Theism, Nontheism, and Quaker Identity
November 1, 2024 § 3 Comments
This is a long post—lots of ground to cover. So here’s a brief outline:
Introduction
I subscribe to an email newsletter of Academia, a site that aggregates academic articles, and I’ve set a filter for Quaker articles. I get stuff I want to read regularly—can’t keep up with it.
Today, I got “Quakers and Non/Theism: Questions and Prospects,” by Jeffrey Dudiak, an article that appeared in Quaker Religious Thought, volume 118, from 2012. The issue features essays on theism, nontheism, and Quaker identity by Howard Macy as editor, Paul Anderson, Jeffrey Dudiak, David Boulton, Shannon Craigo-Snell, and Patrick J. Nugent. The latter two articles are responses primarily to Dudiak and Boulton, the theist and nontheist apologists.
I wanted to share this resource on what I believe is a very important subject, whose salience has not diminished since 2012, though maybe the heat’s been turned down a bit since then. But I also want to offer my own position on these questions. I don’t imagine that my convictions settle anything, but I hope that they do speak to some Friends.
Not in the traditional sense, as in believing in a supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient, completely good; “personal” in the sense of keen to engage in relationship with me; “historical,” not just in the sense of paying attention to human history, both writ large and personal, but also having a plan for the fulfillment and redemption of humanity writ large and for individual humans, too, like me—a supreme deity who knows me, cares about me, and whom I could know in return.
I do not know such a deity—I have no experience to base such a belief on. Intellectually, such an idea even offends me a bit: where was some history-caring and engaged deity during the Holocaust, for instance? Furthermore, experience of a supreme being by a being as finite as myself would, it seems, shatter my consciousness. And even if I did experience [him] without exploding, what good would it do me? My yoga teachers taught a similar Vedanta endgame of pure consciousness as the goal of my practice, and it just seemed irrelevant to my lived life.
On the other hand, I have experienced—what shall I call them? Angels? Spirits? Devas? I am some kind of polytheist, having had direct transcendental experience of spiritual beings, and I subsequently have enjoyed relationships with them as central to my spiritual life. So I call myself a para-theist. My experience is that there are deities out there, just with a small “d”.
And I take at face value the testimony of my Christian f/Friends, and the testimony of the first Friends, and of thousands of Friends since the 17th century—the testimony of their encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ. Therefore, I believe in Jesus Christ, even though I have not (yet) been called by him into his discipleship.
I am not willing to disrespect the experiences of those Friends who have been blessed by his presence in their lives by telling them that their experience is just a projection of their unconscious, or not real in some other way, or whatever, just because I don’t share their experience; and also because I wouldn’t want anybody to disrespect my own such experiences. Don’t mess with with my experience and I won’t mess with yours; though I do invite inquiry, and even respectful challenge.
Quakerism is a Christian religion
For this reason, and for several other reasons, I consider Quakerism a Christian religion, and I feel that I am a guest in the house that Christ built. I am grateful that my meetings have accepted me without my Christian confession (though they never even considered such a matter, being to that degree non-Christian or post-Christian). And I think other non-Christians should share my gratitude and act accordingly. By act accordingly, I mean, not just tolerate, but invite and celebrate Christian and Biblical vocal ministry, and actively contribute to a Quaker culture in which Christian Friends feel invited to talk from their own experience and religious sensibilities without fear or censure. Or even to pray, as I do, that Christ will join us, gather us, in our worship.
In other words, a theism built on relationship with Christ seems not just reasonable to me; it parallels my own experience. Hence my para-theism.
It is natural for us to venture out of our experience into theology. I can’t keep from doing this, myself. Well, actually, I love doing it, I do it all the time, in my head and in my writing. And, while a lot of the legacy theology of the Christian tradition does not work for me, it obviously works for a lot of Friends, at least up to a point. From the beginning, starting with Fox himself, some Quakers have always been a bit heterodox.
So we are theists
So, for me, the bottom line is that Quakers are theists in our core identity, because we are Christian; that is, we were gathered as a people of God by Christ, most of us have been invited into personal f/Friendship with Christ, and that’s that. We are a Christian faith historically. We are a Christian faith demographically still today. And the lack of such experience by a small minority of the movement does not change the identity of the movement as a whole.
