Liberal Quakerism, Part 2—Some Definitions
April 4, 2013 § 2 Comments
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.
Toward a Liberal Quaker theology—A Series
April 1, 2013 § 5 Comments
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.
Eco-Sin Series: Recovering a Collective Understanding of Sin
March 7, 2013 § 10 Comments
In this post I want to talk about how the sin-salvation paradigm, with its focus on the individual, misses the basic reality of ecological crisis, and how we need a new, collective understanding of sin against ecosystems.
With its moral lens, Christianity traditionally focuses almost exclusively on the individual, on individual sin and salvation. The sins it cares about the most are the sins that individuals commit. Think of the ten commandments and the moral teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and the sins that Paul catalogs in his letters.
Thus the solutions to the problem of individual sin also focus on the individual: preaching and evangelism, confession, and the sacraments. These vehicles for forgiveness are all about the individual.
By contrast, the real “sinners” in the ecological sphere are not individuals primarily. Oh, I suppose we might be held accountable by the Creator for neglecting our recycling, or destroying a lot of trees so we can read just three sections of the Sunday New York Times, or working on a boat that is overfishing the blue fin tuna, or lobbying against the signing of the Kyoto Accords. But the real culprits are collective entities—at the smallest and simplest end of the scale, domestic households; but much more importantly, corporations (and, yes, nonprofits, congregations, denominations), communities, nations, societies, and civilizations, plus the facilities, infrastructures, and the other systems, economic, social, and political, that give these collective entities bodies, as it were—hands and feet, eyes and ears, mouths and tools with which to act in the world and have an impact on our ecosystems.
A religious ideology that seeks to guide or even control only individual human behavior fails almost utterly to address these more important sources of our problems, which are collective. It fails to deal with collective sin.
Effective faith-based, Spirit-led earthcare witness in a Christian milieu like ours needs to recover the reality of collective sin.
We have Paul (as usual) and, to a lesser extent, Jesus himself to blame for this.
One of the under-recognized innovations in Jesus’ religious thinking is his focus on individual sin. We take this for granted now, but all the other prophets and the whole religious framework of redemption and salvation in ancient Judaism had focused primarily on collective sin—Israel sinned and Israel would be punished. Hence the destruction of the ten tribes by Assyria and the Exile of the remaining two tribes in Babylon, just to name the two main biblical examples. Individuals sinned, of course, but the focus of the prophets was on the collective.
Hear the word of Yahweh: Stand up, plead your case before the mountains and let the hills hear your voice. Hear, O mountains the indictment of Yahweh, listen, you everlasting foundations of the earth, for Yahweh has a case against his people, he is lodging a charge against Israel. (Micah 6:1-2, 13-14)
This began to change somewhat around the time of the Maccabean war, roughly 165 BCE, with the emergence of the Pharisee and Essene movements, though we begin to see hints of the shift even in Ezra, maybe 450 BCE. But Jesus brought this new emphasis to a new level.
The stories told by and of Jesus in Christian scripture are unique in Hebrew tradition in their personal poignancy, intimacy, and relevance. His encounters with real people are unlike anything in the earlier prophets of Israel. But he did not altogether abandon ancient Israel’s self-identity as a tribal, corporate entity. He talked about leaving the flock to find the one lost sheep, yes, but the sheep was still lost without the flock. So Jesus extended the collective understanding of sin, judgment, and redemption to include the individual, without wholly abandoning the sense of Israel’s collective identity and culpability.
Then along came Paul. Paul did utterly abandon his tradition’s collective understanding of sin. He focused exclusively on the individual. His Gentile converts had no connection to the collective identity of Israel and no tribal consciousness of that sort at all. In this, we are their descendants and, as in so many other areas, our religion has been impoverished by the Pauline legacy as a result.
We need to recover the kind of collective understanding of sin that Micah had.
But what if we did recover a collective understanding of sin? How would we bring the prophetic case of an earthcaring God to the collective entities of our own time? To the corporations that would release the vast stores of carbon in the tar sands and gas shale deposits of North America, for instance? With what forms of judgment could we threaten them?
For this is another weakness of the sin-salvation paradigm, that it has no concrete, real-time, real-world consequences to raise up as divine judgment. Almost all we have to work with is hell. Individuals can go to hell. But can a corporation go to hell? And even hell is not a realistic deterrent, unless the threat is reinforced through emotional trauma. Fear of hell can make you depressed, repressed, and neurotic, but it doesn’t seem to stem the tide of sin very effectively. In fact, when people become severely infected with the fear of hell, the trauma tends to make them a problem rather than a solution.
