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The Sociology of Collective Religious Experience | Through the Flaming Sword



The Sociology of Collective Religious Experience | Through the Flaming Sword
The Sociology of Collective Religious Experience

November 4, 2017 § 5 Comments

Jesus, the Christ, and I—Part 9

In a previous post, written quite awhile ago now, I gave the first of four reasons why I think we should name our collective religious experience as the spirit of Christ. That was a negative reason: that the more diverse theologically and the more uncomfortable we have become with our traditional Christian identity, the more diluted our worship has become.

I have more to say about this, about whether our worship really has become more shallow and how theological diversity might have that effect, but it’s not seasoned enough yet. In this post, I want to explore the sociology of our collective religious experience. For collective religious experience is intensely social even while it is ineffably transcendental.

By “collective religious experience”, I mean the gathered meeting, primarily, plus those instances of profound vocal ministry that brings a meeting into divine communion, and the other extraordinary psychic experiences that arise in the practice of the Quaker way. I believe that coherence in our collective understanding, a shared framework for understanding and a shared vocabulary—or lack of it—has a real effect on the quality of our worship.

The group dynamics and psychology of a religious community act both as “drivers” behind its experience and as part of the discernment by which the community seeks to understand the experience that it does have.

The chain of our tradition is long and the links are strong. In Christian scripture, Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit (in several places in the gospel of John) and to be present whenever two or three are gathered (Matthew 18). Then, according to the testimony of our forbears, the promise was fulfilled in the experience of the early Friends, beginning 1600 years after those promises and continuing as revelation for another three centuries and more of our history as a people of God. Jesus’ promise and fulfillment established a foundation of faith upon which many Friends have built their religious lives. That faith, and its fulfillment in continuing revelation, fosters what we now call continuing revelation.

But our tradition does not just encourage our collective religious experience; it also explains it. It gives us a framework for understanding our experience and for talking about it, amongst ourselves, to our children, to newcomers. For more than 300 years we have said that we were gathered together in Christ. In fact, the tradition gave us our very identity: “You are my friends, if you do whatsoever I command you. . . I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard of the Father I have made known unto you.” (John 14:14, 15)

Or it used to explain our experience. Until sometime around the middle of the twentieth century. Now, we in the liberal tradition don’t really have an explanation. And I suspect we don’t have the support for such experience that the tradition used to give us, either.

Nothing illustrates how the tradition comes into play after collective transcendental experience more powerfully than the resurrection experiences recounted in Christian scripture, of which there are ten or so accounts, depending on how many stories you consider accounts of the same appearance by different evangelists.

In all but two of the resurrection stories, the people to whom the risen Christ appears do not recognize him or they have their doubts about what’s going on. Some cases are extremely challenging. How, for instance, could Mary Magdelene, Jesus’s closest disciple, fail to recognize him in the garden until he says her name (John’s gospel)? How could those two fellows on the road to Emmaus walk with Jesus himself for several hours while talking to him about his own crucifixion and the rumors of his appearances, and still only recognize him after they have arrived at their destination and broken bread together?

The answer is in the breaking of bread, that is, in the communal meal inaugurated at the Last Supper. We know that this meal was the central practice of Jesus’ movement. Jesus’s followers would gather at someone’s house, share a meal, hear catechetical teaching, pray and worship together, and distribute food and resources to the poor among them (Acts 2:42).

Here’s my point: Some of Jesus’ followers were having visions of Jesus after his death, but the meaning of those visions had to be worked out collectively over time, and this took place in the context of the “daily bread”, the daily meal. Put another way, Jesus did not come to these friends and disciples with his name tag on. It wasn’t obvious what they were experiencing. They had to discern together what was happening to them.

The resurrection experiences of the disciples are directly pertinent to my suggestion that we name the spirit of Christ as the center of our gathering. Even at the very roots of our religious tradition, doubt and confusion prevailed, and community discernment was needed to arrive at a conclusion.

Likewise, in our gathered meetings today, it is not immediately apparent what is going on; it is only obvious that something is going on. In the past, our collective discernment has concluded that we were being gathered in the spirit of Christ.

Now, however, the bathwater, the deep and rich tradition in which we have been steeped for three hundred and fifty years, has been thrown out the window. Is it any wonder that we now we look around and find that the baby is gone, also, that we wonder why we so seldom experience the gathered meeting?

