Meetings and Ministry, Part 2: My Story
July 28, 2025 § Leave a comment
A Leading Leads to Frustration, and to New Leading
In 1990, Buffalo Meeting in New York asked New York Yearly Meeting’s Friends in Unity with Nature Task Group to bring them an earthcare program on the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day. A f/Friend and I answered their call.
On Saturday night before the program on Sunday, I was sitting up praying over my notes for the following morning when an opening came to me that pushed its way in front of my preparations. It came out of nowhere—well, as it turns out, it came out of Spirit-where—and it would not go away. It was this: If Christ was the Word “through whom were all things were made and without whom nothing was made that was made,” as John 1:3 puts it, then destroying creation is re-crucifying Christ.
Now this was what Friends in the elder days called a cross to the will: my will and my intentions and expectations were being crucified. Because I was in those days actively hostile to Christ, Christianity, and the Bible.
But I had been raised in a pretty pious and active evangelical Lutheran family and I knew the Bible pretty well. And the more I thought about it, the more important this new idea seemed, and the more it ramified—the more I remembered and discovered that I could say to Buffalo Meeting. But I did not want to say it. And I was pretty sure that Buffalo Meeting wouldn’t want to hear it.
But the Holy Spirit had seized me by the scruff of the neck and would not let me go. I had to scrap my original notes and go with this crazy new thing. So I gave Buffalo Meeting a little Bible-based sermon and, as I remember it, they did in fact give it a rather cool reception.
It was weird. Or wyrd, in the Old Norse sense of the origins of the word, a situation that was so important the gods were involved. God was involved. And it didn’t stop there.
Over the next few weeks, the original opening expanded and ramified and it dug in. Eventually, I felt I was called to write a book of Bible-based earth stewardship theology—another cross to the will. I did not want to do this. First of all, I knew it meant probably years of research; I didn’t know nearly enough. I had read none of the earth stewardship theology that had been written up to that time, and I didn’t know the Bible well enough to treat it properly. But more importantly, I still felt hostile to Christianity and the Bible.
So I brought my leading to my meeting. I asked for an oversight committee. I knew that my prejudices threatened to thwart or distort my faithfulness and I wanted my meeting to help me stay faithful.
In my first meeting with ministry and counsel, they did not understand what I was asking for, even though some weighty and seasoned Friends served on that committee. I went away frustrated. But I still felt it was important to get some support. So I went back to them. This time, some of them understood just enough to actually misunderstand in a new way.
“We can’t tell you what to think,” they said. I didn’t want them to tell me what to think, I wanted them to tell me if I was going off the rails. “That’s for your editor to tell you,” they said. That would be way too late, I said. In the end, they said no again.
I was left to my own discernment and discipline. I hustled some financial support and went to Pendle Hill for two terms in 1991 to begin research on the book. There, I was mentored by Bill Taber and Doug Gwyn, who taught Quakerism and the Bible respectively. My time with them and at Pendle Hill confirmed my calling and gave me the support I needed. I reclaimed the love of the Bible I had had as a teenager. I stopped being Christ and Christianity’s adversary. And the course work with Doug and Bill deepened my knowledge of and commitment to the faith and practice of Quaker ministry. The experience deepened my love for and commitment to the Quaker way. It changed my life.
And: the leading to write that book and the frustrating experience I had with my meeting led to two new leadings, both of which I still carry as ministries. The first was—is—to foster in our meetings the recovery of our traditions regarding ministry, so that others with leadings would not be left bereft, as I had been. The second was a sustained and intensive study of, the Bible, such that I have for years now moderated a weekly online Bible study and written another (unpublished) book on the gospel of Jesus, which grew out of the things I learned writing the first one; and I have two more in my head and heart.
Meetings and Ministry, Part 1 : Introduction
July 28, 2025 § Leave a comment
I’m starting a new series of posts that looks at how our meetings recognize gifts in ministry, how we help emerging ministers discern their calling, and how we support their ministries.
I’ve been away from this blog more or less for quite a while, but I think I’m back. I have been paying attention to publishing my poetry and more recently, I’ve been working on a couple of submissions to Pendle Hill. One of these is on the meeting’s role in supporting vocal ministry. At the same time, while thinking and praying and writing in a deep and sustained way about vocal ministry for many months, my own ministries are in an exciting and exercising period of engagement and transition.
