Quakers and money

May 28, 2016 § 15 Comments

Just a little more than a hundred years ago, Quaker meetings were full of business people, and for a long time, Friends were one of the wealthiest communities in England. Many of us did pretty well here in the colonies, too. We really understood money then—we knew how to make it, we knew how to use it, and we were not ashamed of it, at least not in a way that made us weird about it, like we are now.

Today, at least in the liberal Quaker meetings I’m familiar with in the US, we are almost notoriously dysfunctional when it comes to money. Meetings often have a “faith-based” rather than reality-based attitude toward their budgets. Meeting finances are often anything but transparent. Meetings are often reticent to ask for money, or even to talk about it. Quaker institutions and Quaker meetings at all levels of organization are struggling for their lives financially. And Friends who own their own businesses or who work in or for corporations often find themselves being harassed, even though they often are very generous with their talents and treasure—liberal Quakers often have a prejudice against business people. Why? Why this 180-degree shift in culture?

One of the primary reasons I started writing my history of Quakers and Capitalism was to find an answer to this question. A few days ago, I returned to this question and a host of possible answers came to mind. They are just conjecture, but I am ready to share them and see what my readers think. Here are some possible reasons for why a movement of often-wealthy (sometimes exceedingly wealthy) business people became a movement of people who are uneasy with money and the people who make it:

  • Liberal economics replaces evangelical economics. Around the turn of the 20th century, David Lloyd George and the new Liberal Party in Great Britain openly credited the Quaker Seebohm Rowntree, brother of the key liberal Friend John Wilhelm Rowntree, with the foundational insight that poverty and other social ills were structural, not character-based, as the dominant political economics of the 19th century had claimed. Until about the middle of the twentieth century, political economics had two schools, both born around 1800—a liberal school born from the pens of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (who married a Quaker), and an evangelical school born from the pens of Thomas Malthus and Thomas Chalmers, both evangelical ministers. Evangelical economics dominated public policy throughout the 19th century, at least in Britain. That ended with Seebohm Rowntree. Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Town Life proved scientifically (using the first widely discussed statistical sociological survey in history) that poor people were not poor because of their character—drinking, gambling, sex (too many children), and other forms of wantonness—but rather, they mostly did have jobs and worked hard; they just weren’t being paid enough. This book—this idea—that poverty was structural gave birth to the Liberal Party in Great Britain and to the British welfare state. Liberal Quakerism, in the UK, at least, was joined at the hip with the belief that capitalism needed curbs on its behavior and the only gorilla in the room that was big enough to enforce those curbs and pick up the slack was the government.
  • The Great Depression. The Great Depression dealt a body-blow to evangelical political economic theory. “Evangelical” economics would not get back up on its feet until Ronald Reagan resurrected it. Herbert Hoover was an evangelical Friend and he brought an evangelical Quaker worldview to his thinking about the Great Depression—self-reliance, appeals to private people and organizations for philanthropy and to companies for ethical response to the crisis, and a reluctance to get the government involved. It was an abject failure. The New Deal was the liberal economic school at work and the welfare state came to America. Roosevelt even employed the concept and the very formula that Rowntree had developed for the “poverty line”—a measure of the cost of basic human needs as the basic metric for social welfare.
  • The death of the “Protestant ethic”. Most people think that Max Weber had Puritans in mind when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and this is partially true; but he talks about Quakers quite a bit, too, and we actually fit the mold better than the Puritans did. We weren’t Calvinist, so we didn’t see material success as a signifier of our election, but that is just a footnote in the story. The core of the Protestant ethic story is seeing one’s work in the world as a religious vocation, a calling (we would say leading) from God. This makes doing good imperative and doing well okay. This was the “spirit of capitalism”, and it drove Quaker business for two hundred years., until limited liability laws passed in both England and America in the 1890s led to the issue of public shares and the gradual dissolution of the great dynastic Quaker family businesses. By at least the end of the first world war, the spirit of capitalism was Mammon, not the Protestant ethic. Maybe before then. A lot of Quakers thought so already when London Yearly Meeting charged its Committee on War and the Social Order to investigate the Great War’s causes, in 1915. The report that the Committee returned in 1918 confirmed their suspicions—capitalism was partly to blame for the Great War and thus so were capitalists.
  • The theology of experience replaces the theology of atonement—and unleashes individualism. When Rufus Jones recast Quakerism as a mystical religion around the turn of the 20th century, and the liberal movement in Quakerism embraced the new “scientific” tools for Bible study at the same time, religious experience became the goal of (liberal) Quakerism and religious authority began to shift away from the Bible. Both threads had always been there; the past atonement of Christ on the cross was virtually irrelevant to early Friends, though they would never had said so—they were experiencing the living Christ directly and right now; salvation was happening within them in “real time”, making the event on the cross a kind of prefiguring, rather than the defining event in salvation history. And the Bible was a necessary source of relgious authority, but secondary to the experience of the Light. Throughout the 19th century, evangelicalism had driven this thread of direct experience partly underground, except to some extent in American Hicksite and Wilburite circles, but liberal Quakerism revived it. However, the emphasis on personal experience also undermined the authority of the meeting and gradually empowered the individual liberal Friend to do as he or she pleases. This feeling of entitlement is now one of the gods of liberal Quakerism.
  • The Vietnam War and the Sixties. Beginning in the 1960s, a wave of convincement brought a generation of people into the movement who were either social activists or ‘60s mystics, or both. I am part of that generation. We distrusted authority. Many of us had either fled or abandoned our original religious roots as either oppressive or spiritually empty, or both; we were post-Christian. A lot of us had also abandoned self discipline for a while; that had been fun for us, in ways even valuable, but it left us a bit self-indulgent. Many of us had picked up an anti-money prejudice in the 60s that we seem to have retained to some degree, even though most of us ended up in the middle class. After all, a lot of us had degrees and we were the last generation to benefit from higher education en masse without going broke in the process. We remember $0.29 gasoline and $150 apartment rents—the good life was sort of handed to us. Finally, we had built our spiritual lives around whatever we had picked up on our journeys, and, when we became convinced as Quakers, we grafted that onto a Quaker framework that was already becoming increasingly pliable, increasingly defined by values rather than content. And we didn’t really value money, even though we enjoyed it.
  • (Radically) declining wealth base. There are three paths to wealth: creating a successful business, landing one of those rare very high-paying jobs, and inheritance. The first and last have been the foundation of Quaker wealth for centuries. But nowadays, many, many Friends are somewhere in the middle class, with decent but not high-paying paying jobs, if they are lucky, with pensions and enough saved to maybe keep them in comfort as they live into their 80s and 90s, if they are really lucky. Maybe there will be a little left over for the kids when we die. However, for twenty years or more, our middle class status has been steadily eroding, as college, health care, and nursing home costs have skyrocketed. There just isn’t the wealth base left to maintain our meetings the way our forebears did, and we are less likely to leave big bequests. As an example: the Friends who supplied two-thirds of the capital funds that renovated New York Yearly Meeting’s youth retreat center a few years ago died—in just three or four years’ time! Two-thirds of a significant wealth base in the yearly meeting died in a handful of years! The wealth base that made the budgets of yesteryear possible is dying off.
  • Mixed marriages. I suspect that, over the past century, more and more convinced Friends have joined the movement without their spouses. When you have to divide your charitable contributions in half, or at least negotiate with a partner about it, chances are good that your meeting will get less than it would have if you had joined as a couple or if you were single.
  • Meaningless membership. I would add the fact that there’s really no reason to even make the minimal commitment to a meeting of becoming a member. What do you get out of it? The privilege of serving on Ministry and Worship Committee? We no longer treat membership as a covenant in which the member and the meeting have clear, mutual responsibilities for support. Oh, the member has responsibilities, financial support among them. But what skin does the meeting have in this game? All we seem to feel we need to provide is a space in which to hold meeting for worship every Sunday morning and a sense of community. We often don’t offer religious education to even our children, let alone the adults. We don’t offer programs or other support for the individual spiritual life, beyond meeting for worship. We often are rather less than effective at pastoral care, even worse at material care. Why join? And, if you’re only a partially-committed attender, why not give as a partially-committed attender?
  • Consumer culture religion. In a mass consumer economy, we pay for the things we want, and we seek the lowest price. This cultural ethos has invaded religious life, just as it has penetrated every other aspect of modern life. Most Friends come to meeting for something; they are less likely to consider what they come to meeting with. What do they come for? At the least, I think they come for an hour of peace and psychological refreshment and a sense of community. We often give them that. But what is it worth? Can it be had at a bargain? Could they get it elsewhere more cheaply? Probably not. But if they could, they just might leave. At least we have a corner on the collective silent worship market.

