republication of a comment left on on a blogpost that published the epistle.
Reading the epistle from this year’s Quaker Women’s Theology Conference I shared the sadness expressed at the lack of support for women’s ministries in the Society and at the continuing sexism that divides us.
It may well turn out, when we reach a situation in which it is possible to have some hindsight on this struggle, that overcoming the self-comforting illusions to which we cling about ourselves will turn out to have been as important to success as the Other overcoming the illusions they use to limit and control us.
I know of no Quaker who does not share the unity that our Society must work through the issues of sexism and come free of them. It is not, however, the devil that is in the details of getting that done. It is, rather, walking in God’s ways that will lead us to this as to all other iterations of salvation. This transformation will be a fruit of the Spirit, not a fruit of the flesh.
When that happens we (or perhaps our grandchildren) all will have been transformed into different people than we are now, having laid down, among other things, the stereotypes we held that limited the Other. We will also have laid down those stereotypes with which, although we cherished them, we came to see that we were limiting ourselves.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Of What Value Is Theology?
I ask Friends to help me with that which I am trying to deal at the moment.
If you share the traditional Quaker experiential knowledge of direct and transforming guidance from Christ/Light/Spirit, what good is theology? (the study of God and God's relation to the world--last phrase of the first definition in Merriam Webster's on-line). What is the value of thinking about such things as the nature, character and purposes of God?
If you will write here, if you confess experience of the direct access to guidance from The Source, how it is that study and discussion of theology edifies you and makes a positive contribution to improving your individual condition and that of the corporate body of which you are a part, I promise I will not engage with you to argue with or attempt to refute what you write.
If I make any response it will be to ask clarifying questions and you will be the only judge of whether any question I ask is not actually an attempt to argue or refute, in disguise. I can ask any such questions I might have "off line" if you would prefer (please indicate such a preference--or one that I keep any questions I may have to myself).
I just want the benefit of reading about the role of theology in your life and your spiritual community.
Thank you.
If you share the traditional Quaker experiential knowledge of direct and transforming guidance from Christ/Light/Spirit, what good is theology? (the study of God and God's relation to the world--last phrase of the first definition in Merriam Webster's on-line). What is the value of thinking about such things as the nature, character and purposes of God?
If you will write here, if you confess experience of the direct access to guidance from The Source, how it is that study and discussion of theology edifies you and makes a positive contribution to improving your individual condition and that of the corporate body of which you are a part, I promise I will not engage with you to argue with or attempt to refute what you write.
If I make any response it will be to ask clarifying questions and you will be the only judge of whether any question I ask is not actually an attempt to argue or refute, in disguise. I can ask any such questions I might have "off line" if you would prefer (please indicate such a preference--or one that I keep any questions I may have to myself).
I just want the benefit of reading about the role of theology in your life and your spiritual community.
Thank you.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
In response to my ramblings on about the place (or lack thereof) of theology in my discernment process, in the working out of my salvation, George referred me to a post on his blog
It was probably not what he hoped I would take from it but I was struck as he wrote of a Friend who rose to ministry in his meeting and said, in effect, that one who follows the Light will oppose abortion.
That made me realize that the times I am pulled into the Light (and held there if I squirm to leave) don't have to do with such things as my abstract beliefs about "issues" like abortion or war. I am dealt with by Christ about specific things that have actually happened or are happening in my life or the lives of people who are in my life, immediately or remotely. It's about the choices I have or am making about dealing with real circumstances and situations, choices about how I am or am not treating someone, impacts--direct and indirect--of my behavior on others. It's very non-abstract, and has nothing to do with "issues" (things about which people disagree).
God is in the choices I live out--not in the lame ideas I come up with, or adopt from others, about how the world (or God) works and how that should inform my choices. My thoughts about abortion or war or global warming are just that: thoughts. Throughout my life I have "thought through" a lot of issues (from an array of points of view) and come to have "firm convictions" about such things that I could quack about with others around a table or in the course of whiling away a long trip. But my experience is that such convictions have often led me to regrettable outcomes in some real situation in which I turned to them and expected to have been able to rely on them for guidance.