That we non-Christians, and nontheists, and para-theists in the minority have been given a bed in the spare room of the house that Christ built is a blessing to be grateful for. Trying to kick Christ out of the master bedroom onto the living room couch is deeply disrespectful of our tradition, and of him.
About “God”
One more thing, though. I just used the word God. So what do I mean by “God”, capital “G”? In my public discourse, I use the word God as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind my listener’s or my reader’s own spiritual and religious experience is. Your experience is real; I honor that with belief and respect.
I do have my own personal understanding of God, but it’s mine and I will not press it upon you as some greater truth. But I will share it as mine.
For me, God is the spiritual dimension of evolution. In this, I am something of a student of Teilhard de Chardin and of Thomas Berry. The universe is unfolding. There is a wisdom, an intelligence, and an apparent direction to this unfolding—a Logos, as the writer of the prologue to the gospel of John put it, and as the ancient Stoics understood it, and Philo of Alexandria and the writer of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom. There is a Mystery Reality behind creation, within creation, a spiritual dynamic in evolution that we can sometimes sense somehow, in some small but intimate way—when I’m free-climbing the cliffs of the Shawangunks, for instance, or hearing a V of geese pass overhead above the fog.
That communion is the deepest of all communions for me, with the possible exception of a gathered Quaker meeting for worship. So God is real for me in this way, yes.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—Direct Experience
October 27, 2024 § Leave a comment
The quote below is from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838). About the essay the editor of The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, Lawrence Buell, writes in his introduction:
“This is Emerson’s most incendiary work. It was delivered as a commencement oration at the behest of the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, Unitarianism’s academic home base and Emerson’s own graduate alma mater. Emerson takes aim at the two related arguments on which Unitarian theology chiefly rested its case for being a distinctive form of ‘rational’ Christianity: that the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ miracles proved the authenticity of Christianity, and that Jesus was God’s unique and authoritative messenger. After this comes an equally acerbic denunciation of ineffective preaching, in which Emerson charges each graduate to think of himself by contrast as ‘a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost’ and preach prophetically. The address caused an irreversible rift between Unitarian liberals and radicals. Emerson was not invited back again to speak at Harvard for nearly thirty years.”
This quote comes from Emerson’s strongly worded injunction to preach from one’s own experience and in what we would call continuing revelation. In it, he mentions George Fox and admonishes against relying on past religious personages rather than on one’s own “soul.” More about soul after the quote. And please make allowances for his use of “man” for humankind.
The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true preacher to show us that God is, not was; the He speaketh, not spake The true Christianity,—a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,—is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul; and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. . . . Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries,—the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those mosts sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . .
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. . . .
What attracted me to this passage and urges me to share it is its mention of Fox in a warning germane to us Friends to look within for Truth rather than to Fox or any past and outward authority, and its partial development of the idea of the Soul and some correspondence I see in it to our liberal Quaker use of the phrase “that of God in everyone.”
The idea and reality of what Emerson calls the Soul seems to be central to his theology and philosophy. I’ve not yet plumbed the full depth and breadth of this idea in his writing. But it seems that the Soul is for Emerson something similar to what many Friends today call “that of God in everyone.” Certainly, it is universal. It is an inward indwelling of a divine aspect. It is the true source of religious teaching. It seems to have some affinity for the atma and brahma of Vedanta philosophy, with which Emerson was familiar, brahma being pure consciousness, of which atma is like a drop from the brahma ocean from which it “comes,” with which it communicates, and to which it will return; atma is part of Mahatma Ghandi’s popular name, meaning “great soul”. Emerson’s soul is an American, nineteenth century Neoplatonic idea.
Emerson was an Idealist in the Platonic and Neoplatonic mold, in which the idea, the ideal, the mind, is the only thing that is truly real. He cites the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume in this regard in this essay.
So in this, he differs from the faith of Friends. As I’ve written many times before, our modern liberal Quaker idea of that of God as a divine spark is far from what Fox intended with the phrase, having been given to us by Rufus Jones. But almost no one goes on to develop what this phrase means beyond the vague idea of a “divine spark”. We are not metaphysically inclined enough to develop the idea much further. Emerson has no such compunction. He was a philosopher to the core, just as he was a preacher, theologian, and poet to the core.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—On Reading the Bible
October 19, 2024 § 2 Comments
On Reading the Bible
This quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature:
“Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” is the fundamental law of criticism.