Well, these ideas just came flying out of my head as I wrote. What are my readers’ experiences? Why do we harass our business people? Why do we give so little? Why have Quaker meetings and institutions been cutting back on their budgets and yet still feel like they’re headed for the shoals? Why are we weird about money, when we used to be so good with it? Have I missed anything? Have I gone too far?

I would love to hear from you.

Earthcare and the Heart and Soul of Jesus’ Gospel

May 10, 2016 § Leave a comment

After giving up on Christian earth stewardship and rebooting my study of the gospel of Jesus looking for some opening into earthcare, I found two. Well, one and a half.

“Good news for the poor”. The heart of Jesus’ gospel, I discovered, was what I call the economics of redemption in the common-wealth of God: Jesus’ good news was a prophetic condemnation of the imperial economics that oppressed his people and a radical restructuring of his own community’s economics so as to release the poor from that oppression and from their suffering.

“And he was with the wild animals”. The soul of his gospel—or at least one dimension of it—was the role that the landscape of Palestine played in his communion with the Father: a radical spiritual ecology that informed where he went to do what and why.

The economics of redemption in the commonwealth of God

In the course of my study of the gospel, I took a course on The Prophetic Tradition with the School of the Spirit. On the reading list was The Politics of Jesus by the Mennonite John Howard Yoder. Yoder has a chapter on the Jubilee message in Luke. This put me on a trail back into Torah to study debt redemption law, beginning with the Jubilee described in Leviticus 25 and including related legislation, like that in Deuteronomy 15.

The Jubilee called for four things:

  1. The cancelation of all debts.
  2. The release of all debt slaves, people who had gone into indentured servanthood to pay off a loan.
  3. The return of families who had lost their family farms through bankruptcy to their ancestral portion, or landholding, to their inheritance, to the farm that they had lost to debt—or more accurately, to creditors.
  4. And the injunction to let your land lie fallow for a year.

As the very first action in his public ministry in the gospel of Luke (chapter four), Jesus declared “good news to the poor” through a Jubilee, “the year that Yahweh favors”. But this was just the foundation of his economic platform. Once I had learned to recognize the Jubilee and redemption terms of Torah, I found them everywhere I looked in Jesus’ teachings and actions. From this initial proclamation of the good news for the poor, the message spreads into every corner of his ministry. It is the cornerstone of the kingdom of God he preached.