In the middle of all this, I became aware of the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry, which I mentioned in my last post, and I participated in the development of “The Public Friends Recording Process,” which the Incubator’s convener Windy Cooler shepherded
Back in 1992, I had been part of a three-person team that updated New York Yearly Meeting’s process for recording gifts in ministry and soon after that, I served on the first clearness committee convened under the new guidelines to consider the recording of a Friend’s gifts. We did recommend recording to the Yearly Meeting and they approved it. So I have been carrying a concern for the recognition, discernment, and support of gifts in ministry for a long time.
All this focus and activity around our meetings and their support of our ministers and their ministries has reactivated my own call to a ministry focused on fostering greater attention in our meetings on these concerns. It has produced new openings that I want to share with you my readers and raised questions that I hope my readers will be led to answer, here in this blog, but also in your own meetings.
Much of this exploration will be personal, as many of these issues are front and center for me and my meeting right now. But some of it will be about our tradition, our faith and practice, our history and our experience.
In the next post, I want to start with the story of my own first call to ministry and how it has led to this moment.
Liberal Theology—A Definition
June 30, 2025 § 2 Comments
I’ve just finished reading The Foundations of Liberal Quakerism, by Stephen W. Angell, the 45th Annual Walton Lecture presented at the Annual Southeastern Yearly Meeting Gathering of Friends in 2008 and published as a pamphlet available from SEYM. It describes the historical precursors of liberal Quakerism, especially the writings of William Penn, progressive Friends in the Midwest, and Lucretia Mott and the Progressive Friends movement (see also Chuck Fager’s books on this movement). I highly recommend Stephen Angell’s pamphlet.
Stephen Angell starts with some definitions and he quotes Garry Dorrien, a historian of liberal Christian theology, with this definition, which I found useful:
“liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.”
According to my own studies, this very aptly describes the priorities of the young adults who gave birth to liberal Quakerism in the late 19th century, whose new sensibilities emerged fairly decisively with the Manchester Conference in Britain in 1895. The most famous of these young Friends were John Stephenson Rowntree and Rufus Jones.
The sciences. These young Friends embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution and the critical study of the Bible that had begun in Germany earlier in the century. These two advances, one in the natural sciences and the other in the social sciences, were directly related to each other in their influence, since the theory of evolution required an all-new look at the creation story in Genesis and by extension a new kind of relationship to the Bible’s authority and role in religious life.
Individual reason and experience. Those young Friends were desperate for a place in a Quaker culture of eldership that had become ossified and restrictive; they wanted their voices heard and they wanted a theology that matched their religious experience, and vice versa.
Ethics. They revolutionized how Christian moral principles should be applied to society’s problems. In the evangelical view that had dominated Quaker culture for roughly a century, social problems derived from sin, and so the solution to these problems was evangelism: bring people to Christ and they will act more righteously, and society will follow. But social science was just then realizing that social ills had structural elements that both constrained and transcended individual moral choice. The signature development along these lines was Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Study in Town Life, which proved scientifically that poverty in the city of York was not due to the poor’s moral failures—sex (too many children), drink, gambling, and other vices—but simply because they were not being paid enough. Capitalism was the problem, though he didn’t put it that way.
Atonement. Friends had always emphasized the transformation of the soul by the immediate and inward work of Christ over the theology of blood atonement on the cross, at least until the evangelical revolution in Quakerism that began around 1800. These young liberals reclaimed the earlier emphasis on God’s direct moral guidance.
Credibility and relevance. And they wanted their faith to be relevant, they wanted to be able to stand on their faith as a foundation and in their faith as a frame for their message and work to make the world a better place. And for that, they needed a theology that spoke to their time.
Britain Yearly Meeting Minute on Gaza
June 3, 2025 § 2 Comments
At their annual gathering recently, Quakers in Britain became the first British church to state their belief that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. (Download a pdf of the minute here.) I happen to agree with their discernment and pray that their minute was approved in a truly gathered meeting.
However, I really don’t like the minute itself. Like almost all of the minutes of conscience I’ve seen approved by meetings in the “liberal” branch of Quakerism, most of this minute reads as though it were written by a secular social change nonprofit. (But at least these minutes are being drafted and approved; we almost never hear from the evangelicals.)
