I said before that this whole discussion of the Christian character of Quakerism begs the question of just what do we mean by the word “Christian”? i said that I felt compelled by the testimony of integrity to answer the question for myself, as part of my quest to put my own experience in the Quaker context in a way that does not do violence to either the tradition or my own experience. And I said that eventually I had come up with five definitions of “Christian” and that none of them seemed to apply to me. Here they are.

Cultural Christian. Some people simply self-identify as Christian without thinking too much about it. They go to church, maybe not very often, but when asked, they would say, yes, I’m a Christian. They take for granted the divinity of Christ and probably have some vague idea of Jesus as savior. Doesn’t work for me. I think too much.

Believing Christian. Some people have thought about their Christian identity. They can say the Nicene Creed or the Apostle’s Creed and testify that they believe the words. For them, being a Christian is a matter of belief, of mental acceptance of a religious ideology and usually some kind of commitment to the moral teachings that go along with it and to worship in whatever Christian tradition they follow. Not me. Those ideas don’t work for me, and anyway, I define myself in terms of my experience, not in terms of my beliefs.

Experience Christian. Some people have personal experience of Jesus Christ. They are born again, or have had some other transforming encounter with Christ and now conduct their religious life as a relationship with him. Beliefs are really secondary, in a sense, though usually the ideology fits hand in glove with the experience. This, I think, describes in a general way many evangelical Christians.

Now I do have inner experience of Jesus of several kinds, so we’ll have to get into that. But none of them match the usual evangelical experience of salvation in Christ. More importantly, though, none of them have led me to realign my spiritual life around Christ as its center and none of them have convinced me to conduct my religious life as a relationship with Jesus.

Jesus’ own definition of discipleship. Here we touch on one of the relationships with Jesus that I actually do have, as an avid student of the gospels who has come to a clear and for me compelling understanding of how Jesus himself defined his messiahship—his role as the Christ—and what he required of those who would follow him. So this is a purely biblical definition, but according to my own unorthodox reading of the gospels.

I believe that the most important passage in Christian scripture is Luke 4:16-30 because in it Jesus declares what his mission as the messiah is in clear terms: to proclaim good news to the poor and the year that Yahweh favors, meaning the Jubilee of Leviticus 25.

Jesus has been anointed by the Holy Spirit to minister to the suffering and oppression of the poor and those who would follow him must live in a community (like that of Acts 2 and 4) that is organized specifically to do this, including the expectation that his followers must make their surplus wealth available to the community for poor relief, as Barnabas did (Luke’s positive case study) in Acts 4:32–37.

I believe that the heart of the real gospel—the gospel of Jesus, not of Paul—is an economic message of redemption (an economic term) for the poor. I have not realigned my life as ministry to the poor, which I believe would be almost impossible without the kind of community you see at work in Acts, anyway, and I don’t belong to a Quaker meeting that has this as its mission either. In fact, I believe that there are almost no Christians at all in the world according to the definition Jesus himself gave us and I know of only a couple of churches that try. So I’m not a Christian according to the one definition that I consider truly authoritative biblically.

The Quaker definition of Christian. Well, maybe I’m a Christian according to the universalist definition that Friends have given to the world, the great gift of our tradition. This definition, I believe, is that a Christian is one who has turned toward the Light. Early Friends, of course, equated the Light with Christ—the Light is the light of Christ. Originally, traditionally, this turning followed a convincement by the Light, in which one’s sins were revealed, and then one repented and turned toward the grace that Christ offered.

So the traditional Quaker definition is really a mutation of the traditional evangelical definition, in that it focuses on sin and salvation. But even from the beginning, it had this universalist twist, that all people possessed the Light and that the turning was what mattered, not the rest of the content that adheres to it in our tradition. Even Native Americans who had no knowledge of the gospel felt the light of the conscience guiding them and could turn toward it in obedience, according to George Fox in his journal. But Fox felt differently about those of us who have heard the word of the gospel: for us, confessing Christ matters.