Therefore, just as we need a new collective definition of sin, so we also need a new formula for collective judgment. We need a new understanding of collective judgment because, unfortunately, we already have an old one and it is a total disaster—literally. I am referring to eschatology, the theology of the Endtimes—the belief that God will destroy all of creation as one of God’s last saving acts. Besides being a horrific religious ideology, the idea is virtually an oxymoron.
Moreover, the collective actor in the Endtimes is all of humanity, as it was in the story of the Flood. And the punishment is the annihilation of the very thing we earthcare witnesses are trying to save, the earth and all its creatures. I will return to this theme in a later post. Here, suffice it to say that “humanity” may be destroying creation all on its own, but this is a less than worthless way to think about changing human ecological behavior.
So the sin-salvation paradigm fails us at both ends of the spectrum of ecological action. The individual is too small an actor in ecological terms and “humanity” is too meaninglessly large an actor to talk about without becoming silly.
The real actors, the real locus of our problems, lie in between. The real focus of our prophetic witness should be the corporations and other collective entities with power to effect policy and impact ecosystems on a massive scale. It is they who sin. It is they whom we should condemn with our prophecy. It is they who should suffer judgment.
With corporations, this is theoretically not so hard. We have some legal tools to work with. Since incorporation confers legal personhood on a collective of humans, let’s treat corporations the way we do individual criminals (although, in fact, we should not be doing many of the things we do to accuse and punish individual humans, including especially capital punishment). I say let’s treat corporations like the “persons” they claim legally to be. Let’s define capital crimes for corporations and then exercise capital punishment as one of our options. Let’s start executing companies for crimes against humanity.
(Of course, executing a company will hurt innocent people, so we will need another set of laws that protect them, something along the lines of the laws the FDIC uses to dismantle a failed bank. The whole thing will get complicated, I admit. My point is to begin thinking in new ways about corporate accountability in a religious framework.)
Of course, not all crimes are capital crimes. We need less extreme measures, too. These could include more avenues for criminalizing the behavior of the executives who execute corporate crimes against the ecosystems their organizations are destroying.
And there are other things we might try. For example, I would favor requiring all executives above a certain level in charge of public safety and operations of nuclear power plants to live next door and downwind of their plant. I would require mining executives to get their water from the groundwater near their own mine’s tailings piles, waste disposal ponds, and extraction sites. You get the idea.
In the meantime (and of course, that “meantime” will probably approach eternity as a limit), religious communities that still ascribe to sin as a key element in their theology should take a new look at how they define sin and how they will respond to it, how they will raise a new kind of prophetic voice against our collective sinners.
If we’re going to believe in sin—in ecological sin—let’s get real about it. And let’s do it where it matters, in the sphere of collective human activity.
. . . Of course, many Liberal Friends do not “ascribe to sin as a key element in their theology”. But that’s another post.
Sin — A Series on Sin and Spirit-led Earthcare Witness
March 6, 2013 § 9 Comments
Introduction to the series
In the early 1980s, I was active in the bioregional movement, a movement that sought to make deep ecology the foundation of all human systems, believing that you should design, manage, and live as though the place you lived in mattered, and that bioregions* had no right to exceed their carrying capacities or to colonize other bioregions to sustain themselves.
The spiritual godfather of the movement was Thomas Berry, creator of the New Cosmology, and he lived in New York where I was active. One evening, a bunch of us in the New York City group were having dinner together after going to a lecture and I happened to be sitting next to Thomas. For some reason I said that I didn’t see what the idea of sin had to offer to our work as environmentalists and bioregionalists and he responded quite strongly that no, sin was really important, sin was at the very heart of what we were doing.
This took me by surprise. Berry was a Catholic Passionist priest, so he knew a lot about sin, but he hadn’t mentioned sin even once that I could remember in all the monographs I had read that eventually became his landmark book The Dream of the Earth. (The Church had prohibited him from publishing his ideas and he was still abiding by the silencing at that time, so his graduate students at Fordham had published his essays themselves in the kind of bindings that dissertations often have. There’s no entry for “sin” in the index of The Dream of the Earth.) So I was surprised that he felt so fervently about sin when he hadn’t mentioned it in his writings. I wanted to get into it with him but someone else joined the conversation at that point and it moved off in another direction. I have been thinking about what Thomas Berry said ever since.