Very many of our most treasured and familiar teachings and sayings of Jesus deal directly with one or more of the four elements laid out in Leviticus 25, though he reinterpreted them in really creative ways. The Beatitudes are my favorite. They are an extended midrash on inheritance law, promising to fulfill number three above.

And the economics of redemption do not just find expression in Jesus’ sayings; they also find embodiment in his actions. All the stories of feeding figure prominently, including the Last Supper. But also at least half of his healing miracles and some of his other “miracles” either serve to relieve the suffering of the poor directly or have some economic dimension.

These are big claims, I know, and obviously I can’t go into detail here. And we’re still not talking about earthcare, either, at least not directly. For while Jesus has basically nothing to say about land use, he is all about land tenure—who gets to own the land. This in a civilization that defines poverty as the inability to support yourself and your family, that is, as possessing neither land nor trade.

Spiritual ecology

But as exciting as it has been to discover the economics of redemption in the gospel of Jesus, it has been even more thrilling to discover how Jesus used the landscape of Palestine in his own spiritual practice—to look at where he went, to do what, and why.

But this path led me even deeper, into the very origins of the western religious tradition, a tradition of spiritual ecology that Jesus either knew already or rediscovered, but which began with Moses and the inhabitation of the promised land of Canaan, and was in some ways picked up again by George Fox. By spiritual ecology, I mean using the ecology of your landbase as a doorway into communion with the divine.

This is a completely different approach to earthcare than stewardship of property loaned to you in trust. It is an invitation to communion with land and with God. In fact, Christian earth stewardship practically prohibits such nature communion with the principle that we worship the creator, not the creation. I say “practically” because this principle does not literally prohibit seeking divine communion in the natural world, but it builds a fence around it, fearing the slippery slope toward paganism. This fence is maintained most ardently in the evangelical Christian hatred for “New Age Spirituality”, the intuitive seeking for this communion by some of our contemporaries.

These topics—spiritual ecology, land-based spirituality, and religious culture of place—are the subject of another book that I have not even really started writing yet, though I’ve done some workshops on aspects of it. I’m not sure whether this blog is the place to work this out. My blog entries are already way too long to work well as blog entries. But I think I will touch on a couple of things experimentally.

Christian Earth Stewardship—A Dead End

May 7, 2016 § 7 Comments

From 1990 to 1996 or so, I followed my initial leading to write a book synthesizing the work of Christian earth stewardship theologians. Reading it now after decades have passed, I am astonished at how thoroughly I internalized the Christian worldview to which I had been so hostile for so long and how comfortable I became speaking with a Christian voice. Reading it now pulls be back into that head space and reminds me how—joyful, really—it was for me to be there then.

I read those theologians, I followed the trails into Scripture that they had discovered and the trails that I found on my own, and I read some of their critics. And the more I read and thought while doing this research and this writing, the more I came to feel that Christian earth stewardship led to a dead end. I became a critic myself. Over time, the book became both a synthesis and a critique. And that critique inevitably became not just a critique of the Christian approach to earthcare, but of the Christian worldview itself. Again, I was the critic.

I had been a critic before; I had started out that way. But that earlier critique was shallow, ignorant, and hostile. Now I was inside. Now I felt I understood the assumptions behind the work and I had developed—or rather recovered—a profound love for the foundation, for the Bible, the love I had known as a pious Christian teenager. Now I wanted to speak to the tradition from the tradition about its own strengths and shortcomings and what I saw as its full potential.

In the book, I added chapters on Strengths and Weaknesses and on Assumptions, and I wrote detailed critiques of each of the Ten Principles of Christian Earth Stewardship. I suppose I will publish these here at some point. Strengths and Weaknesses is ready now, so I’ll publish that one, at least.

But I had lost the passion I had started with. I no longer believed in the direction I was going. First, just as an observation, earth stewardship was a demonstrable failure. More than a generation had passed and the church still had not caught on—hardly at all. Lots of good theology and still no action. Relentlessly, I asked myself why.

I see lots of reasons, but the three that loomed largest for me were, first, that the foundational Christian paradigm of sin, salvation through faith in Christ, and deferred judgment simply crowded destruction of creation onto an already long list of more compelling, sexier sins without providing any real accountability here and now, in this world and time.

Second, that the sins of destruction were mostly collective sins, not individual. The basic unit of ecological action (or non-action) is the household, not the individual, not even the individual as consumer. As individuals, we are virtually powerless to change our civilization’s ways. This allows denial and encourages apathy.

As “household” I included, besides family households, businesses, governments, churches, nonprofits, and other corporate entities—any entity that produced, consumed, and exchanged using a system of its own governance. And then there was the infrastructure—the electrical grid, roads and railroads, the internet—and corporate capitalism itself as a system of production, consumption, and exchange—structures of civilization that were not even really under the governance of even the largest “households”. An individual corporation, for instance, could decide to go green, but they would still have to use FedEx and computers and the rest.

Meanwhile, Christianity had atomized the sin and judgment and salvation paradigm to the individual as the locus of action, judgment, and reward or punishment. Jesus had started it, to a certain extent, but Paul finished it when he said, “In Christ there is no Jew or Gentile”. The people of Israel were no longer actors to be held accountable as a people under covenant, as they had been in the Jewish tradition for almost two thousand years up to that time. Thus Christian earth stewardship had no structures for meaningful accountability in the real world in real time, unless it chose to recover the ancient meanings and structures of covenant, beyond the rhetoric of the principle of covenant that they had articulated—but only as principle, not as concrete, practical plans for changing how we make ecological decisions as corporate households under God’s guidance and God’s judging eye.