Here’s a synopsis: The minute mentions previous action by their Meeting for Sufferings (without explaining to non-Quaker readers what that is). It describes collective horror at the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza. It reviews the problems with a declaration of genocide. It offers two tenets of Quakerism as rationale for their stand. And it makes some appeals to action.
Here are those statements of Quaker faith given as rationale:
Central to Quakerism is the experience that there is that of God in everyone. From this belief – that all people are unique, precious, children of God – all others follow. We therefore abhor racism, including antisemitism, in all its forms.
. . .
It is also a tenet of Quakerism that violence can never be the answer. That the means are just as important as the ends. This is our peace testimony that has led us for more than 350 years to eschew all war and all violence at all times.
That’s 87 “religious” words out of a total of 944, less than ten percent of the minute.
I have problems not with its message, but with how it represents the Religious Society of Friends and our testimonies and with the weakness of its moral argument.
Integrity and misrepresentation
Central to Quakerism
The minute presents “the experience that there is that of God in everyone” as the foundation from which all our other beliefs follow. This simply is not true. it is not central to Quakerism. It might be central to a lot of Quakers in the so-called liberal branch of the movement, but it certainly is not central to the much larger evangelical branches, or to Conservative Friends. We shouldn’t be speaking of “Quakerism” with such a broad brush.
Nor is it central even to “liberal” Quakerism, except as a kind of unreflective doctrinal drift. We’ve been saying this kind of thing for decades now without any meaningful corporate discernment. It’s been slipping into our books of faith and practice and getting approved, much like a sly amendment to a massive legislative bill that most representatives haven’t noticed. Meanwhile, no meeting has actually carefully unpacked and considered the meaning or standing of this phrase “that of God in everyone” on its own. We think George Fox said it so now we can say it, too; meanwhile, George Fox never actually did say it.
Moreover, there are still quite a few of us “liberal” Friends who do know that Fox never said it that way and wouldn’t have ever said it, and we would never say that it’s the foundation of our religious faith and experience as stated. We might be in the minority in a lot of meetings, but if a meaningful discernment process actually took place in our yearly meeting’s revision of their faith and practice, we would stand in the way. Well, I would, anyway.
That of God in everyone
And anyway, what does “that of God in everyone” mean? The minute does not explain. What do we mean by “that of”? What or who do we mean by “God”? And what does “that of God” mean? And how do we experience it, or say we do, in “everyone”? We can say we believe it’s in everyone, but can we experience it in everyone? I can’t.
I suppose this statement tries to express what I agree is perhaps the central experience of Friends, that we humans can commune directly with God (however we experience the Divine), personally, inwardly, immediately. But why and how would this experience lead us to “abhor racism”? Because, in that experience, God’s anointing Spirit, the spirit of the christ, awakens and guides us to love and compassion, to truth and service. That’s the real message here: we are led into love and compassion by the Spirit, whatever each of us might mean by that, not by the “experience” of some abstract notion about our nature as humans.
What’s missing
This is what’s missing in this minute—religious and moral appeal, especially to love and compassion. I suppose it’s worth something to be the first church in Britain to call Israeli action in Gaza genocide; it will get attention. But I’m not sure it’s the most powerful thing we can say. The unique and powerful thing we as Quakers have to offer is our religious and moral message and appeal and our guidance from the Spirit. The secular activists are not going to talk like that, or appeal to the people for whom religious and moral appeal might be appealing.
That means speaking from our religious tradition. Specifically, we should use the prophetic voice of Hebrew and Christian scripture, because it’s a powerful voice and a powerful message, and it might appeal to the hearts and souls of people who are inured to political polemic, especially those who at least claim to be people of faith. And I would use queries, not declarations.
For instance: With their horrific actions and policies, are you the Israeli government and your military loving God with all your hearts and souls and strength, as God demanded in Deuteronomy? Are you loving your neighbors as yourselves, as God demanded in Leviticus?
Or: You want to be a “Christian nation”, you American Christian conservatives in government and other institutions of power who support and supply these atrocities? What about Jesus’ commandment of love? Is American military support loving one another even as we have been loved? Is helping to slaughter and starve children, who are “the least of these”, not re-crucifying Christ all over again? Is killing them inviting these “little children” to come unto him?