In this and future posts, I want to pursue these thoughts. I want to explore the idea of sin in general, but also specifically as regards our earthcare witness.
I still am not comfortable with the idea of sin. Not that I don’t believe in sin. Certainly people sin. And certainly harming creation is a sin. What I have been rejecting is the value of the whole religious ideology for which sin is the linchpin. I call this ideology the sin-salvation paradigm, the belief that sin is the basic human problem (certainly the basic religious problem), that sin incurs divine judgment, and that Christ’s atonement is the (only) salvation from that judgment.
This has been the basic message of the Christian tradition for a couple of millennia and today it still informs the political ideology of powerful people who either don’t see how their religious beliefs should turn them toward earthcare, or it actually turns them against earthcare.
Now, as in the early ’80s, I still resist the idea that sin and the sin-salvation paradigm are useful ideas in the struggle to reverse our ecological downspiral, or that they can help humans, or at least Western society, turn towards ways of thinking and living that foster and embody Spirit-led earthcare. More negatively, I find I often want to struggle against this gospel message as one of our ideological enemies in our attempts to cure Western society of its ecological insanity.
And yet my respect—my love—for Thomas Berry runs so deep that I feel I cannot ignore his perspective. I feel I must be missing something. So I want to explore my resistance and my counter-arguments with my readers, to see what kind of way might open. I know that for many of my readers—and many of my f/Friends—sin and salvation are at the heart of their religious lives and I trust that they will join the conversation. Together let us see what love and truth can do.
So this post has been a brief introduction to a series of posts in which I plan to explore sin and its possible role in Spirit-led earthcare. In the next post, I want to talk about how
the sin-salvation paradigm misses the basic reality of our ecological crises with its focus on individual sin and the individual sinner, rather than on collective sin and collective actors like corporations and communities and societies and the ecological sins that these collective entities commit.
* Bioregions are geographical regions defined by their physical and ecological features, often by the boundaries of watersheds, and also by culture, to the degree that a culture is defined by, or related to, or has impact on, its bioregion. New York City, for instance, has always been defined physically and culturally to a degree by the bays it has turned into harbors and by its relation to the Hudson River. The lower Hudson River valley (some would say all the way up to the falls in Troy, New York, since the Hudson is a tidal river to that point) could be considered a bioregion. Richmond, Indiana, lies in the watershed of the White River—a much smaller bioregion, perhaps too small to be useful in thinking about the human systems it supports. But it would be interesting to break out the maps and take a look.
Taking the Bible Literally
February 6, 2013 § Leave a comment
Micah Bales recently wrote a post on his blog about taking the Bible literally. It’s a great post, as usual with Micah, and it got me thinking again about this topic. I started to comment on his blog and then the response got too long, so I have decided to post it on my blog instead and link to his, in case my readers want to see the original spark that got me going.
First of all, I don’t think that anybody really takes the Bible literally. What they really are doing most of the time is applying to a particular passage the meaning that they have been taught that it has, whatever the passage literally says. To take the Bible literally is, by definition, to not be very thoughtful about the Bible, and I think most people who “take the Bible literally” haven’t really thought much about what it means to take the Bible literally, either.
Because it is literally impossible to take the Bible literally.
For instance, which translation are you taking literally? Reading a translation means that you are not taking literally the original text; you are taking literally somebody else’s interpretation of the original text—and that interpretation is not likely to be a literal interpretation! To really take the Bible literally, you would have to be fluent in biblical Greek and Hebrew.
So you choose a translation—how? Most folks use the one that their community has settled on as the best. I like the NRSV when I can’t get to my Anchor Bible commentaries. But there will be problems no matter which translation you choose.
Take the NIV, for instance. I think it’s likely that the NIV gets taken literally more than any other version because it is a favorite translation among Evangelical Christians. Now the NIV routinely translates “Yahweh” as “the Lord”. Not only does this not “take the Bible literally”, but it also skews the identity of God away from the role of creator that is inherent in the name Yahweh (literally, “I bring into being what I bring into being”, or something along those lines) and toward “the Lord’s” role as a monarchical lord. I am not saying that Yahweh is not a monarch. I am saying that reading the NIV does not give you a “literal” rendering of a sacred text in an instance that has real significance—God’s name. And this is just one among uncountable instances.