Now, doubt, confusion, and most egregiously, disinterest dominate our collective (lack of) discernment about what is happening in the gathered meeting. When it happens, the worship has a center or we wouldn’t be gathered, but we have no way to articulate what that center is. We have no framework, no vocabulary with which to speak to each other, or to our children, or to newcomers about what we have experienced. As a result, we don’t speak about it much. Furthermore, we have no context, no cohesive religious ecosystem for nurturing the experience.

Now, as I’ve said in earlier posts, I myself have no direct experience of Jesus Christ at the center of the gathered meeting. In this I am like a lot of Friends in the liberal tradition. But I am not really talking about Jesus Christ as conventional Christianity understands him, that is, as a spiritual entity who was the Jesus of Christian scripture, who was crucified, dead, and buried and rose again according to the creed. I am speaking of the spirit of Christ—that mysterious experience of awakening, joy, comfort, and renewal that the two men on the road to Emmaus experienced—after they had been taught who had come into their midst.

My name for that spirit in which we are gathered in our collective religious experience as Friends is the spirit of Christ. For me, the relation of that spirit to the man who walked the roads of Galilee is a matter for speculation rather than one of direct revelation. And that’s enough for me, though I love the study, thought, and imagination that such speculation requires.

For me, the spirit of Christ is more than just a placeholder for whatever might be going on in our collective religious experience, though it is that. It is another link, made of faith, in the chain of our tradition, one that I refuse to break simply because I am still on the road to Emmaus and have not yet broken bread with Jesus as the Christ.

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Tagged: liberal Quakerism, sociology, The gathered meeting, worship
§ 5 Responses to The Sociology of Collective Religious Experience
patradallmann
November 8, 2017 at 10:34 am

Steve, I laud your desire to put Christ back into the center of Quaker faith, but without Christ present among us (or at least a deep, Seekers-like hunger for a foundation for life, manifesting as fervent love of truth) our meetings could at best be an environment in which an individual’s inward discovery of Christ could be confirmed, and, in that case, our meetings would not be much different from what now’s available in any other “Christian” church. You left out the essential phrase in Mt. 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together IN MY NAME, there am I in the midst of them.” A gathering that is not in Jesus’s name, that is to say, not in Jesus’s power and life, is not a gathering in which he is in the midst of them.

I say your theory of the need for communal discernment in order to recognize Jesus in these stories isn’t a valid one. Most clearly, the theory is undermined by the story in John 21 of Mary Magdalene, alone at the tomb, exclaiming “Rabboni” in recognition. Each story in which disciples fail to recognize Christ has a particular lesson; they aren’t all the same. In the same chapter, the disciples only recognize Jesus when they see his wounds. My essay “The Gift of Scriptures” looks at these recognition stories, each having its own lesson. https://patradallmann.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/the-gift-of-scriptures/ And the road to Emmaus story gives yet a different lesson, which I’ve not written about.

The common thread throughout these failure-to-recognize stories is that recognition, when it comes, is strong and immediate, not mulled over and put together by communal effort, as you have said. Recognition is immediate and individual, as for the ones at Emmaus: “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him” (Lk. 24:31). Each having his own eyes opened, each knew him; it’s individual.

The following passage from Matthew 24 denies that conferring with others about where Christ is to be found is a useful activity. Instead, the recognition is immediate, the Son of man is seen, i.e., recognized, like one sees a lightening flash.

Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be (26-27).
Reply
treegestalt
November 8, 2017 at 1:01 pm

If “in my name” means in his spirit (Steve’s usage — ‘under his influence’ perhaps) then all branches of Friends, within our human limitations, should quality.

If the appearance stories (symbolic afterthoughts as they seem to me*) are any guide, it wasn’t only among people particularly inclined to expect or recognize him that he’d appear.

