2020/01/01

Books to check out | Through the Flaming Sword



Books to check out | Through the Flaming Sword
Books to check out


This is an annotated bibliography of books I’ve found interesting or useful as a Friend.

Quakers and Capitalism

Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants in Colonial Philadelphia: 11682–1783. Frederick B. Tolles; Chapel Hill, NC; 1948.

The Philadelphia Quakers in the Industrial Age: 1865­–1920. Philip S. Benjamin; Temple University Press, Phil.; 1976.

Quakerism and Industry Before 1800. Isabel Grubb, M.A.; Williams & Norgate, Ltd., London; 1930.

Quakers In Science and Industry; being an account of the Quaker contribution to science and industry during the 17th and 18th centuries. Arthur Raistrick; The Bannisdale Press, London; 1950.

Quakers in Commerce: A Record of Business Achievement. Paul H. Emden; Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., London; 1939.

The Quakers: Money & Morals. James Walvin; John Murray, London; 1997.

The Covenant Crucified: Quakers and the Rise of Capitalism. Douglas Qwyn; Pendle Hill Publications, Wallingford, PA; 1995.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber; Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY; 1905.

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The peace testimony



World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Amy Chua: Doubleday, 2002.

 Invaluable book on what drives ethnic violence: how economically oppressed or marginalized ethnic majorities rise up against economically dominant minorities when empowered by partial democratization. The Shia insurgency against the Sunnis in Iraq is a good example, though it postdates the book’s publication.


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Are Quakers Christian? | Through the Flaming Sword

Are Quakers Christian? | Through the Flaming Sword



Are Quakers Christian?

April 13, 2019 § 12 Comments

Last week I attended a viewing of a relatively new documentary on Friends titled Quakers the Quiet Revolutionaries by The Gardner Documentary Group. The principals of the group, Janet Gardner and Dick Nurse, are members of Princeton Meeting in New Jersey. The film is quite good. The production quality is excellent and they covered quite a lot of ground very well. There were a couple of egregious misrepresentations of Friends, in my opinion, but overall, I give it a favorable rating.
As for these misrepresentations, the film claimed, as many liberal Friends do, that the foundation of the Quaker faith is the belief that there is that of God in everyone, and the film explicitly invoked the notion of a divine spark as the meaning of “that of God”. As my regular readers know, I believe this springs from ignorance of Fox’s real intention when using that phrase and of its revisioning by Rufus Jones around the turn of the twentieth century. It just isn’t true that this is the foundation of Quakerism or our testimonies. But I’m not digressing now into that theme.
The film also highlighted the SPICES in a scene with kids in a Quaker school. This scene made it clear why the odious SPICES are so successful—kids get it and they can remember it, sort of. Problem is, they’re getting the wrong thing. But no digression here, either.
In this post, I want to address a question that came from the audience in the Q&A: Are Quakers Christian?
The MC, Ingrid Lakey, and Dick Nurse gave what I thought were fairly satisfactory answers, given how difficult this question is to answer with integrity in the liberal branch. Their answers were the usual disclaimers about how diverse we are (it depends on who you ask) and good personal answers about the Inner Light. Here, however, is how I would have answered that question: Are Quakers Christian? Yes, mostly, yes, and it depends.
