Quaker Theology #11 -- Spring-Summer 2005
The Core Quaker Theology: Is there Such a Thing? -- page 2
In this country this change is easy to trace by looking at the programs of Friends General Conference: As late as the 1950s, the speakers lineup for its major conferences included US Senators, Supreme Court justices, international diplomats, and even Martin Luther King. But the days when these gatherings could command figures of such public stature are long past, and unlikely to return.
The same is true of the Friends Committee on National Legislation: in my memory, its annual meeting regularly attracted a prominent member of Congress as a major speaker. That hasn’t happened in a long time either. (By the way, just for the record, I don’t lose much sleep over these losses of worldly "status.")
So that’s one trajectory, and if it sounds merely social or political to you, I suggest you think again – one’s theology is definitely affected by one’s social position: Insiders see the world, and God, differently than outsiders. And I suspect that the impact of this change for Friends, which is still being worked out, will be important.
And here’s another trajectory to consider: that of group self-definition. In the beginning, Friends like William Penn and Barclay were quite clear that the Society of Friends was the true Church of Christ restored, brought back from the "wilderness" of priestly and papal oppression in which it had been wandering for at least a thousand years.
Another part of that image was that Friends were a gathered people – no, that’s not plain enough: Friends were a divinely-chosen people, the assembly of God’s very elect. And this sense of election and corporate specialness persisted for more than 200 years (and it still does in some ways even today).
Yet between 1850 and 1926, this self-understanding shifted dramatically, away from a corporate-centered to a very individualistic spirituality: then it was the group, God’s special people, which was the locus of divine initiative on earth; now it is me, and you, and the Inner Light in each of us, that is primary; the group is subordinate, or even irrelevant. (The same goes, by the way, for evangelical Friends: despite all the differences in our styles, salvation and holiness likewise come to them one person at a time.)
That is the second trajectory, of several that I want to describe, in an effort to grapple with the question of a "core" to Quaker theology.
Here are some of the others, which we have time only to sketch: Related to the matter of self-definition is one of governance: when Friends were self-consciously a "people," they were also, to borrow a biblical image, like a flock of sheep, led and cared for by devoted shepherds, in the form of a defined hierarchy of ministers, elders and overseers.
The task of these shepherds was clear: to preserve the "Reputation of Truth," that is the Society, against external threats and internal strayings. To this end there was also a clear ranking of meetings, from preparative up to monthly up to quarterly up to yearly. The Society of Friends was a top-down pyramid with definite rules and lines of authority and accountability. Such quaintly modern notions as individual self-expression or personal fulfillment, if they were thought of at all, were definitely of secondary, or tertiary importance.
Today that pyramid has been turned on its head: Friends’ polity is now unmistakably congregational, with monthly meetings at the top, and quarterly, yearly, and other structures their servant bodies rather than their masters. Some of the pastoral groups still retain vestiges of central authority, but it is under constant strain, and I doubt it will survive much longer. And rather than being shepherded, we Friends are occasionally exhorted but are pretty much on our own. "Like herding cats" is how I often hear harried clerks describe our business sessions; and I can meow and yowl with the best of them.
Or in another parallel case, take Quaker Christianity. The aspect of our Christianity with which we seem most out of touch is what early Friends called simply, "the cross." As I understand it, for Fox and others the cross was much more important as a personal and social reality than some doctrine to argue about. Its meaning was simple: Christ had to face and absorb suffering in the course of his mission; and if we are his followers, we can expect the same. As he put it in Matthew 10:24: "The disciple is not above his master." Convincement and conversion might make you happy and spirit-filled and joined to a special people. But it did not make you safe.
This is a formulation that is increasingly opaque to many in our therapeutic, continuous improvement, self-help culture. So many of us insist that our meetings are to be "safe spaces," and our worship and ministry are aimed at making us whole; and one of our most frequent phrases in business sessions is, God help me, "Are Friends comfortable" with this or that.
Yet to the extent that the Society of Friends has been of real use in the world, as opposed to when it thinks it has been of service, a great deal of that "value" has been "added" not through comfort, or staying safe, but by means of unmerited suffering, as in the decades of persecution.
This emphasis on the cross is hardly a Quaker exclusive. Yet in our time, as far as I can see, it is mainly gay and lesbian Friends who have most come to understand this abiding paradox of faith, because they have had to live (and die) through and try to redeem the AIDS epidemic. Some of the most powerful Quaker ministry of our time has emerged from this crucible; and I guarantee you it was not "comfortable" stuff.
