Liberal Theology—A Definition
June 30, 2025 § 2 Comments
I’ve just finished reading The Foundations of Liberal Quakerism, by Stephen W. Angell, the 45th Annual Walton Lecture presented at the Annual Southeastern Yearly Meeting Gathering of Friends in 2008 and published as a pamphlet available from SEYM. It describes the historical precursors of liberal Quakerism, especially the writings of William Penn, progressive Friends in the Midwest, and Lucretia Mott and the Progressive Friends movement (see also Chuck Fager’s books on this movement). I highly recommend Stephen Angell’s pamphlet.
Stephen Angell starts with some definitions and he quotes Garry Dorrien, a historian of liberal Christian theology, with this definition, which I found useful:
“liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.”
According to my own studies, this very aptly describes the priorities of the young adults who gave birth to liberal Quakerism in the late 19th century, whose new sensibilities emerged fairly decisively with the Manchester Conference in Britain in 1895. The most famous of these young Friends were John Stephenson Rowntree and Rufus Jones.
The sciences. These young Friends embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution and the critical study of the Bible that had begun in Germany earlier in the century. These two advances, one in the natural sciences and the other in the social sciences, were directly related to each other in their influence, since the theory of evolution required an all-new look at the creation story in Genesis and by extension a new kind of relationship to the Bible’s authority and role in religious life.
Individual reason and experience. Those young Friends were desperate for a place in a Quaker culture of eldership that had become ossified and restrictive; they wanted their voices heard and they wanted a theology that matched their religious experience, and vice versa.
Ethics. They revolutionized how Christian moral principles should be applied to society’s problems. In the evangelical view that had dominated Quaker culture for roughly a century, social problems derived from sin, and so the solution to these problems was evangelism: bring people to Christ and they will act more righteously, and society will follow. But social science was just then realizing that social ills had structural elements that both constrained and transcended individual moral choice. The signature development along these lines was Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Study in Town Life, which proved scientifically that poverty in the city of York was not due to the poor’s moral failures—sex (too many children), drink, gambling, and other vices—but simply because they were not being paid enough. Capitalism was the problem, though he didn’t put it that way.
Atonement. Friends had always emphasized the transformation of the soul by the immediate and inward work of Christ over the theology of blood atonement on the cross, at least until the evangelical revolution in Quakerism that began around 1800. These young liberals reclaimed the earlier emphasis on God’s direct moral guidance.
Credibility and relevance. And they wanted their faith to be relevant, they wanted to be able to stand on their faith as a foundation and in their faith as a frame for their message and work to make the world a better place. And for that, they needed a theology that spoke to their time.
Theism, Nontheism, and Quaker Identity
November 1, 2024 § 3 Comments
This is a long post—lots of ground to cover. So here’s a brief outline:
Introduction
I subscribe to an email newsletter of Academia, a site that aggregates academic articles, and I’ve set a filter for Quaker articles. I get stuff I want to read regularly—can’t keep up with it.
Today, I got “Quakers and Non/Theism: Questions and Prospects,” by Jeffrey Dudiak, an article that appeared in Quaker Religious Thought, volume 118, from 2012. The issue features essays on theism, nontheism, and Quaker identity by Howard Macy as editor, Paul Anderson, Jeffrey Dudiak, David Boulton, Shannon Craigo-Snell, and Patrick J. Nugent. The latter two articles are responses primarily to Dudiak and Boulton, the theist and nontheist apologists.
I wanted to share this resource on what I believe is a very important subject, whose salience has not diminished since 2012, though maybe the heat’s been turned down a bit since then. But I also want to offer my own position on these questions. I don’t imagine that my convictions settle anything, but I hope that they do speak to some Friends.
Not in the traditional sense, as in believing in a supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient, completely good; “personal” in the sense of keen to engage in relationship with me; “historical,” not just in the sense of paying attention to human history, both writ large and personal, but also having a plan for the fulfillment and redemption of humanity writ large and for individual humans, too, like me—a supreme deity who knows me, cares about me, and whom I could know in return.
I do not know such a deity—I have no experience to base such a belief on. Intellectually, such an idea even offends me a bit: where was some history-caring and engaged deity during the Holocaust, for instance? Furthermore, experience of a supreme being by a being as finite as myself would, it seems, shatter my consciousness. And even if I did experience [him] without exploding, what good would it do me? My yoga teachers taught a similar Vedanta endgame of pure consciousness as the goal of my practice, and it just seemed irrelevant to my lived life.
On the other hand, I have experienced—what shall I call them? Angels? Spirits? Devas? I am some kind of polytheist, having had direct transcendental experience of spiritual beings, and I subsequently have enjoyed relationships with them as central to my spiritual life. So I call myself a para-theist. My experience is that there are deities out there, just with a small “d”.