Now I feel the work of the Light within me, like that Indian in the Journal did, and I try to obey the leadings of the spirit that it gives me. But it has yet to come to me with a name tag saying, “Jesus Christ”. Is the name tag required? Since I do know the gospel of salvation in Christ (though I don’t think it’s the true gospel), must I then confess Jesus as my savior, or—or what? Roast in hell?

See, that’s the thing—I reject the whole sin-salvation paradigm, as I call it. And so do a lot of other Liberal Friends, and with good reason, I believe. But that’s another blog entry. In any event, I could embrace the universalist mutation of the traditional doctrine of the Light that now prevails in Liberal Quakerism, in which the Light is fully decoupled from Christ and is its own spiritual—something. But that does too much violence to the tradition. I don’t feel particularly responsible to the Quaker tradition, but I do feel very responsible for it, and I won’t manhandle it that way. Ergo, I am not a Christian by the traditional Quaker definition, either. But by a more universalist Quaker definition? Maybe.

So we’re back where we started. We’ve reviewed several definitions of Christian and I’m not any of them. And I do believe that Quakerism is a form of Christianity. So where do I fit in? Can I articulate a Liberal Quaker theology that provides an honest home for my experience and yet keeps Jesus Christ in the master bedroom?

I think so. I doubt that it will appeal to my more traditional Christian Friends because it does not revolve around sin and salvation in Christ. I might have to get into why I reject what I call the sin-salvation paradigm at some point. I’ve already written quite a lot on this. But when I go to publish it in this blog, I feel a stop. I just have not found a way to say what I believe without feeling that I’m being insulting, and I love and respect my Christian Friends too much to do that. So I’m going to have to sit with it more.

So, again, I don’t expect to please Friends with a traditional understanding of the gospel. Maybe I won’t please anybody. But I do feel led to try.

So in the next post, I will return to experience as the foundation for this attempt. We’ll start with the experience that all of us have had—the gathered meeting. Well, a lot of us. One of the strongest indicators of our decline as a religion, at least in the Liberal branch with which I’m familiar, is that the gathered meeting has become so uncommon that now many of our members and attenders don’t really know what we’re talking about.

Definitions

I want to begin this exploration of a Liberal Quaker theology with some definitions. As I said in my introduction to this series, I want to start with experience rather than with the legacy ideas of our tradition. I start with experience partly because Liberal Quakers tend to value experience more than ideas, sharing more than theological discourse, feeling more than thinking. The Quaker tradition itself values “what canst thou say” more than what early Friends called “notions” and “shadows”, and it rejects “forms without power”. But most important, I am looking to identify the common experience that keeps us a “people gathered” and to find a way to talk about that experience.

Ultimately, we will have to define “God”, but let’s work up to that by starting with personal spiritual experience.

Spiritual experience. I define “spiritual experience” as experience that is transcendental and yet real. It transcends usual experience, and it transforms you in positive ways. It transcends one’s understanding, one’s ability to describe or explain it. It often transcends one’s senses and one can only make full sense of it intuitively, emotionally, not rationally. It is not completely inarticulate or indescribable or mysterious, but language and normal consciousness only take you so far. In the end, something about spiritual experience remains mysterious; it goes deeper than one’s usual consciousness.

Just as important, spiritual experience is nevertheless real. You know it is real because you are not the same afterwords. You are somehow healed or more whole, more wholly yourself, awake to things you were not aware of before, stronger, deeper, better, less inclined to sin, more alive to opening. Sometimes, only you feel the difference. But often, others can see the difference, also.

Along these lines, spiritual practice is whatever you do to prepare for spiritual experience, to nurture it, and to follow through on it in faithfulness.

Religion. I define “religion” as the spiritual practice of a community—whatever the community does to prepare itself for real transcendent experience, to nurture it, and to follow through on it. For communities can have collective spiritual experience just as individuals do, spiritual experience that the members of the community share, experience that transcends the usual experience and the full understanding of the community, but that is nevertheless real and transformative, after which the community and its members are no longer the same.

The classic example of collective spiritual experience for Friends is the gathered meeting for worship. Historical examples include the Exodus for the emerging Israelites, Pentecost for the emerging Christian movement, and the convincement of the Seekers by George Fox at Firbank Fell for the emerging Quaker movement.

