HARD-CORE QUAKER, QUAKER THEOLOGY
WHY DON’T I KNOW MUCH ABOUT QUAKERISM?
FEBRUARY 11, 2016 CHUCK FAGER 1 COMMENT
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Why Don’t I Know Much About Quakerism? Quaker FAQs #1
From “Some Quaker FAQs — For New & Curious Friends”
Recently a young Friend told me about a church, which I’ll call New Covenant Temple, that’s not far from her house. The young Friend had schoolmates who went there, and they had invited her to visit.
She also said they’ve been asking about what Quakers believe, and how that might be different from what they believe there, or what other churches like them believe. But she had trouble answering.
I looked around, and didn’t find anything to help her cope with these questions that was short and focused, and meant for younger or newer Quakers like her.
So I wrote this booklet, “Some Quaker FAQs.” I believe it can help Friends like her handle such questions. Of course, it’s just a beginning in learning about Quakerism, and the Bible, and Jesus. And the views here are mine, and unofficial. At the end there’s a list of more books to follow up with if you like.
I’ll start with one important question she asked:
Q. Why Don’t I Know Much About Quakerism – Or Other Churches?
Good question! She’s taken part in lots of Quaker activities, but not in anything like a “class” on Quakerism and its beliefs. I don’t think there’s been any such class for her to take. (There are several kinds of Quakers, and she was raised among what are called “Liberal (or Progressive) Quakers.” But this is true for most other kinds as well.
And two, she hasn’t been taught much about other churches and what they believe and do either.
If you think about it, the answer to the question is pretty obvious: not having been taught much about these two things is bound to make it hard to explain Quakers, or figure out how they’re like – or different from – other groups.
Frankly, I think young and new Friends are not well served by the lack of such “Quaker education.” If Quakers don’t teach Quakers about Quakerism, who will?
And as she’s noticing, churches and religion are important to people around her. So it’s a good idea to get familiar enough to be able to explain your group, and understand at least a little about others.
I’d like to start filling in some of these gaps of information here, at least about Quakers.
Partly I’ll do it by talking about New Covenant Temple, what they believe and do, and comparing it to Progressive Quaker ideas.
How do I know about New Covenant Temple, since I’ve never been there? Simple: I did some detective work.
Nothing sneaky. I started with Google – what else?? New Covenant Temple has a big website, and I looked it up. And then I looked up some other similar church websites.
Also I did some study. I don’t mean just now – I’ve been studying religions for many years. So I could fit what I learned about New Covenant Temple into a much bigger picture – because that church is a lot like many other churches, but with its own style and set of beliefs.
So, where to start?
First, a bit about what they do at New Covenant Temple. It seems they want to make going to church a lot like going to a concert or a party – plenty of music and singing, and talking in small groups. They also do a lot of preaching.
All of this has a goal. That goal is to convert people to their particular religious beliefs, especially about God, Jesus, and the Bible.
Q. Where can I find out what other churches believe?
New Covenant; like most churches, has a “Statement of Belief,” or a Creed, and it’s on their website. It’s similar to many others. We’ll use that one as a guide. We’ll jump right in, with God, Jesus and the Bible.
Q. What Is God Like, In The Bible?
At New Covenant their sermons mainly use stories and passages from the Bible. These Bible stories are presented in the way the preachers there understand them, that is, how they interpret them.Interpretation is a big part of talking about or studying the Bible. And interpretations vary widely. We’ll have to talk about that some more later. But here’s one example:
In the Bible, is God peaceful? Or is God warlike?
Well, in some stories it says that God is a “man of war” (Ex 15:3 ). In other places it insists that “our god is a god of peace” (Romans 15:33; 1 Cor 14:33).Some people think the war God is the real one, others that the peaceful God is more true; some would even say both.
Who’s right? How can this variety be sorted out? That’s interpretation.
One Progressive Quaker principle is that, bottom line, it’s up to YOU and ME to answer these Bible questions, and other religious questions. Sure, we can & should learn a lot from books and other people. But no preacher, no bishop, no pope can replace your own study and thinking and “leadings.” For that matter, the same goes for interpreting the Bible itself.