The third main problem was that earth stewardship did not come organically out of the gospel of Jesus. Jesus himself has basically nothing to say about care of the earth. Oh, he does have a couple of stewardship parables, but they are really about the kingdom of God, and especially about money, not earthcare. And yes, he uses land-based and agricultural metaphors all the time. But again, they are about the kingdom of God.

It was telling that the earth stewardship theologians don’t rely on Jesus. They are quoting Hebrew Scripture almost exclusively, plus the “cosmic Christ” passages of Paul. Jesus has basically nothing to say about earthcare.

I came to believe that, if the message of earthcare did not come directly and organically out of the gospel of Jesus, Christians were not going to pay much attention; and they weren’t. If Jesus doesn’t talk about it, why should we?

So I dropped the project before really finishing the book. I told myself that I would now study the gospel of Jesus on its own terms and if I found something, I would follow it, but if I didn’t, I would lay the project down.

And so I started over. I spent years studying the gospels, trying not to force some revelation, but to read them in the spirit in which they were written, waiting to see what G*d would reveal, following the openings that G*d gifted me with. I did not find an earthcare message in Jesus’ gospel; it’s just not there.

But I found something else—two things, really. And they ignited a new fire that has yet to burn out. Not even close. That is for another post.

Ten Principles of Christian Earth Stewardship

April 24, 2016 § 5 Comments

Christian theologians began addressing the destruction of creation in a serious way after Rachel Carson published her landmark book Silent Spring in 1960. For my first book on earthcare, I read a lot of these books and began synthesizing the main common themes. I found ten such themes.

The first several principles define God’s relation to creation as its Creator. Principle four—the central principle of Christian earth stewardship—defines the human’s proper relation to creation. The rest of the principles define the human’s proper relation to God vis a vis creation. Together these principles define a covenantal triangle, a three-way set of mutual promises and obligations, though these Christian theologians mostly ignore God’s side of the covenant and focus only on ours.

Here are the ten themes or core ideas I found in this literature:

  1. “The earth is the Lords”: God is the sovereign proprietor of creation—not humans. (Ps. 24:1)
  2. “Behold, it was utterly good”: God’s creation is inherently good.n (Gen 2:4)
  3. “The heavens are telling the glory of God”: The creation glorifies God; therefore so should we, especially in our earth stewardship. (Ps. 19:1)
  4. “Have dominion . . . “: We are given dominion over creation, but only in trust as stewards. (Gen 1:28)
  5. “A little lower than God”: Among the creatures, we humans enjoy the privilege of God’s special favor. (Ps 8)
  6. “Because they worshiped the creature rather than the creator”: We worship the transcendent Creator, not the creation. (Rom 1:25)
  7. “I am establishing my covenant with you”: Covenant is the rightful context for our earth stewardship. (Gen 9:8)
  8. “Open your hand to the poor”: Responsible earth stewardship calls for social justice. (Deut 15:11)
  9. “The time has come . . . for destroying those who destroy the earth”: We are called to responsible earth stewardship; harming creation is a sin.
  10. “The creation waits with eager longing”: Salvation in Christ offers the prophetic promise of a new covenant with creation. (Rom 8:19)

Writers supported these principles with biblical proof texts. Soon I will provide a document with the passages I found either in my reading or in my own research. I reviewed it briefly and saw some problems with it; I haven’t looked at it in a while.

A lot of these Bible passages don’t really work very well, in my opinion. A lot of the time, you must argue from inference and stretch the meaning pretty thin, at that. The most glaring case are those supporting the idea that destroying creation is a sin. This is the key claim of Christian earth stewardship, and yet nowhere in the Bible does it say this outright.

All Christian theology must work within the basic framework of its sin-salvation paradigm, in which the basic human problem, not just spiritually, but in all human spheres, is sin, and the irreplaceable solution is salvation in Christ. So Christian earth stewardship theologians must add bad earthcare to the already long list of sins, a list that is dominated by things that have been on the list for millennia and have been more clearly defined in the Bible.

But I am getting to my critique. For, after writing most of this book, I came to the depressing conclusion that the book led to a dead end, that Christian earth stewardship was itself a dead end, and that some new approach was required. I felt I had to start over, after years of research and writing.

Quaker Earthcare Testimony—An Opening

April 23, 2016 § 1 Comment

From opening to leading to ministry

In 1990, Buffalo Meeting asked New York Yearly Meeting’s Friends in Unity with Nature task group to bring them a program for the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, which was still celebrated on Sundays then. NYYM’s FUN had been established by the little group that heard the word from Marshall Massey’s address to the FGC Gathering several years before.

A f/Friend and I went to Buffalo, and I had my notes all ready. But while praying over them the night before, I had an opening. I would later find the opening articulated by Matthew Fox in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, so I know the basic ideas were in the air, but to me it came as a thunderbolt, a new revelation. The opening was this:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (John 1:1-3)

If the Christ was the Word, the Logos, the organizing principle and order of creation, then to destroy creation was to re-crucify Christ.

Now I knew the Bible pretty well and immediately, meaning began branching out from this white hot source point, leaving trails like fuses to other Bible passages and new ideas. I was on fire. The next morning I shared this stuff with the meeting, receiving a cool reception. I don’t think they were expecting a Scripture-based sermon.

Well, neither was I. I had spent the last couple of decades bashing the Bible and being openly hostile to Christians and their ideas. But here I was quoting the Bible and sharing what was obviously a Christian message.