Well, now I’ve slipped into an American focus. This minute comes from Britain Yearly Meeting. I’m not sure whether Britain has a comparable Christian nationalist element, like we do here. But Britain does still have a national church. If I were a British Friend, I would be in challenging dialogue with the Church of England about this situation—unless they are already in unity with a Prince of Peace message. Then I would join with our religious fellow travelers.
I would be moral and religious, prophetic and traditional, in both voice and message.
The First “Palm Sunday”
April 13, 2025 § 4 Comments
Today is Palm Sunday and the weird political vibe of our time prompts me to reflect on the first “Palm Sunday.” The first “Palm Sunday” was a radical political event, but its import has not been taught to us. In fact, a surface reading of the accounts does not even really tell us what actually happened, let alone what the event meant in the moment.
Just a little imagination and common sense shows us something quite different than the “cleansing of the temple” summary that we usually get as a heading in our Bibles for these passages. While Jesus was vehemently opposed to the corruption of the temple, he was not much concerned with its “uncleanness”; he famously disregarded his culture’s obsession with “uncleanness” in the first place. His real concern was the temple’s thievery.
It started out with what amounted to a royal coronation procession into the gates of Jerusalem in which he and his followers proclaimed that God’s kingdom was being established right then and there. Never mind those high priests behind the curtain pretending to be in charge of Judea’s temple-state, or the Roman imperial occupiers who had the final say over all the really important stuff in Judea’s governance.
After proclaiming his alternative kingdom, what does the herald of this new kingdom do next? He raids the temple-state’s currency exchange.
Jesus and his followers burst into the court where Jews from all over the empire, who had come to celebrate Passover in the Holy Land, have come to change their unclean foreign currency for temple-state coinage and then buy the animals they need for their guilt offerings and sin offerings and for Passover itself.
Picture the scene: Jesus and his followers drive the animals into a frenzy. He or his people pitch over the cashiers’ tables, with their record keeping scrolls and their trays of money. His people intercept the servants who are desperately trying to escape into the temple precincts with the “vessels”.
This is the scene: Animals are crashing around, the noise a raucous din, maybe the door has been left open and the animals are making a break for it. Disciples are grabbing the record scrolls off the floor and making off with them or tearing them up. Others are scrambling on the floor to scoop up the coins that are rolling around. Others seize the big clay jars with the coin reserves in them that the temple servants are trying to escape with. And all the while, Jesus is calling down an oracle of God’s judgment, quoting Jeremiah about a “den of thieves”, while his own people are themselves Robin Hood-thieving the temple-state’s money. A wonderful, even comical irony.
If the insurrectionists had left the door open and the animals are finding their way out, you can picture his followers making their escape, too, under cover of the herd’s bleating retreat out the door, much like Odysseus did with his men when escaping from the cyclops’s cave in the Odyssey.
One wonders where the security forces were in this melee. Surely the temple-state had some kind of security there to guard the money. Maybe they are the “servants” who try to make it to the doors with the “vessels.” Clearly the mayhem, the tactical genius of the action, outmaneuvers them.
Meanwhile, all this takes place in the literal shadow of the Roman fort that had been built right up against the city’s walls next to the temple precinct to prevent exactly this kind of peasant revolt from happening, as it had occurred just a few years before and would soon again. Passover is, after all, a religious holiday celebrating God liberating his people from their captivity by a foreign imperial power. Rome sent an entire extra legion to Palestine during the Passover season to deal with any insurrectionists (like Jesus) who might be too inspired by the holiday’s message, because it happened so often.
Meanwhile, the city is extremely crowded with all the pilgrims from the Jewish Roman diaspora come here for Passover, crowded in a massive tent city throughout the streets of the city because there aren’t enough rooms to let. People, tens, animals, all trying to find a place as close to the temple as possible, ‘cause that’s where all the action is, that’s where all the crowds will be going. It’s as if all the families in America that could afford it planned to go to Disney World on the same day.
So the rioters just melt into the massive crowds with their loot and maybe some animals and their grins on their faces, while the Roman soldiers arrive too late to do anything but scoop up some leftover coins themselves.
I imagine the high priests in charge of the temple-state calling the guys in charge of the exchange onto the carpet to answer for the loss of all that revenue and monetary reserves, maybe taking it out of their salaries, or even out of their hides. I imagine the famously cruel and erratic Pontius Pilate calling the garrison commander onto the carpet to answer for how he let this rabble raid the temple under their very noses and demanding some intel about where the insurrectionist leader might have skied off to—“He announced himself at the city gates, for Tiberius’s sake. What—were you playing lots with your officers and drinking this terrible Judean wine while a riot breaks out next door?” I wonder who lost their commission that day?
