest we get rid of it. Maybe that will finally put a spike in the heart of SPICES. I doubt we’d continue with SPIES.