Yes—historically. Some meetings have become post-Christian only since the middle of the twentieth century. By post-Christian, I mean dominated by Friends who either never were Christians or have left behind their Christian upbringing. But the roots of the tree are Christian and most branches still draw their spiritsap from the Christian tradition. We are a Christian movement even if some of our meetings no longer identify that way.
Mostly—demographically. The vast majority of Friends today are Christians.
Yes—technically. By this I mean that Friends hold that we retain a tradition, identity, or position until we change it in a meeting for worship with attention to the life of the meeting held under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; that is, in a gathered meeting. Some yearly meetings have drifted into a post-Christian identity by a kind of thoughtless default as they remove more and more Christianity from their books of discipline. However, I know of no meeting that has ever clearly declared itself not Christian in a gathered meeting for business—or even considered the question, for that matter. Without such discernment, we remain technically Christian by our own standards—unless, as we apparently do, we consider these tacit unconsidered deletions from our formal statements of identity to be some kind of true discernment; or unless we think that just because our meeting doesn’t have many Christians that means Quakerism isn’t Christian. I don’t think this blind drift in our books of faith and practice does amount to true discernment, but I admit that this backing-out effect does carry some kind of weight—if there’s no Christianity there, then it’s not there—even if that weight is a negative weight of absence and is freighted with unconscious violations of the testimony of integrity.
Ultimately, whether we are Christian or not depends, not on who you ask or what you believe, but how you worship. It certainly is the case that many unprogrammed meetings are, in fact, post-Christian in terms of what most of their members believe. But more to the real point, since belief isn’t really the point, most liberal Friends do not put Jesus Christ at the heart of their religious lives and neither do their meetings.
That’s the real answer to the question, Are Quakers Christian? It depends, not on how a given individual might answer, and not even on how a meeting answers, but rather on how the meeting worships. Does your meeting worship Christ? Or—stretching things a little here—does your meeting understand itself to be worshipping in the spirit of Christ?
This begs a bunch of questions based on definitions, of course. What is worship? Who, or what, is Christ? And, following the stretch I offered just above, what is meant by “the spirit of Christ”? Questions for another post. Meanwhile, I think the answer for most unprogrammed meetings I know is: no, we’re not Christian. But are we then still Quaker?
As I’ve said many times in this blog, I think we in the liberal branch need to be more forthright about what our post-Christian reality really means. How can we claim to be Quakers and not be Christians? How can we claim to be a true branch of the vine when we have cut ourselves off from its roots? How can we claim our worship is true when it does not draw its spiritsap from the spirit of Christ?
I am going to make a bold apology for a clarified liberal Quaker identity that retains its roots and recovers worship in the spirit of Christ, but yet releases us from the orthodox Christian preoccupations that no longer speak to so many unprogrammed Friends.
It will take a while to unpack my thinking here. For one thing, I’m not done thinking. For another, a blog is really not the ideal format for the kind of long-form writing that careful theology requires. But this is the platform I have.

