Liberal Theology—A Definition
June 30, 2025 § 2 Comments
I’ve just finished reading The Foundations of Liberal Quakerism, by Stephen W. Angell, the 45th Annual Walton Lecture presented at the Annual Southeastern Yearly Meeting Gathering of Friends in 2008 and published as a pamphlet available from SEYM. It describes the historical precursors of liberal Quakerism, especially the writings of William Penn, progressive Friends in the Midwest, and Lucretia Mott and the Progressive Friends movement (see also Chuck Fager’s books on this movement). I highly recommend Stephen Angell’s pamphlet.
Stephen Angell starts with some definitions and he quotes Garry Dorrien, a historian of liberal Christian theology, with this definition, which I found useful:
“liberal theology is defined by its openness to the verdicts of modern intellectual inquiry, especially the natural and social sciences; its commitment to the authority of individual reason and experience; its conception of Christianity as an ethical way of life; its favoring of moral concepts of atonement; and its commitment to make Christianity credible and socially relevant to modern people.”
According to my own studies, this very aptly describes the priorities of the young adults who gave birth to liberal Quakerism in the late 19th century, whose new sensibilities emerged fairly decisively with the Manchester Conference in Britain in 1895. The most famous of these young Friends were John Stephenson Rowntree and Rufus Jones.
The sciences. These young Friends embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution and the critical study of the Bible that had begun in Germany earlier in the century. These two advances, one in the natural sciences and the other in the social sciences, were directly related to each other in their influence, since the theory of evolution required an all-new look at the creation story in Genesis and by extension a new kind of relationship to the Bible’s authority and role in religious life.
Individual reason and experience. Those young Friends were desperate for a place in a Quaker culture of eldership that had become ossified and restrictive; they wanted their voices heard and they wanted a theology that matched their religious experience, and vice versa.
Ethics. They revolutionized how Christian moral principles should be applied to society’s problems. In the evangelical view that had dominated Quaker culture for roughly a century, social problems derived from sin, and so the solution to these problems was evangelism: bring people to Christ and they will act more righteously, and society will follow. But social science was just then realizing that social ills had structural elements that both constrained and transcended individual moral choice. The signature development along these lines was Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Study in Town Life, which proved scientifically that poverty in the city of York was not due to the poor’s moral failures—sex (too many children), drink, gambling, and other vices—but simply because they were not being paid enough. Capitalism was the problem, though he didn’t put it that way.
Atonement. Friends had always emphasized the transformation of the soul by the immediate and inward work of Christ over the theology of blood atonement on the cross, at least until the evangelical revolution in Quakerism that began around 1800. These young liberals reclaimed the earlier emphasis on God’s direct moral guidance.
Credibility and relevance. And they wanted their faith to be relevant, they wanted to be able to stand on their faith as a foundation and in their faith as a frame for their message and work to make the world a better place. And for that, they needed a theology that spoke to their time.
Quakers and Theology
June 10, 2025 § 1 Comment
I’ve been editing a submission to Pendle Hill Pamphlets on the faith behind the gathered meeting. It would be sequel to my earlier pamphlet The Gathered Meeting, which focused more on the experience, the history, and the practice of the gathered meeting, and on what might foster the gathered meeting. This new essay is more about the faith side of the faith and practice duo regarding the gathered meeting.
It’s about what’s going on when we are gathered in the Spirit, and how we talk about what’s going on. It’s a theology of the gathered meeting.
Theology—yikes. Let’s not talk about that. I suspect that many Friends in the “liberal” branch of the movement will react negatively to this topic, perhaps quite viscerally. Haven’t we fought each other enough over theology? But I’m here to make a case for theology, for doctrine, for what we have to say.
Not dogma! Not something you have to believe to save your soul or to be one of “us” on the inside of an exclusionary religious community. I’m talking about what we think and how we think about our Quaker history, practice, and experience. I’m talking about what we have to say, to seekers, to those folks checking us out to see if we’re their spiritual home, what we have say to our kids, to each other—to ourselves.
So I am an unapologetic Quaker theologian. But what do I mean by that? What is a Quaker theologian?
For me, it’s trying to think of the best questions I can ask about my religion’s faith and practice, its history and experience. About my own Quaker religious experience, the spiritual experiences I’ve had in the context of meeting for worship and as I practice the Quaker way understood more broadly. Being a Quaker theologian is trying to ask the best questions about my community, its history and tradition and future prospects. And then I try to answer them, with integrity and creativity, while trying to remain grounded in experience.
Why? Why ask these questions; why pursue such answers?