You haven’t been taught much about the Bible; few young Quakers really have. But at New Covenant Temple, and most other Christian churches, it’s a big deal.
Q. Okay, What About The Bible?
Here’s what New Covenant Temple’s website says is their “official” view of it:
The Bible: We believe the Bible was written by authors through the guidance of the Holy Spirit and is the inspired word of God. It is the TRUTH without error and our complete source for Christian living. II Timothy 3:16,17
(The part at the end, “II Timothy 3:16,17” refers to a particular short passage, or verse, in one part of the Bible.)
So talking with people from such churches, we’ll likely be getting a lot of questions that include the phrase, “But the Bible says . . . .”
But wait: if something is “written in the Bible,” does that automatically make it true, or right?
Seen this billboard? It’s real, and there are lots of them out there.It will be better if you can answer such questions based on your own study of the Bible. But it’s also a fair answer for a Progressive Quaker to say, “Suppose the Bible does say such and such. So what? For our kind of Quakers, we learn from the Bible, but the Bible is not the whole ‘TRUTH’ without any errors. It’s not the ‘complete source’ for our religion. It is not a substitute for God or the Inner Light or the Spirit for us.”
(Be advised, such an answer might shock some people. You might get a reply like, “But if you don’t believe in the Bible as all true, you’re going to burn in hell.” We’ll talk a little further on about this
“burning in hell” idea. But don’t let it scare you.)
On the other hand, some folks at these churches might even agree with you about the Bible, because they think it’s more important what you think or believe about Jesus than what you think about the Bible. . . .
Next time:
Q. What About Jesus?
The second installment of this series is here.
This post is adapted from the booklet, Some Quaker FAQs, by Chuck Fager. More information about it is here.
Related
A Series: Some Quaker FAQs, For New & Curious FriendsMarch 9, 2010In "Cross-Generational Conversation: YAFS & OFFs"
For Friendly Summer Reading: Two New BooksJune 11, 2015In "Books - by Chuck Fager"
Some Quaker FAQs - Part 7May 6, 2016In "Hard-Core Quaker"
“SOME QUAKER FAQS” CONTINUED-WHAT ABOUT JESUS?
FEBRUARY 16, 2016 CHUCK FAGER LEAVE A COMMENT
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“Some Quaker FAQs” Continued-What About Jesus?
A Series For New & Curious Friends
(Part 1 of this series is here.)
Q. What About Jesus?
What does New Covenant Temple believe about Jesus?** Again, here’s what it says on their website:
** For more about New Covenant Temple, and why we use them as a reference point, click here.
Jesus Christ: We believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God who gave his life on a cross as the perfect sacrifice for all of our sins. He arose from the grave to show his power over sin and death. He ascended into heaven and will return to earth again to rule as King of all kings.
Okay, there’s a lot in this to talk about. And it’s similar to what many other Christian churches believe, including the evangelical Friends churches.
Some Quakers, especially liberal/Progressive ones, have come from such churches. Many others are not very familiar with it, though they may have heard pieces of it here and there. Liberal/Progressive Quakers often shy away from even talking about all that; which is too bad.
Avoiding it won’t help much when your friends start asking you those questions, or when political leaders start crusading about “reclaiming” the country “for Christ.” And you may have questions of your own about it.
There are plenty of churches out there which will lay out all the answers (their answers) for you, and then all you have to do is to agree and follow along.
Among Progressive Quakers, it works differently. You can learn a lot from seeking and study, for instance by reading the Bible, and the books of Faith & Practice that the Yearly Meetings issue. But the bottom line answers come from you and the Inner Light.
So, what about Jesus? Let’s see if we can take this one piece at a time.
Q. What Does “The Son of God” Mean?
Was Jesus the “Son of God”?