§ 12 Responses to Are Quakers Christian?

  • patradallmann
    April 19, 2019 at 7:55 am
    These words of Penington convey the Christian’s experience of being indwelled by Christ:
    He who hath the power, and putteth forth the power inwardly…he is the Messiah, the Saviour, the Word of life, the Son of the living God. They that believe in him, in his Spirit, in his power, in his inward appearance, have the witness in themselves, the living testimony, which none can put out, or take away from them. He hath opened mine eyes, he hath opened my heart, he hath changed me inwardly, created me inwardly, by the working of his mighty power; and I daily live, and am preserved, and grow by the same power, I feel his life, his virtue, his power, his presence day by day. He is with me, he lives in me; and I live not of myself, but by feeling him to live in me, finding life spring up from him into me, and through me; and therein lies all my ability and strength for evermore (Works, III:338).
    Reply
  • Are Quakers Christian?
    April 15, 2019 at 12:52 pm
    […] Are Quak­ers Chris­t­ian? […]
    Reply
  • Gerard Guiton
    April 15, 2019 at 8:53 am
    The central focus of early Quakerism was the Kingdom of God because it was Jesus’. Today, although I believe that the Kingdom (or, as I call it “The Way”) cannot be separated from Jesus, I don’t think it depends entirely on him. It is a universal, cosmological principle. It is “of God”—the Light, Seed, Presence, etc. Hence to suggest that modern Quakerism is Christian or not is really irrelevant in my view since Jesus’ focus went beyond religious consideration. If anything, Jesus was post-religion of the universality of The Way. Just thoughts, 🙂
    Reply
  • John Cowan
    April 15, 2019 at 6:40 am
    Would you mind taking a shot at the “odious” spices? My understanding is they are a way of packaging what many of us do much of the time, which takes enough away to make me alright with them.
    Reply
    • Steven Davison
      April 15, 2019 at 10:10 am
      My objections to the SPICES are mainly twofold.
      First, they objectify the testimonies, turning them into outward forms that define a set of values to which we try to adhere. They are the fruits of the testimonial life, rather than its roots. They tempt us into answering to a set of values rather than answering the inner promptings of the Light within us, which gives these testimonies forth. The more important (and more difficult) mission of our First Day Schools should be to try to help young people hear their inner Guide, that which will help them make good decisions in their everyday lives, though these outward guidelines have been tested and they’ve held up.
      For the “testimonies” do represent truths to which we as a movement have consistently found ourselves led by the Spirit over the centuries. But it’s the leading that’s really important, not the “destination”. I think it’s worthwhile naming them and teaching them, but always as the fruit of our own obedience to the Guide as individuals and as leadings consistently confirmed by Quaker communities as they are gathered in the spirit of Christ (however you name that).
      Second, the SPICES are incomplete and they are limited by their status as an acronym. They leave out our opposition to the death penalty, for instance, and our efforts toward prison reform. Furthermore, they have already grown once, from SPICE to SPICES, when we added (earth) stewardship or sustainability. What happens when a new truth is revealed to us about how we should walk through the world?
      I fear that they will tend to suppress new revelation in a way similar to the way standing committees organized around a concern suppress new prophetic testimony. Our first response as meetings to a new concern is to try to cram it concern into some existing committee, rather that treating the person bringing the concern as a potential prophet who needs from us, not a home in committee, but discernment of the leading and then support for the ministry.
      When an emerging new testimony threatens to crack the shell of the acronym, what will First Day School teachers do then?
      Reply
      • Don Badgley
        April 15, 2019 at 10:25 am