As a religious tradition develops around this kind of transformative initiation of the Spirit, the community eventually agrees upon practices that seem to build upon the experience and reconnect the community with the Spirit that initiated it. This communal spiritual practice I define as religion. True religion is collective practice that still connects the community and its members with its initiating Spirit. Most religion, however, has lost that connection and practices forms without real transcendental power.

Religious experience. Religious experience in this manner of thinking, is spiritual experience that takes place in the context of a religious tradition. Religious experience could arise from the practice of one’s religion; one thinks of John Woolman’s openings, or the mysticism of Thomas Kelly. Or one might come to understand one’s own spiritual experience, even if it has not resulted from your practice of your given or chosen religion, in the terms that your chosen religious tradition has given you.

Arguably, this is what happened to Paul when he was converted on the road to Damascus: he had been practicing a Hellenized version of first-century Judaism; then he has a visitation from the risen Christ and wham! Now a Christian named Ananias has to help him understand what happened to him. A spiritual experience that took place outside of his own religious tradition transformed his life; to integrate that experience and make sense of it, Paul needed someone versed in the new tradition to teach him what it meant and to help him integrate it with his life and his psyche.

This process of integrating previous or foreign spiritual experience with one’s adopted religion is really important for my project of exploring a Liberal Quaker theology. Many of us come to Friends with experiences—often formative ones—that we had before we became Friends. Some of us are still practicing some non-Quaker spiritual discipline while we also attend meeting for worship and share in the Quaker way.

My own formative spiritual experiences came mainly from my intensive use of psychedelic drugs, from my deep immersion in yoga as spiritual practice, from my partial immersion in Native American spiritways, and most importantly, from one truly overwhelming and transformative experience in a sweat lodge. That experience showed me who I am and what I am doing in this world. But it didn’t give me two essential elements for continuing toward fulfillment: a community and a tradition within which to understand, explore, and develop the original opening. Quakerism gave me both.

In my next entry, I want to begin looking at the legacy tradition of Quakerism and start answering some questions related to this aspect of integrating non-Quaker experience in our Quaker faith and practice. Because there’s one big problem with my situation and that of very many post-Christian liberal Friends:

Quakerism is a Christian religion and my experiences are not Christian. So how do I fit in?

This, I believe, is the essential Liberal Quaker dilemma. Many Liberal Friends balk a bit at calling their brand of Quakerism Christian. In my next post, I want to explain why I think Quakerism—even Liberal Quakerism—is Christian and why I think this matters.

Introduction

For years, I have been complaining, in this blog and in my other writing, about the strong trend in Liberal Quakerism toward a post-Christian, post-traditional condition in which we have hollowed out our ancient and venerable heritage by ejecting much of its distinctive and extraordinary content. And not just the specific tenets of our “faith,” but “theology” and “beliefs” in general. Instead, we have defined ourselves in terms of experience and values and by our distinctive practice. Along the way, we also have abandoned not just Christian and biblical language in particular but what is often called “God language” more generally.

That’s the negative side of my complaint. The positive side is negative, as well. For we have not just abandoned; we have also failed to replace all this valuable tradition with anything substantive. We’ve allowed ourselves to be satisfied with just one remnant to stand in for the whole, and we have flipped the meaning of that remnant a hundred and eighty degrees from George Fox’s original intention. The single disfigured fragment upon which we now perch our entire 350 year-old tradition is the idea that there is that of God in everyone.

This is not just a language problem. It is a consciousness problem. We have moved away from a way of speaking, yes, and thus, away from a way of thinking. But more important, we have moved away from a way of being. Ultimately, this is a problem of experience.

Many of us simply have no experience of the things that the language we’ve inherited from our Quaker ancestors denotes and still implies. To speak for myself, at least, I just have not had any transformative experience that corresponds to that of early Friends, which was centered in Jesus Christ and all about sin and its conviction. I do have experience of what I am prepared to call the Light, but faithful traditionalists could challenge that call (rightly, I think) because my experience of the Light does not draw me back to Jesus as my savior.