This idea turns up in stories told about Jesus in the Bible – though these stories don’t all agree. What it seems to come down to, though, is that God sort of “cloned” himself (yes, this God was “male”), and then about 2000 years ago, put the God-clone into the womb of a woman named Mary, from which he emerged in human form (like a “son”), and thus sent him down to earth to live among people for 33 years, as the person Jesus.
(In many of the creeds about Jesus, Mary is said to have been a virgin when this all happened, so it was the “Virgin Birth.”)
BTW – when stories about Jesus were first being told, there were other religions with somewhat similar tales; so the “son-of-God-living-with-people-awhile” idea didn’t sound as strange to people then as it does to many today. (And come to think of it, this tale is no weirder than a lot of those you can see on movie screens today.)
This God-son’s life started, of course, with the Christmas story: born in Bethlehem, laid in a manger, angels singing, three kings a-visiting, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree. All of that – except that the last two are not in the Bible.
Q. Do we have to talk about “God”?
No, we don’t “have to,” and some Friends prefer not to. For that matter, “God” has been defined many ways. But I’m going to use “God” here, without trying to sort it out or define it, beyond pointing out that “God” appears to be the main character of Biblical stories and religion, and that, like it or not, both “God” and the Bible were very important to Quakers for most of our history. So both of these will be big parts of the discussion here. You’re free to define “God” as you wish, or substitute something else.
Q. What About “Sin”?
And why did God take human form? The answers at New Covenant and similar churches are based on a belief that we humans have all “sinned” – that is, we’ve made a hopeless mess of life and the world, ever since the beginning. We made such a big terrible mess that we can’t possibly fix it by ourselves.
That’s all of us, by the way, including you and me. Plus everyone who has yet to be born too. Trapped in this mess, can’t fix it. So God finally stepped in, in the form of Jesus, and fixed it for us.
Here’s another way to think about it, through a story, a parable:
Q. More About Sin: Were You ever Stuck In A Deep Hole?
Suppose you were walking by yourself one day and fell into a deep hole. You weren’t hurt, but the sides of the hole were very steep and slippery, so that you couldn’t climb out. You were stuck there, alone and hungry, maybe cold and wet too. Then, finally, someone came along and found you, and put down a ladder, and you were able to climb out of the hole. You were rescued, or “saved.”
That’s where New Covenant Temple folks believe we all are: trapped in a pit of “sin.” Can’t get out by our human efforts. So God then offered to pull us all out of this bottomless “hole” of sin and evil. God acted to rescue, or “save” us, every one.
How? God essentially put a ladder down into this hole. Jesus was the “ladder.” By grabbing the “ladder” named Jesus, we can climb out and be “saved.” (Many churches will say there are other ladders being dangled into the “hole” of sin – but all these others are fakes. More on that later.)In the Bible stories, Jesus grew up and became a traveling teacher and preacher. He lived to be about thirty-three. Stories about him healing sick people and doing other miracles were collected in the Bible, along with some of his teachings.
But for New Covenant Temple folks, and most other Christian churches, it’s not what Jesus taught that made the rescue possible, as much as one thing he did. That was the most important.
Next Time: More About Sin, Jesus & Salvation
“SOME QUAKER FAQS” #3: JESUS/SALVATION, CONT.
GALLERY FEBRUARY 22, 2016 CHUCK FAGER 5 COMMENTS
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“Some Quaker FAQs” #3: Jesus/Salvation, Cont.
For New & Curious Friends
(Part 2 of this series is here. Part 1 is here.)
Q. What Does “Died For Our Sins” Mean?
At New Covenant Temple, a church we use as a reference point,** here’s what it says on their website:
** For more about New Covenant Temple, and why we use them as a reference point, click here.
Jesus Christ: We believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God who gave his life on a cross as the perfect sacrifice for all of our sins. He arose from the grave to show his power over sin and death. He ascended into heaven and will return to earth again to rule as King of all kings.
Last time we noted that they, like many other Christian groups, believe that Jesus provided the saving “ladder” for us, to climb out of a bottomless pit of sin. In fact, they say Jesus himself was that “ladder.”