It’s as if Emerson had taken this principle directly from early Quaker writings, and maybe he had. Or maybe from Friends he knew. Or perhaps this is a principle that the Unitarians of his time shared with Friends, for Emerson, like many of the Transcendentalists, started out as a Unitarian minister. I don’t know enough about 19th century Unitarianism to know the answer.
Throughout this essay, Emerson has been making a case for a spiritual understanding of and relationship with Nature as a text, a sacred scripture written by God. In the paragraph that has this quote, he goes on to say:
A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.
This harkens back to the idea expressed in part one of this series on Transcendentalism, that: “In proportion as we receive this spirit, we possess within ourselves the explanation of what we see. We discern more and more of God in everything, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars.”
Creation is the first, and still continuing, divine revelation, and when embraced with arms of Spirit, it reveals the truth and beauty of the Divine Mind. That Mind is the Logos, the Word, the source and wisdom and purpose of evolution.
Of course, Darwin had not published On the Origin of Species yet (1859), so Emerson had only a limited intuition of how nature was evolving. But he had a deep understanding of how it teaches.
Teufelvolksbefolgengeist, Part 1
June 4, 2024 § 1 Comment
Spirit-possession in America
America has become like the town of Gerasa in the gospel of Mark (5:1–20 and parallels in Matthew 8 and Luke 8): we have a man with an evil spirit who roams the dead places in our society crying out blasphemies and repeatedly escaping from those who would bind him.
Now it would be easy to conclude that I’m talking about Donald Trump, and yes, he fits the description. But, like the Gerasene demoniac, this spirit possesses not just one person; it is legion. Mark tells us the demoniac kept cutting himself with stones. Stoning was the prescribed punishment for blasphemy, among other crimes. This story is a metaphor for a society insanely attacking itself.
In the story, Jesus does not address himself to the man, but rather to the spirit. He asks: “What is your name?” “Legion,” answers the spirit, referring obviously, to the Roman military occupation/possession of Gerasa, of Palestine, of the known world, an unclean presence of violence and oppression in society. This explains why Gerasene society is attacking itself: some folks are okay with the occupation; some want to fight against it. Insurrections were so persistent and frequent in this region of the Near East that Rome posted a legion there to put them down.
When Jesus drives the unclean spirit Legion into the sea (an obvious reference to Roman expulsion), it/they enter a herd of pigs. “Legion” is a collective spiritual entity who, when seen through prophetic eyes, manifests through individuals.
The quasi-fascist takeover of the Republican party and other once-conservative institutions in America is our modern-day Legion. And like the story in the gospels, our Legion is a spiritual problem. The fear that animates the movement, the hate that darkens it, the crudeness, cravenness, and cruelty that characterizes the movement, all are spiritual conditions that reflect a corruption of character in the individuals who comprise it.
But like Legion, the movement is not just personal and individual in its characters, but also social, inter-personal, and trans-personal in its collective character. The individuals are in personal moral and spiritual crisis, especially in the the root meaning of that word in Greek—krisis means judgment in Greek. But the body politic is sick, also, and not just the body politic, but also the body civic, and even the body of Christ.
There is in the collective, in our contemporary white Christian nationalist movement, a momentum. Momentum is defined in physics as mass times velocity; velocity is defined as speed with direction. A movement in its spiritual dimension has mass, it has its people and their words and actions. It also has speed, it is on the move. And it has direction, it is moving toward something; the people that are its mass are trying to achieve something with their words and their actions.
This momentum is spiritual in character. It is greater than the sum of its parts. It is trans-personal. That is, it is transcendental, it transcends the wills of its constituent members; it has a mob psychology. It can induce people to do things they would not otherwise do, as it did in Nazi Germany.
Its power is fear. It’s lever is loss and resentment. Its weight is the promise of release from fear and the hope of recovering what has been lost.
But what to do? In my next post, I name this spirit and offer some ways to cast it out from us.
Through the Flaming Sword 