———–
* Given the fact of: “He’s back alive and showing up among us”, then as long as such appearances keep happening, “Where, when and who saw him do what?” become pretty secondary. Details become more important in their own right when people start needing to ‘prove’ it to others with doubts.
Reply
Ellis Hein
November 4, 2017 at 11:30 pm

“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” (John 6:53) “This is my body, which is given for you…” (Luke 22:19) “The flesh profits nothing, the words I have spoken/am speaking to you, these are breath, these are life.” (My rendition of John 6:63) Are you thirsty, come to the water of life. But you cannot buy a drink. Are you hungry, come to the living bread. But it is not for sale. These are to be had for no money or price. “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me and eat that which is good. Delight your soul in fatness” of listening to every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. (See Isaiah 55:1-3, and Deut. 8:3)

These scripture passages have come running through my head. They are a call to life that only comes by hearing the voice of Jesus, the Christ, who is the Word of God. Do you stumble at the door? They are a call to partake of the sustenance that sustains life. You cannot listen while words of argument fill your mind. These words are a call to lay aside all the garments you have stitched together to hide your nakedness. Come and receive the garment of the breath of the living God. Will you remain in hiding, oh children of Adam and Eve? Turn from the broken cisterns you have dug and come to the spring of living water that bubbles up. Come to the teacher who will instruct you in the way of righteousness, that you may be cleansed from dead works to serve the living God in the newness of life.
Reply
treegestalt
November 4, 2017 at 5:15 pm

The word ‘spirit’ gets used for at least two related things: as the Spirit that lives as our consciousness/awareness and as a mood/style/personality-flavor/way characteristic of a particular person, group, organization, piece-of-music, place, artwork, etc…

So I generally find Friends’ Meetings to be typically ‘in the spirit of Christ’ in that second sense. Whether or not members itch when they hear the word “Christian”, they tend to be drawn toward, and to exemplify, that mode of being.

But “the Spirit of Christ” in that first sense refers to “the Spirit of God” as a consciousness embodied (imperfectly) in us all, “our” consciousness (only utterly transcending our local embodiment of it) — “the image of God” aka “the breath of God” as I’ve felt for a long time.

That’s what puts the juice in that nice Quaker flavoring… and we don’t get to tell ‘That’ when or how to come or go. It’s always ‘here’ for each-and-every-here; but the challenge (how to put this?!) is to let ourselves be knowingly ‘with’ it — not just to experience a meal but to let ourselves be nourished by the food that “is” the Whole Holy, regardless of what we and That are bringing to each other at the time.

What we have to contribute will be changed by this. But as R.B. put it, that’s not the object. For us and That to be with each other, that matters.
Reply
Sam Kennet
November 4, 2017 at 2:45 pm

Amen. Your last paragraph would make a good summary of your blog and is certainly the reason I come here to read your words. Solidarity on that road… Thank you.
Reply

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Membership — in a Yearly Meeting? | Through the Flaming Sword

Membership — in a Yearly Meeting? | Through the Flaming Sword



Membership — in a Yearly Meeting?