Of course, the NIV is not alone in this. Compare any popular translation with one in a good commentary and you can see really big differences between the commentary and the popular translations. And who’s to say that your commentary is correct? One of the reasons I like the Anchor Bible series is that it’s the editors’ policy to include alternative readings for everything, though the translator generally settles on one as their best judgment; but at least you get to see the options and the reasoning behind the translator’s choice.
Similarly, what textual tradition lies behind the version you are taking literally? (Again, the Anchor Series always includes a review of the extant texts, a discussion of the options, and a rationale for the translator’s choices.) For instance, one of the textual traditions for the Book of Acts is hundreds of words longer than the others. (I think there are four or five textual traditions for Acts; I forget the actual number.) Our modern Bibles, I suspect, probably use this longer one because it’s longer and that seems more complete. But which one is truer to Luke’s original work? And—more important—who decided which textual tradition to use in the Bible that’s in your hands? You didn’t decide, and you don’t know anything about the people who did. You are taking literally someone else’s choices about biblical truth.
Then there’s lacunae. The physical manuscripts sometimes have damage that has eliminated words or whole phrases, so translators are forced to fill in these lacunae—these holes—with their best guess, based on context and their reading of the writer’s intent. So sometimes you’re taking literally a text that somebody literally made up, and unless you read a good commentary or a good study Bible, you don’t even know when you’re reading a lacuna.
Furthermore, about a third of the Bible is poetry. Taking poetry literally is almost an oxymoron; nobody thinks that the Lord (literally, Yawheh) is literally my shepherd. The whole of Psalm 23 is an extended metaphor.
So how can you take the Bible literally when there are so many questions and choices to be made regarding what you’re reading? People who say they take the Bible literally aren’t really thinking about what that means. They are just aligning themselves with a given theology.
So what matters, I think, is to read the Bible with spiritual integrity—that is, in the spirit in which it was given forth, as Friends would say. For me, the “spirit in which Scripture was given forth” includes, not just the Holy Spirit that inspired it, but also the spirit that received it—what I would call “the spirit of the times” in which the books of the Bible were written.
An example: “Love the Lord (literally, Yahweh) with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength.” We modern English speakers have inherited our anthropology of body symbology from the Greeks; like them we think of the heart as the home of the emotions. However, Jesus and the writers of the books of the Bible had a Semitic anthropology in which the heart was the home of the will, not the emotions. So “love God with all your heart” meant with all your will, that is, with assiduous study of Torah (or the gospel, in Jesus’ case), and with joyful, complete dedication to following it—not with complete emotional devotion. (Either way, of course, we are not taking “heart” literally here, are we?)
This is not to say, of course, that emotional devotion to God is not important. It’s just not literally what the Bible intended in this passage. Everywhere you turn, the Bible presents this kind of confounding depth. We could delve into what “soul” means to ancient Greek speakers like Matthew and Luke versus the ancient Israelites (the difference is quite significant), and then move on to “strength”, and so on, writing whole long articles about just this one line of Scripture.
My favorite area for this kind of problem is the Beatitudes, which, when you know Torah’s technical covenantal vocabulary well enough, turns out to be all about inheritance law. Furthermore, inheritance law is fundamental to Torah and to the Israelites’ covenant with God in ways that are almost completely unknown to us modern Gentile readers and quite alien, besides, to our modern, market-based (rather than peasant agrarian) cultural context. So we’ve given the Beatitudes spiritualized meanings that have nurtured Gentile believers for centuries, but which miss the original and very concrete intent of Jesus and we are also missing an important aspect of his gospel—how he promised to relieve the suffering of the poor and especially, of those who have lost their inheritance through foreclosure. (See biblemonster, my Bible blog, on the Beatitudes.)
If we assume that God intended something relevant to God’s first readers when these books were first written, then we have to understand the milieu of those writers and their readers. But this is notoriously hard to do with any certainty. Centuries have passed and redactors often have reconfigured the text for their own, later community. Often they themselves no longer understood the original milieu, but they did their best to pass the tradition on in a way that worked for their own readers. Then the text lay static in the canon for several millennia while successive societies of Bible readers went through countless changes until we came along. How much of the spirit of the times has been lost to us? A lot.
