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.

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.

Bringing God back into Quaker witness

August 26, 2012 § 8 Comments

At its Summer Sessions this year, New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM) approved a minute calling on the Senate to make the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples the law of the land and repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery (as in Christopher Columbus), a principle that has been used as the religious, moral, and legal foundation for the colonization of indigenous peoples and their lands up until the present day. It was used in a US Supreme Court decision as recently as 2005. Here’s the text of NYYM’s minute:

We seek to live in a just peace with our fellow human beings, both as individuals, and as peoples.

The United States has formally declared its support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007. We now call on the United States Senate to enact the legislation that will make this the law of the land in the United States of America.

We repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery, which originated in the 15th century from Papal Bulls and European royal charters issued at that time. The Doctrine of Discovery mandated the seizure of lands belonging to any non-Christian peoples and encouraged the enslavement, exploitation, or eradication of those peoples. We cannot accept that the Doctrine of Discovery was ever a true authority for the forced takings of lands and the enslavement or extermination of peoples. It is reprehensible for the United States to use the Doctrine of Discovery as a legal doctrine to compel a jurisdiction over Indigenous Peoples or their lands.

We honor the inalienable rights of Indigenous Peoples to their homelands, water, spiritual practices, languages, cultural practices, and to self-government, all of which sustain life and the life of a People, and the autonomy of Indigenous Peoples. An Indigenous People has the right to make decisions and establish constructive arrangements with other nations, governments and peoples on their own behalf.

This is a wonderful act of faithfulness to our testimony of equality. It generated quite a bit of spirit-led vocal ministry on the floor, too, much of it very supportive. However, two themes of disquiet in that discussion stood out for me. One was that we Quakers were complicit in the oppression of North American First Nations, and that therefore the minute should include a confession of sorts and an expression of our remorse and repentance.

We Quakers have a relatively good record of treatment of the First Nations. Some moments in our early history have become important parts of our story. I am thinking of the time George Fox, in one of his famous disputations (this one in North Carolina, I think) in which he was claiming that all humans had within them a light of conscience, asked a Native who was there whether there was something in him that told him when he was doing something wrong, and the man said yes. This episode has long been used to demonstrate early Quaker Christian universalism.

Then there is Woolman’s famous line that “love was the first motion,” referring to why he felt led to travel among the Indians. And of course there’s William Penn’s treaty with the Indians, famously immortalized by Edward Hicks in his several paintings, which was apparently a model of fair negotiation. Finally, we could add that Quakers settled in Richmond, Indiana, because that town was as far west as you could go—that is, as far away from slavery in North Carolina as you could get—within the territory ceded by a treaty that both the First Nations and the settlers felt was fair, and still have a river suitable for a mill. That river is the White River in Richmond. I’ve forgotten the name of the treaty. I keep thinking it’s the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, but I can’t confirm it.

But there is a dark side to Quaker relations with the First Nations, even to Penn’s treaty. Penn’s intentions were irreproachable, I believe. But his sons subsequently expanded Pennsylvania through fraud in what is called the Walking Purchase, in which the new territory was to be defined by the area stretching east to the coast from the point to which a man could walk in a day and a half from the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh rivers. Trained runners were used working in relays on prepared trails and they ended up demarking a territory that was much larger than the Lenni Lenape had originally envisioned—1,200,000 acres. The Lenape appealed to the Iroquois, who had indigenous authority over the Delaware valley, but the Iroquois had been bought off. They also appealed to the British crown, also to no avail. Arguably, the British monarchy propped up its unwillingness to intercede with the Doctrine of Discovery.

Less contemptible but still momentous was the Quaker mission to the Seneca in the 1790s. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting sent three missionaries to Chief Cornplanter’s people at his request (he educated his sons in Quaker schools in Philadelphia) to teach “agriculture and the American arts.” They were not to proselytize. The problem was that in traditional Iroquois culture, women gardened and men hunted, but the plows introduced by the Americans required animal handling and they took more strength to operate than most women had. American agricultural practice ended up completely deconstructing traditional Seneca society. This and other upheavals led to a revolution among the Seneca and helped give birth to a new religious movement among the Iroquois that still has some adherents today, led by a prophet named Handsome Lake, Cornplanter’s half-brother. This story is vividly told in The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca by Anthony F. Wallace. My Mohawk and Seneca friends told me that the book has some inaccuracies, but I don’t remember the details.

The other theme that came up during deliberations at New York Yearly Meeting is the one that prompts me to write this entry. That is that the minute is totally bereft of religious language. Nor is this an isolated case, in my experience. All too often, our minutes of testimony and our other witness writings and ministry rely exclusively on secular language to make our arguments. One could read these minutes and never know that they were written by a religious community, let alone by Quakers. When speaking out on social issues, we tend to rely on the social sciences. When speaking out on environmental issues, we tend to use the earth sciences. When explaining our witness on economic issues, we tend to use economic arguments. When speaking on social justice issues, we tend to use the language of legal and human rights. The American Friends Service Committee has led the way in this trend, increasingly resembling over the decades a secular advocacy organization.

In our witness, we often do not use a moral argument to explain why something is wrong or why the course we recommend is right. Even more seldom do we use spiritual language to explain our motives. We may refer to our testimonies, but not to the promptings of the Holy Spirit that are the foundation of our testimonies and of the testimonial life. We almost never quote Scripture, even though the Bible is the foundation for virtually every one of our testimonies. We do not stand on the language of Fox or Fell or Woolman or Barclay to present a theological argument, relying instead on one idea that is not actually quite true: that we believe in peace, equality, or whatever—because we believe that there is that of God in everyone.

Maybe we do believe that there is that of God in everyone, whatever that means, but it is not why we believe in our testimonies, at least not originally. The testimonies all come originally, in the outward sense, from original readings of Scripture by early Friends. In the inward sense, they come from the promptings of the Holy Spirit. To make “that of God” the foundation for our testimonies and the heart of our arguments in our witness life in this way misrepresents our history and tradition and it misses an opportunity to speak our truth in language that has real power and meaning and resonance with the wider Christian culture.

I know that, unfortunately, my words here have the effect of condemning or belittling the work of NYYM’s Indian Affairs committee, which prepared this minute, and of the Yearly Meeting itself for approving it this way. For that I am sorry. I served on that committee myself for six years and I know how dedicated New York Friends are to Indian concerns. (Indian Affairs committee was originally formed in the 1790s and is the oldest standing witness committee in the Yearly Meeting.) The stand the minute takes is an important one and it has already evoked heartfelt thanks from some in the Native American community. I am very grateful that we’ve taken it, and I hope that other yearly meetings around the country do the same.

The committee and the Yearly Meeting apparently labored over the minute for something like two years and the issues I am raising either didn’t come up or never found traction. But it’s not really the Indian Affairs committee’s fault, as far as fault goes, or the Yearly Meeting’s.