Over the next few weeks, the ideas just kept coming. The fire within me just got more intense. It became clear that I was led to write a book, a book of biblical earthcare theology.

Because this was such a cross to my will, I asked my meeting for a support committee. I was afraid that my hostility toward the Bible and toward Christianity would interfere with the truth I was seeking. I didn’t get the support I wanted and that is another story. But I found I had to go on without that support anyway. Soon I was applying to be a resident student at Pendle Hill, intending to start my research and my writing there. I was at Pendle Hill for two terms, coincident with the first gulf war in 1991.

I continued my research for several years, studying the Bible intensely and also reading Christian earth stewardship theology. In 1995, I went to Earlham School of Religion under the Patrick D. Henry Scholarship for Christian Writers and began writing in earnest. The result was How Long Will the Land Mourn: A Synthesis and Critique of Christian Earth Stewardship. The title comes from my favorite Bible passage on earthcare:

How long will the land mourn,

and the grass of every field wither?

For the wickedness of those who live in it

the animals and the birds are swept away,

and because people said,

“He does not see what we do.”

In the next post: the Ten Principles of Christian Earth Stewardship, the first fruits of this leading.

The Foundation of our “Testimonies”

April 21, 2016 § 8 Comments

You hear Friends say sometimes that our testimonies are founded on the belief that there is that of God in everyone—that, as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice puts it, “We believe there is that of God in every person, and thus we believe in human equality before God” (p. 75). But this is untrue in several ways—historically, theologically, and psycho-spiritually.

First, anti-historically, if you will, Friends have only meant what we seem to mean by the phrase “that of God in everyone” since sometime around 1900 when Rufus Jones gave the phrase its current “neoplatonic” twist.

By “neoplatonic” I mean the idea that we each possess a divine spark, a shard of the divine, which serves as our vehicle for mystical experience of the greater Divine, an idea that had its roots in Plato’s philosophy and was subsequently developed by Plotinus (204-270 CE) and later neoplatonist philosophers. Rufus Jones found in this idea a key to religious experience in general and to Quakerism in particular, and he was, I believe, the first to apply the idea to Fox’s phrase “that of God in everyone”.

Meanwhile, this is not at all what George Fox had in mind when he used the phrase “that of God in everyone”. For him, “that of God” in a person was the work that Christ was doing in them to save, transform, and sanctify them. Fox used the phrase almost exclusively in his pastoral writings, not in his doctrinal writings, including in the passage that everyone quotes as their source for the phrase. He is saying there that if you do your own inner work then you will be able to answer the work Christ is doing in others with integrity because you’ve been there yourself.

So much for the anti-historical use of “that of God” as foundation for the testimonies. Historically speaking, our testimonies derive from two sources, an outward and an inward.

Outwardly, they derive from early Friends’ distinctive reading of scripture. Sandra Cronk’s pamphlet Peace be with You: A Study of the Spiritual Basis of the Friends Peace Testimony lays this out for the peace testimony in wonderful detail. The “testimony of equality” has its  roots, I believe, in our refusal to give hat honor, which arose, I believe, from early Friends’ distinctive reading of a line from the book of Acts, chapter 10 verses 34 and 35:

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.

This Friends understood to mean that God judges all people equally regardless of their social station. Peter is speaking to the household of Cornelius, a centurion who had sent for him because of a vision. Cornelius had prostrated himself when Peter arrived and Peter “took him up, saying, “Stand up. I myself am also a man.” Peter then went on to point out that “it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath showed me that I should not call any man common or unclean”.

But the deeper source for the testimonies is inward. For early Friends, the testimonies arose from within. Friends experienced the “testimonies”, not as outward moral principles to which we should adhere, or even as ideas they got from the Bible, but inwardly as the moral force of the Light of Christ within them, which brought them into that “Life which taketh away the occasion of all wars”, as Fox said of what we now call the peace testimony. So the first-order source of our testimonies was the Light, and the second-order source was scripture, which confirmed the divine truth that had come to Friends first as inward revelation.

And so it is with us today. Speaking “psycho-spiritually”, we do not turn away from violence and turn toward peace because we believe in that of God in others—or because we believe in any outward principle or notion at all—but because “that of God” within us—the Light—turns us away from violence and toward peace. We know the truth of the “peace testimony” or any testimony because the Light has revealed it to us inwardly, just as it did for early Friends. . . . In theory, at least.

So the belief in that of God in everyone has nothing to do with the traditional Quaker testimonies. . . . Except that now it does, by virtue of having been embedded that way in the religious worldview of an awful lot of Friends. Never mind that this is a misreading of the phrase. Never mind that this usage tends to point us outward toward a theological notion, rather than inward toward the source of Truth. Never mind that it both distorts and forgets our history. Lots of Friends now believe that there is that of God in everyone. And for that matter, lots of Friends believe that this idea is the foundation of our testimonies, even if they are wrong about that—or are they?

Maybe this idea of a neoplatonic, or neo-Gnostic “that of God” within us is new Light. Maybe this idea is a true revelation, manifesting through Friend Jones initially, and now speaking to that of God within many of us today. Maybe there is a “that of God” in each of us. The idea’s been around for a hundred years, after all; it’s stood the test of time, if not the test of rigorous philosophical/religious scholarship, careful study of our tradition, or thoughtful historical research.

The idea doesn’t work for me, I must say. I am too much of an empiricist and existentialist. I have not experienced that of God in other people in any way that would allow me to make such a sweeping and profound generalization about human/divine nature. I have experienced the Light within myself, yes, but not a “divine spark” in myself or in others.