The only way to be faithful in our circumstance of distance and ignorance, since we are so far removed from the biblical writers’ own milieu, is to step back from the text a bit and open up to the Spirit that gave it forth. Because what you’re really looking for is not the literal meaning of the text—or even its original intended meaning—but what God wants to say to you.
For I completely accept the power of the Bible as a medium for divine communication. For one thing, the empirical evidence for it is overwhelming. And for another, it’s happened to me. And while I do think that really valuable openings come from understanding the original milieu of the text when you can—whole new layers emerge—you have to stay humble before what you’re reading.
For even if we become serious students of the Bible, so that we can recognize legal terms in the Beatitudes, or whatever, we are still in the same boat, with chance for wind and ignorance for our sail, because the Bible is so big and so deep and so confounding and so old—you can never know enough, and what you think you know could very well be wrong, anyway.
So you have to read the Bible as a spiritual discipline for opening to the Holy Spirit. And reading it literally—well that stands in the way of that Spirit, besides being foolish and impossible.
Funding Quaker Ministry
January 25, 2013 § 8 Comments
A couple of months ago I learned of an idea that I believe is a breakthrough of continuing revelation on a par with the clearness committee. It’s a proposal by Friends Vonn New of Bulls Head-Oswego Meeting in New York Yearly Meeting and Viv Hawkins of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting for funding Quaker ministry through a crowd-sourcing platform modeled on Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects in which creatives publish what amounts to a grant proposal for their project and visitors to the website then pledge whatever support they want. If the project reaches the funding goal set by its creator, then the donors’ credit cards are charged and the creator is off and running.
Vonn and Viv’s idea (I call it QuakeStarter) is to do the same for Quaker ministers. Someone led by the Spirit into some form of service describes on the website what they want to do, documents the discernment they have received so far, and declares the amount and kind of support they need to be faithful to their leading. Friends (and others) can then go to the website and pledge support for the ministry. If the minister’s request for pledges reaches its goal, then the cards get charged and the service is secured.
When this idea takes off, we will undoubtedly discover unexpected issues and see unintended consequences, as is always the case with Quaker ministry. But won’t that be an adventure!
When I learned about this idea, I was in the process of editing an issue of Spark, New York Yearly Meeting’s newsletter, with the theme of Cultivating Gifts in Ministry. I invited them to write an article for Spark and they did. Click here to read “Ministry & Money: A Proposal” on the NYYM website to get a better idea of their goals and rationale.
They dedicate much of the article to rationale—why such a tool is needed. It boils down to the fact that important ministry is languishing because the ministers can’t afford to pursue it. Most of the ministers they mention are young adults. One hears a lot these days about how important it is to encourage young adult Friends, while many of our institutions are pulling back on the funding that supports this sort of work. Viv and Vonn’s idea is a creative way to do something that we all agree is important independently of the failing resources of our established institutions.
Catch-22: Viv and Vonn need support themselves to get this project off the ground. Vonn is a web developer, so they have what it takes to pull it off. They end their article with this appeal, which I wholeheartedly support:
Vonn New and Viv Hawkins seek others who are interested in this project, whether that be Friends with ministries under the care of a meeting seeking support, individuals or faith communities seeking the services of a ministry, people seeking to provide support to ministries, Friends with expertise in funding and governance, or funders for this particular project. Please contact us at friendviv@gmail.com or vonn.new@gmail.com.
I hope my readers will consider spreading the word about this idea and about offering some support of their own.
Links to some of my articles: on science, recording ministers, and the gathered meeting
January 11, 2013 § Leave a comment
I have three longish articles on the New York Yearly Meeting website that were submitted to the Yearly Meeting’s newsletter, Spark, of which I also am the editor. The first two were too long to include in the print edition, the third too long to print all of it.
Science, Revelation, and Quaker History looks at the role science has played in our history, and especially, in our divisions.
On Recording Ministers discusses the practice of recording ministers, offering reasons for why it’s valuable and some answers to those who feel we should not record ministers.
The Gathered Meeting explores the history of the gathered meeting, what it is, how to foster the gathered meeting, and its importance to the life of the Religious Society of Friends.
Spirituality and Religion—Some Definitions
January 1, 2013 § 8 Comments
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.
Thank you, readers!