No wonder they all wanted his head.
The Christian faith is radical in its very core, and much of the gospel message is about money, poverty, and economic oppression—“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” reads the very heart of the Lord’s Prayer.
Ani, the Hebrew word for “poor,” can mean either poor or oppressed because, in ancient Israel, they were the same thing. Ani, as in Bethany—beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed, home of Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and Simon the Leper. Ani, the poor and oppressed, are Jesus’ constituency (Like 15-30). And “Palm Sunday” was their breakout moment, their formal declaration of their kingdom intentions and their first insurrectionist act.
Sarah Ruden on the Apostle Paul
March 13, 2025 § 2 Comments
Dear Friends
I’ve started another of Sarah Ruden’s books: Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own time. It promises to be exceedingly good. As a classics scholar, she reads Paul against the backdrop of contemporary (to him) Greco-Roman literature and culture. I’m sharing a couple of examples from early in the book.
Here’s the first couple of paragraphs from chapter 1: Paul and Aristophanes—No, Really, an another from a paragraph a few pages later :
The last thing I expected my Greek and Latin to be of any use for was a better understanding of Paul. The very idea, had anyone proposed it, would have annoyed me. I am a Christian, but like many, I kept Paul in a pen out back with the louder and more sexist Old Testament prophets. Jesus was my teacher; Paul was an embarrassment.
But one day, in a Bible study class I was taking, a young woman objected to the stricture against sorcery in the “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. She said that to her sorcery meant “just the ability to project my power and essence.” Most of the class gave the familiar sigh: Paul was kind of a brute, wasn’t he? I would have sighed too, had there not flashed into my mind an example of what sorcery could mean in a Greco-Roman context: the Roman poet Horace’s image of a small boy buried up to his neck and left to starve to death while staring at food, so that his liver and bone marrow, which must now be imbued with his frenzied longing, could serve as a love charm. Paul, I reflected, may never have read this poem (which depicts a crime that may never have happened), but it shows the kind of reputation sorcery had in the Roman Emipire—certainly among people with a polytheistic background, who made up the main readership for his letters both during his lifetime and after it. I could not get away from the thought that what his writings would have meant for them is probably as close as we can come to their basic original importance, as key documents (prior even to the gospels) inspiring the world-changing new movement, Christianity.
Then later:
What Greco-Roman works can teach about Paul’s writings is incredibly rich and virtually unexplored so far—and often rather mortifying to a previous knee-jerk anti-Paulist like me. For example, there is the matter of the komos and the right to have a really good party. The “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Galatians does not forbid “carousing,” the outrageous New Revised Standard Version translation of the word, or “revellings,” as in the King James. A komos was a late-night, very drunken, sometimes violent postparty parad—which could even end in kidnapping and rape. We have livid scenes of it in Greek comedy and other genres. It was nearly the worst of Greek nightlife, and if any Christian young men counted on still being allowed to behave like the rampaging frat boys or overgrown trick-or-treaters in a foul mood, their elders would have been relieved to have it in writing from Paul that this was banned. Other translations, probably in an effort to be less dour, have “orgies,” but that is unsatisfactory: some features of Greek parties were orgy-like, but not the komos. And since orgies are quite rare today (I think), a reader might wonder why Paul included something so unusual in his list, as if a modern pastor were to speak against flashing. We would never guess from the English that the abuse Paul is speaking of is both serious and customary.
Theism, Nontheism, and Quaker Identity
November 1, 2024 § 3 Comments
This is a long post—lots of ground to cover. So here’s a brief outline:
Introduction
I subscribe to an email newsletter of Academia, a site that aggregates academic articles, and I’ve set a filter for Quaker articles. I get stuff I want to read regularly—can’t keep up with it.
Today, I got “Quakers and Non/Theism: Questions and Prospects,” by Jeffrey Dudiak, an article that appeared in Quaker Religious Thought, volume 118, from 2012. The issue features essays on theism, nontheism, and Quaker identity by Howard Macy as editor, Paul Anderson, Jeffrey Dudiak, David Boulton, Shannon Craigo-Snell, and Patrick J. Nugent. The latter two articles are responses primarily to Dudiak and Boulton, the theist and nontheist apologists.