Because this is where we are today in liberal Quakerism. You can see “that of God” used as the foundation for our testimonies in many of our books of Faith and Practice. And, as I’ve said, our witness testimony routinely omits explicitly religious language. We are, I think, often embarrassed to be explicitly religious in our witness life, let alone explicitly biblical or Christian.

I suspect this is partly because if you put such language in your minute when you present it to the body for approval, someone is likely to object and you stand a good chance of having a potentially long and divisive discussion on the floor about it. The objectors sometimes hold the meeting hostage and then the meeting often capitulates in a spirit of peace-making, or out of sheer exhaustion, and takes the language out, seeking a consensus as a lowest common denominator, rather than seeking a sense of a meeting gathered in the Spirit. Doing that would require a body willing to be patient and faithful.

Moreover, although it hurts me to say this, I suspect that very often, we just aren’t ‘spiritual’ in our motives in the first place: our minds, our worldviews, have been so suborned by the secular worldview and we have become so attuned to secular struggles for peace, justice, and care for the earth, that we do not experience the promptings of our consciences as religious a lot of the time, anymore, let alone as from God.

What to do? New York Yearly Meeting did not have the patience to develop this minute further, not after two years had already passed. And I’ve seen this kind of wrangling strangle a minute that you would have thought would be a no-brainer for Friends to support—Friends getting really fussy over the details of an obviously valuable piece of witness. We were able to give the minute some religious context in the letter/press release with which we distributed it. So things went pretty well in this particular case.

As for the long-term problem, beyond complaining about it in my blog, so far I have only general ideas about what to do. The Religious Society of Friends has for a long time been evolving into the Society of f(F)riends. The problem calls for religious education, for sure, so that at least we know our tradition and represent our history and tradition faithfully to the world, to our children, and to ourselves. And it calls for ministry: for Friends who feel so called to work among us to revitalize a culture of eldership that can help our members recognize their spiritual gifts and the promptings of the Holy Spirit for what they are; and for Friends who feel called to recover and further develop the traditions, faith, and practice of Quaker ministry. I am happy to say that this process is well under way now in New York Yearly Meeting.

The goal would be a corporate witness life that instinctively presents our testimony as religiously motivated in language that carries power. That Power liberated the Israelites from Egypt, it delivered the poor, the sick, and the oppressed through Jesus’ prophetic ministry, and it gathered a peculiar people in the 1600s who had rediscovered some essential Truths. It sent ambulance crews to Europe in wartime, it sends peacemakers into prisons in our own time, it provides water filters for families in Kenya. That Power is alive and well. We believe that we can open a direct channel to that Power, both as individuals and as communities. So the project is to not just believe that, but to actually experience it.

American Spring

October 11, 2011 § 12 Comments

One of the goals of my research and writing on Quakers and capitalism is to bring historical perspective to a call for a living testimony on economic justice. The movement that began as Occupy Wall Street has spread to other cities around the country and may, I hope, become a truly national movement, the beginning of an American Spring that, like the Arab Spring that has brought regime change to Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, will bring regime change to America. The regime that needs changing here in the U.S. is the dominion of corporate interests and the interests of the very wealthy over the interests of the rest of us.

The press has made much of the apparent incoherence of the Occupy movement and its lack of clearly defined goals. However, as Walter Bruegemann has said (I think it was him; it might have been Dorothy Soelle), prophecy begins as lamentation. The first step in prophetic movement toward justice is recognizing and naming your suffering. That’s the stage the Occupy movement is in right now, it seems to me.

However, in what I see so far, a clear thread does run through their rather chaotic and scattershot message: the hijacking of our economics, our democracy and political culture, our social culture and social welfare, our food and water supplies, our media—and our minds, really—by the 1% of Americans that own 50% of our wealth. We are the 99%. Jesus would have named this condition Mammon—greed, ill-gotten wealth, the oppressive interests of the rich.

The American Spring represents a historic opportunity for the Religious Society of Friends to join the conversation, to develop for ourselves for the first time, really, a clearly articulated set of goals toward economic justice and to bring our witness to the movement. Where do we Quakers stand? What do we have to offer? How are we led by the Holy Spirit to testify to truth?

This is one of those areas where having your Quaker roots firmly planted in Christian scripture really pays off (though not, sadly, traditional Christian theology). Economic justice was the very heart of Jesus’ mission. The synoptic gospels offer enough planks in the platform of the kingdom of God to build a movement on, or to base your testimony upon. Jesus’ foundation for what I like to call the commonwealth of God is incredibly rich. It is both radical and practical. It is concrete, coherent and comprehensive. It speaks truth to power and it speaks to a very large percentage of American society from a position of authority that they already acknowledge as important if not supreme—Christian faith. It speaks directly to the plight of the poor and to the dissolving middle class and to the segments of right wing politics and policy that favor big money over little people. It speaks to those who distort the gospel and would bring evangelical economics into government. (See Chris Lehman’s cover story in the October issue of Harper’s titled “Pennies from Heaven: How Mormon Economics Shape the GOP.”) And it speaks directly to the central issue of our current crisis: debt, debt relief and, especially, home foreclosure.

Meanwhile, without this scriptural foundation, liberal Friends are left (so far) with preaching that there is that of God in everyone and adapting generalities from the testimony of equality into the economic sphere—not bad as far as it goes. We could also recover the writings of George Fox that speak directly to economic justice, or Woolman’s A Plea for the Poor, or the Eight Principles of a Just Social Order published by London Yearly Meeting in 1918, though these earlier Quaker manifestos would bring us back to the Christian gospel again.

So we are not totally bereft, even if we do not employ Christian scripture and the planks in the platform of the commonwealth of God that Jesus lived and taught, though I believe it would be a shame to leave these aside. Virtually all of our other testimonies, not just the testimony of equality, translate in some way to the economic sphere. And the incipient divine-spark theology implicitly understood by Friends in the belief that there is that of God in everyone holds promise. We just need to develop it further and demonstrate how it reflects the guidance we are receiving from the Spirit.

For that is the true meaning of ‘testimony’ for Friends: not that we have an outward set of principles that we try to uphold in our individual and corporate lives, but that these are the ways in which the Light has transformed our inner lives, not just as a historical legacy, but today, right now, in each of us. These are the outward ways in which God is leading us inwardly to testify to God’s truth.

In subsequent posts I want to develop these two strands of tradition further—Jesus’ teachings on economic life and the potential implicit in our liberal ‘theology’ and our current testimonies. And I want to begin exploring their implications for action in this potentially historic time. And I hope my readers will join in this conversation. And I plan to visit some of the Occupy groups in my area to see what they really are up to, rather than rely on reports in the media, and to explore how Friends might contribute.

What if Friends all over the country did the same?