And I take at face value the testimony of my Christian f/Friends, and the testimony of the first Friends, and of thousands of Friends since the 17th century—the testimony of their encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ. Therefore, I believe in Jesus Christ, even though I have not (yet) been called by him into his discipleship.
I am not willing to disrespect the experiences of those Friends who have been blessed by his presence in their lives by telling them that their experience is just a projection of their unconscious, or not real in some other way, or whatever, just because I don’t share their experience; and also because I wouldn’t want anybody to disrespect my own such experiences. Don’t mess with with my experience and I won’t mess with yours; though I do invite inquiry, and even respectful challenge.
Quakerism is a Christian religion
For this reason, and for several other reasons, I consider Quakerism a Christian religion, and I feel that I am a guest in the house that Christ built. I am grateful that my meetings have accepted me without my Christian confession (though they never even considered such a matter, being to that degree non-Christian or post-Christian). And I think other non-Christians should share my gratitude and act accordingly. By act accordingly, I mean, not just tolerate, but invite and celebrate Christian and Biblical vocal ministry, and actively contribute to a Quaker culture in which Christian Friends feel invited to talk from their own experience and religious sensibilities without fear or censure. Or even to pray, as I do, that Christ will join us, gather us, in our worship.
In other words, a theism built on relationship with Christ seems not just reasonable to me; it parallels my own experience. Hence my para-theism.
It is natural for us to venture out of our experience into theology. I can’t keep from doing this, myself. Well, actually, I love doing it, I do it all the time, in my head and in my writing. And, while a lot of the legacy theology of the Christian tradition does not work for me, it obviously works for a lot of Friends, at least up to a point. From the beginning, starting with Fox himself, some Quakers have always been a bit heterodox.
So we are theists
So, for me, the bottom line is that Quakers are theists in our core identity, because we are Christian; that is, we were gathered as a people of God by Christ, most of us have been invited into personal f/Friendship with Christ, and that’s that. We are a Christian faith historically. We are a Christian faith demographically still today. And the lack of such experience by a small minority of the movement does not change the identity of the movement as a whole.
That we non-Christians, and nontheists, and para-theists in the minority have been given a bed in the spare room of the house that Christ built is a blessing to be grateful for. Trying to kick Christ out of the master bedroom onto the living room couch is deeply disrespectful of our tradition, and of him.
About “God”
One more thing, though. I just used the word God. So what do I mean by “God”, capital “G”? In my public discourse, I use the word God as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind my listener’s or my reader’s own spiritual and religious experience is. Your experience is real; I honor that with belief and respect.
I do have my own personal understanding of God, but it’s mine and I will not press it upon you as some greater truth. But I will share it as mine.
For me, God is the spiritual dimension of evolution. In this, I am something of a student of Teilhard de Chardin and of Thomas Berry. The universe is unfolding. There is a wisdom, an intelligence, and an apparent direction to this unfolding—a Logos, as the writer of the prologue to the gospel of John put it, and as the ancient Stoics understood it, and Philo of Alexandria and the writer of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom. There is a Mystery Reality behind creation, within creation, a spiritual dynamic in evolution that we can sometimes sense somehow, in some small but intimate way—when I’m free-climbing the cliffs of the Shawangunks, for instance, or hearing a V of geese pass overhead above the fog.
That communion is the deepest of all communions for me, with the possible exception of a gathered Quaker meeting for worship. So God is real for me in this way, yes.
Chosen
October 2, 2022 § 3 Comments
In meeting for worship this morning, someone quoted Jesus from Matthew 7:7: “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He went on to say that, notwithstanding the promise, we often do not get what we ask for, and very often doors remained shut to us, and perhaps that is because we are asking for outward things that are not what would fulfill us. That what we are really asking for are friendship and love. (I am reminded of James 4:3, a favorite of George Fox: “You ask, and receive not, because you ask amiss, that you may consume it upon your lusts [unrighteous desires of any kind].”)
From this seed grew a message of my own, from the gospel of John, from which we get our name as the Religious Society of Friends:
You are my friends, if you do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth, I call you not servants; for the servant knows not what his lord does, but I have called you friends, for all the things that I have heard of my Father I have made known to you. . . . These things I command you, that you love one another.
John 15:14–17
I didn’t say more today—I just quoted the passage—but I have written in the past about how our name is therefore rooted in the commandment of love and in the promise of continuing revelation.
But today I left out verse 16: “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.”
After I had spoken, I realized that I had left verse 16 out—and that I always leave this verse out, or at least that I have never paid much attention to this verse about being chosen and its importance for early Friends. And it was opened to me that this verse was probably at least as important to early friends as the others, maybe—probably, even?—the most important verse of all.