I wanted to share this resource on what I believe is a very important subject, whose salience has not diminished since 2012, though maybe the heat’s been turned down a bit since then. But I also want to offer my own position on these questions. I don’t imagine that my convictions settle anything, but I hope that they do speak to some Friends.
Not in the traditional sense, as in believing in a supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient, completely good; “personal” in the sense of keen to engage in relationship with me; “historical,” not just in the sense of paying attention to human history, both writ large and personal, but also having a plan for the fulfillment and redemption of humanity writ large and for individual humans, too, like me—a supreme deity who knows me, cares about me, and whom I could know in return.
I do not know such a deity—I have no experience to base such a belief on. Intellectually, such an idea even offends me a bit: where was some history-caring and engaged deity during the Holocaust, for instance? Furthermore, experience of a supreme being by a being as finite as myself would, it seems, shatter my consciousness. And even if I did experience [him] without exploding, what good would it do me? My yoga teachers taught a similar Vedanta endgame of pure consciousness as the goal of my practice, and it just seemed irrelevant to my lived life.
On the other hand, I have experienced—what shall I call them? Angels? Spirits? Devas? I am some kind of polytheist, having had direct transcendental experience of spiritual beings, and I subsequently have enjoyed relationships with them as central to my spiritual life. So I call myself a para-theist. My experience is that there are deities out there, just with a small “d”.
And I take at face value the testimony of my Christian f/Friends, and the testimony of the first Friends, and of thousands of Friends since the 17th century—the testimony of their encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ. Therefore, I believe in Jesus Christ, even though I have not (yet) been called by him into his discipleship.
I am not willing to disrespect the experiences of those Friends who have been blessed by his presence in their lives by telling them that their experience is just a projection of their unconscious, or not real in some other way, or whatever, just because I don’t share their experience; and also because I wouldn’t want anybody to disrespect my own such experiences. Don’t mess with with my experience and I won’t mess with yours; though I do invite inquiry, and even respectful challenge.
Quakerism is a Christian religion
For this reason, and for several other reasons, I consider Quakerism a Christian religion, and I feel that I am a guest in the house that Christ built. I am grateful that my meetings have accepted me without my Christian confession (though they never even considered such a matter, being to that degree non-Christian or post-Christian). And I think other non-Christians should share my gratitude and act accordingly. By act accordingly, I mean, not just tolerate, but invite and celebrate Christian and Biblical vocal ministry, and actively contribute to a Quaker culture in which Christian Friends feel invited to talk from their own experience and religious sensibilities without fear or censure. Or even to pray, as I do, that Christ will join us, gather us, in our worship.
In other words, a theism built on relationship with Christ seems not just reasonable to me; it parallels my own experience. Hence my para-theism.
It is natural for us to venture out of our experience into theology. I can’t keep from doing this, myself. Well, actually, I love doing it, I do it all the time, in my head and in my writing. And, while a lot of the legacy theology of the Christian tradition does not work for me, it obviously works for a lot of Friends, at least up to a point. From the beginning, starting with Fox himself, some Quakers have always been a bit heterodox.
So we are theists
So, for me, the bottom line is that Quakers are theists in our core identity, because we are Christian; that is, we were gathered as a people of God by Christ, most of us have been invited into personal f/Friendship with Christ, and that’s that. We are a Christian faith historically. We are a Christian faith demographically still today. And the lack of such experience by a small minority of the movement does not change the identity of the movement as a whole.
That we non-Christians, and nontheists, and para-theists in the minority have been given a bed in the spare room of the house that Christ built is a blessing to be grateful for. Trying to kick Christ out of the master bedroom onto the living room couch is deeply disrespectful of our tradition, and of him.
About “God”
One more thing, though. I just used the word God. So what do I mean by “God”, capital “G”? In my public discourse, I use the word God as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind my listener’s or my reader’s own spiritual and religious experience is. Your experience is real; I honor that with belief and respect.
I do have my own personal understanding of God, but it’s mine and I will not press it upon you as some greater truth. But I will share it as mine.