        I agree with all you have said and add that we Friends sometimes seem lonely for a nice little creed to which we can refer. If we succeed in simply leading people into the Light, the Spirit of Christ, the fruit of that tree will be sweet enough without calling each manifestation of the harvest a “testimony.” Thanks for all you do!
  • Ellis Hein
    April 13, 2019 at 10:34 pm
    “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”
    One of the major themes of the Old Testament scriptures is God’s call to humanity to “Taste and see that I am good.” Or take Isaiah’s contrast between starvation and fatness: “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, let your soul delight itself in fatness [of listening]. Incline your ear. Listen that your soul may live.” Then there is God’s covenant that was to be the foundation of the Israelite people: “If you will indeed hear my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be to me a peculiar treasure…”
    I point these things out in order to state that Fox and the early Quakers were a people who tasted, who were fat with hearing the voice of Christ, who were a covenanted people and kept that covenant in deed and in word.
    So, lets turn your question around and point it at that institution that calls itself after the name of Christ. On what grounds do they lay claim to the name of being Christ-like? Because they do the will of the heavenly Father? Have they tasted the substance of knowing that there is one alone, who can speak to their condition?
    This is where we began as a people: giving ample and living demonstration of what it means to be a people gathered to Christ as our head, shepherd, preacher, priest, king, prophet, and way to God. We did this in the midst of a society of sham Christianity.
    So, before we divest ourselves of the name of Christianity, we owe it to ourselves to discern the true from the sham, truth from error. Before we say that Christianity is not for me, have we tasted Christ-likeness or have we only tasted religion? Have we experience the thinness of trying to live on the husks and then been brought to the life and fatness of soul of hearing Christ, the Word of God. If we have not done these things, our judgment is too hasty
    Reply
  • septembre
    April 13, 2019 at 8:30 pm
    I look forward to your articulation of a “clarified liberal Quaker identity that retains its roots and recovers worship in the spirit of Christ, but yet releases us from the orthodox Christian preoccupations that no longer speak to so many unprogrammed Friends.”
    I have been following your blog for sometime and how you have explored aspects of this already has resounded with me – “spoke to my condition” ? – even though I come from a different place in terms of faith and membership than you.
    I am an attender of a liberal unprogrammed Friends meeting in Canada but I identify as Christ-centred and while I have tensions with traditional Christianity these tensions tend to be more political and ethical rather than doctrinal or spiritual.
    I am spiritually attracted to the unprogrammed tradition and have a dialectical relationship with the openness, pluralistic, post-Christian aspect of it.
    On the one hand I appreciate the openness both relationship wise (seems like good hospitality to individual people, an act of personal and spiritual care) and believe there is solid spiritual / theological grounding for this openness in the early Quaker message of “that of God in everyone,” the universality of the inward light. I don’t find myself in agreement with the Rufus Jones or human dignity interpretation of what that means, but I do believe it nonetheless. I also think that openness to folks coming from diverse spiritual paths can (with caveats, see below) enrich the whole meeting community.
    On the other hand the openness confuses me and I worry that it endangers the sustainability of the community and its traditions long term. I think the sociological-organizations foundations, and the spiritual foundations to which our sociological forms could bear witness to, can be threatened when the very words, processes, self-images can mean so many different things. I don’t believe in a monoculture of meanings but I think too much diversity in understanding core parts of Quaker tradition and language – as you have said – violates the testimony of integrity.