I now know that's because these "convictions" are the product of abstract ideologies and theologies (and there is no other kind) from whose speculative premises and assumptions I have reasoned, with whatever data I have had on hand, doing as best I could in overcoming the shortcomings of my reasoning abilities (the extent of which many can provide eloquent testimony), including the skewing effect of the beams in my eye (called "thinking errors" these days) and the threats involved, sometimes, in doing what I know (even when I need reminding) I should do without going through any "thinking through," at all.
I have also seen people sink--and pull others under with them--wearing the iron life vest of one or another firmly held conviction about the way to stay afloat in stormy seas (especially firmly held convictions, convictions that made perfect sense, about how to deal with interpersonal conflict).
I think of the accusers of the adulterous woman--they knew what their ideo-theology told them to do in that situation. But the Light of Christ shining through Jesus, it is written, led them out of the evil into which their reasoning was drawing them, and to an edifying outcome (for all) of compassion and righteousness. Beyond its immediate impact, some of those men, at least, grew and were changed by the experience that superseded their "common/cultural sense" as a guide.
My experience is that Christ is not involved in my lame figuring and my reckoning about abstractions and hypothetical situations. The longer I have "agonized" over a moral decision the more room there was for rationalization to lead me where it was easiest, and in my short term interest, to go: to some kind of disaster for me or for someone else.
It was probably not what he hoped I would take from it but I was struck as he wrote of a Friend who rose to ministry in his meeting and said, in effect, that one who follows the Light will oppose abortion.
That made me realize that the times I am pulled into the Light (and held there if I squirm to leave) don't have to do with such things as my abstract beliefs about "issues" like abortion or war. I am dealt with by Christ about specific things that have actually happened or are happening in my life or the lives of people who are in my life, immediately or remotely. It's about the choices I have or am making about dealing with real circumstances and situations, choices about how I am or am not treating someone, impacts--direct and indirect--of my behavior on others. It's very non-abstract, and has nothing to do with "issues" (things about which people disagree).
God is in the choices I live out--not in the lame ideas I come up with, or adopt from others, about how the world (or God) works and how that should inform my choices. My thoughts about abortion or war or global warming are just that: thoughts. Throughout my life I have "thought through" a lot of issues (from an array of points of view) and come to have "firm convictions" about such things that I could quack about with others around a table or in the course of whiling away a long trip. But my experience is that such convictions have often led me to regrettable outcomes in some real situation in which I turned to them and expected to have been able to rely on them for guidance.
I now know that's because these "convictions" are the product of abstract ideologies and theologies (and there is no other kind) from whose speculative premises and assumptions I have reasoned, with whatever data I have had on hand, doing as best I could in overcoming the shortcomings of my reasoning abilities (the extent of which many can provide eloquent testimony), including the skewing effect of the beams in my eye (called "thinking errors" these days) and the threats involved, sometimes, in doing what I know (even when I need reminding) I should do without going through any "thinking through," at all.
I have also seen people sink--and pull others under with them--wearing the iron life vest of one or another firmly held conviction about the way to stay afloat in stormy seas (especially firmly held convictions, convictions that made perfect sense, about how to deal with interpersonal conflict).
I think of the accusers of the adulterous woman--they knew what their ideo-theology told them to do in that situation. But the Light of Christ shining through Jesus, it is written, led them out of the evil into which their reasoning was drawing them, and to an edifying outcome (for all) of compassion and righteousness. Beyond its immediate impact, some of those men, at least, grew and were changed by the experience that superseded their "common/cultural sense" as a guide.
My experience is that Christ is not involved in my lame figuring and my reckoning about abstractions and hypothetical situations. The longer I have "agonized" over a moral decision the more room there was for rationalization to lead me where it was easiest, and in my short term interest, to go: to some kind of disaster for me or for someone else.
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Response to a Facebook Friend
You sent me a message on Face Book that was relevant to my last few posts. My attempt to respond there generated a missive beyond the space limits imposed by that vehicle. Therefore, I am posting it here.
Friend
We are in the "agree to abide and disagree place." I'll explain where I am coming from about ideo/theological discussions and spiritual authority but please do not consider this an attempt to convince you of anything.
I do not agree with you that we should continue to discuss the issues that divide us, as Friends. I do not think, as you suggest, that continuing to do this will lead us to unity.
Most of the the issues that divided our Society are questions that could be discussed for years, even in the best of faith, and the facts at issue would never amount to truth. The nature of those issues, however, seems to me to rule out such "best of faith" discussion. At least, the history of talking about such issues has shown the fruit to be bitter and divisive.