Because what we think and how we think about these things do affect our religious experience. What we think and how we think about our practice, our history and traditions affect the course of our religious movement. Mindset, worldview, frameworks of thought—these do matter. They’re not the most important thing; no, actual experience remains paramount—“What canst thou say?”
But experience takes place in context, and part of that context is mindset, worldview, frameworks for understanding. They help to shape our experience, and experience helps to shape our understanding. It’s a feedback system: faith and practice, in dynamic relationship with each other over time, evolving and emerging in real time, sometimes, right before our eyes, as the promise of continuing revelation continues to be fulfilled. For revelation has content.
One more pushback against a certain kind of resistance to “theology”. I have been eldered for being in my head, which is a condition presumed to be at the expense of my heart and my spirit. Isn’t that just like a man, that person said, in so many words. And ain’t I a man, to coopt Sojourner Truth.
As if the very many transcendental experiences I’ve had in this blessed life could not have happened to someone who’s too much in his head, like me. As if the life of the mind and the life of the heart and soul could ever be separated. As if a spiritual path, let alone a religious path, with its history and traditions and testimonies and distinctive practices, could not be one holistic, holy whole in someone’s life. And as if gender necessarily defined one’s spiritual and religious potential.
But to be fair, one can get out of balance. I do get out of balance. We all do. But the heart is arguably better than the mind at unbalancing a person. Or perhaps I should say the unconscious mind, which often has the heart in its secret capture.
That’s where Quaker discernment comes in. With her or his mind, someone asks some questions and then offers some possible answers. Continuing revelation is now on the table. Time for the community to test these ideas and see if they stand in truth and beauty and usefulness. Is it from the Light, or not?
That’s the role of the Quaker theologian: to be a servant of continuing revelation, at the prompting of and accountable to, the Holy Spirit in discernment.
American Transcendentalism – Forms and Doctrines
October 31, 2024 § Leave a comment
This is Theodore Parker, taken from an essay titled “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” dated 1841. Parker was another Unitarian minister, a second-generation Transcendentalist. Like Emerson, he’s pushing back on mainstream Unitarianism and got pushback in return. But in the mid-1840s, in spite of this establishment resistance, he moved to Boston and built one of the largest congregations in New England.
It must be confessed, though with sorrow, that transient things form a great part of what is commonly taught as Religion. And undue place has often been assigned to forms and doctrines, while too little stress has been laid on the divine life of the soul, love to God, and love to man. Religious forms may be useful, and beautiful. They are so, whenever they speak to the soul, and answer a want thereof. In our present state some forms are perhaps necessary. But they are only the accident of Christianity; not its substance. They are the robe, no th angel, who may take another robe, quite as becoming and useful. One sect has many forms; another none. Yet both may be equally Christian, in spite of the redundance or the deficiency. They are a part of the language in which religion speaks, and exist, with few exceptions, wherever man is found. In our calculating nation, in our rationalizing sect, we have retained but two of the rites so numerous in the early Christian church, and even these we have attenuated to the last degree, leaving them little more than a spectre of the ancient form. Another age may continue or forsake both; may revive old forms, or invent new ones to suit the altered circumstances of the times, and yet be Christians quite as good as we, or our fathers of the dark ages. Whether the Apostles designed these rites to be perpetual, seems a question which belongs to scholars and antiquarians, not to us, as Christian men and women. So long as they satisfy or help the pious heart, so long they are good. Looking behind, or around us, we see that the forms and rites of the Christians are quite as fluctuating as those of the heathens; from whom some of them have been, not unwisely, adopted by the earlier church.
Again, the doctrines that have been connected with Christianity, and taught in its name, are quite as changeable as the form. This also takes place unavoidably. . . . Now there can be but one Religion which is absolutely true, existing in the facts of human nature, and the ideas of Infinite God. . . . Now it has often happened that men took their theology thus at second hand, distorted the history of he world and man’s nature besides, to make Religion conform to their notions. Their theology stood between them and God. Those obstinate philosophers have disciples in no small number.
As Emerson does, Parker speaks of Nature in parallel terms, seeing correspondences between natural law and divine law, and, to a degree, science and religion. In the middle of this excerpt, where I have inserted ellipses, he discusses how different observers and philosophers will come to different theories about Nature, just as the divines do about Religion; yet:
“the true system of Nature which exists in the outward facts, whether discovered or not, is always the same thing, though the philosophy of Nature, which men invent, change every month, and be one thing as London and the opposite at Berlin. Thus there is but one system of Nature as it exists in fact, though many theories of Nature, which exist in our imperfect notions of that system, and bu which we may approximate and at length reach it.”
