Continuing Revelation—The Gathered Meeting
August 1, 2022 § 4 Comments
The fourth traditional touchstone for discernment is the gathered meeting, the testing of a new leading under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in a meeting for business with attention to the life of the meeting. This is the ultimate test; ultimately, all our new testimonies are confirmed by meetings for business as the culmination of a Spirit-led process of collective discernment. In theory.
In practice, however, even this touchstone has its problems. Two stand out in particular. The first is that we don’t actually submit some of our most important shifts in faith and practice to a process of collective discernment in the first place; we adopt them in an unself-reflective process that takes place in the meeting’s collective unconscious. The second is that we sometimes (often?) make decisions in meetings that are not gathered in the Holy Spirit, but rather in some other spirit, or even more than one spirit.
Failure to discern at all
Two of the most consequential changes in Quaker faith and practice have never been tested in any meaningful way—the decades-long shift away from Christ-centered and biblically grounded faith in the liberal branch, and a related adoption of the idea of that of God in everyone as a divine spark in the human.
The post-Christian shift
The post-Christian shift has taken place incrementally, meeting by meeting, as meetings brought into their membership folks who weren’t Christians, some of whom have been wounded by their Christian upbringing. Gradually, Christian Friends who really need Christian fellowship leave for someplace they can feel at home.
The meeting only faces the issue directly when it’s time to approve a new book of discipline. By then, divided sensibilities inevitably lead to conflict, and in the lead-up to final decision about the book, more Christian Friends have left. The final decision drives out the last of those for whom Christian fellowship is absolutely essential, but only after a discernment process in which these Friends either withdrew from meaningful participation or were ignored.
The take-away is that collective discernment is our ultimate venue for testing a new leading, but it’s not without its own problems.
That of God in everyone
Meanwhile, the process for adopting a divine spark meaning for the phrase that of God in everyone has not had any meaningful discernment at all. I have yet to hear of any meeting that has put the divine spark theory to a formal test in any kind of discernment process. Lewis Benson postulates that it was AFSC that led the adoption of a divine spark meaning for this phrase and that it spread gradually into meeting usage in the hands of witness-oriented Friends. Seems reasonable to me, especially given Rufus Jones’s role in founding AFSC and in giving us this divine spark interpretation, and the way that AFSC and social activism in the twentieth century attracted so many Friends from secular activist communities for whom Quakerism offers a spiritual grounding for their activism. But the very fact that we don’t really know how we got here with this phrase indicates how utterly lacking in discernment the process has been.
The (un)gathered meeting
While the process of confirming a new leading usually culminates in a meeting for business, it usually includes discernment in other venues in the lead-up: committee meetings, informal discussions, workshops, threshing sessions, and previous business meetings, which all culminates in a business meeting in which the community comes to unity. In theory.
I was present when New York Yearly Meeting approved a new edition of its Faith and Practice, which had been in the works for seventeen years, someone told me—the process started before I became a Friend. I had been actively involved myself for several years by then.
I remember two main issues being the stop for many of the Friends in the yearly meeting: same sex marriage, and as its broader context, a general and to some, a substantial shift away from a Christ-centered and biblical worldview, sensibility, and language.
I was present in the session in which the document was finally approved. I did not at the time feel that it was a meeting gathered in the Spirit, though many others did. Certainly, there was a tremendous release of energy upon approval. Real joy erupted. But we were not in unity of Spirit because I know some Friends disagreed.
Rather, I read the energy in that meeting at the time as spiritual exhaustion, and the release of energy as relief, but also of love for those gay and lesbian Friends whose lives were going to be changed forever by our decision.
I felt that the clerk had his hands on the wheel, at certain moments in that session. But I suspect that this was not ideological favoritism, but rather perhaps compassion for the body and its years-long struggle, seeing the body’s desire to be released from our travail as the movement of the Spirit. And maybe he was right.
But we did lose some valuable Friends that day, and many who have stayed still carry scars from the process, from how it went, from how long it took, from some of the things that were said.
The take-away for me is that all of these touchstones are fraught with limitations and are prone to corruption. Maybe corruption is too strong a word. Messiness—I’ll go with messiness. The Spirit moves in mysterious and often unpredictable ways, and humans are involved. So it gets messy.
A second take-away for me is to be wary of too strong an attachment to process. Sometimes you have to follow the love against the apparent requirements of Quaker process. People are more important than righteous, rigid adherence to traditional process.
I think of the mess we can see in the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters over whether to allow Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. Years of wrangling that was often bitter and then a final decision made in a meeting for business that nevertheless drove some of the original covenanters out. The book says that meeting was gathered in the Spirit; but it would say that, it had to say that. Was the meeting really gathered? I suspect that it was, but that it was still really messy and painful and not perfect, that for many it was joyful and for some, it was the last straw
Through the Flaming Sword 
Steve, I agree with you that today’s Quakers do not really know what they mean when they say “that of God”. I have heard people use it as a justification for the Peace Testimony, which early Quakers did not do. Early Quakers used “that of God” and many other sets of words to talk about the still small voice of God within, that was calling them to make changes in their life. Some of their words were the Inward Christ, the Inward Light, the Cross, and the Light of Christ were just a few. Each had slightly different connotations. In her book, “Our Life is Love”, Marcelle Martin talks about the process that early Quakers went through when their interior life was exposed to the Inward Christ.