December 31, 2012 § Leave a comment
WordPress prepared an annual report for ThroughTheFlamingSword for 2012 that I found quite interesting. I’m making it public, in case you find it interesting, as well. See below.
Also, it prompts me to say thank you to you, my readers. I’m a little stunned to find out how many of you there are, how many places you come from, and how much interest you have shown in my work. Thank you very much for your interest.
I haven’t been very active in the past few months. In late July, I began a new job as communications director for New York Yearly Meeting after being unemployed for a long time, and I have found that working more or less full time limits my contributions to the blog. Also, I have been writing longer essays lately that naturally take a longer time to complete and then aren’t so blog-friendly when they’re finished.
Plus several of them have been for publication in NYYM’s newsletter Spark. I keep planning to provide links to them here, but only now am I finally doing that. So here are links to two of these more long-form articles. We publish the January Spark in the next few days and it will include another article by me; the theme for the January issue is the gathered meeting.
Science, Revelation, and Quaker History (for Spark, September 2012—Quakers and Science theme).
This looks at the role science has played in our divisions.
On Recording Gifts in Ministry (for Spark, November 2012—Recognizing Gifts in Ministry theme). I affirm the value of recording gifts in ministry—or doing something proactive to nurture spiritual gifts—looking at both the positive reasons for doing so and at the reasons some Friends give against it.
So once again, thank you all for following Through the Flaming Sword. I look forward to hearing from you as I post in the future—hopefully more often than I have in the past few months.
Steven
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,700 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 13 years to get that many views.
Accountability in Quaker Institutions
December 2, 2012 § 13 Comments
A recent issue of Friends Journal is dedicated to Friends and Money. In a searching article titled “When Quaker Process Fails,” John M. Coleman looks at why so many Friends institutions are declining financially and have failed to respond creatively or effectively to the current recession. Friend Coleman uses the recent financial debacle in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting as a case for study in understanding these trends and failures, though, as he points out, the problems he identifies are widespread among Quaker institutions.
John Coleman also points out that we didn’t used to be this way. For centuries, Friends have been extremely competent at managing organizations and money. This only began to change in the early twentieth century. For the book that I’ve been writing on Quakers and Capitalism, I have looked at our relationship with money, taking the research up through the 1920 Conference of All-Friends in London, which is the point at which Friends began to move out of business and management. As a result, I have some ideas about why these changes took place, but they are tentative and not fully baked. Still, I’d like to suggest some possibilities.
Let me start by trying to clearly frame the question. John Coleman has done a great job of naming the problems:
- disregard of elementary principles of accountability,
- insensitivity to ethics,
- weak-to-nonexistent strategic planning and goal-setting,
- lack of realistic priorities,
- poor personnel practices,
- scant appreciation for expertise;
- unworkable organizational structures,
- lack of transparency,
- a failure to measure, and
- an unwillingness to look outside of Friends for models and ideas.
So that’s a broad sketch of the problems we face. Here’s the question: Why, after centuries of world-famous excellence in all these areas, have Friends become so inept? Why, especially, are we failing in areas like ethics and transparency, in which we pridefully maintain an apparently unwarranted self-esteem?
In later posts, I would like to look at a range of other causes for these failures, but what’s on my mind right now is the first one John Coleman names—the disregard for accountability. Many of the problems John Coleman names descend in part from this one.
In the late nineteenth century, Friends turned against the culture of eldership to which they had adhered since George Fox began “bringing gospel order” to meetings in the 1660s. Beginning in the mid-1800s, meetings began laying down the practice of recording elders. Soon after, we began laying down the practice of recording ministers. In doing so we abandoned the structures we had for holding each other accountable. We did this for some good reasons; they had become moribund, in some ways even toxically repressive, and change really was called for. But we threw out the baby with the bath water.
To replace recorded ministers and elders, we created committees for ministry and oversight or ministry and counsel and we staffed these committees with Friends named by nominating committees. By about the 1920s, I think, this process of abandoning recording and other aspects of our traditional culture of eldership was virtually complete, at least in the Liberal branch.
Gradually (maybe right away?), these committees suffered from uncertainty as to their scope of activity and their authority. In the decades since, these committees have come to consist of Friends who very often do have spiritual gifts in ministry and eldership that their nominating committees have recognized. But in my experience, they often now do not know the tradition well enough to understand, exercise, and transmit what is left of our shredded culture of eldership and I’m not sure they would try if they did know it. For one thing, they would likely face serious resistance from some in their meetings.