    I remember reading a letter to an editor from a pastor in the midst of a controversy in a church denomination about including LGBTQ people into membership and ministry. The pastor, who was affirming himself, wrote that while inclusion is important it is also important, perhaps even more so, to ask ‘what we are we including people into it?’
    Reply
  • Don Badgley
    April 13, 2019 at 4:42 pm
    When George Fox said that, “Jesus Christ has come to teach his people himself,” he was making an unequivocally Christian statement. They named their group a “society” because they considered themselves a segment of the total “body of Christ”, not a new religion. Much time has passed, and Steve rightly points out that the answer to, are Quakers Christian, resides in some difficult and tricky definitions. I suspect than many 17th Century Christians would have answered no, Quakers are not Christian.
    So, I began with self-reflection about my own Christianity. I begin with; I am absolutely a Friend and member of the society of that name. Would a “born again” evangelical Christian of any denomination consider me Christian? I doubt it. That includes 90% of 21st Century Quakers. Do I subscribe to the post Constantinian parameters, creeds, doctrines and fundamental teachings of the thousands of Christian churches? No.
    Fox made a discovery and named it the Spirit of Christ. I believe it is exactly the same discovery made by Jesus of Nazareth, and others through the ages. Fox said as much. My experience of that Divine Source makes me a member of the body that centers itself on that Light and Experience. Simply naming that phenomenon “The Spirit of Christ” does not make me a Christian and my refusal of the forms that Christianity has adopted and demands excludes me from that body by their definitions.
    I cannot find the place in scripture in which Jesus says he is God. I cannot find the place that calls for and defines a priesthood. I cannot find a place in which he excludes those who do not worship him as a God. I do find that he said to simply call him friend and that the Kingdom of God was at hand, right there for the asking. Divine Love belonged to all of humanity. His ministry was not exclusive but perfectly inclusive, to all who opened their hearts to the Holy Spirit that existed from before time and space. He most certainly never called himself a Christian and would not have recognized the word.
    Am I a Christian? Are Quakers Christian? As Steven said, “It depends, not on how a given individual might answer, and not even on how a meeting answers, but rather on how the meeting worships.” In fact, I am quite certain that Jesus of Nazareth would not even ask the question. He would ask if you love God and one another and even your enemies. If you answer in the affirmative and live under that order, then it matters not one bit what you call yourself, even if you call yourself a Samaritan. I am also certain that he would reject most of the doctrines and practices of those people and organizations that name themselves – “Christian.”
    When I am under the care and order of the One Light, that Inward Teacher and Divine Source, you can call me any name you like and I will love you the same. My “membership” is there.
    Reply
  • treegestalt
    April 13, 2019 at 3:50 pm
    Given what Jesus said about the value of saying “Lord, Lord” to him — it may not matter as much as we think it does, whether people think it’s the spirit of “Christ” they’re following, not as much as whether or not that’s what’s actually leading them.
    Reply
    • Zeke
      April 15, 2019 at 11:02 pm
      Your comment brings to mind those who pray mightily and at great length, with flowery phrases, using “Lord” as a comma, or a substitute for “uh” as they try to connect one thought with an other on the fly. I recall that Jesus had something to say about such people. I doubt that he would approve of most who label themselves “Christian” these days. But I also hesitate to abandon the appellation simply because it is often used dishonestly or in error. We are Christian (like Christ) if we attempt to follow his teachings. Nothing else really matters.
      Reply