I have experienced something truly extraordinary and transcendental both in myself and in others, however. The leap for me is calling that “something” divine, calling it that of God. This something I have experienced seems blessedly human to me, even if it is transcendental in nature. Maybe some Friends feel that anything transcendental in the human should be considered divine.

Well—let’s say for matters of discussion that there is, in fact, “that of God” in everyone, whatever that means (another concern of mine: we use the phrase all the time but have never collectively explained to ourselves in any meaningful terms what we mean by it).

Nevertheless, “that of God” in everyone is NOT the foundation of any of our testimonies. It is NOT where our testimonies come from, either historically or experientially. We could add it to our story about the testimonies with integrity only if we clarify its role: it is a theological speculation about the nature of the human and of the human’s relationship to the divine that many of us find compelling. But it remains a “notion”, a theological idea, until we ourselves have experienced it. And it has no proper place in Quaker “doctrine”—what we tell people about ourselves—until the community comes to unity collectively around the experience—the experience, not the idea—as divine truth.

The Politics of Passion Week—More Afterthoughts about the Resurrection

March 29, 2016 § 3 Comments

Jesus appeared to his friends and followers ten different times after his death, if you count all the accounts in all four gospels and then adjust for duplicates (both Mark and Luke recount an appearance to two men walking on the road; both Mark and John recount an appearance to Mary Magdalene alone at the tomb). Mark 16:14, Luke 24:36, and John 20:19-23 might all be the same event, as well, since Jesus appears to the disciples in each story while they are eating and they all include references to doubting the resurrection; but I’m treating them as separate events. All of the accounts in Mark are somewhat suspect because the original gospel breaks off abruptly before any of the resurrection accounts; all of chapter 16 was added later and most manuscripts don’t have verses nine to the end, which includes all the appearances.

In fact, doubt, ambivalence, and ambiguity color most of the stories of resurrection appearances.

In three of the ten, the people to whom Jesus appears do not recognize him until something happens to open their eyes. These include appearances to the two men on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-32); to the disciples, right after being told by these same fellows from Emmaus about their encounter (and these two are apparently actually there in the room; Lk 24:36-49); and to several disciples while fishing on the Sea of Galilee (Jn 21:1-14).

One of the appearances—to Mary Magdalene at the tomb—receives conflicting accounts. In Mark (16:9), Mary recognizes Jesus. In John (20:14), she doesn’t, at least not right away.

Four of the accounts include some reference to a problem with recognizing Jesus or believing in his resurrection. In Matthew 28:16ff, Jesus appears to the Eleven on a mountain in Galilee, “but some doubted.” In Mark 16:14, Jesus appears to the Eleven and rebukes them “for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe.” In the two appearances to the disciples with and without doubting Thomas in John 20:19-29, the people present at the moment do not doubt, but the stories are all about the doubter Thomas. Also, weirdly, seven of these men, including Simon and Thomas, fail to recognize Jesus again in the story of the appearance to the fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, in a passage that follows directly after the story of Thomas feeling Jesus’ wounds and believing. So they doubt—or at least Thomas doubts; then they are convinced; but then sometime later, they have lost their belief again, including Thomas. That’s a lot of pretty persistent doubt.

In only two of the accounts do Jesus’ followers recognize him right away, with no reservations or complications, when he appears to them: the account of the women at the tomb in Matthew 28:1-10, and the account of the appearance to Simon, in a very brief, offhand notice with no elaboration, in Luke 24:34.

The point is that Jesus’ followers needed to be coaxed into believing that he was still alive in some form, still a force in their lives in some way, however ambiguous that relationship seemed to be. To believe that the vision Jesus had given them of a reign of God that would transform their outer and inner lives was still alive and viable, they needed some time. They needed repetition. And they needed teaching.

Even people who were intimates of Jesus when he was in the flesh had to be coached—they had to be taught, all over again, over and over again, what the kingdom of God meant, now that the Teacher was no longer with them in the flesh.

The story of the two men on the road to Emmaus is instructive in this regard. After hours of conversation with their teacher, in which they discuss the very events that led to his death, they only recognize Jesus after he has broken bread with them. That is, after they have shared the common meal that the Last Supper epitomized and perhaps inaugurated, and which was apparently the central daily-bread event in Jesus’ movement.

The teaching dimension of this meal comes clear in its description in Acts (2:42-47):

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.  Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

When gathered together for the daily common meal, the apostles taught; they distributed food and money to the poor; they ate; and they prayed. Food and teaching and religious experience and radical economics were all almost literally the same thing.

The disciples ate together, they studied together, they shared all they had, and they had profound religious experiences, all of which were so attractive that more and more people joined them. And this teaching/preaching/sharing all involved eating—as in the Last Supper.

Give us this day our daily bread. Feed my sheep. You shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him? This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.

I believe that the Sermon on the Mount and the feeding of the 5000 on the mountain were the same event; in fact, the miraculous feeding may have been the miraculous teaching—to share.

At some point in the future, I want to start a series on spiritual food—on the way Christian scripture conflates feeding and teaching, eating and learning, sharing and understanding. For now, I close this series on the Politics of Passion Week with this conclusion about the politics of resurrection:

When Jesus’ followers were finally convinced that he continued to live and work among them and within them (and it took some time and some teaching), his presence inspired them to continue the radical remake the social and economic structures of their community along egalitarian and communitarian lines. This took discipline. It took study, practice, repetition, example. Folks would lose the message, and then be brought brought back again. This is what all that doubting signifies—how hard the work of believing in the kingdom was when its prophet had been murdered. But all that praying and teaching and feeding paid off. It filled them with such awe and joy that other people flocked to their message.