Another set of words that early Quakers used for this concept that I particularly like was the Seed of God. Both Robert Barclay (in his Apology) and Elizabeth Bathurst (an early female Quaker theologian) expanded on this concept. Barclay talked about it in his section trying to console parents who were concerned about their children who died young going to hell; he says they won’t because they have the seed of God in them.
Both of them contrast the Seed of God with the Seed of Man, as did Isaac Pennington when he said: “This is the sumor substance of our religion; to wit, to feel and discern the two seeds: theseed of enmity and the seed of love; the seed of the flesh and the seed of theSpirit.. and to feel the judgements of God administered to one of these til itbe brought into bondage and death and the other to be raised up in the love andmercy of the Lord to live in us, and our souls gathered into it, to live to Godin it. “ (This quote is from Marcelle Martin’s book.) What I like about this concept is that it points out that we have a choice of what to pay attention to, what to feed.Whatever we feed, whatever we spend time doing, reading, talking about andpraying about expands. It also points out the discernment that is crucial. How often do we confuse our thoughts with God’s? When George Fox says, “What canst thou say?” He isn’t talking about our thoughts, but rather those of the Seed of God. I would like for today’s Quakers to explore what early Quakers had to say about this concept and not just parrot the words without examining the concept behind them.
Karen Tibbals Author of Persuade, Don’t PreachEthical Frames LLC http://persuadedontpreach.com Office: 908.223.7375Mobile: 732.266.7692
I was not a Christian when I asked for membership in the Religious Society of Friends. The request was based on my acknowledgment of a Spiritual Presence that was becoming the center of my life. The Clearness Committee (Yellow Springs Monthly Meeting) told me that most Quakers were Christian and I accepted that Christians would have the last word (I also began reading the Bible, but that was me and the Spirit, not part of the Clearness process).
Several years later I was attending FGC where one section was hearing about the Spiritual Journeys of several eminent Friends. One of these was John McCandless whom I knew to be a worthy Friend. John was also an entertaining speaker. We were enjoying the presentation when John stopped, and said: “This is going to be difficult, but the Son of a Galilean carpenter who died 2,000 years ago is a central force in my life.”
OK: “Spirit,” I prayed, “are you simply ‘g/God’, or are you ‘Jesus Christ’? and I heard a voice: “I am Jesus Christ.”
So now I am a Christian, but I don’t know what that means and there’s no one around willing (able?) to tell me. I decided to add George Fox’s Journal to my reading program and at one point (which I didn’t note and haven’t found) found Fox objection to all of the Christian Doctrine that my Unitarian Sunday School teachers and worship leaders had objected to, but Fox had Scriptural citations for all of his objections. So I went back and looked them all up and concluded that Fox was reading the Bible from a different perspective, one the I wanted to learn.
That was my beginning.
To those who want me to leave the Religious Society of Friends: Quakerism is fundamentally Christian and as a Christian I have to be a Quaker. “There is One, even Christ Jesus, who speaks to my condition”. Are we going to disown those who founded our religious society in the name of continuing revelation? Is our faith a changeable thing or an eternal truth?
If you need Biblical grounds for that “divine spark” in people, I’ve known since childhood that this is what was meant by God making us “in His image” (owing that one to a Methodist preacher who carefully explained that it couldn’t mean our physical appearance), and by God breathing into Adam’s nostrils, so that “he” (and we) “became a living being.”
There was a pretty clear sense at that age, that some things In There were suspect, while others were clearly “how it is.” Those passages were among the latter.
“Created in his image” does provide a possible biblical foundation for a divine spark in the human. I suspect that this is where the gnostics landed. And maybe Origen, too, the one “mainstream” neo-Platonic theologian of the early church; it’s been too long since I studied Origen, so I’m just guessing. But that’s not how I interpret that passage.
First, the whole creation story in Genesis is mythology, the narrative of which is patently not true; this is not how humans were created. So it might carry metaphorical truth, but that truth remains a metaphor. In reality, we are primates, products of evolution, and, while I believe in some kind of divine wisdom behind and within evolution—the Logos of creation, if you will—that doesn’t change the fact that our true creation story tells us nothing about divine sparks.
Secondly, even as mythology, the divine image image is not necessarily a metaphor for emanation from a divine being. It is much closer to Plato’s cave analogy, in which some spiritual source casts an image onto a receptor (in this case, Adam) as a lamp casts a silhouette onto paper, as Friends used to do before cameras. That’s the sense of the Hebrew, anyway. And the story of Adam’s creation with divine breath animating molded clay is from a different source and a different time for a different purpose than the story in chapter one, which is just a simple statement of creation without narrative; we’re talking J source in chapters two and three versus P in chapter one. We could decide, as the tradition has, that the two stories are from the same ultimate source (the Holy Spirit) and therefore really only one story with two tellings, so the breathing is the imparting of image, but that’s now how I read those passages.
I must repeat, though, that I’m not saying we do not have a divine spark. I’m just saying that that’s not what Fox mean by the phrase that of God; that the biblical tradition doesn’t really solidly support such an idea; and that I myself have never experienced such a divine spark, in myself or in anyone else. It feels like feel good speculation about human metaphysical anthropology to me. It’s a very appealing idea, and I believed it when I was a yoga student—atman from brahma, if you know your Hindu philosophy. But even that seemed like speculation to me, though that wisdom tradition is at least as old as the Bible’s.