These Transcendentalists are never very far from their consideration of Nature, no matter how deep they get into the theological weeds.
American Transcendentalism and Quakerism—Direct Experience
October 27, 2024 § Leave a comment
The quote below is from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838). About the essay the editor of The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, Lawrence Buell, writes in his introduction:
“This is Emerson’s most incendiary work. It was delivered as a commencement oration at the behest of the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School, Unitarianism’s academic home base and Emerson’s own graduate alma mater. Emerson takes aim at the two related arguments on which Unitarian theology chiefly rested its case for being a distinctive form of ‘rational’ Christianity: that the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ miracles proved the authenticity of Christianity, and that Jesus was God’s unique and authoritative messenger. After this comes an equally acerbic denunciation of ineffective preaching, in which Emerson charges each graduate to think of himself by contrast as ‘a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost’ and preach prophetically. The address caused an irreversible rift between Unitarian liberals and radicals. Emerson was not invited back again to speak at Harvard for nearly thirty years.”
This quote comes from Emerson’s strongly worded injunction to preach from one’s own experience and in what we would call continuing revelation. In it, he mentions George Fox and admonishes against relying on past religious personages rather than on one’s own “soul.” More about soul after the quote. And please make allowances for his use of “man” for humankind.
The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true preacher to show us that God is, not was; the He speaketh, not spake The true Christianity,—a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man,—is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society is wiser than their soul; and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. . . . Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries,—the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those mosts sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . .
Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,—cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. . . .
What attracted me to this passage and urges me to share it is its mention of Fox in a warning germane to us Friends to look within for Truth rather than to Fox or any past and outward authority, and its partial development of the idea of the Soul and some correspondence I see in it to our liberal Quaker use of the phrase “that of God in everyone.”
The idea and reality of what Emerson calls the Soul seems to be central to his theology and philosophy. I’ve not yet plumbed the full depth and breadth of this idea in his writing. But it seems that the Soul is for Emerson something similar to what many Friends today call “that of God in everyone.” Certainly, it is universal. It is an inward indwelling of a divine aspect. It is the true source of religious teaching. It seems to have some affinity for the atma and brahma of Vedanta philosophy, with which Emerson was familiar, brahma being pure consciousness, of which atma is like a drop from the brahma ocean from which it “comes,” with which it communicates, and to which it will return; atma is part of Mahatma Ghandi’s popular name, meaning “great soul”. Emerson’s soul is an American, nineteenth century Neoplatonic idea.
Emerson was an Idealist in the Platonic and Neoplatonic mold, in which the idea, the ideal, the mind, is the only thing that is truly real. He cites the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume in this regard in this essay.
So in this, he differs from the faith of Friends. As I’ve written many times before, our modern liberal Quaker idea of that of God as a divine spark is far from what Fox intended with the phrase, having been given to us by Rufus Jones. But almost no one goes on to develop what this phrase means beyond the vague idea of a “divine spark”. We are not metaphysically inclined enough to develop the idea much further. Emerson has no such compunction. He was a philosopher to the core, just as he was a preacher, theologian, and poet to the core.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments
June 22, 2024 § 1 Comment
The governor of Louisiana has recently signed a bill that requires public schools to display a large poster of the ten commandments in each classroom. This is unconstitutional behavior, but it is also ignorant, sloppy, and disingenuous, maybe even deceitful, theology. I won’t talk about how this seems to violate the first amendment of the US constitution’s establishment clause. Rather, I want to address the way we violate the commandments themselves and the bad theology behind these violations, which makes the people who wrote, passed, and signed this law immoral according to their own professed faith.
The vast majority of modern-day Christians violate the first two commandments. We often violate the third. And we usually misunderstand the tenth commandment and ignore the way Jesus interpreted it. Louisiana’s ruling elites are either ignorant of the meaning of the ten commandments, or ignore-ant of their meaning.
In the next few posts, I want to explain what I mean.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Traditional Christianity inherently violates the first commandment. Traditional Christianity places Jesus Christ before the Father in every way that matters. Christians look to Christ for their salvation from sin, which is their understanding of the purpose of their religion; his sacrifice on the cross is what saves them and he even plays a role as a judge, though his Father is presumably the chief justice. Christians pray in Jesus’ name, even though Jesus himself prayed directly to his Father—“Our father who art in heaven.” The paragraph about Jesus in all the creeds, Nicene, Apostolic, and Athanasian, is far longer than those for the Father and the Holy Spirit, and its theology is central to the creed as a whole.