July 31, 2018 § 6 Comments
A young adult f/Friend that I know and some of her friends (not sure how many of them have the capital F) are considering asking New York Yearly Meeting to give them membership. (Technically in my friend’s case, I suppose, she would be asking for a transfer of membership, since she’s already a member of a monthly meeting by birth.)
My initial reaction was negative. But then I began thinking about it and now I’m not so sure.
From the point of view of her monthly meeting, on the surface it looks like a loss. But in fact, they have already lost her. So that’s a “0”.
From the point of view of the yearly meeting, it would essentially be recording what is already a reality, that she treats the yearly meeting as a surrogate meeting already, and is quite active in its life. In addition, it would theoretically cement deeper relationships with the other young adult friends in her cohort and support an aspect of yearly meeting life that it’s always struggled with, the place and engagement of its young adults. So I’ll call that a “+1”.
On the other hand, the yearly meeting is ill equipped to provide her with most of the “services” that monthly meetings provide. This gets to the third part of the relationship, benefits and costs to the Friend herself. So far, she has apparently not yet felt the need for the monthly meeting services I am referring to, by which I mean:
  • pastoral care, including the care of a meeting for marriage, the conduct of a memorial meeting when she dies, and conduct of a clearness committee for solving a personal problem;
  • spiritual formation and support, including regular worship, regular religious education, and discernment and support for a leading or ministry; and finally,
  • the unique fellowship one gets from the more intimate community life of a local meeting.
To be fair, the yearly meeting does dedicate some time at each of its sessions to memorialize deceased members who have been an important part of the life of the yearly meeting, so I bet she would get that; and anyway, she won’t be around to know. And the yearly meeting does enjoy truly deep fellowship—lots of Friends who know each other well and love each other well. This, I suspect, is the reason she thinks of the yearly meeting as her surrogate meeting. So that’s a “+1”.
Furthermore, the yearly meeting could take on many of these other roles. But its resources—especially its human resources—are already stretched almost to the breaking point. I imagine that it would decline to take them on, and rightly so, in my opinion. But apparently, this Friend does not want or need those things.
For my part, without meaningful pastoral care, regular worship, spiritual nurture, and a fellowship that goes deeper than just three annual meetings could provide, what does “membership” mean? All that’s left is Quaker identity and a sense of belonging to the unique spiritual community that is New York Yearly Meeting. To me, that’s a half-baked Quaker life.
On the other hand, all the renewal movements in Quaker history have been youth movements, and their innovations have been resisted by their elders every time, and usually wrong-headedly. Fox and his cohort were themselves young adults when they got started. So were the Friends who began experimenting with programmed worship. So were the Friends who gave birth to the liberal Quaker movement around the turn of the twentieth century.
Those were all resistance movements. Those young people were unsatisfied with the status quo, couldn’t get a meaningful response to their concerns from their elders, and took matters into their own hands.
So in my next post, I want to look more carefully at what today’s young adult Friends might find so unsatisfying, think about whether this membership in a yearly meeting solves the problem, and whether something else might. Now it’s extremely presumptuous for me to speak for them, so this will just be speculation on my part, and I expect I’ll be wrong about some of it. But maybe it will spark a conversation.

§ 6 Responses to Membership — in a Yearly Meeting?

  • Evelyn Schmitz-Hertzberg
    August 1, 2018 at 3:12 pm
    YF’s in Canada tried to have membership in Camp NeeKauNis. That did not fly. CYM however, might be an idea though it is already difficult to find people to serve on CYM
    Reply
  • Janaki
    August 1, 2018 at 12:54 pm
    Have you spoken with young adult Friends in your yearly meeting? The YAFs of PYM wrote an 8-page minute of concern to the yearly meeting last year (that PYM had still not officially “received”) that might be a good starting place. I don’t get a sense of whether you’re reporting on a conversation already in progress or wanting to start a conversation; if the latter, I’d invite you to join the conversation we’ve been having.
    Reply
    • Steven Davison
      August 1, 2018 at 4:46 pm
      I’m reporting on a conversation that I think is already taking place. I’m not sure that these young adult Friends have approached the yearly meeting yet—that yearly meeting is New York Yearly Meeting.
      I would love to see the minute from PhYM YAFs. I’m not really plugged in to PhYM yet.
      Reply
      • quiestistquaker
        August 1, 2018 at 10:10 pm
        http://www.pym.org/pym-young-adult-friends-minute-concern/ is the URL for the PhYM YAF’s minute of concern from last year. I posted a bit of followup on my blog, quietistquaker.wordpress.com.
        I’ve heard a number of young adult Friends lament the ways in which we are marginalized in meetings, and that on the yearly meeting level is where we really experience beloved community. Sometimes there is capacity for pastoral care, etc; at times, there has been in PhYM, and having a dedicated coordinator really helps make that happen. When I was in Baltimore Yearly Meeting, there really wasn’t that capacity. It depends on the Friends. I know a number of YAFs who struggled to connect with a meeting but would have appreciated being able to be members of the YAF community itself. It’s interesting to me that another group that found themselves routinely marginalized in PhYM, Friends of color, have created a meeting; a number of people are members both of a PhYM meeting and of Ujima Friends Peace Center.
  • Carl Abbott, Portland, OR
    August 1, 2018 at 10:55 am
    YM membership can be a point of attachment for individuals who are too mobile to sink roots deeply into a single monthly meeting. As one moves around in young adulthood, some local meetings resonate better than others, and YM affiliation can be an anchor in shifting seas.
    Reply
  • Membership — in a Yearly Meeting?
    July 31, 2018 at 9:27 pm
    […] Mem­ber­ship — in a Year­ly Meet­ing? […]
    Reply

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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.

---------------------


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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