This sort of disconnect between our experience and the language we use complicates talking about our Quakerism, to say the least. Some of us deal with the complications by blithely using the language of our heritage to say things that our ancestors never intended. Our elevation of the phrase “that of God” to the status of essential tenet of Quaker faith is a case in point. Some of us find it easier to simply avoid talking about our Quakerism and sometimes cover our tracks by lashing out at theologizing itself, making a creed of our non-credalism. Some of us (myself included) grope for a new way to talk that honors our tradition and yet makes room for the wide variety of religious and spiritual experience that Friends in the liberal tradition bring to our meeting life.

We have another related problem: many Liberal Friends are more comfortable thinking of their Quakerism as a spirituality than as a religion. Many Liberal Friends, I suspect, feel that a “religion” has a “God” and they just don’t have a relationship with “God” as God is usually understood—a a supreme being who created the universe, knows and cares about every one of us and about human history in general, and is the “Father” of Jesus Christ, his “Son”. Instead, without a common language that is based in shared religious experience, or at least on the shared text of the Bible, Liberal Friends have fallen back upon their own individual experience; they practice a personal spirituality and they call this arrangement Quakerism.

To accommodate this realignment away from religion and toward spirituality, we have recast the Religious Society of Friends as an open-source environment in which everyone is free to pursue her or his own individual spirituality. From a Religious Society of Friends defined originally in terms given us by the Bible (in which, for instance, we got the meaning of “Friends” from the gospel of John—chapters 14-15), we have become a Society of f/Friends without reference to religion and in which “Friends” carries a social meaning that is devoid of reference to obedience to Christ, as once was the case.

Well, I’ve spent more time than I wanted to outlining the problem, and many of my readers have heard this from me before. For years I’ve been complaining in this way. But for a while now, I have been feeling that it’s time I tried to solve the problem instead of just complain about it. So I’ve been seeking a solution.

I have been seeking a way to talk about Quakerism that honors this impulse to personal spirituality and our diverse experience on the one hand, while on the other hand expressing our shared spirituality and our common experience. I have been groping toward a new theology for Liberal Quakers, one that honors my own personal experience and the vast range of experience of other Liberal Friends and yet is faithful to the roots of our tradition in Christian experience and biblical language. I have been groping for a unified field theory of Quakerism that could speak with integrity to both my Christian Friends and my “universalist” Friends.

I think I am not likely to succeed. But I do feel led. And now, after years of meditating on the problem, my leading seems to be bearing some fruit. I am still groping, still experimenting with ways to express what I’m experiencing, but now I feel impelled to write.

The “methodology” came first: that I should work outward from experience, not downward from ideas, that I should start with my own experience, which is quite varied, but also with the experiences that I have shared with other Friends. Here, I am speaking specifically of the gathered meeting for worship, the one shared religious experience that transcends all labels and boundaries. I have tried to keep the meaning of the “religious words” I’m using concrete rather than abstract, and accessible and universal without being vague or all-inclusive. I have tried to test them against my own experience, and to use them in my writing and in my conversations with people to see whether they work in practice.

It’s a big, long-term project, so I’m going to have to break it up into sections that will fit in a blog. And I’m not even close to done exploring, so this blog approach will be piecemeal and a bit helter skelter rather than cleanly systematic. I fully expect to change my mind, to change course more than once along the way, and to be corrected by my readers. I expect to step through the traces now and again. But I have to start somewhere, so I’m going to see how this goes. In the next entry, I will start with some definitions—for:

• spiritual experience,
• spiritual practice,
• religion, and
• religious experience.

Some time ago, I was a Friendly Adult Presence at a high school Friends conference sponsored by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Many—most, I would say—of these young people made a clear distinction between spiritual life and religion and they definitely identified as spiritual and rejected religion. It made me sad and happy at the same time: happy that they had quite rich spiritual lives, sad that religion didn’t work for them, which meant that their meetings probably didn’t work for them.