I suspect that this verse was, among others, the foundation upon which they built their sense of themselves as a peculiar people, a people gathered by Christ for a purpose, and that purpose was to bear fruit that lasts. The most concrete and immediate manifestation of this sense of chosenness, this sense of being “ordained,” is vocal ministry, feeling ordained by Christ to proclaim the gospel, not just in meeting for worship, but also in the world—in the steeplehouses and streets, in the courts of the sultan and the pope, in England and the Americas. . . .
Somewhere along the line, we Friends have lost our sense of being chosen and our vision of the fruit we are to bear. Well, “liberal” Friends have, anyway; I don’t know the evangelical branch well enough to know whether they feel chosen anymore, or what their vision of their mission is, beyond, perhaps, winning souls for Christ.
Christ is the key here. To feel truly chosen, someone must have chosen you. Most of us in the liberal branch no longer believe in a Christ who might be choosing us. Now we “feel led.” We use the passive voice to avoid declaring our leader. (Though it must be said that the passive voice is a classic biblical rhetorical device, also: “Your sins are forgiven,” proclaims Jesus (Matthew 9:2); he obviously means forgiven by the Father.)
Now, “vocal ministry” is often expressed as “speaking in meeting,” or “giving a message.” “Vocal ministry” means, etymologically, “spoken service”. Service to whom? There’s a “whom” implicit there. We could say service to the meeting and/or to the other worshippers, and this is certainly true.
But that is not what we originally meant by vocal ministry. We originally meant service to God, or more specifically, to Christ, who is making know to us all the things he has heard of his Father.
We’ve switched from Christ to the Holy Spirit, sans the baggage of the Trinity. Now we pray for “Spirit-led” vocal ministry without tying “the Spirit” to the spirit of Christ.
Well, that actually works for me. I, too, have no direct experience of “the Spirit” as the spirit of the risen Jesus. And I share the modern liberal nervousness about believing we are a “chosen people”. Think of the ramifications.
But this highlights a radical shift in the character of Quakerism as a religion. It used to be about relationship (with Christ). Now it’s about a more vague, diffuse, impersonal spirituality of being led by “the Spirit”. There’s no sentient being on the other side of a relationship. What are the ramifications of that kind of spirituality?
Climate Change, Apocalypticism, and Christian Failure—Part 2: Apoclyptic Narcissism
September 15, 2022 § Leave a comment
I’ve written about this before. Christian apocalypticism poses its own unique threat to the earth, its peoples, and all our fellow creatures.
When you believe that God will destroy a corrupt world as part of his last saving act, as he did in the time of Noah and promises in the book of Revelation, then an earth in destruction can be a good thing, a sign of God’s immanent return in judgmental glory. Furthermore, humans who are destroying the earth can be seen as, in some way, participating in God’s final act of righteousness. And finally, trying to stop the earth’s destruction can be seen as acting against God’s will, and that is Satan’s work.
Religious apocalyptic ideology, especially that based on biblical apocalyptic, like the book of Revelation, is itself the ultimate conspiracy theory, one of the factors cited by Zaleha in his article as contributing to fundamentalist hostility to action on climate change. The ultimate apocalyptic conspirator is the divine who wrote Revelation, and the belief system is so fantastic that to believe in it warps cognitive thinking itself; it infects all the other things you believe or could believe, and it makes lots of room for more thinking along similar lines. It is so rife with vague and esoteric symbology that it invites an unlimited amount of further speculation. And it offers the ultimate incentive: it invites its believers to feel that they have a role to play in the ultimate drama—when the drama is truly cosmic, even the bit parts in the drama are important. And the final curtain call takes place before the audience of the angels and the throne of God himself (sic).
The Revelation script is now two thousand years old and the failure of its fulfillment to date would, you might think, weaken its hold on believers. But apparently not; it never fails to resurface periodically. And now, the apocalyptic threat is all too real. Now believers have real world events to hold onto, regardless of the disconnect between those events and the specific symbolic elements of the myth. First, those symbolic elements have always been subject to adaptive interpretation, as I’ve already noted. But more importantly, they were never the main thing, anyway—it’s the spirit of apocalypticism that really matters, the feeling that you are part of some ultimate inbreaking of God’s presence, and that it’s all about judgment: a planet will die, but you will live on in bliss in a heaven that transcends life on a planet.
This is the ultimate face of what Zaleha calls “collective narcissism:” the ultimate story is all about us, God’s faithful, and, of course, them, those who face his judgment for their unbelief in the conspiracy theory.