Quakers & Capitalism: A Brief Recap

September 9, 2011 § 5 Comments

It’s been a while since I published an essay in the Quakers and Capitalism series, in which I’ve been digesting a book in progress, a sketchy and rather schematic history of the influence that Friends and capitalism have had on each other. Because of the piecemeal nature of blog posting, I have found myself losing track of my progress and of the arc of the whole; I imagine my readers may have, too. Also, I had fallen behind in creating pdf files of these postings. Thus, before I go on, I’ve decided to offer a brief (well, medium-sized) recap of the project so far.

I have also finished and reorganized the pdf files for each ‘chapter’ in the book. The summary below has links to the respective files and they are also listed as links on the page labeled Quakers & Capitalism—The Book, accessible from the navigation column to the left of the posts. Reading those pdf files in order will give you the main thread of the book. Note that there are several appendices. I’m not satisfied with their style and formatting—I think they’re ugly, in fact, though properly Quaker plain, I suppose—but I did not want to delay while I experiment with style.

I have divided this history of Quakers and capitalism into three main periods: the 1650s, 1700 to 1900, and the 20th century. These are separated by major periods of transition, periods lasting roughly a generation in which external forces collide with forces within Quakerism to transform both capitalist culture and Quaker culture in a symbiotic relationship. During these periods of transition, Quaker fortunes and their relationship with the world around them completely change. Here’s the sketchy outline, with links to their respective essays:

  • Introduction — Introducing John Bellers as perhaps the second most well-known Quaker in history, a man of extraordinary talent and intelligence who had a tremendous impact on Western culture, yet is almost completely unknown among his own Quaker community. Why? Introducing the idea of cultural amnesia regarding economics among Friends, the almost utter lack of meaningful economic testimony (until very recently, at least), notwithstanding our almost indispensable role in creating and developing the capitalist system, and the need for a ministry of teaching and prophetic examination of Quaker economic history.

    • Quakers & Capitalism — Introduction

    • The 1650s — Early Friends (who were mostly yeoman farmers and small trades people) assail the world order with revolutionary fervor in the Lamb’s War, challenging some aspects of economic life, notably in the practices of plain speech and refusing hat honor, but somewhat indirectly, as their focus was essentially religious and aimed primarily at the church. Friends absorb the leaders and members of both the Diggers and the Levellers, more radical egalitarian social movements, but do not absorb their ideas.

    Quakers & Capitalism — The 1650s

      • First major transition (1661 – 1695) — Externally, the persecutions, and internally, the establishment of gospel order, completely transform Quaker culture and Quaker economics. After the Restoration, the state tries to stamp the movement out and seizes vast amounts of Quaker treasure over roughly thirty years. Friends respond to these external pressures by reorganizing—or perhaps organizing would be a better description—instituting structures and processes for internal discipline. Notwithstanding the intense economic assault, however, Friends emerge from this period as a class of wealthy merchants poised to create not quite single-handedly the first truly new platform for creating wealth since the invention of agriculture: industrial capitalism. This extraordinary feat—not just thriving in the face of economic oppression, but ending up in a position to change the world, after all—was a cultural miracle.

    First Transition: Persecution and Gospel Order

    • 1700 – 1900: The Double-culture Period
      • The 18th century — During the 18th century and on into the 19th century, Quakers make many of the indispensable technological innovations upon which industrial capitalism depends, including coke smelting, cast steel, and the railroad. They build many of the key industries, establish many of the most important companies, build its financial infrastructure, develop new modes of organization, and pioneer humane treatment of workers. At the same time that they are engaging the world of business, industry and commerce with incredible energy and invention, they are withdrawing from engagement with the world in virtually every other area of life. Friends maintain this double culture for two hundred years. In England, they become fabulously wealthy; in America, they do pretty well.
      • John Bellers and Quaker responses to Industrial capitalism — Already by 1700, the new industrial economy was creating a new class of the poor: industrial workers, people who had left the land or their village to work in the new urban factories. One extraordinary Friend, John Bellers, saw the problem and proposed a solution: Colledges of Industry. In several pamphlets over 25 years, he brought his ideas to Friends and to Parliament. Both declined to act on them. He made many other significant contributions to Western civilization, as well, only to be virtually forgotten by his own people for two hundred years.

    Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period

    Quakers & Capitalism — Quaker Contributions to Industrial Capitalism

      • Minor transition (1800 – 1828) — Two new ideologies, or domains of western thought, are born as fraternal twins around 1800— evangelical theology and the new ‘science’ of political economy. Thomas Malthus, in particular, was both an evangelical minister and one of the first progenitors of political economy; in his work, the two are fused into one approach to wealth and poverty. Evangelical political economy dominates economic policy in competition with classical economics; Malthus, the evangelical minister, and David Ricardo the investor, (and married to a Quaker, though a Jew converted to Unitarianism himself), embody this rivalry in the early 1800s, though they are personal friends. Joseph John Gurney and Thomas Chalmers make the most influential connection between evangelical Friends and evangelical political economy; these hugely influential figures also are friends.
      • The 19th century — Quakers fragment under the influence of evangelicalism and some evangelical Friends partially reengage with economic/social issues, notably becoming leaders in the philanthropical movement that is the signature response to capitalism’s collateral damage in the Victorian period.

    Quakers & Capitalism — Evangelicalism and Political Economy

      • Major transition (1895 – 1920) — A number of external forces combine with new trends in Quakerism to end the double-culture period and usher in the spirit of liberal engagement with the world that characterizes much of Quaker culture in the 20th century. Quakers had cut a deal with the powers that be: leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone. Now the deal was off.

    Second major transition: The Corporation, the Great War, Liberalism and the Social Order

    This last transition period is a complex one and deserves a little more treatment. For one thing, the fragmentation of Quaker culture in the 1800s means that the forces unleashed at the turn of the century affect different communities differently. You can’t really tell just one story, as I have been trying to do so far. And these forces are so many and so complex that it’s hard to treat them properly in a format like a blog. But here goes:

        • The rise of corporate capitalism — The laws governing the limited liability corporation are finally settled definitively in the 1890s in both America and Britain and the modern corporation is born—a business owned by shareholders rather than private families and so big as to require management. Over time, this innovation deconstructs the great Quaker fortunes in Great Britain.
        • The emergence of the social sciences, including the science of economics — New kinds of thinking are brought to bear on social problems. The Quaker Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree of the Rowntree chocolate dynasty plays a central role in proving scientifically that the poor are not poor because of poor character but because of structural inequities in capitalism itself. In England, the rise of New Liberalism gives birth to a new political party and inaugurates the welfare state, in which, for the first time, government tries to protect the citizenry from capitalism’s downside.
        • Classical economics takes the field — Classical economic theory eclipses evangelical political economy, which was already in decline. However, the spirit of evangelical political economy—the blame for poverty on character (sin), the reliance on private and faith-based solutions for social ills, and the dread of government intervention—lies dormant.
        • The rise of liberalism — The Richmond Conference in America in 1887 and the Manchester Conference in England in 1895 mark the beginning of ‘liberal’ Quakerism, in which ‘liberal’ ideas, especially the scientific study of the Bible, transform and galvanize British Friends and the Hicksite branch of American Quakerism. FGC and FUM (then Five Years Meeting) are born. Rufus Jones introduces a new historiography of Quakerism in which the faith is recast as “mystical” and Fox’s phrase “that of God in everyone” is understood anew as a kind of neo-Platonic divine spark; it becomes over time the central tenet of liberal Quakerism.
        • The Great War — For the first time in two hundred years, Friends are persecuted for their convictions of conscience. This helps to decisively pull Quakers, especially young adult Friends, back into engagement with the world. AFSC is born.
        • The rise of ‘social concerns’ — London Yearly Meeting explores the relationship between war and the social order and, in 1918, approves the Foundations of a True Social Order, a decisive departure from the hands-off attitude toward the social order maintained during the double-culture period and a fairly radical indictment of capitalism as one of the factors leading to the Great War. The document and the debate are carried forward into the first Friends World Conference in 1920 in London. Quaker culture enters the modern era.

    I’ve not yet written one of these transition essays, on the rise of liberalism. I have a lot of new notes from recent research that I need to digest first. And I’ve only just begun to research the economic history of Friends during the twentieth century. In a subsequent entry, I do want to outline the subjects and the people who I think figure prominently in 20th century Quakerism, and I invite any readers who know any of these subjects or people in some depth to contribute. It’s going to take me a while, a long while, to finish this project alone. I welcome collaboration.

Tradition and Religious Experience

July 25, 2011 § 8 Comments

Note: This post began as a reply to a comment on a previous post by George Amoss Jr, but it got so long and felt so important that I decided to make it its own post. Here is George’s original comment, for context:

Steven, it’s not clear to me in the preceding material that you take this view, but I read your final paragraph as implying that the experience of the light or that of God within is primary, the interpretation being secondary. That’s a place of possible difference for you and me, and so, as an offer of a little food for thought, I’ll share my thinking very briefly.

What if the interpretation were, in a sense, to come first, to be the necessary matrix in which the experience takes place? That is, might the experience be the imaginative playing-out of the “narrative” that Fox and others developed from a particular reading of scripture? That’s how it looks to me as I read Fox’s Journal — for example, his famous auditory experience appears to happen well into his development of a radical hermeneutic — and as I compare the Quakerisms of various periods. And if that’s the case, then does the loss of the narrative mean the loss of the original experience, and the substitution of experience shaped by some other narrative? Also, could it be that liberal Quakers can’t explain their experience well because of the incoherent nature of the “narrative” that gives it shape; i.e., because the experience is of the same nature as its parent?

Again, just food for thought.

George, you’ve touched on a subject that I find truly fascinating and I think it’s really important, too: the dynamic relationship between our tradition and our experience—how they shape each other and depend on each other. Behind this issue lies an even deeper question: where do religious experiences come from?

You are right about me: I do think experience is primary. I don’t think religious experience is an “imaginary playing-out of the ‘narrative'”, as you put it. Well, sometimes I suppose it is. But not the profound, life-changing experiences, like those of George Fox and other Friends who have given us our tradition—and not my own formative spiritual experience, either. My own experience encourages me to act as though God is the source, not me or my narrative.

There are all kinds of spiritual and religious experiences, of course, (* see note below), but, like Fox, I have experienced my experience as coming from somewhere outside of myself. My formative spiritual experience, and many of its aftershocks (less powerful experiences that seemed to grow out of the first and helped to develop its meaning and importance for me) came with—or as—a sense of presence, a presence distinct and personal, a ‘personality’ who made an offer of relationship that was covenantal in character. I experienced this ‘angel’, for want of a better word, as Other than me.

Nor was it ‘imaginary’. It was real. The changes it wrought in me testify to its reality. However, by ‘imaginary’ perhaps you mean, not something that isn’t real but something that has been produced by the imagination—not quite the same thing. Well, I could easily explain it all as a projection of my unconscious or my imagination. Or, to turn Jungian for a moment (and I think I am a Jungian), I could say the experience was my own unconscious tapping archetypes in the collective unconscious to project an experience that plays out my own inner narrative in the garb of a cultural narrative. It happens that the ‘narrative’ in my case was Native American, the situation was a sweat lodge ceremony, and the whole thing was animistic in its essential elements. In fact, I have done a lot of thinking along these psychological lines, and this speculation is rather satisfying to me intellectually. But that’s NOT how I experienced it. I had an encounter with an Other and nothing has ever been the same since.

And, I refuse to redefine my own experience just because an elegant social science gives me the tools to ‘make sense’ of an otherwise almost ineffable experience and because my primary cultural (that is, scientific and secular) milieu encourages me to do so. Rather, I choose to honor my own experience by owning it as it came to me. Just so, I refuse to redefine other people’s experience for them. I refuse to say that George Fox was playing out a narrative built on his interpretation of scripture rather than experiencing the living Christ. It seems deeply disrespectful to me to do that. I don’t want anybody telling me what my experience really means, and I try to return the favor.

This is not for me just a kind of respectful tolerance, with which I keep my mouth shut but still inwardly translate the other person’s experience into something that works for me. These testimonies, these witnesses to the Truth lay upon me the responsibility I have in meeting for worship: not just to listen respectfully to someone’s vocal ministry, but to try to actually HEAR the Truth inside the message. So I take their experience at face value: if George Fox says it was Christ, then it WAS Christ who spoke to his condition. Nor is he alone. Millions of people have experienced Christ; dozens—hundreds—of his Quaker contemporaries shared his experience. I take that to mean that their Christ exists, even though I have no experience of him myself. This makes me a polytheist, I suppose, because I take everyone’s account of their experience at face value, meaning that whatever they experienced really exists. One way to put this, I suppose, is that we do not have spiritual or religious experiences—they have us. This is not to say, however, that interpretation does not have a role to play.

I first started thinking about this when reading a great book by Alan F. Segal titled Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee. Among other things, Segal uses studies in the sociology of religion, and especially of conversion experiences, to look at Paul, and Paul is a good case study in how it goes: You have a life-changing experience—you’re changed for sure, but at first it’s all power and little content—you’re dazzled and blind and all you’ve got to go on is one or two short sentences. You can’t really see how you’re changed right away for all the light, or what it means, or where you fit in the larger tradition that seems to be the context for the little bit of content you do have to work with. (This is exactly how it was for me in my own formative visionary experience: all I had was an overwhelming sense of presence and some indecipherable auditory data, a voice I could not understand.) If you are lucky, someone—Ananias, in Paul’s case—is there to teach you what your experience means, to guide you in reordering your life according to your vision, to help you with the interpretation.