For me, God is the spiritual dimension of evolution. In this, I am something of a student of Teilhard de Chardin and of Thomas Berry. The universe is unfolding. There is a wisdom, an intelligence, and an apparent direction to this unfolding—a Logos, as the writer of the prologue to the gospel of John put it, and as the ancient Stoics understood it, and Philo of Alexandria and the writer of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom. There is a Mystery Reality behind creation, within creation, a spiritual dynamic in evolution that we can sometimes sense somehow, in some small but intimate way—when I’m free-climbing the cliffs of the Shawangunks, for instance, or hearing a V of geese pass overhead above the fog.
That communion is the deepest of all communions for me, with the possible exception of a gathered Quaker meeting for worship. So God is real for me in this way, yes.
American Transcendentalism – Forms and Doctrines
October 31, 2024 § Leave a comment
This is Theodore Parker, taken from an essay titled “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” dated 1841. Parker was another Unitarian minister, a second-generation Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he’s pushing back on mainstream Unitarianism and got pushback in return. But in the mid-1840s, in spite of this establishment resistance, he moved to Boston and built one of the largest congregations in New England.
It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. And undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man. Religious forms may be useful, and beautiful. They are so, whenever they speak to the soul, and answer a want thereof. In our present state some forms are perhaps necessary. But they are only the accident of Christianity; not its substance. They are the robe, no th angel, who may take another robe, quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another none. Yet both may be equally Christian, in spite of the redundance or the deficiency. They are a part of the language in which religion speaks, and exist, with few exceptions, wherever man is found. In our calculating nation, in our rationalizing sect, we have retained but two of the rites so numerous in the early Christian church, and even these we have attenuated to the last degree, leaving them little more than a spectre of the ancient form. Another age may continue or forsake both; may revive old forms, or invent new ones to suit the altered circumstances of the times, and yet be Christians quite as good as we, or our fathers of the dark ages. Whether the Apostles designed these rites to be perpetual, seems a question which belongs to scholars and antiquarians, not to us, as Christian men and women. So long as they satisfy or help the pious heart, so long they are good. Looking behind, or around us, we see that the forms and rites of the Christians are quite as fluctuating as those of the heathens; from whom some of them have been, not unwisely, adopted by the earlier church.
Again, the doctrines that have been connected with Christianity, and taught in its name, are quite as changeable as the form. This also takes place unavoidably. . . . Now there can be but one Religion which is absolutely true, existing in the facts of human nature, and the ideas of Infinite God. . . . Now it has often happened that men took their theology thus at second hand, distorted the history of he world and man’s nature besides, to make Religion conform to their notions. Their theology stood between them and God. Those obstinate philosophers have disciples in no small number.
As Emerson does, Parker speaks of Nature in parallel terms, seeing correspondences between natural law and divine law, and, to a degree, science and religion. In the middle of this excerpt, where I have inserted ellipses, he discusses how different observers and philosophers will come to different theories about Nature, just as the divines do about Religion; yet:
“the true system of Nature which exists in the outward facts, whether discovered or not, is always the same thing, though the philosophy of Nature, which men invent, change every month, and be one thing as London and the opposite at Berlin. Thus there is but one system of Nature as it exists in fact, though many theories of Nature, which exist in our imperfect notions of that system, and bu which we may approximate and at length reach it.”
These Transcendentalists are never very far from their consideration of Nature, no matter how deep they get into the theological weeds.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—Direct Experience
October 27, 2024 § Leave a comment
The quote below is from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838). About the essay the editor of The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, Lawrence Buell, writes in his introduction:
“This is Emerson’s most incendiary work. It was delivered as a commencement oration at the behest of the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, Unitarianism’s academic home base and Emerson’s own graduate alma mater. Emerson takes aim at the two related arguments on which Unitarian theology chiefly rested its case for being a distinctive form of ‘rational’ Christianity: that the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ miracles proved the authenticity of Christianity, and that Jesus was God’s unique and authoritative messenger. After this comes an equally acerbic denunciation of ineffective preaching, in which Emerson charges each graduate to think of himself by contrast as ‘a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost’ and preach prophetically. The address caused an irreversible rift between Unitarian liberals and radicals. Emerson was not invited back again to speak at Harvard for nearly thirty years.”
This quote comes from Emerson’s strongly worded injunction to preach from one’s own experience and in what we would call continuing revelation. In it, he mentions George Fox and admonishes against relying on past religious personages rather than on one’s own “soul.” More about soul after the quote. And please make allowances for his use of “man” for humankind.