How did he get to be this “ladder”? He “gave his life on a cross” (that is, he was executed) as a ‘perfect sacrifice’ for our sins’” – that’s what.
Now, what does that mean??
First off, Christian thinkers have been arguing about exactly what it means for 2000 years, and show no signs of stopping. But many churches believe they’ve figured out the correct answer.
One part at least, “died on the cross,” is pretty clear: in Jesus’ day, the Roman empire was in charge, and Roman officials executed many people in public by nailing them to wooden crosses, and leaving them hanging there til they died. It was, and was meant to be, a gruesome and humiliating way to die.
And they did that to Jesus. They suspected him — wrongly, according to the Bible story — of planning a rebellion against Roman rule. He was innocent, but they killed him anyway.
This is the easy part.So that part is not hard to explain. Yet thousands of other people also suffered and died on Roman crosses. When Jesus was crucified, how did his death turn out to be a “perfect sacrifice for our sins”?
Well, that is a lot more complicated.
Remember our “deep hole parable”? At one level, it means his death somehow became the ladder that God let down into the impossibly deep hole of human sin and evil so we could climb out.
But here that parable breaks down. Jesus didn’t pull anyone out of a hole; he was nailed to a cross and died, alone. How did that do anyone any good?
Q. Was Jesus Like The Friendly Billionaire?
Let’s try another analogy: Suppose you borrowed a million dollars from someone, and then lost it at the racetrack and couldn’t pay it back. You’d be in debt, and in trouble.
But then what if a friendly billionaire heard about your plight, and decided to pay the million dollars for you? Then your debt would be paid up, and – Whew! – you’d be out of trouble. You’d be “saved”!
In that sense, the friendly billionaire made a sacrifice: gave up something he didn’t have to. Other sacrifices are less dramatic, but
more familiar: a parent who works day and night and gives up having any luxuries, so their children can go to college. Or more dramatically, a parent who gives up their life to save a child. Jesus said something about this: “greater love than this no one hath, but that they lay down their life for their friends.” (John 15:13)Many Christians think that’s what Jesus did. Instead of falling in a hole, somehow all the sin and evil done by humans is like spending money we borrowed from God. So it added up to an impossibly huge moral or spiritual “debt” humans “owed” to God, and couldn’t pay.
Q. Was Jesus “The Perfect Sacrifice”? How?
By dying on the cross for a crime he didn’t commit, Jesus somehow “paid” that “debt” of sin to God for us.
But this analogy has problems too. Jesus, after all, was not a billionaire. Anyway, this “debt” was not a matter of borrowed money, or anything like it, but sin and evil.
In ordinary life when people are caught doing evil, they are punished. We speak of them as “owing a debt to society,” not in money, but because they disturbed the “law and order” that makes a peaceful life possible. This “debt to society” is “paid” through their punishment.
In a family, such “payment” might mean a parent takes away a child’s privileges. For more serious matters, people can end up in court. There the punishments can often involve paying money, like a traffic ticket. Other offenders do community service, cleaning up trash along public roads and the like; or they go to jail, and some are even executed. In whatever way, they “pay their debt to society.” This happens every day.
Q. But how does Jesus “pay” for whatever “debt” of “sins” I might “owe”?
A good, hard question. In “normal society,” people are punished for their own crimes, not somebody else’s. If I killed my neighbor, and was sentenced to life in prison for it, would my “debt to society” be paid if the court instead locked up, say, my best friend in my place, and let me go free?
That wouldn’t make sense in modern terms. A criminal’s “debt to society” can’t be “transferred” to somebody else.
But in Jesus’ day, it was common for religious people to “pay” for their sins by finding a “substitute.” Very often this substitute was an animal, which they took to a temple or holy place. Then with customary rituals, the animal was killed, and its body burned. As the smoke rose into the sky, that made the animal’s burned body a “sacrifice” to the god or gods who were imagined as living somewhere up there. In some old religions, they also sacrificed humans.