So most of the interpretation comes AFTER the experience. But still, religious experience rarely comes in a cultural vacuum. The little bit of content that comprises the experience (for Paul, the voice of Christ saying just a couple of sentences; for Jesus, just one sentence from heaven)—most of the time, the core of your experience has behind it a religious tradition, a context. Even when your experience launches you on a trajectory that diverges from the tradition that was its original context, as the experience of Paul and Jesus and George Fox did, still there is a meme, as it were, that comes from a tradition that forms the seed for your vision.

So tradition helps to shape experience up front, and then that tradition—or some other mutation of the tradition—helps to give it meaning afterward. And then some prophetic experiences have the power to reshape the tradition, to cause a mutation. It’s a feedback system constantly spiraling forward. Continuing revelation.

Which brings us to liberal Quakers and the radical erosion of tradition, of meaningful narrative, and the dearth of deep, transformative religious experience among liberal Friends. Many of us have abandoned the Christian and biblical traditions, not just intellectually, as a belief system, but more viscerally, as a deep spiritual disconnect; for some, it’s even a form of revulsion.

Ironically, that seems to be how George Fox felt. Like him, we feel that the tradition we inherited no longer works for us, that its memes are no longer available to us as seeds for religious experience. But salvation in Christ—the ur-meme of Christianity—did, in fact, seed his experience, and he gave that experience primacy. A religious genius, he was able to interpret it on his own, without the help of an Ananias. He did not so much interpret his experience in terms of scripture as he interpreted scripture in terms of his experience. The result was the major mutation known as Quakerism.

Meanwhile, we modern liberal Friends have no shared narrative to provide us with new seeds. Some of us, like me, come to Quakers from other traditions, formed by experiences already seeded and interpreted in those traditions. We share these experiences only very reluctantly, partly because that’s how you treat your own sacred experience, and partly because we don’t know how it fits in.

This is the dilemma of modern, post-Christian, post-traditional liberal Quakerism: no clear narrative context to support religious experience and, much more importantly, no coherent culture of eldership: We often don’t know people who have had religious experience, whose experience could inspire our own. Or we don’t know people whose religious experience corresponds to our own, who could therefore help us understand and integrate our experience. We don’t have the scriptural tools Fox had and we don’t have an Ananias.

Well, this is a very long response. But as I said, I think this subject lies at the crux of our condition as liberal Friends. Where does religious experience come from? What role does tradition or narrative play in our experience? And what do you do as a community and as individual seekers when you don’t have a traditional narrative to work with?

I’m still exploring these questions, and your comment has been very fruitful for me to think about. I feel increasingly called to a ministry of exploration, seeking ways to support transformative religious experience among liberal Friends, given the incoherent nature of our ‘narrative’, as you have put it. Our narrative is ‘incoherent’ . . .

  • because so many convinced Friends bring experiences from other traditions, as I have, making for a diverse polyglot of experience that militates against any coherent collective experience or narrative;
  • because so many liberal Friends have not had transformative religious experiences yet themselves, in the first place;
  • because we wouldn’t know it if they did: our culture of silence prevents us from knowing each others’ experience, so we would not know that an elder sits next to us who could help us with our own experience; and
  • because we’ve laid down the narrative we inherited, leaving us meme-less and bereft.

* On ‘spiritual experience’ vs ‘religious experience’: I think of spiritual experience as personal experience that is both transcendental and transformational—it transcends the ken of the senses and of normal consciousness, and it changes you for the better. I think of ‘religious experience’ as spiritual experience that takes place in the context of one’s religious life, that is, life within a tradition and a community of the spirit.

The Meaning of ‘the Light’—Three Stages in the History of an Essential Quaker Insight

July 20, 2011 § 8 Comments

A Note:

George Amoss Jr. posted two very interesting pieces on basically the same topic as my post below at The Postmodern Quaker and on the same day. We’re on complementary paths and I hope you’ll take a look at what he has to say.

Some background

I have for many years campaigned against the claim that the phrase ‘there is that of God in everyone’ is the essential tenet of Quakerism, feeling very strongly that modern liberal Friends are

  • dumbing down the content of our rich tradition to this one sound bite,
  • saying something with it that George Fox never intended and would never have agreed with and which we ourselves cannot—or at least do not—clearly articulate, and
  • making claims for its authority that simply are not true—that, for instance, it’s the foundation of our inward listening spirituality and of our testimonies (it’s especially common to hear it used to explain the peace testimony).

Some time ago, I was writing one of my rants against the way we use the phrase when I realized that I wasn’t completely sure about some of my claims, so I decided to do some research. I am just now finishing this research and the results have astounded me. I have not changed my mind about most of my concerns about this ubiquitous phrase and I plan to return to these concerns in subsequent posts, but about one thing I found I was completely wrong.

I had always believed that Fox would never have countenanced the vaguely neo-Gnostic meaning for ‘that of God’ that is so common among us nowadays—namely, that there is some aspect of the divine in the human, a divine spark, as the neo-Platonists put it. Now it seems that George Fox was some kind of ‘Gnostic’, after all. That he did believe—or rather, that he had experienced in his visions of 1647 (“There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition”) and 1648 (“I was brought up in the spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God”)—that he had experienced his own nature to be the “flesh and blood” of Christ, not separate or distinct from the substance of God, that “the light”, the “seed”, which all humans possessed, was “of God”, that is, the very substance of Christ’s heavenly body. That “the light” was not just a teacher or revealer or convincer/convictor, but that it was ‘metaphysical’ in its effect, raising up “the first body”, the paradisiacal body that was before the fall. That this was the nature of salvation in Christ: to shed the inner, ‘carnal’ body that could sin, and to be inhabited instead, body and spirit, by the immaterial, heavenly body of Christ himself, so as to partake of his power and authority and even perfection. That this indeed was the original foundation for Quaker ‘perfectionism’, the belief that one could live without sin. The authors and the works that make these assertions (Glen D. Reynolds, Richard Bailey, Rosemary Moore) are listed at the end of this post.

I could feel a little better about my ignorance of Fox’s understanding of the light because these authors and a couple of others seem to have uncovered a deliberate effort on the part of early Friends to excise this aspect of Fox’s and early Friends’ theology from public record. They name, especially, Thomas Ellwood, the first editor of Fox’s journal, and William Penn, but even including Fox himself, to some degree. Soon after the Naylor affair in 1656, but especially after the Restoration, these editors did what they could to hide, deny, recast or otherwise explain away this Gnostic bent in order to avoid charges of blasphemy and tone down Quaker rhetoric in the face of the persecutions. Fox himself never actually changed his mind about the divine character of the “soul”, nor about his own ‘divination’ through perfect union with Christ, though he voiced these claims less often and more cleverly later in life. So Ellwood and Penn did it for him posthumously.

I am swayed by these writers’ arguments. So now it seems to me that the doctrine of “the light” has gone through three phases in our history.