For myself, I learned about it not from Friends at all, but from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in my early days as an activist in the Deep South. "Unearned suffering is redemptive," he preached to us; but this phrase made no sense to me until I saw it lived out in the churches and streets and jails there, and even took a few minor licks myself. It too was hardly "comfortable"; but in the old Quaker phrase, I was "much favored."
Another piece of this Quaker Christian trajectory is that in my view it has always had an unmistakable and ineradicable universalist character. That is, Friends were tilted toward the inclusive "sheep and goats" sayings of Jesus more than to the exclusive "I am the Way" sayings. Now we have many who are universalist with perhaps a dash of Christianity, rather like a dollop of hot sauce in the soup, and not a few who would need to have the gospel sheep and goats story explained to them to know what I was talking about.
Which leads us to another trajectory, the place and use of the Bible among us. It has gone from serving as our lingua franca, providing the basic vocabulary and imagery of our discourse, to being a largely unknown document, almost a terra incognita. Moreover, this Bible, as mediated to Friends by such as Barclay, was understood through a more or less clear set of key religious interpretations.
Now we have a plethora of religious interpretations, either with no Bible, or with a whole shelf full, bearing other names like A Course In Miracles, the newest tome on Jungian-feminist-pagan psychology, the latest environmental apocalypse, or pronouncements from that most reliable of our contemporary spokespersons for the divine, National Public Radio.
Like some others, I often lament our general ignorance of the Bible – the old one, I mean. At the most mundane level, the people running our militarized society justify their course based on it, and biblical illiterates (like most of us) are not even players in such discussions, whether we realize it or not.
But there are some upsides to this condition: for one thing, when Friends do rediscover the Bible, they tend to do so with new eyes; and such new seeing is an urgent task of our theological and spiritual life together today. So to me it seems that in this regard we mostly have nowhere to go but up.
And there is another positive aspect as well: few Friends in the time of Barclay had even heard of the Koran, much less read it. (Perhaps that’s why Barclay could refer to Muslims as "Turks," when even then that faith encompassed many other ethnic and national groups). Ditto for the formative sacred texts of other major world religions. But now we know, even if many in America still like to pretend otherwise, that religion, the experience of, and writing and ritual about, the sacred, is a pluriform, varied phenomenon, as real in its other manifestations for other peoples, as ours has been to us.
And this knowledge in my view is of the fatal, bite-of- the-apple kind: or to repeat our evolutionary image, it is mutational – once our eyes are truly opened about it, I don’t think there is any going back. The way Barclay saw the Bible was intimately related to how he saw the world; our worldview is perhaps not better, but it is ineluctably and radically different. So what was good enough for Barclay cannot be good enough for us, at least not entirely.
It may be, as has often been alleged, that the liberal Quaker acquaintance with other world religions is largely of a superficial sort, another variety of our insatiable, rich country consumerism, and perhaps this is so. Nevertheless, it is another place to start, and anyway there are exceptions.
So there we have the trajectories that I think have the most to do with the question of what, if anything, the "core" Quaker theology might be: We are a people that is not much of a people anymore, decentralized, mainly on our own, steeped in our larger culture yet more or less out of favor with our rulers, unfamiliar with our Jesus, his cross and our own Bible, and barely smattered with knowledge of other faiths.
It is easy enough to look at a catalog like this and see in it only a story of sorry decline – devolution, not evolution, regress rather than progress. And I have heard many such loud laments, so many that I’ve coined a term for them: Handbasket Theology – as in "going to hell in a . . . ."
But I don’t think much of Handbasket Theology. I don’t think much of it for two reasons:
First, my study and experience with other Christian or once-Christian bodies, past and present, persuades me that if we Quakers are in a mess today, and we surely are, so is everybody else. In which case, there’s simply no escape; being in a mess is the common condition today. Further, I don’t think there’s really much to be gained by trading in our mess for someone else’s. (For instance, how many Friends would really feel better if, instead of Quaker theological confusion, we had the Catholics’ huge priestly pedophilia cross to bear? Not me, at any rate; math is not my strong point, but I can still count that as a blessing!)