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What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Spirituality vs Religion ‹ Through the Flaming Sword ‹ Reader — WordPress.com

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What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Spirituality vs Religion

Religion as Corporate Spirituality

My one-line answer to the question, What is Quakerism for? is: bringing people to G*d and bringing G*d into the world. “Bringing people to G*d” has two parts: personal spirituality and communal spirituality.
The last post’s discussion of worship provides a segue from personal spirituality to communal spirituality—that is, to religion.
Several years ago I was a Friendly Adult Presence in a youth conference sponsored by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and in one of the exercises, the young people were asked to sort themselves out by whether they had a spiritual life or not and whether they practiced a religion. The vast majority said yes to spirituality and no to religion. This made me feel bad.
I suspect that quite a few adult Friends have similar feelings. They are much more comfortable talking about spirituality and not so comfortable talking about their “religion”. For many Friends, I suspect, “religion” conjures traditional belief in a “God”, a supreme being, maybe even the trinity of Christianity, whom the community worships, and aspects of this traditional definition of religion just don’t work for them. Many, like me, I suspect, have no direct experience of such a God. Many may have had negative experiences of traditional worship of such a God. And thus many may be uncomfortable with “worship” when defined as adoration, praise, and supplication of such a God.
And then there’s Jesus and the intensely Christ-centered legacy of our own Quaker tradition. For many Friends, “religion” is relationship with him, placing him at the center of our individual lives and at the center of our life as a community. And again, for many Friends, this just is not their experience.
I’ve written about my own struggles with this question quite a lot—how confounding I usually find it to belong to what I believe is a Christian religious community and not be a Christian myself. As is happening right this second, every time I get to a certain depth in exploring Quakerism, in this blog and in my other writing, I find myself trying to identify who Jesus Christ is for me, and what Quakerism means without experience of him. And I mean experience of him, not belief in him; I have the belief, but not the experience. It is one of the central questions of my religious life. I believe it is perhaps the central question for modern Liberal Quakerism in general. I’m still working on it.
In the meantime, I keep beavering away at other questions while skirting this elephant in the room. Why? Because I feel led to, is the basic answer. But also in the hope that circling this central question will eventually lead to some answers. And finally, because I know I am not alone. I feel that I am exploring the issues I write about alongside many other nonChristian Friends, and I hope to be useful to others in their search.
So I do have a nonChristian definition of “religion” and “worship”. And I have a concern to bridge the gap between “spirituality” and “religion”, which I see as a misperception. I do not want a religion that is little more than a society for practicing individual spiritualities together. I have done that and it is not enough for me. The reason it’s not enough is that I have had collective spiritual experience, experience shared with others of something deep and profound. I have had religious experience. So my definition of religion starts with a definition of spirituality.
By “spirituality” I mean the faith and the practices through which we as individuals seek to open ourselves to the Light within us—to the presence, motion, guidance, teaching, healing, strengthening, inspiration, and redemption of the ChristSpirit acting in us—and the ways in which we try to follow its guidance in our lives.
“Religion” I define as the faith and the practices through which the community seeks to commune with the Mystery Reality that lies behind and beyond the Light within each of us as individuals, that lies between us or among us as a community, and that becomes real for us in the mystery of the gathered meeting for worship.
For the Light, the kingdom of heaven, is not only within us; it is also among us, as Jesus put it. It is the presence in the midst. It is the motion of love between us. It is the guidance, teaching, healing, strengthening, inspiration, and reconciliation of the Spirit acting through us as individuals and among us at the center of our worship and our fellowship. The presence within us and the presence in our midst—these are the same. This is our faith, born of our experience in the gathered meeting for worship.
Thus I define “religion” as the spiritual life, the faith and spiritual practices, of a community, the things a religious community does to renew its communion with the Divine.
This begs the question (again) of just what we mean by “the Divine”, which is one of Liberal Quakerism’s placeholders for whatever it is we are experiencing, when we don’t think it’s the traditional triune Christian God. I have dealt with this problem by using “G*d”, letting the asterisk stand in for whatever your experience is. Speaking this way, however—speaking around a more explicit naming of God—just throws us back into individualism, casting ourselves again as a society of individuals practicing our own spiritualities, rather than defining ourselves as an integral community with a clear focus for our worship.
The only thing that belies this individualist reality, the only hope in all this mess, it seems to me, is to be found in the gathered meeting. As I have written earlier, the gathered meeting seems not to care about name tags. I have felt a meeting become gathered in spite of its theological confusion and diversity. I once felt a meeting gathered because of its diversity, reaching exquisitely joyous unity as the result of deep wrestling with the plurality of our experience.
Anyway, I hope that thinking of religion as the shared spiritual practice of a community encourages some Friends to warm up to the idea of Quakerism as a religion. And I, at least, find great encouragement in the fact that this practice now and again delivers genuine fulfillment—both spiritual fulfillment; that is, individual fulfillment, joy, healing, and inspiration; and religious fulfillment, a corporate experience of the presence in our midst, of love and the healing of conflict, of inspiration and prompting to corporate witness, and of unity and joy in the knowing of each other in that place where words come from.
If only it happened more often.
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MORE IN THROUGH THE FLAMING SWORD