  • First, Fox and many early Friends apparently did believe in a divine element in the human, which they often called “the seed”, and in salvation as a complete union with Christ as the light.
  • Then this was replaced fairly soon (beginning in the aftermath of the Naylor affair in 1656 and gaining momentum during the persecutions after the Restoration in 1661) with a spiritualizing theology of the Inward Light, the recasting of “the seed” as a capacity for Christ’s spiritual inhabitation rather than an inherent sharing of the divine substance, and a partial restoration of the Puritan gulf between God and his creature.
  • Finally, beginning with Rufus Jones and gaining momentum among liberal Friends since the 1960s, a return to a vaguely neo-Gnostic, neo-Platonic mysticism of the Light, in which “that of God” is some kind of divine spark inherent in all humans, and a new emphasis on the Inner Light as a universal divine principle in the human, replacing the Inward Light of Christ that had prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

The first understanding of the light—“the light” and “the Seed”.

For Fox and Naylor and many, if not most of the early Friends (according to Moore, Bailey and Reynolds), “the light” was both the agent of unity with God and the object of that unity as it acted upon an “unchangeable life and power, and seed of God” in us. (Reynolds, page 57, quoting Fox). Fox believed that Galatians 3:16* (see below) meant that all of Adam and Eve’s offspring had within them a “seed”, which was Christ: “I speak the same seed which is Christ…Jesus Christ the way, the truth and the life, he is the door that all must pass through, and he is the porter that opens it”.

To me, these writers are quite persuasive and comprehensive when discussing the role of the light and the seed in salvation, but much less clear about the nature of the soul and its relation to this divine principle—about what we appear to refer to when we say “that of God in everyone”. This is mostly, I think, because Fox himself was not particularly concerned with the metaphysics involved in the creation of the soul and hardly even interested in the metaphysics of the soul’s salvation. He was more interested in the effects of the light than its causes, in the “raising up” of the seed than in its planting at creation.

Fox uses the phrase “that of God” or its equivalent by my count roughly 720 times in his works, but almost always in the context of discussing ministry, rather than in theologizing about the nature of the human or the metaphysics of the soul (which I say again did not seem to interest him very much). He uses this phrase to denote something within us that yearns for God. This is the case in the quote most often cited, from a pastoral epistle in the Journal (Nickals edition, page 263):

Bring all into the worship of God. Plough up the fallow ground . . . And none are ploughed up but he who comes to the principle of God in him which he hath transgressed. Then he doth service to God; then the planting and the watering and the increase from God cometh. So the ministers of the Spirit must minister to the spirit that is transgressed and in prison, which hath been in captivity in every one; whereby with the same spirit people must be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits, and do service to him and have unity with him, with the Scriptures and one with another. And this is the word of the Lord God to you all, and a charge to you all in the presence of the living God, be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you. Then to the Lord God you will be a sweet savour and a blessing.

The “principle of God in him which he hath transgressed”, “the spirit that is transgressed and in prison”, “that of God in every one”, and “the witness of God in them” all seem in this light to refer to some divine element in the human, which is “the same spirit [whereby] people must be led out of captivity up to God, the Father of spirits . . . and have unity with him”—that is, Christ. And the salvation of the soul—indeed, its perfection—is this unity with what Bailey calls Christ’s “celestial body”, the heavenly body of Christ.

 

The second understanding of the Light—the Inward Light of Christ.

The second phase in the meaning of the light comes with the retreat from the idea of salvation as divination through complete union with the light. According to Reynolds, the phrase “inner light” never occurs before 1700 and “inward light” is rare. But already with the publication of Barclay’s Apology in 1676, and then with the bowdlerized version of Fox’s journal that included Penn’s temporizing introduction in 1694, Friends began identifying the Light with the spirit of Christ, as something that came to us, rather than something already dwelling within us. The ‘seed’ became a capacity for receiving the Inward Light, rather than a sharing of the substance of the divine. Fox’s understanding of ‘ the seed’, the first body, was buried beneath a new theology that restored the Puritan gulf between God and his creature, a gulf which Christ crosses on the bridge of the Light to dwell within us spiritually. The Light became an ethical influence that could help us overcome sin as each impulse to sin arose, rather than a metaphysically transforming and substantial inhabitation of Christ’s heavenly body. Salvation and “the Light” became spiritualized.

 

The third understanding of the Light—the Inner Light and “that of God”.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, through his study of mysticism, Rufus Jones believed he saw a common theme that explained the universal character of mystical experience, and he applied this understanding to the Quaker insight of the Inner Light. This was the neo-Platonic idea of the divine spark: that there was within the human an element of the divine, which not only yearned for reunion with God, its source, but was also capable of experiencing the divine through mystical experience. In applying this insight to Fox’s phrase, “that of God” and the Inner Light, he redefined Quakerism as a mystical religion—not that it wasn’t ‘mystical’ all along, but that he taught us to think of ourselves this way.

It took a while, but this idea caught on and, especially since the 1960s, this neo-Gnostic idea has become the dominant tenet of modern liberal Quakerism: that “there is that of God in everyone”, meaning that every person has within them a kind of divine spark, that humans partake of the divine in some way that accounts for our religious experience. In fact, this is now virtually the only tenet of liberal Quaker theology upon which we seem to agree.

So the Inner Light has replaced the Inward Light of Christ, which was dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries, which itself had replaced the light and the seed as a sharing of divine substance inherent in the human, which had been dominant from the 1640s through the 1660s. The Inner Light has become a thing unto itself, independent of Christ, or of any specifically Christian theology, or of any theology or religious tradition at all, for that matter. Most Friends probably do not recognize the connection with neo-Platonism that inspired Rufus Jones, for instance. “That of God” is universal, not just as something universally possessed by all humans, but also as a principle to be understood independently of any specific doctrine or tradition.

Without a tradition to give it meaning or context, and given that liberal Friends are inclined to see themselves as having ‘outgrown’ the limitations of Quakerism’s specifically Christian roots and tend to be a bit allergic to theologizing in the first place, we now are free to define the Light and “that of God” however we like—if we define it at all. We used to define the phrase using God as the starting point: “that of” derived its meaning and value from a shared understanding of who and what “God” was. Now we humans are the starting point—“that of” is the starting point. Now “God” derives its value and meaning from “that of”. We have reversed the direction of the metaphysical vector implied in the phrase “that of God”. We now define God in terms of ourselves, working from a more or less shared understanding of what “that of” is: “that of” God is the divine spark. “God”, as a consequence, has become a projection of the divine principle that all humans have within them.

And “the Light” has come to stand in for God, representing this whole metaphysical ecosystem in which all humans possess a divine principle that makes each individual life sacred and accounts for individual spiritual experience, and this principle somehow connects us all in a mysterious and sacred way, and this connection somehow accounts for our collective spiritual experience.