An increasing number of adults feel the same way, even some members and attenders of our meetings: they understand and embrace spirituality, but religion (by which they mean organized religion) seems unnecessary to them, if not foreign, or, at the worst, even dangerous. Some are able to be Friends because they see Quakerism as the least organized of organized religions. They’ve joined the “Society of Friends” and are happy to tacitly leave “Religious” out of their identity, their worldview, and their practice.

Likewise, many of our meetings are so unclear or nervous about their religiosity that they too act like a Society of Friends. Meeting for worship is a gathering of meditators. Meeting for business is conducted as a process for consensus decision-making without reference to or regard for the Holy Spirit. Religious education at all levels is a program of comparative religion that treats Quakerism as just one of many options, if it receives attention at all. The purpose of the meeting is to serve as a warm, safe community. This is not true everywhere, of course, and not all the time, but I think it’s true in many meetings (at least in the Liberal branch) and often enough.

This experience with the high schoolers focused my thinking about the difference between spirituality and religion and what these folks might be missing, or assuming, about religion. I ended up trying to clarify for myself definitions of both spiritual and religious experience. Here are my definitions.

I define spiritual experience as experience that is transcendental and transformative. It is experience that transcends usual experience, and that transforms you in positive ways.

It transcends one’s understanding, one’s ability to describe or explain it. It transcends one’s senses and one can only make sense of it intuitively, emotionally, not rationally, and even then, something about the experience remains mysterious. Spiritual experience goes deeper than one’s usual consciousness.

And it is real. You know it is real because you are not the same afterwards. You are somehow healed, or more whole, more wholly yourself, awake to things you were not aware of before, stronger, deeper, better, more alive to opening and possibility.

Along these lines, spiritual practice is whatever an individual does to prepare for, nurture, and follow through on spiritual experience

Religion I define as the spiritual practice of a community. Religion is whatever a community does to connect with, or reconnect with, the Mystery Reality behind its shared transcendent experience. For communities can have collective spiritual experience, experience that the whole community shares and that transforms it in some real way. Examples include the Exodus, Pentecost, the convincement of the Seekers by George Fox at Firbank Fell, and the gathered meeting for worship.

Religious experience, then, is spiritual experience that takes place in the context of a religious tradition. This can happen in two ways.

First, religious experience can come from practicing one’s religion, from engaging in the spiritual practices of one’s community. Examples include

• delivering—or hearing—deep, genuine vocal ministry;
• feeling led by a prompting of the Spirit into some other form of ministry; or
• sharing in a gathered meeting

Second, we can come to understand our spiritual experience in the terms that our religious tradition has given us, even if it did not take place in our given religious context. Arguably, this is what happened to Paul when he was converted on the road to Damascus—he wasn’t a practicing Christian when he had that experience, but he came to understand what had happened to him in Christian terms. It became a Christian experience.

Many Friends, myself included, have had this second kind of religious experience, though we don’t always think of it this way. As convinced Friends, we have come to Quakerism already formed by deep spiritual experiences that took place outside of the Quaker or Christian tradition. Naturally, we do not want to give up these experiences or influences or practices when we join. I simply could not have done that myself. But liberal Quakerism is open and flexible enough to take me in on my own terms.

Since then, I have come to understand many of these prior experiences in Quaker terms. I have folded these influences and practices into my Quaker practice. I now practice a religion that allows if not embraces my distinctive spiritual experience. And most of my subsequent spiritual experiences have, in fact, been Quaker religious experiences—they resulted from my practice of Quakerism and I understand them in Quaker terms.

For the religion of Quakerism has its own distinctive religious practice and it fosters its own unique brand of religious experience. As a religion, what kinds of religious experience do we offer our members? And what do we offer our members as our own spiritual practice? Here I am talking about both individual religious practice and the practices of the community as a whole.

Individual Quaker religious practice. The individual religious practice peculiar to Quakerism is the faith and practice of Quaker ministry—

• the belief based on experience that every person is capable of direct communion with God* and that God can—that God will—call each of us into service in the world; and
• the practice that prepares us to hear and recognize the call to service and to answer it with faithfulness.

(* Now that I’ve mentioned “God”, I need to establish another definition. I’ll get to that in a moment.)