The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true preacher to show us that God is, not was; the He speaketh, not spake The true Christianity,—a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,—is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul; and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. . . . Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries,—the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those mosts sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . .
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. . . .
What attracted me to this passage and urges me to share it is its mention of Fox in a warning germane to us Friends to look within for Truth rather than to Fox or any past and outward authority, and its partial development of the idea of the Soul and some correspondence I see in it to our liberal Quaker use of the phrase “that of God in everyone.”
The idea and reality of what Emerson calls the Soul seems to be central to his theology and philosophy. I’ve not yet plumbed the full depth and breadth of this idea in his writing. But it seems that the Soul is for Emerson something similar to what many Friends today call “that of God in everyone.” Certainly, it is universal. It is an inward indwelling of a divine aspect. It is the true source of religious teaching. It seems to have some affinity for the atma and brahma of Vedanta philosophy, with which Emerson was familiar, brahma being pure consciousness, of which atma is like a drop from the brahma ocean from which it “comes,” with which it communicates, and to which it will return; atma is part of Mahatma Ghandi’s popular name, meaning “great soul”. Emerson’s soul is an American, nineteenth century Neoplatonic idea.
Emerson was an Idealist in the Platonic and Neoplatonic mold, in which the idea, the ideal, the mind, is the only thing that is truly real. He cites the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume in this regard in this essay.
So in this, he differs from the faith of Friends. As I’ve written many times before, our modern liberal Quaker idea of that of God as a divine spark is far from what Fox intended with the phrase, having been given to us by Rufus Jones. But almost no one goes on to develop what this phrase means beyond the vague idea of a “divine spark”. We are not metaphysically inclined enough to develop the idea much further. Emerson has no such compunction. He was a philosopher to the core, just as he was a preacher, theologian, and poet to the core.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—Likeness to God
October 17, 2024 § 4 Comments
I have been reading The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, edited by Lawrence Buell. It’s a collection of essays by the main figures in the American Transcendentalist movement, of whom the most famous are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
I keep coming across passages that so align with our Quaker thinking that I want to pass some of them along. I’m going to do them one by one in subsequent posts.
“Humanity’s Likeness to God,” by William Ellery Channing (Buell, p. 12)
“It is only in proportion to this likeness that we can enjoy either God, or the universe. That God can be known and enjoyed only through sympathy or kindred attributes, is a doctrine which even Gentile philosophy discerned. That the pure of heart can alone see and commune with the pure Divinity, was the sublime instruction of ancient sages [thinking of Plotinus, here, and the neo-Platonists, I suspect] as well as of inspired prophets. It is indeed the lesson of daily experience. To understand a great and good being, we must have the seeds of the same excellence. How quickly, by what an instinct, do accordant minds recognize one another! No attraction is so powerful as that which subsists between the truly wise, and good; whilst the brightest excellence is lost on those who have nothing congenial in their own breasts. God becomes a real being to us, in proportion as his own nature is unfolded within us. To a man who is growing in the likeness of God, faith begins even here to change into vision. He carries within himself a proof of a Deity, which can only be understood by experience. He more than believes, he feels the divine presence; and gradually rises to an intercourse with his Maker, to which it is not irreverent to apply the name of friendship and intimacy. The apostle John intended to express this truth, when he tells us that he, in whom a principle of divine charity or benevolence has become a habit and life, “dwells in God and God in him.”
“It is plain, too, that likeness to god is the true and only preparation for the enjoyment of the universe. . . . I think, however, that every reflecting man will feel, that the likeness to God must be a principle of sympathy or accordance with his creation; for the creation is a birth and shining forth of the Divine Mind, a work through which his spirit breathes. In proportion as we receive this spirit, we possess within ourselves the explanation of what we see. We discern more and more of God in everything, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.”
Some thoughts
The first paragraph reminds me of Rufus Jones, who was influenced I believe by neo-Platonism himself, and talked of “that of God’ in similar terms. In his books on mysticism, Jones makes a similar case, that mystical experience is made possible by some aspect of the Divine that dwells in the human. It is through the affinity of this divine principle in the human with its divine source that enables and indeed conducts the mystic into the Divine Presence.
This second paragraph reminds me of Fox’s recounting of one of his first visions: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. . . . The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue. . . . in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof, may be known, through the openings of that divine Word of wisdom and power by which they were made.”
Through the Flaming Sword 