Let me speak carefully here: Wilson is right about the importance of grace and inward change to move individuals away from the spirit of war; I unite with that sentiment.

But it is emphatically not enough. Individual spiritual change is not all there is to peacemaking or overcoming war. The insufficiency here surprises me, because it is sharply at variance with both the Bible, and with one of the teachers Wilson cites frequently, Walter Wink – not to mention hard experience.

What this interpretation leaves out is any awareness or understanding of the role of "principalities and powers" which are Walter Wink’s main theme. These are the supra-individual forces that dominate our society and keep the wheels of the war machine turning ever faster – while sucking up the souls and bodies of hundreds of thousands of otherwise good people into their engines of destruction. As the Bible itself emphasizes, private, one-on-one piety is no match for these powers; indeed, by itself such isolated witness radically misses the necessity of even being aware of them, never mind finding an adequate response.

At one point, Wilson makes a brief bow toward Wink’s view (p. 90), but does not flesh it out, and gives no guidance as to what that might mean. The focus of these pages remains overwhelmingly individualized and privatized, capped by superficial put-downs of "anti-war" work, as turning its practitioners into "what they fight against." (p. 50, 187)

These comments require closer attention. It would be one thing if what was meant here is simply, "different strokes for different folks," (or as Scripture says, "a diversity of gifts"). Not everyone is called to the barricades, or to the board rooms. And it would be another thing if the message were that there are moral hazards in activism, as in any other sphere of activity.

But the clear implication here is otherwise, and more sweeping. It is that speaking and acting assertively against, say, torture will turn us into torturers.

To which a restrained response would be: Baloney! Such a grossly exaggerated asymmetry would be insulting if one took it seriously. There might be a nugget of useful advice somewhere here, but such platitudes are pernicious and deserve to be called out. Did fifty years of anti-slavery activism make Lucretia Mott a slaveholder? Give me a break.

This is not the place to lay out an alternative biblical/Quaker peace witness scenario in detail; suffice to say that I have made several efforts in this direction elsewhere. (Cf. my A Quaker Declaration of War.) But one other point does need to be explored: Wilson’s text includes a detailed analysis of the 1660 letter from George Fox and others to King Charles II, which is cited by many as a "classic" statement of the Quaker peace testimony. (pp. 92-103)

But something is missing from his exposition: it fails to note the Declaration’s passages which include explicit legitimization of warmaking by "the authorities," in this case the king. (P. 95, 97) These introduce a major element of ambiguity into a declaration which is presented, by Wilson as by many others, as unambiguously pacifist.

Not so. The ambivalence in the 1660 Letter was not simply theoretical, but runs through early Quaker history like a red thread. Wilson’s contention that "classic Quakerism" as expressed in the 1660 Letter was unambiguously opposed to participation in warmaking is just plain false. I have elucidated these ambiguities in the record elsewhere, as have scholars like Meredith Baldwin Weddle. (Cf. her excellent Walking In the Way of Peace, Oxford 2001.)

Finally for now, as to Quaker polity. Wilson makes much of the communal nature of "classic Quakerism," both as a central aspect of its spirituality, and as an antidote for what he sees as the excessive individualism in our culture.

Again, I could agree in part; but here too, the lack of historical context undercuts the value of his commentary. In Quaker history, the patterns of communal oversight and group discernment have not only been a guide; they were also found by many Friends, over many years, to have become a burden and a form of hierarchical, top-down oppression, both social and religious. (Cf. "Lucretia Mott; Liberal Quaker Theologian," in Quaker Theology #10.)

Much of the sad history of Quaker separations revolves around this fact, that large numbers of Quakers, after many years of patient struggle, rose up to throw off the shackles of what had become to them ecclesiastical tyranny. (Cf. H. Larry Ingle, Quakers In Conflict, U. Of Tennessee 1986.) The outcome, particularly in the liberal stream, has been a very different polity than that of his "classical tradition," one that is resolutely congregational, with much space for individual initiative and leading.

This history is not widely known among the liberal Friends who embrace its outcome, but it has been laid out clearly enough by the scholars in the field, so there is no reason to think that Wilson is unaware of it. Yet nowhere in his book could I find any forthright discussion of this evolution-by-struggle, or of what can be learned from it, or how his "classic" recipe proposes to avoid repeating these abuses.

In my view this lack of context is a serious shortcoming. In its place, what we get are numerous barely-concealed jabs at liberal Quakerism, via frequent rebukes of unbridled individualism, fulsome praise of the glories of communal discernment and oversight, plus scornful dismissals of "salad bar" spiritualities, other than his. None of this inspires confidence that wider acceptance of his brand of "tradition" would avoid sowing similar seeds of divisiveness.

Nor is there reassurance in the numerous remarks here, made in passing, trashing much of liberal Quakerism, again without any responsible exposition or justification: he summarily dismisses those Friends who do not identify as Christian (p. 15), who engage in antiwar activism (p. 113, 187), explore native spirituality (p. 33), or question the efforts to restore much of the old top-down communal ethos (p. 46).

Wilson is entitled to his views on all these matters. But many of them, if teased out and brought into the light of day, look less "classic" than narrow, ill-informed, tendentious, and writ large, a recipe for trouble.

They cry out to be expressed clearly and debated fully, so interested Friends can make a more seasoned judgment of them and their implications. And the first judgments to be offered here are that the "Classic" label is misapplied, and to suggest that this version of Quakerism still has considerable and important "rough edges" to be smoothed out in order to be of much real service to the wider circle of Friends.