At least that’s how it looks to me. I’m speculating when I describe the third stage in our understanding of the Light in this way because we haven’t really come up with a theology about it; the modern liberal Quaker tendency to shy away from doctrine, creeds and theology in general has kept us from articulating what we think about the Light or “that of God in everyone” in any serious way. I’m just drawing inferences from how we use these phrases and ideas today and trying to make sense of them.

So we have come full circle, but in a spiral. We’ve returned to Fox’s belief in a divine substance in the human, but we hold the idea now in a completely new context. We’ve separated it from its foundation in Christian faith and Scripture. More importantly, we’ve separated it from experience. George Fox didn’t infer his ‘theology’ of the light from Scripture; he experienced the light personally, viscerally, as utter spiritual and physical transformation, and then adapted his Christian and scriptural tradition to explain his experience. Later Friends continued to experience the Inward Light, also, and they continued to find that their Christian and biblical tradition helped them articulate that experience.

What of us? We ‘believe’ in the Inner Light, in “that of God” within us, but have we experienced it? And, without the worldview, the vocabulary, and the theological infrastructure of Christian and biblical tradition to help us articulate whatever our experience is, how do we communicate it—to ourselves, to each other, to our children, to newcomers and seekers inquiring about Quakerism? What canst we say?

* Galatians 3:16 (KJV): “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, ‘And to seeds’, as of many; but as of one, ‘And to thy seed’, which is Christ.” Paul is apparently referring to Genesis 12:3 & 7; 13:15-16; 24:7; and especially, Genesis 17:7-10. Fox seems also to have had in mind Genesis 3:15 when talking about the “seed”: (God speaking to the serpent after the Fall) “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his seed.”

Books I’ve recently read on the how George Fox and early Friends understood “the light”:

  • Glen D. Reynolds, Was George Fox a Gnostic? An Examination of Foxian Theology from a Valentinian Gnostic Perspective; and “Was Seventeenth-century Quaker Christology Homogeneous?”, a chapter in The Creation of Quaker Theory: New Perspectives, Pink Dandelion, editor.
  • Richard Bailey, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism: The Making and Unmaking of a God.
  • Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain 1646-1666.

Liberal Quakerism: ‘Profession’ without ‘Possession’?

May 23, 2011 § 13 Comments

I’ve been reading Towards Tragedy/Reclaiming Hope: Literature, Theology and Sociology in Conversation, by Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn, Rachel Muers, Brian Phillips, and Richard E. Sturm (Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, England and Burlington, Vermont; 2004). It’s a sometimes fascinating book that uses tragedy as a lens through which to view history—British history, especially, and Quaker history, in particular—and as a touchstone for evaluating contemporary (Quaker) culture and its trajectory into the future. It follows a more or less chronological scheme, with chapters on The Ancient Origin and Sense of Tragedy (Sturm), The Early Quaker Lamb’s War: Secularization and the Death of Tragedy (Gwyn), Apocalypse Without Tears: Hubris and Folly Among Late Victorian and Edwardian British Friends (Phillips), The Loss of Hope: England and its Establishment in the Twentieth Century (Dandelion), The Loss of Providence (Dandelion), New Voices, New Hopes? (Muers), and several Postscripts.

The book’s literary and somewhat abstract premise keeps it from appealing to many Quaker readers, I suspect, and every once in a while, I was glad that I had studied and read Greek tragedy somewhat. (If you haven’t, don’t let that stop you from reading Towards Tragedy, though—it won’t keep you from getting a lot out it.) The authors also make broad generalizations about the meaning and the ‘spirit’ of the periods they examine, without much rigorous historical detail or argument. I think and write this way myself—I have filled my own history of Quakers and Capitalism with similar schematic characterizations—so I didn’t mind. But we all have to watch the tendency to draw conclusions rather glibly, only to discover that we had not accounted for historical forces we didn’t know about or understood only superficially.

That said, in these authors’ hands, I found that new light did pass through this lens of tragedy, that it revealed much that is, if not unique in Quaker studies, at least fresh with valuable insight into who we are and how we got here. (“We” is mostly British Quakerism, but many of these insights apply just as well to liberal Quakerism in America.) I want to raise a couple of passages up for broader discussion among Friends. The first comes from Doug Gwyn’s Postscript (page 127-128):

[However,] given that Quaker spirituality took shape within the context of a deep reflection and personal immersion in the drama of the gospels, there is a Christoform quality to the deeper structures of Quaker faith and practice that has been too long ignored and outright denied. Liberal Quakerism has drifted over the twentieth century into a belief that it can take some of the central metaphors of Quaker language – key terms such as ‘light’, ‘seed’, ‘that of God in everyone’ – and strip them of their framing in the gospel and overall biblical framework of salvation history without losing any of their earlier potency. What has emerged from this process is a Quaker faith and practice that maintains a ‘profession’ in words of a reality no longer in ‘possession’ – the very hypocrisy that early Friends denounced so strongly in the Puritan culture of their day. It is only by continuing to use the sham of right-wing, fundamentalist Christianity as their rhetorical foil that Liberal Friends manage to maintain their own parody of Quaker faith and practice. By chronically trading in caricatures of ‘Christianity’, Liberal Quakerism has become a caricature of itself. This cannot last. And when it collapses, it will be no tragedy.

The tragedy is the present condition, when one confronts it and enters into its painful reality in the light of Christ. By ‘in the light of Christ’ I mean both the inward, revealing presence of Christ within and the ‘in light of’ the gospel narrative of Jesus’ own life, suffering, death and resurrection. There is no authentic Quaker epistemology of ‘the light within’ without its attendant hermeneutic of Scripture. Without the latter’s framing, the former knows anything, everything, nothing. Without the gospel, the reflexive self of postmodernity shrinks from suffering as a lethal blow to self-esteem and human dignity. And without the larger biblical saga of God’s providential designs in history, there is very little that Friends will corporately discern as their calling to do together in a world of suffering, violence and injustice. (emphases are Gwyn’s)

[epistemology: the study of the nature and grounds of knowledge—what we can know and how we know it—especially as regards the limits and validity of our knowledge;

hermeneutic: a way of interpreting texts, especially the Bible]

I think what Doug is saying is that, by abandoning the original Christian and biblical framework for our tradition while continuing to use the vocabulary, we end up talking jive.  And we violate the testimony of integrity: our outward expression has no meaningful connection to an inward truth. I would say that the distortion and hypocrisy go down to the core of Quaker spirituality, passing through three layers of self-deception (by the way, I consider myself a post-Christian, liberal Quaker, so I’m talking about myself here, not just about some ‘other’ Friends):

  1. First, we use words to say things that they weren’t meant to say, disconnecting them from their original meaning and context. The modern use of the phrase ‘that of God in everyone’ is the quintessential example.
  2. More deeply, we still think we know what we’re saying and we blithely assume in our ignorance that we are right. We often (usually?) don’t know what Fox meant by ‘that of God’, for example; we don’t know that the modern ‘divine spark’ meaning comes from Rufus Jones barely a hundred years ago, and we assume that our meaning (whatever that is) is, in fact, Quaker tradition going way back, and furthermore, that it’s the foundation for the peace testimony and just about everything else, to boot; which it isn’t.
  3. Finally, at the very heart of this empty and misrepresented shell, we do not know the truth of what we say experimentally. We have not experienced the light, at least not ‘the light’ that Fox and Fell and Howgill and Woolman experienced. We have no knowledge of the ‘seed’. We have no direct experience of ‘that of God’ in others, or ourselves, for that matter. We have the profession without the possession. (In fact, we’ve made a fetish out of not knowing, of perpetually seeking as the only authentic spiritual path, teaching ourselves to actually suspect and fear those who profess to know—Doug’s fundamentalist foil at work.)