Christian theology’s solution to this problem is the theology of the trinity. In my opinion, with this theology we project a meaning out of the theological dissonance created by holding two opposing ideas and commitments of faith in one’s mind at the same time: that there are three Powers in heaven, but really, there is only one. (By “theological dissonance,” I mean the combination of cognitive and moral dissonance). I consider the arguments for why the trinity is truth quite tortured. I feel that the only real solution for this dissonance is to fall back on faith and let reason be.
Now I’m not saying that Jesus Christ is not God, nor that the triune God is not real, nor that Friends should not worship a triune God. Some religious temperaments do not need a coherent and sensible theology to know religious fulfillment. Some traditions of religious faith and practice can deliver on their promises without a reasonable theology. And just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean that the Trinity doesn’t work for others or, more importantly, that it isn’t the religious truth.
But traditional conservative Christian evangelicalism does, in fact, need a coherent theology; it’s all about what you believe. And I’m saying that trinitarian Christianity isn’t monotheism, however clever your argument is. Three persons but one God—how does that work? This is why the rabbis at the Council of Jamnia in 84 CE declared Christianity a heresy: there can only be one Power in heaven.
More importantly for an examination of Louisiana’s new law, on the face of it, traditional Christianity puts Christ before his Father in every way that really matters, even though Jesus himself did exactly the opposite—and that violates the first commandment.
Joys of the Quaker Way—Quaker Theology
December 12, 2014 § 8 Comments
I know Friends who dislike or distrust “theology”. Many Friends feel that theology only tends to divide us. Very many Friends define their Quakerism in terms of values and practice rather than beliefs or religious “content”. Many Friends believe that our insistence on direct personal experience as the foundation of faith and our historical refusal to have a creed means that beliefs don’t matter much, or, more accurately, that beliefs are a personal matter over which the community has no authority. Many Friends feel that the belief in that of God in everyone plus the testimonies pretty much sums up our theology.
These negative feelings toward theology sometimes translate into a kind of quiet, passive persecution of theologians. Some Friends seem to feel that “intellectualizing” our faith damages it somehow, and that certainly, “intellectualizing” is an inferior expression of faith to that of the witness activist or the mystic, that Friends like me are too much in our heads. Some Friends seem to feel that the life of the mind is somehow not integral to the life of the spirit. I know these things experientially, since I am a Quaker theologian myself and I have occasionally suffered this kind of prejudice.
But I get such joy from the life of the mind. And Quaker theology in particular gives me sublime pleasure. I love reading and learning and thinking and teaching and talking about Quaker tradition and the dynamics of Quaker community life. Likewise for the Bible.
And I love Quaker theologians.
I am in awe of the extraordinary mind of George Fox, even though I sometimes do not quite get what he’s saying, and I know that I miss many of his biblical references, and I don’t share his foundation in the gospel of salvation in Jesus. But his way of thinking about religion is unique in all my experience. Trying to follow his way of thinking does something to my own mind; it forges neural pathways that change the way that I think. The effect reminds me of what it was like reading the radical feminist “theologian” Mary Daly’s book Pure Lust, in which she invents scores of new words and uses new forms of syntax in order to overthrow the dominion of patriarchy in her readers’ consciousness. Except that Fox’s the language seems to come directly out of his own mind as an expression of native genius, whereas Mary Daly deliberately created her new language.
And I love the rest of them, too, those early Friends whom I’ve read. Pennington, in particular, is a wonderful writer with a genius for expressing the mystical dimension of early Quaker experience in a way that’s much more accessible than Fox’s.
But most of all, I love the Quaker theologians alive today. We live in a third golden age of Quaker theology. Not since those first two generations, of Pennington and Howgill and Fox and Fell and Naylor, and of Penn and Barclay; not since the Friends who launched the liberal Quaker movement at the turn of the 20th century, Rufus Jones, John Wilhelm Rowntree, Seebohm Rowntree, and others—have Friends followed the Light into the truth with such searching perception and clear articulation as do some of the people writing today—or just yesterday, because I must include Lewis Benson and Bill Taber, who have passed on.
The five that have influenced me the most are John Punshon, Douglas Gwyn, Ben Pink Dandelion, Lloyd Lee Wilson, and Bill Taber. Everything these Friends have written is worth reading.
John Punshon. Punshon’s Portrait In Grey is, of course, the indispensable accessible history of Quakerism. But the little pamphlet Letter to a Universalist is, in my opinion absolute must-read for every Quaker, especially every Friend in the liberal tradition. I would give it to every applicant for membership. And then there’s Encounter with Silence, Alternative Christianity, and Testimony and Tradition.