In the Bible, there is a commandment that once a year a goat was to be sacrificed especially as a “scapegoat.” (The story is in Leviticus 16) The “sins of the people” were somehow transferred to it by the high priest, and then it was sent away into the desert, and the sins went with it. The word its still used, but today “scapegoat” refers to an innocent person being unfairly penalized for something they did not do — which we think of as wrong and unfair.
Perhaps in part this kind of sacrifice was thought to “work” because the animal had been valuable to its owner, who then gave it up. Thus the sacrifice “paid the debt,” and turned away the god’s anger and met the need for punishment.
This process is also called “atonement”; the scapegoat ceremony was part of an annual Day of Atonement.” Such animal sacrifices are still practiced today in some religions.
Does this explain it?I realize I’m saying “somehow” a lot here. That’s because I really don’t understand how all this was supposed to work. (Here’s another blogger’s intriguing account of a conversation with a street preacher about it.) Such “sacrifices” are a very old practice, but they are rooted in ancient cultures and ideas that are hard to understand today.
I’m not alone in my confusion, though; theologians still argue about what it all means.
Anyway, many Christians, probably most, still believe that somehow Jesus, because he was the “Son of God,” and innocent besides, was able to serve as the “perfect sacrifice,” for all the sins and evil committed by all people who ever lived (including you and me as well as everyone who hasn’t been born yet).
All these sins, past, present, and future, added up to a “moral debt” that humans “owed” to God that was much more than we could ever possibly repay.
Q. But was this matter about sin only about paying a “debt” to God?
A shortcoming of the “debt” concept is that comparing it to money is too bloodless. In early Christian terms, the load of crime and evil –war, murder, genocide, rape, and so forth– was much too big for any human to repay. Besides, the “debt” was something in which all humans are implicated, even those not yet born, so that all humans deserved nothing less than a death sentence, with God as the judge, jury, and executioner.
And God is often portrayed as not only “owed” this debt, but also very angry about this load of sin. There are dozens of verses in the Bible that speak of the “wrath of God” which has fallen or will fall on sinful humans, individually and collectively; in the biblical stories God angrily and personally destroys many sinful people, often along with their family members, cities, and even animals, most of whom had nothing to do with the specific crimes involved.
In the traditional Christian stories, on a final “Judgment Day,” God would carry out this moral “death sentence,” and satisfy the divine anger by sending all humans to hell, a place where we would all burn in an endless fire, or face other awful torments, forever and ever. That’s what we deserved according to this view – yes, even you and me.
This is the moral “debt” that Jesus somehow took on and “paid” by becoming the “perfect sacrifice” on the cross. His death persuaded God NOT to carry out the punishment that all humans “deserved,” at least not on everyone.
By dying, Jesus “atoned” for our sins, and “saved” us (or at least some of us) from God’s punishment, of burning in hell forever.
Q. But Why was Jesus the “perfect” sacrifice?
I guess because he was God’s son; somehow (there’s that word again), it made him special enough to pull all of humanity out of the pit of sin, to pay that unpayable debt. He became the “scapegoat” for all, our universal sacrificial substitute which persuaded God to let go of his wrath.
Yes, it’s confusing to me too. But that’s the story.
And there’s more. In the Bible stories, and on New Covenant Temple’s website, it says that Jesus was brought back to life by God after three days, spent some time with his followers, and then floated up to heaven like a helium balloon.
And at New Covenant, like most Christian churches, they also believe that Jesus will come back to earth someday, maybe very soon. (There have been claims that it would be “VERY soon”– like next Tuesday – for 2000-plus years.)
Oops! The date was May 21, 2011.What will happen then depends on which stories you believe (there are many different ones). They usually end with some kind of sorting out of all the people who ever lived. In the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, Jesus describes it as dividing all people into two groups — the sheep, and the goats. (Guess where the goats go.)
Next time: Other ways to think about Jesus and his death. Plus: What’s a “personal relationship with Jesus”? Do I need one?
This post is adapted from the booklet, Some Quaker FAQs, by Chuck Fager. More information about it is here