And secondly, I have traveled pretty widely among Quakers in North America, and my experience as one confused Friend amid other confused Friends, is that in the midst of all this seeming disarray, we are still a vital people. It seems clear to me that, amazingly and through no special virtue of our own, God is not done with us, and the signs of life are all around. Our trajectories are not complete; we’re still moving with, and against, that invisible, intrusive wind of the spirit. And this means, for one thing, that when we are ready to stop complaining and smell them, the Quaker roses are still there.
How are these trajectories moving currently? Responding to this question is like trying to predict the stock market, or the weather – or which baseball team can stop the Yankees this year. But here are some of my hopefully educated guesses:
I think many Friends are beginning to reconsider the idea of the Society as a gathered people. We can’t recreate the old versions of this, but maybe we can work toward a functional contemporary equivalent.
And I think there are among us some who are quietly moving beyond a consumerist approach to other world religions, to something deeper – which also means they’ll have to take their own Quaker Christian origins more seriously as well.
The matter of our return to Outsider status is more murky: I’m sure it’s happening; but by and large we are still safe within the middle and upper middle classes – or we think we are, anyway – and so I see too many still reflexively clinging to the illusion of significant participation that’s peddled by our mass media. In any case, of all our fabled Quaker testimonies, it is Simplicity, which I see pointing the way out of this particular mess, which is also the toughest one of all to understand and practice. It certainly is for me.
Another drawback of this outwardly comfortable position is that it still leaves too many of us pretty much strangers to the cross. And again, I speak here of the cross as an experience, not a doctrine. I see this issue particularly from my position up-close and personal with the US war machine. Friends, militarism is a consuming monster, a growing power that pervades and perverts our society in a thousand ways, most of which we have trained ourselves not to see.
If we ever begin to become more truly aware of this condition, our condition – watch out! There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth, and suffering within and without. And this is but one of the ways in which our time could bring us to the cross, if and when we’re ready to face up to it; the environmental cost of the global waste economy is another.
These are my guesses about our major trajectories, and as the auto commercials say, your mileage may differ. What the "core theology" for this group, this people, is now, I think we are only beginning to discover and articulate. And we will not, I predict be able to articulate it fully, in anything like a creed. There have been efforts among Friends to do that, to banish the confusion once and for all – and in my view they have always ended in disaster. Yet that is not an excuse for not seeking it, and it does not justify concluding that there is no core, no "there" there. That is as unwarranted as concluding that the wind is not real because we can’t see it or pin it down. I urge you to resist the temptation to denial, which leads to despair.
This also moves me to warn you against another temptation: the urge to select one or two segments from the past of these various trajectories, deprive them of the essential element of motion, and privilege them as the norm, the authentic, the true Quakerism – the core. Such efforts, and I have seen several, usually end up looking a lot like mirrors, telling us more about the needs of those doing the selecting than anything else.
There is value in all, or at least most of these segments of the Quaker journey; we can even learn from the times, and they are not few, when Friends were most insufferably smug and self-important. Indeed, I often think such embarrassing periods offer the most important lessons for us today, because they can inject us with doses of humility, which we always desperately need..
But perhaps learning is not a strong enough word here. I am very much attached to a term called "god-wrestling," which I learned from a Jewish writer named Arthur Waskow. It comes out of the 3nd chapter of Genesis, the story of when Jacob wrestled God all night and would not let go until God blessed him. The blessing was a change of name, from Jacob to Israel, which means the God-wrestler. That name is still archetypal in Hebrew life and thought; and I believe it applies as well to the Christian variant thereof, much as most Christians have sought to avoid or deny it.
And it applies as well to Friends. These varied and often parallel trajectories are not only matters of history to study – they are also matters to wrestle with, even points of struggle – and this includes the pleasing parts as well as the tough ones. (Wrestling, after all, is a sport as well as a way of fighting.) Part of the point of the story is that such struggle is not a sign of decline or death, but can be a sign of life, and part of the work of renewal.
If anything must be the "core" of Quaker theology, I commend this image to your consideration: wrestling with our tradition and experience as a people, and wrestling with what this can mean for us today and tomorrow. What we’re doing today is an example of this. Don’t worry about becoming too weary; you will also have time outs, periods of rest and blessed community in the process.
But wrestle we must, because we do not struggle alone, or only with each other. We are also struggling with the One who called us to be a people, and calls us still, and can still bless us, Friends, if we do not let go.
That at least, is at the core of my Quaker theology.
Thank you.