As a result, nowadays the roles and functions of eldering are haphazardly practiced by inexperienced Friends who do what they can at considerable personal risk. I speak primarily of dealing with problems and with problem people in our meetings and institutions, but even the more positive, nurturing role of elders is now left to chance, or to God, if you will. God does raise up elders among us, but our meetings are often quick to tear them down, or more likely, to let Friends who are allergic to discipline tear them down while we feel paralyzed to stop it.
Just as we turned away internally from the damage that a corrupt and ossified culture of eldership was doing to us, we increasingly embraced newcomers who were refugees from the religious cultures of their upbringing. Some of these people have been damaged by those communities. These Friends don’t just find that ‘eldership’ doesn’t work for them; they are scarred and often scared, and therefore hostile towards it. The treatment that has scarred these Friends almost always involved some kind of coercion. Thus, throughout the twentieth century our ranks have swelled with people who were not going to tolerate anything that looked like coercion in their new home among Friends. And because eldering or accountability of any kind looks suspiciously like coercion and therefore causes these Friends pain, their natural resistance to structures and processes of discipline reinforces the already-established trend of abandoning responsibility for eldership. As a result, we are systematically and systemically failing in our responsibility to protect our worship, our fellowship, and the corporate health of our meetings and institutions.
This includes failure to discipline those who do harm in the name of resisting discipline: we can not and do not hold these wounded Friends accountable for the damage that they themselves do. I know; I was one of those people. I caused a lot of trouble for a while in my meeting and the only person who ever really eldered me for it was the person I was harassing the most.
Part of the reason we have no accountability in our institutions is our practices of membership. I have discussed this in other posts. When we meet with prospective members, we often do not include agreements about mutual accountability in our discussions, especially regarding finances. We don’t think of membership as a covenant between member and meeting in which we exchange promises of mutual accountability for support and nurture. Thus we leave financial support of the meeting to chance, or rather, to individual choice surrounded by a culture of silence and avoidance. The result is that (if I am not mistaken) we are among the least generous of religious communities when it comes to members’ financial support.
I’m not sure what the solution is for this. This fear of coercion goes deep. This creedal commitment to radical individualism is now an established tenet of our faith. This wholesale abandonment of any culture of eldership is now a longstanding aspect of our practice. It will take a conscious choice and a sustained effort to reverse these trends in our culture. No realistic person looking at the problem from the outside would expect us to undertake such a far-reaching and difficult transformation.
But, as I’ve said in a recent post [https://throughtheflamingsword.wordpress.com/], we have done it in the past. The problems we face today are nothing compared to the challenges Friends overcame in the 1660s and ‘70s when we first established gospel order as a way to reign in ranters among us and protect us from the depredations of official persecution with structures and discipline. And two hundred years later, British Friends turned on a metaphorical dine (farthing?) and reversed a catastrophic decline in membership.
In the 1660s, the solution was more discipline, corporate efforts to prevent another James Naylor affair and to create a structure that could endure despite the catastrophic loss of leadership in England’s gaols. In the 1860s, however, British Friends relaxed discipline, saving themselves from self-destruction and helping to put us on the slightly slippery slope that has got us where we are today. In the 1870s and ‘80s in America, many Friends found renewal in the great transition to programmed worship and ultimately, professional ministry. In the 1960s, Liberal Friends rode the currents of cultural revolution away from discipline again.
It’s time for the pendulum to swing again.
- We need to recover, study, evaluate, adopt, and adapt what’s left of our ancient culture of eldership and experiment with new forms of discipline that work for us. This calls for a Society-wide commitment to religious education.
- We can pray for spirit-led ministry: vocal ministry in our meetings that begins to open eyes and minds and hearts and doors; written ministry that teaches, preaches, and proposes; and ‘workshop’ ministry that engages Friends in hands-on experience with the faith and practice of eldership.
- And we need to rethink our approach to the membership process. We need to discuss eldership with prospective members, to ask them how far they are willing to engage with the meeting in mutual accountability; we need to establish whether they think of discipline as an essential aspect of religious life. This assumes, of course, that the meeting is itself willing to engage, that it believes that discipline is an essential aspect of religious life. Not many do, in my experience.
- So we need to have an open conversation in our meetings about just how “covenantal” we want our meeting to be.
Through the Flaming Sword 