9 COMMENTS
  1. Jnana Hodson
    Jnana Hodson
    Dec 14, 2013
    Steven, you pack a lot into this small posting, and I’m glad to hear your thoughts. (It’s tempting for the blogging universe to fall back on Plain Speech … Steven, thee packs a lot into this small posing, and I’m glad to hear thy thoughts.)
    Some of our struggles as Quakers these days springs from the prohibitions that kept early Friends from laying out their insights in a fuller articulation — their compression of Christ, Logos (the Word, in all of the richness of the Greek philosophical system), and the Light into one metaphorical unit, especially. Add to that the interlocking metaphors of the Seed and the Truth and you have a powerful and fresh theology. (Now there’s a word to stir up our liberal end of the Friends’ spectrum, theology!)
    The early Friends’ unspoken message was this: Christ is bigger than Jesus. And it’s still revolutionary, yet has its own array of Scriptural support.
    I’ve been delving into much of their thinking and connecting the dots over the past several decades and have been posting much of it on my blog, “As Light Is Sown.” A more extended version of my argument here is laid out in the August 8, 2012, post, “Revolutionary Light” (friendjnana.wordpress.com/2012/08/).
    Hope you find it stimulating and helpful. I’m looking forward to seeing where your explorations lead.
  2. treegestalt
    treegestalt
    Dec 14, 2013
    There is really only one workable exit from imagining yourself trapped inside some “individualist reality” — because going to a collectively-imagined “reality” makes no significant difference.
    We’re only able to collect in any sort of “reality” in the first place because something is real in its own right; we can connect through it precisely because there really is a ‘there’ there.
    Whether this looks to you like a traditional Triune Christian God is beside the point; that is merely a concept certain other people in the past have been able to form of that big What’s There (or ‘big Who’s There’ — since it lets Itself be experienced in various modes by various people.)
    You don’t want to commune with ‘a concept’; “God is not a concept of God.” You recognize something as real because it has the potential to give rise to experiences; a computer is not “an experience” or “something people experience together”; that’s simply how people know of it.
    The “religion/spiritualy” dichotomy is shorthand for “I want something I can actually find, myself, rather than mentally swalllowing what someone else has heard/read from somebody else.”
    On that basis, “spirituality” is a perfectly valid stance; it just needs to develop into a deeper realisation — “Oh! That’s what everyone else is experiencing, describing in various ways, too!” At that point people can compare notes and generate your desireable sense of ‘religion.’
  3. Thy Friend John
    Thy Friend John
    Dec 14, 2013
    Steve, thank you for this, and for trying to challenge our knee-jerk reflex discomfort about the word “religion.”
    This morning I read the following words in the _Philokalia_, attributed to Makarios of Egypt (c.300 – c. 390): “But in reality Christianity is like food and drink: the more a man tastes it, the more he longs for it, until his intellect becomes insatiable and uncontrollable.” I’m coming to feel that way myself. And to think that it all happened to me through membership in Fifteenth Street Monthly Meeting! Who would have thought!? L.O.L.!
    Well, perhaps I should say “through membership in Fifteenth Street Monthly Meeting and by the grace of God.” I got a whole lot of my Christian religion by shying away from the chit-chat of social hour and going to the library, where I sought out the company of Friends like George Fox, John Woolman and Thomas Kelly. It’s been reinforced along the way by certain living Friends, who’ve affirmed my gifts of the Holy Spirit and encouraged me to daily and constant spiritual practice, by guiding words from the Still, Small Voice, and by the kindling of fire in my heart by the living Christ, whom I hail as my Savior, though I won’t go into what I mean by that now.
    How I wish I could persuade others around me — Quakers and non-Quakers — to own Christ, to die to the old man of selfishness and be reborn a new creature, and to realize that this *is* the Christian religion, where all things work together for good to those that love God, in spite of the sorrow and suffering and evil and mortality that plague this life! More addictive than dope, better even than sex, more empowering than money… what shall I compare the Christian religion to, as I’ve experienced it? It’s love for all creation and all creatures, and yet more than that; it’s waking up from a dream of being an ugly, dirty, defiling, treacherous predator to find oneself washed clean and made innocent, nay, luminous, so as to help light the way to glory for others. Makarios of Egypt, or whoever made that statement, knew what he was talking about, and probably knew it better than I do.
  4. Bill Rushby
    Bill Rushby
    Dec 28, 2013
    If this has not already been posted on QuakerQuaker, I think it should be!
  5. Agni Ashwin
    Agni Ashwin
    Jan 7, 2014
    I know Quakers sit in silence communally. Do they sit in silence individually, as a common practice, too?
    1. Steven Davison
      Steven Davison
      Agni Ashwin
      Jan 11, 2014
      Agni, that really depends on the Friend. I don’t think we can give a global answer for (all) Quakers. But I think it’s safe to say that many Friends do model their personal spiritual practice on meeting for worship to some degree and do sit in silence as a personal practice.
      I do myself, though I also use some of the deepening practices I’ve learned along the way, mostly from the study of yoga.
  6. Daniel Francis
    Daniel Francis
    Jan 9, 2014
    What I don’t understand is the difference between the “God of Christianity” and the G*d that you consider yours.