Douglas Gwyn. I am right now almost finished with Doug Gwyn’s latest book, A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation. This book expresses Quaker faith and practice in a truly fresh and powerful way. And he seeks to ground Quaker faith and practice in a testimony for earthcare—no, that’s not quite right: he seeks to describe how Quaker faith and practice and a sustainable life both grow integrally together out of a grounding in communion with God.
Moreover, one chapter in A Sustainable Life has transformed my personal spiritual life, in a perfect example of how theology and the life of the mind are integral to faith, values, and community life, at least for me. This was a corrective experience for me, a bit of eldering through written ministry. I don’t think I can express it yet in a way that would be concise enough to fit well into this entry, so that will have to wait. But we all have known those moments when you read a passage in a book and something just clicks and you lean back and close your eyes and see the world or your own life in an all new way, for which you are so grateful. Doug Gwyn has done that for me more than once.
Then there’s his Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624-1691), which has completely transformed Quaker thought in the modern period about our origins. Not since Rufus Jones a century ago have we had such a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves, and, along with Lewis Benson’s work, Apocalypse of the Word is actually a much-needed partial corrective to the direction Rufus Jones and his contemporaries launched us on.
Gwyn’s The Covenant Crucified: Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism could not have been more important to my own writing on Quakers and capitalism, and, once again, it is both a groundbreaking work of history and an important contribution to our understanding of ourselves as a movement.
Ben Pink Dandelion. After reading some essays by Ben Pink Dandelion in a collection with Doug Gwyn and Timothy Peat (Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming), I stumbled upon A Sociological Analysis of the Theology of Quakers: The Silent Revolution, which is Dandelion’s sociology doctoral thesis. It’s dense. It has a whole chapter just on methodology. It’s an academic work organized as a thesis with sections given numbers to the third digit; for example: 3.4.1. Vocal Ministry: A Case Study of Attitudes to Belief and Practice. And it’s really expensive. Oy.
But it’s brilliant. This book has been so important to me. I came away understanding how Quaker community works in an all new way. But my feelings go deeper than that. It ignited in me a deep passion for our strengths and a prophetic call to minister to our weaknesses. The truths Dandelion unveils in this book have become an integral part of my own religious calling. I only wish it were more accessible. One day, I plan to condense the insights of this book into entries in this blog, hoping that he finds my presentation faithful to his work.
I just finished reading Dandelion’s 2014 Swarthmore Lecture, Open for Transformation: Being Quaker. This is the most insightful book on the condition of contemporary Quakerism (or liberal Quakerism, at least) that I have ever read. For decades, this man has been holding Quakerism up to the Light and in the light of modern social science, and this book feels like the culmination of all that insight. As seems always to be the case with any such analysis, the analysis is deeper than the solutions. But that’s because solutions are so hard to conceive, let alone implement successfully. Healing and renewing religious community is really, really hard; only G*d can do it, really.
But G*d has only G*d’s prophets to work with. And Dandelion is one of them. I think this book is a major contribution to whatever renewal we will undergo in our own time. It gave me great joy to read this book
Dandelion’s other works are also very good, though some are, like A Sociological Analysis, a bit academic.
Lloyd Lee Wilson. Lloyd Lee Wilson’s Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order brought us back to an aspect of our tradition that we were about to lose, I think. Though “aspect’ is too weak a word—core would be more like it. What a brilliant work of written ministry this book is! What joy it gave me to learn this material and to fold it into my own Quaker faith and practice.
William Taber. Finally, no one has influenced my understanding and love of the Quaker way more than Bill Taber. I was a resident at Pendle Hill for two terms while he was the Quakerism teacher there (Doug Gwyn was also on the faculty then) and I count those months as one of the greatest blessings of my life. Everything William Taber has written is deep, indispensable reading.
And there are others, of course. Patricia Loring, Sandra Cronk, Rosemary Moore, Howard Brinton, Wilmer Cooper, Alistair Heron, Alan Kolp . . . And my fellow bloggers out there in Quaker cyberspace.
Great religious literature is very often written in response to a crisis in a religious community.’s life For instance, besides the obvious examples of the Hebrew prophets, many of the books in the front of the Hebrew scriptures were put together during the Israelites’ captivity in Babylon and sought to minister to the doubt and despair of the Exiles.
We live in a time of crisis ourselves. And in our own time, a lot of deep spirits with fine minds are responding with wonderful written ministry. What gifts they bring—truly significant contributions to the advance of Quaker culture, and in fact, to the world’s religious literature more broadly.
Through the Flaming Sword 