The practice of Quaker ministry is a practice of simplicity, listening, and faithfulness. Simplicity—removing the noise, false signals, and obstacles that prevent you from hearing the call and from living a life that allows you to respond when the call comes. Attentiveness—trying always to be open to the guidance of the Light within us. Faithfulness—living our life and making our choices as an answer to that of God within us. And by “that of God” I mean the activity of the Spirit within us, however we define that.

Corporate Quaker religious practice focuses on the meeting for worship, of course, but it also includes the meeting’s role in nurturing individual religious life.

The practice of silent waiting upon the Spirit in meeting for worship is, like the practice of Quaker ministry, a practice of radical simplicity. In the unprogrammed meeting for worship, we seek to strip away all barriers to collective communion with God by eliminating any mediating forms of worship, until God’s spirit breaks in to unite the meeting in the joy of God’s wisdom and presence. The result, the goal—the essential corporate Quaker religious experience—is the gathered meeting.

But in the Quaker religion the meeting also has a role in nurturing individual religious life, mainly, again, through the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. In this respect, the meeting’s role is one of cultivating the gifts of the spirit possessed by its members and in providing its ministers with discernment, support, and oversight. By Quaker ministers I mean Friends who seek always to hear and to do what their Inner Guide asks of them.

What about God?

So far, I have talked about religion without talking about God. For many people (and many Friends) this is the thing that turns them away from religion and towards spirituality. “Religions” have “gods” and “spiritualities” don’t, necessarily, and many of us have not experienced what religions usually call “God”—a supreme being who pays attention to life on earth, who cares about human history, and who cares about our individual lives, in particular. And generally, God is a “who” in a religion, not a “what”—God is capable of relationship.

I am writing another essay that looks more thoroughly at “God” in this context, but that essay is already very long and it keeps getting longer with its many branches. This problem is further complicated by Quakerism’s history as a Christian religion—you have to talk about Christ, too. So that discussion will have to wait.

In the meantime, though, I think I still owe my readers at least my definition of “God”. My definition—my whole “theology”, if you will—is experience-based, rather than deriving from the Bible or a tradition or any inherited legacy of religious thinking.

God—a working definition

I use “God” as a placeholder for the Reality Mystery behind our spiritual or religious experience, whatever that experience is. I say “Reality” because our spiritual or religious experiences are real—they transform us; they bear fruit. They may be completely interior and subjective, but we know they are real because they bring changes that we, and often others, can recognize as real.

And yet our spiritual and religious experiences are a Mystery. They transcend our understanding. Often they transcend our senses. And they transcend usual consciousness. Behind the Reality of our experiences we can sense something deeper that we cannot fully articulate or comprehend. At best we can only glimpse in part where the experience comes from, or why it came, or what it will do to us, or what it means. Its fullness remains a mystery, even after it seems to have stopped unfolding. Some spiritual and religious experience never stops unfolding. I’ve said all this before.

So here it is: for me, “God” is whatever lies behind, or beneath, or inside this experience of unfolding transformation brought on by spiritual or religious experience.

I could elaborate, and many people do. For many people, the Mystery does unfold a bit. They know who their God is. They know where their experience comes from. For myself, I can see through the window of my own experiences some distance into a metaphysical landscape that I can describe and in which “God” does have names. Names, plural—different experiences that have taken place in different contexts, that have come a little bit clearer in different ways, and that engage me in relationships with some “who”s.

But even so, some Mystery remains. God works in mysterious ways. Which is to say that we never fully understand our spiritual or religious experience. This is one of the things about religion that drives secular scientists nuts.

But whatever our experience is, whatever our spiritual or religious tradition, these two dimensions remain in common: we know it is real and yet it remains mysterious. So I try to return always to these core definitions based on the commonalities of our experience.

I love elaborating on what my experience—and our shared experience—means. In fact, I love speculating about them, venturing into the territory known to early Friends as “notions”. But that’s because it’s fun, it’s intellectually exciting for me. But it’s not necessary, and it isn’t even very useful a lot of the time. And it can lead to trouble.

So, back I go to the reality and the mystery of real experience.