The Politics of Passion Week—Afterthoughts: Gethsemane

March 28, 2016 § 1 Comment

In the post for Friday, the day of the arrest, I asked the question: what was Jesus really praying for in the garden of Gethsemane? On the surface, it looks like he was just praying to be delivered from the terrible fate he saw coming, a reasonable—and quite human—hope.  But suppose God had answered his prayer with a ‘yes’? What would have happened then? What alternative outcome was Jesus praying for?

It was the week of Passover, the festival dedicated to remembering when God delivered his people from slavery under an imperial oppressor with the right arm of his military power. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of pilgrims were in Jerusalem for the festival. Riots, and even the occasional popular uprising, occurred so often during the Passover festival, that every year Rome moved its Syrian legion into bivouac outside the city to help the legion that was permanently posted in the city itself in order to help with crowd control.

Jesus started the week declaring God’s kingship over his people and he’s focused on the radical inbreaking of divine sovereignty through the ensuing days. He’s prophesied the destruction of the temple. And if we accept the structure of the gospels as representing more or less the real chronology of events, Jesus has delivered a long sermon prophesying the last days.

It looks like Jesus was expecting the fulfillment of the kingdom he has been preaching in some kind of visitation from the Father and a cataclysmic overthrow of the existing order. Perhaps he looked forward to the fulfillment of the prophecy from Zechariah that he had enacted at the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday:

See, our king comes riding to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. . . I will rouse your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece, and make you like a warrior’s sword. Then the Lord will appear over them; his arrow will flash like lightning . . . The Lord their God will save them on that day as the flock of his people. (Zech 9:9-17)

Perhaps he was expecting the fulfillment of other prophecies, as well. That he was praying on the slopes of the Mount of Olives tends to reinforce this idea, for the Mount of Olives figures prominently in Jesus’ own land-based spirituality. The Mount of Olives had been named by the prophets Zechariah and Ezekiel as a place associated with the Father’s triumphant return to Jerusalem to save his people.

The glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it. (Ezekiel 11:23; part of the famous vision of the ‘wheel within a wheel’, in which the presence of God leaves the temple in Jerusalem and comes to dwell with the exiles in Babylon, stopping at the Mount of Olives on the way.)

Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as when he fights on a day of battle. On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east. . . And the Lord shall become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be one and his name one. . . And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord on that day. (Zechariah 14:3-9, 21) (Notice the echo of the prophecy from Jeremiah about making the temple a “den of thieves” quoted by Jesus when he exorcised the moneychangers.)

Jesus may have been praying on the Mount of Olives because that’s the last place God visited in Israel before leaving the temple, and because Mount Olivet was the place to which he had promised to return in a triumphal manifestation of power against Israel’s enemies. Perhaps Jesus also believed, as the Essenes did, that God had never actually returned to the temple since the Exile, because the temple had never been properly cleansed. That only now was God to finally return to his people.

Except . . .  the Father didn’t return that night. Thus Jesus was left bereft? Was this why he was so cross with James and John and Peter for “falling asleep” in their prayer for “thy kingdom come”, after they had tested so true at the Transfiguration? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he would cry from the cross.

The Politics of Passion Week—The Politics of Resurrection

March 27, 2016 § 2 Comments

Sunday

The most radical thing about the scene at the empty tomb and the two resurrection appearances that took place there (in Matthew and John) is that the first witnesses of the resurrection were women. This in a society in which women could not appear in court as witnesses. As you might then expect, the men in the story don’t believe their testimony.

For a most thorough and enlightening discussion of women’s place among the earliest followers of Jesus, I highly recommend Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.

In regard to gender relations, Jesus seems to have gone quite far in placing the last first. Over and over again, it is women who seem to really know who Jesus is, while the male disciples are consistently obtuse. One thinks of Martha’s anointing in John 12, the woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her hair in Luke 7, and the little group who traveled with him and the twelve in the very early days, who provided them all with financial support (Luke 8:1-4).

In many cases, these women were doubly marginalized by some other condition, either poverty or spirit possession. Luke says these female ‘angel investors’ were “women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases.” See Stevan L. Davies’s Jesus the Healer for a fascinating discussion, building on the work of Franz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), of spirit possession as a strategy of survival for women in abusive family situations and how Jesus may have rescued Mary Magdalene and the others from such relationships and thus “cured’ them of spirit possession.

The other significant political aspect of the crucifixion and resurrection is the collapse of whatever overtly political expectations Jesus may have had for the kingdom of God. We tend to take the subsequent spiritualization of the kingdom of God for granted, but it’s not clear that Jesus had no overtly political ambitions at all. The evangelists are at pains to put a spiritualizing spin on Jesus’ claims for the kingdom during the trial and elsewhere. This is especially true for Luke and John. But the gospels were written a generation after Jesus death, after a disastrous war with Rome, and under active if sporadic imperial persecution and local pogroms. In the second half of the first century, if you were put on trial yourself, you were simply conforming to reality if you claimed that you only sought a spiritual kingdom.

But if Jesus was not concerned with the actual overthrow of Roman rule and the replacement of the empire’s puppets in Jerusalem, and with making the first last and the last first, what was the little apocalyptic sermon in Mark 13 and the other gospels all about? Why stage these provocative demonstrations at the city gate and inside the temple precincts? Why prophecy the utter destruction of the temple? Why buy two swords?