I’m not so sure about this last point. I bet a lot of my readers will protest that they have experienced ‘the light’, even if it did not have Christ’s nametag on its chest, even if it did not illuminate their sins, ‘convincing’ (convicting) them into repentance and new Life in Christ. Who are you to say I have not experienced ‘that of God’ in everyone, you might be saying?

What remains, however, is that no one has come forward with a new ‘profession’ of what these words—the content of our tradition—mean now in this post-Christian, post-biblical age. If we have the ‘possession’—if we possess a new truth—then where is the new explanation of the old words? More to the point, if we possess a new truth—one without Jesus and the gospel at its roots—then why use the old words at all? Where are the new ones?

Vocal ministry offers a good case study. We actually do have a ‘new’ language for vocal ministry: ‘speaking in meeting’. We no longer think of ‘speaking in meeting’ as speaking on God’s behalf, at the prompting of Christ within us. If fact, we’d get pretty nervous if someone claimed to be speaking God’s will. So where does a ‘message’ come from? What authority does it have? How does the meeting provide for the eldership of ‘speaking in meeting’ and of the speakers, themselves, if we do not know where their calling comes from or what authority their ‘messages’ should have? Is there anymore even such a thing as a calling to vocal ministry?

What is the new framework, the new epistemology and hermeneutic—the new way to explain what we know and how we know it and where our knowledge comes from?

The silence is deafening. We do not know.

The Question of Christianity

April 27, 2011 § 12 Comments

A digest and commentary on a sociological study of the question in Britain by Kate Mellor

I have been reading The Quaker Condition: The Sociology of a Liberal Religion edited by Pink Dandelion and Peter Collins, a collection of essays that seek to provide a sociological profile of British Quakerism with often quite personal reflections on the sociology of religion in general and the role of sociology and sociologists among Friends in particular. This is a fascinating book with some important and often surprising insights into liberal Quakerism, at least as it’s practiced by British Friends.

It’s often said and assumed, I think, that British Quakerism is farther down the trajectory toward universalism and liberalism than even liberal Quakerism in America. I’ve not spent enough time there to be able to comment on that from personal experience, but the modest amount of British Quaker books I’ve read suggest that this might be true. I have found the work of Ben Pink Dandelion (1) and Alastair Heron (2) especially valuable in understanding British Quakerism.

I want to digest several of the chapters in this book in later posts, to give American Friends, especially, easier access to its content, and I want to start with Kate Mellor’s startling essay on whether British Friends are Christian (pages 70-87). Two previous sociological surveys addressed this question, the first by Dandelion in 1996, and then by Rosie Rutherford in 2003. Each seemed to conclude that British Quakerism had lost its Christian identity and this seemed to confirm the anecdotal evidence of contributions to The Friend over the past several decades and, especially, the conclusion of Alastair Heron in his 1995 book, Quakers in History: a century of change 1895-1995. Mellor’s results, however, contradict the findings of Dandelion and Rutherford rather dramatically, in some ways. And yet, it seems to me that the accepted characterization of liberal Quakerism (at least in the UK) as post-Christian still holds.

Mellor conducted her survey in three stages in 2005 and 2006. She began with 80 members and attenders of Poole Meeting, then sent her questionnaire to the other Preparative Meetings in the Bournemouth and Swanage Monthly Meeting (a Preparative Meeting is one of several meetings that meet for worship weekly but send their business up to a Monthly Meeting), and then to 1006 Friends in the Yearly Meeting. I’ve made a pdf file of her table of responses to her questionnaire.

Mellor finds that 90% of British Friends believe in God, 80% consider themselves Christian, 97% find Jesus’ ethical teachings meaningful, 91% find his spiritual teachings meaningful, and 91% use his teachings or example to guide their own lives. In Dandelion’s study, 50.7% answered that they “would describe” themselves as Christian from among a set of options; in Rutherford’s sample, 45.5% answered that they “think of themselves as Christian”. The difference, Mellor proposes, is the way in which the question was posed; in particular, she allowed respondents to define “Christian” however they liked, whereas Dandelion and Rutherford used their own definitions. Dandelion used belief in Jesus as unique to define Christian, and this definition was not disclosed to his participants.

When allowed to define ‘Christian’ in their own terms, a very healthy majority of British Friends said they were. On the other hand, almost exactly the same percentage (79% versus 80%) said they did not believe in the Atonement. 66% did not generally use the title Christ, 58% did not believe Jesus was or is the Son of God, 54% claimed to be Universalist, and, perhaps most astoundingly, 82% claimed to be Agnostic and 89% followed some other faith. At the same time, 74% said Fox’s famous declaration that “There is one, even Jesus Christ, who can speak to they condition” ‘rang true for them’ and 79% would describe Quakerism as a Christian faith.

This is really a mixed—I would say even contradictory—picture. It’s fair to say that British Friends self-identity as Christian, but they have radically redefined what that means. They seem unwilling to let go of their Christian tradition while they have at the same time largely abandoned that tradition as it has traditionally defined itself.

To my mind, a set of very crucial questions are missing from her study, and from the others, too—questions about religious experience as opposed to belief. I might phrase them this way: Have you experienced Jesus Christ as a meaningful or transformative presence in your life? Is Jesus Christ the center of your religious life? Do you conduct your religious life in the context of relationship with Jesus? Have your formative religious or spiritual experiences taken place in the context of Christian (or for that matter, Quaker) tradition?

The Christianity of British Friends, as revealed in Mellor’s study, seems to me to be a matter of positive feeling for Jesus’ teachings and a desire for continuity of tradition and identity at the surface. But the fact that almost 90% follow some other faith seems to suggest that very few British Friends actually practice Christianity as their religion.

I would love to see a similar study conducted among American Friends that included questions about experience, in addition to questions about belief.

(1)          A Sociological Analysis of the Theology of Quakers: the silent revolution, 1996; The Creation of Quaker Theory: insider perspectives, 2004; The Liturgies of Quakerism, 2005.

(2)          Caring, Conviction and Commitment: dilemmas of Quaker membership today, 1992; Quakers in Britain: a century of change 1895-1995, 1995.

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