    Is this God a state of mind, a feeling? Is it physics and the evolutionary process?
    You say that G*d is not a supreme being. Is it relational? Does it have personality, consciousness, will? Does it want anything? Does it ask anything of us? Does it feel? Does it want to relate to humans?
    And what does worship mean to you? Is worshiping G*d objectionable?
    Because I would think that any form of praise, admiration, honoring or joyful acknowledgement of someone or something would be considered worship.
    1. Thy Friend John
      Thy Friend John
      Daniel Francis
      Jan 10, 2014
      this comment of yours, daniel, seemed to take down one of the four walls of the room we were talking in and open us up to an infinite vista. i’m very grateful. (i’m mostly doing without capital letters while my broken right arm heals.) it’s all very well to say that the Divine is indescribable, without qualities, both a Person and Not a person, etc., all that apophatic stuff, but in order to have a relationship with God we have to make certain decisions as to who God is: is God supremely good, or morally indifferent, merely an observer? is God omnipresent, almighty? can God save us from sin, addiction, suffering, ignorance, death, & samsara generally, and secondly, does God want to? (thirdly, do we want that?) does God advise us to “pray without ceasing” because God has a huge ego that needs gratifying, or because it’s for our own salvation? are love and forgiveness of God? does God know our every thought? and then – who knows God best: avatars (Rama, Krishna, Jesus, etc.), prophets (Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, etc), or philosophers and theologians? to whom might we turn for help? did Jesus mean it when He said “He who has seen me has seen the Father” and “Behold, I am with you always?”
      To me it seems that the central question in all this is, do we feel the need of salvation?
    2. Steven Davison
      Steven Davison
      Daniel Francis
      Jan 11, 2014
      I agree with John that these are the basic questions: what do we mean by “God”, does worship require a discreet sentient being with whom we could have a relationship, and is it necessary to share an understanding of God to “worship in spirit and truth”, as the gospel of John puts it?
      I’ve been thinking about these questions for a long time, only gradually getting closer to clarity about them. The basic problem for me is that my own answers to these questions and the answers I would like to give for the Society as a whole are not the same.
      This is why I started the previous series trying to develop a theology for Liberal Friends.[http://throughtheflamingsword.wordpress.com/category/liberal-quakerism-an-exploration/] That series turned into an extensive treatment of the gathered meeting because I feel that the gathered meeting offers some answers: we do have the experience of being gathered in the spirit, even though we are not in unity about the object of our “worship”. So something is happening that tests the boundaries of traditional Christian theology.
      But even then, I found myself having to answer the question of whether “God” or more pointedly, Christ, is the “gatherer” when we are gathered. And is my “G*d” a being or not? I use “G*d” so that the asterisk can stand in for whatever my readers’ experience of God is, and because, while I do have experience of spiritual beings with whom one could have a relationship (and I do), I have no experience of “God” as the traditional supreme being. But, this leaves a lot of these questions unanswered.
      In fact, I doubt that we can know a supreme-being god at all, by virtue of its utter supremeness and our utter finiteness. So talk about a supreme being God is by definition an exercise in speculation, or a faithful acceptance of the tradition we have inherited. This is not enough for me.
      But herein lies the genius of the Christian tradition, that we have Christ to relate to, a being whom we already “know” in some ways, if we are willing to take Christian Scripture seriously, because there he is—even though the Jesuses we meet in the various books of Christian Scripture vary a great deal. So, as all Christian communities have had to do throughout history, we are back to trying to define the God we worship and come to unity about it. That has not often gone well and the answers are legion.
      So I will return to these questions. They are really important. I interrupted my first attempt to do this by moving into discussion of the gathered meeting. Well, in truth, I was led into that series of posts. But I didn’t finish. And I don’t want to interrupt this series to go back. So I am going to stay with my exploration of What is the Religious Society of Friends for? But at the end, I will have to return to these questions, because they are the basic ones:
      Who/what is God? Do we need to agree about God? Is theism necessary for faithful Quakerism? And the very core question, which gathers them all together: is Jesus Christ necessary for a faithful Quakerism?
      I know that the fact that I even raise the question deeply troubles many Friends. It ought to be obvious, they feel. Well, it isn’t obvious anymore, and that just is our condition in the Liberal branch of Friends. And it’s my condition, as well. Nevertheless, I feel that I personally have to answer these questions and not just ignore them, as many Liberal Friends do.
      And I feel we have to answer them collectively, as well. It’s not enough to continue as a religious society that simply allows individuals to make their own minds up about this stuff and not address them as a community. It’s not faithful to the testimony of integrity. It avoids a valuable opportunity to engage with the deepest issues our community faces. And it’s such bad religious practice as to challenge whether we are a religion at all if we can’t at least try to define our God.
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