I believe it all hinges on what Jesus was praying for in Gethsemane. When we read “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me”, we tend to think Jesus saw the torture and death that awaited him and felt fear; but what if the Father had answered with a ‘yes’? Jesus isn’t tortured and crucified. But what happens instead? What was Jesus really praying for?

We’ll return to this question in some afterthoughts later this week. The fact is that the answer was no. And with Jesus’ death, his hopes for some other outcome died, as well. Whatever political dimension that outcome might have had foundered and the disciples were left to figure out: what now? That took them awhile.

They did not even recognize right away that the dream they had been pursuing and the figure who had led them were still alive. Several of the first witnesses of the resurrection do not even recognize Jesus when they see him. People like Mary, who had been his intimate for years, look straight at him and do not recognize him. Two fellows travel on the road to Emmaus for hours discussing the fateful events that have just taken place with the very man himself and don’t recognize him until they sit down to eat. What’s with that? Another thing we’ll discuss in the afterthoughts.

The Politics of Passion Week—Torturing the Insurrectionist

March 26, 2016 § 3 Comments

Friday postscript—Am I leading a rebellion?

In doing some research for the Saturday post, I reread the arrest scene in my NIV translation, which has great research tools but whose translation I  do not like sometimes. In the NIV however, Jesus challenges the arresting party in all the gospels by saying, “Am I leading a rebellion?”, rather than “Am I a bandit?” I checked my Anchor Bible commentaries and only the one for Luke addresses the wording, saying that the word lestis can mean insuurectionist, the commentator’s word, and cites none other than Josephus, who was one of the leaders of the insurrection in 65, leading he fighting in Galilee, until he flipped and went over to the Romans.

Saturday

Jesus is arguably the most famous person to be tortured to death as an insurrectionist by an occupying imperial army.

Crucifixion is execution by stress position. Though the victim was often nailed to the cross, as Jesus was, you did not normally die of these wounds, and the victim often was only hung on the cross with rope. You died gradually of asphyxiation from the position in which you hung, sometimes complicated by shock and dehydration, depending on how badly you had been treated while in custody.

Why did the Romans torture Jesus? Why did George W. Bush and Dick Cheney torture insurrectionists at Abu Ghraib and in the CIA’s secret ‘black sites’?

Because dehumanizing the enemy is the sine qua non for all warfare. Because of ideology, which inevitably claims that a little evil is justified in order to protect a greater good. Because of the naked rush of power that the powerful feel when exercising their power over others. Because terror teaches other enemies of the state a lesson, it “sends a message”. Because of breakdowns in morality, reason, character, and political-judicial justice. But also because empires torture dissidents to get information.

“Hail, King of the Jews,” mocked the soldiers as they stripped Jesus, crowned him with thorns and beat him with a staff (the symbol of royal military authority in ancient Israel—“thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”)—no doubt a reference to his triumphal coronation procession a week earlier. “He saved others but he can’t save himself!” Go ahead, save yourself. TELL US WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE. Especially that fellow with the sword.

George W. Bush believes, presumably, that the torture of Jesus was necessary to save his (George’s) immortal soul. George W. Bush believes, apparently, that torturing insurrectionists in Iraq was necessary to save American lives. For George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Jack Bauer, and many Americans, torture has legitimate salvific power. Never mind that the torturer assumes the place of the Romans who murdered their God.

Meanwhile, while the torturers are playing with Jesus, the fellow with the sword is skulking around in their very midst. Peter, wanted by the police for insurrection, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, and associating with a known terrorist, has infiltrated the police compound and hides under their very noses. Thrice, people think they recognize him, and yet he does not run away. Instead he denies their accusations and stays.

Why? What is he doing there? The only answer that makes any sense is that he’s looking for a way to spring his leader from jail, to save him from a terrible death. Does that not sound like the Peter who launched himself into the water without thinking? Is that not about the bravest thing you can imagine him doing? Is it not a miracle that he escaped alive?

A generation later, when confession of faith and martyrdom were becoming idealized and even fetishized, Peter looks like a coward. But in the moment, he was a hero with extraordinary courage, resourcefulness, and loyalty.

He couldn’t save Jesus, but Jesus did save him. Jesus never cracked. He never told his torturers who his confederates were. He took the rap for them all. Greater love hath no one than that he give up his life for his friends.

His followers did, apparently, try one mass demonstration aimed at getting Jesus released. At least that’s how I read the weird and impossible account of Pilate and Barabbas (informed again by the work of Hyam Maccoby). First, the Pilate of Christian Scripture is a wimp, a pathetic if not quite sympathetic character. But the real Pontius Pilate was so vicious and oppressive that the emperor had him removed from office! And we have no record of any tradition of releasing prisoners (especially one like Barabbas, convicted also, of insurrection) on Passover (a holiday dedicated to revolution against empire), a practice that is unthinkable as official Roman imperial policy. So a crowd may have demanded that the authorities release Barabbas, but we can be pretty sure it never happened.

But who was Barabbas? Let’s look at his name. His name is not Barabbas, it is bar Abbas. In Aramaic, Jesus’ native tongue and the universal Semitic language of the time, bar Abbas means son of the Father, a strange redundancy. Father—as in “Our Abbas who art in heaven.”

“Son of the Father” is redundant and meaningless on its own. But it is the obvious appellation for the man whose Father said at his baptism, “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.” For the man who taught the Lord’s Prayer.

And it is perfectly reasonable to think that a crowd might gather to demand Jesus’ release, calling out the epithet by which he had become known: “Give us bar Abbas!” Well, it didn’t work. They crucify insurrectionists, don’t they.

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