Climate Change, Apocalypticism, and Christian Failure—Part 1
September 15, 2022 § Leave a comment
Climate change clearly poses an apocalyptic threat to human life and civilization, to all of God’s other creatures, and perhaps even to the entire biosphere of planet earth. In their responses to this challenge, Christian communities pose their own threat to our future as a species. Well, “Christian communities” is perhaps too general an indictment. But I have come across a study that describes the threat posed by two such communities in North America and I fear that they do in fact represent a much broader swath of Christendom that we might want to admit. I think—I hope—that Quakers have a role here.
In 2018, Bernard Daley Zaleha published “Dissertation—A Tale of Two Christianities: the Religiopolitical Clash Over Climate Change Within America’s Dominant Religion.” The two communities Zaleha studied were “a fundamentalist confederation of churches,” the Calvary Chapels in Arizona, and “liberal congregations affiliated with The Center of Progressive Christianity,” mostly United Church of Christ and Episcopalian, based in California.
Here’s his summary from the paper’s extract:
I found substantial indifference or outright hostility to environmental concerns and climate mitigation at all of my Calvary Chapel sites, due especially to intense apocalyptic expectation of imminent rapture. Other factors included belief in sovereignty of God (the idea that the Christian God causes and controls all events), a tendency toward collective narcissism, and a susceptibility to conspiracy theories. Progressive congregations were open to environmental concerns, talked about their importance, but ultimately were minimally involved. Social justice issues and the immediate needs of the homeless, immigrants, minority communities, and advocating for LGBTQ equality and against systemic injustice in most cases took precedence.
In the following posts, I want to explore this failure and a possible Quaker contribution in greater detail.
Negative Reactions to Jesus and Christianity
January 17, 2021 § 7 Comments
A Friend of mine recently shared that some other Friends in his meeting experience “negative reactions—even visceral ones—when reference is made to Jesus or Christianity during worship”. I’ve been one of these people, actively hostile to Christianity and the Bible, in vocal ministry, in First Day School curriculum, and so on. I’ve changed my mind since then. So I have a tenderness for Friends who feel this way, on the one hand, and a convert’s zeal for pushing back, on the other.
As a result of this transformation, and because I’m a theologian by calling, I have labored a long time and very deeply with how I now identify regarding my own Christianity. I like the response Friend Don Badgley uses when asked whether he is a Christian: What do you mean by “Christian”? But actually, almost no matter how someone might define being Christian, my answer will be no. The main reason is that I have never felt directly called by him into his discipleship.
However, clearly, many, many people have felt so called, some of whom I know intimately and personally, and some of whom, like Fox, have convinced me of the genuineness of their experience through their powerful testimony. Because I respect and trust their testimony, I therefore believe as an article of faith that there is a spirit of Christ who calls some people into his discipleship and who, according to the testimony of the first Friends, originally gathered Friends as a peculiar people of God and has guided the movement for most of its history.
Thus I consider myself a guest in the house that Christ built. I believe he is real and the house is his. Thus, I believe the Religious Society of Friends to be a Christian religious movement. Which is not the same as feeling free to answer unequivocally that Quakers are Christians. The majority of us are Christians, by far. We have been so for most of our history, by far.
And even those Quaker communities in which some members are deeply uncomfortable identifying as Christian—none of these meetings have, to my knowledge, ever tested their identity in a meeting for worship with attention to the life of the meeting and then declared, by a sense of the meeting gathered under the guidance of the Spirit, that they are no longer Christian. Technically, then, according to “Quaker process”, those meetings retain their ancient historical testimony as Christians until they discover themselves otherwise in a gathered meeting.
Meanwhile, I would describe many meetings in my experience in the liberal branch as post-Christian. They may not have formally declared themselves post-Christian, but most of the members don’t identify as Christian and their testimony—their vocal ministry, their witness, and culture—do not express a Christian worldview, however you might define that. Post-Christians have moved into the master bedroom and Christ has been thrown out onto the living room couch—or out of the house altogether.
I don’t feel that way, and I can’t act that way anymore. I feel grateful to be included in the Quaker fold as a lamb who has been invited in, and I gladly sleep on the couch in Christ’s gracious big-tent tabernacle. This means two things, a negative and a positive: I do not (any longer) persecute those who testify to their Teacher, and I actively welcome, desire, pray for, Christian and biblical vocal ministry and the other ways in which my Christian Friends testify to their Guide. They are at home in the house he built—or should be.
It is quite weird to be a member of a Christian movement and not be a Christian myself. This paradox has defined my religious life ever since I became a Friend. The only thing that mutes the dissonance this creates is the fact that the meetings I have belonged to and participated in have all been (non-declared) post-Christian in their culture. Which means that they are comfortable with my non-Christian-ness (though they sometimes act surprised when I sound like a Christian).
On the other hand, however, I will not countenance anti-Christian behavior in any meeting I am a part of. Someone should have eldered me when I did that, and Friends who act that way can expect me to ask some questions.
Through the Flaming Sword 