The saddest part of it is that even if we could "know" the right answers, someday, through hashing it all out, those answers would be no more essential or even material to our salvation than they are as they elude us, today.
Re-consider the questions Iowa Yearly sent to Friends in San Jose, and the spirit/power at work in the sending. Consider, too, the outcome of that exercise.
All of those questions were notional (in the sense that they were/are abstract ideas about the origin, nature, character and plan of God--things we can believe about but not know) and all completely unnecessary to being in that transformational relationship with Christ that has been Quakerism from the beginning. One must go beyond charity into lack of integrity to deny that the lives of many--very many--who know all kinds of answers to all kinds of such ideo/theological questions show a meager measure of the fruits of the spirit. Coming back into the realm of integrity, one must mourn the number of such people whose lives testify far more to the works of the flesh.
I don't know what you mean by "summaries of the Bible's message" about the doctrine of atonement, but I do agree--with great sadness for the irony of it--that something so unimportant as what atonement "means" was pivotal in the rift between Hicks and the Orthodox--getting it "right"--it being something no one can really know--was more important than the unity of f/Friends and families. All the deep wounds inflicted on each other--the degraded condition of the Society, itself--was "worth it" to make sure that no one who wasn't "sound" was allowed on the "sound" side(s) of the hedge.
I don't know what you mean, either, by saying that this summary was "given" by the Holy Spirit. Do you mean that the Spirit took some Friends aside in worship and prayer (as the Christ communicates to me about my behavior toward others that is in need of change) "Such-and-such is the way that atonement works?" Or do you mean, along with my mother-in-law the Presbyterian, that the office of the Holy Spirit being to help us read and interpret the Bible "correctly" that many Friends in one part of the Society got it right and many in another part didn't? (And that the Holy Spirit was far more successful among Friends in one geographical part of the country than the other?) Does this mean that when we do "get it right" the conclusions we reach are "revelation" on par with God, as it is written, calling out to young Samuel (as we have both experienced such direct callings frequently, in our time)? Is this reading and reasoning through which we are led by the Holy Spirit "revelation" in the sense that some consider the conclusions they draw about the character of God from meditating on (or in) and oak tree to be revelations from God?
Sadly, I once said to my mother in law, in jest (and I got firmly "held in the Light" for doing so), the Holy Spirit is not able to get us in the place where we can all read the Bible "correctly," and the only thing that is working for re-unification of divided Protestants is that the doctrines over which they were willing to cause suffering for one another are less important to people than once they were. My own mother, I am sure you have seen me write, moved us from a Congregational to a Presbyterian church in my youth because she didn't like the new pastor and didn't want to build a new church. Imagine what it would have been for a member of a Congregational church to slip into the Presbyterian church back in the day over such issues.
Do we really suppose that God told the Presbyterians that "top down and back up" is the gospel order that is correct and that the Congregationalists just didn't get the memo? Or vice versa? Or do we suppose that the founders of both movements figured out what they thought was best, and (quite sincerely) believed that in all this figuring was revelation from God? Or do we suppose God told each group something different for some reason?
God has never spoken to me about doctrine, although I used to spend a lot of time thinking about it and trying to figure it out. God has never let me know in any way that any doctrine is "correct" or "incorrect." (The only thing I know about doctrine from my personal experience with God that is that, if leads me wrong, that's no defense.) God only deals with me about my behavior and how I should treat others. God has never revealed to me anything about God's origin, nature, character or plans. I may speculate about such things (and I have, at great cost to me and those around me), based on what the Light shows me I must do, how I am led to live (on the pain of having no peace, whatsoever), but anything I "believe" about atonement or the trinity is my speculation--my notion--not "revelation."
Just because the consistent message I get from God is to treat people with love and charity doesn't even justify the conclusion on my part that God is loving and charitable. That's just speculation--"common sense"--stands to reason.,,Helpful? No. Harmless? Hardly. As soon as I say God is a loving God someone brings up childhood cancer and then off I go into the high weeds of notions to try to square that with a loving God. Yeah, I know, "mysterious ways" and something about not being around when the alligators were made. Really, though, why do we do that? Does "believing" God to be a loving God--or not--make any difference in how I live? Isn't what matters that I live as I am guided to live?
I hear people say that theology improves people I have to shake my head and wonder upon what they base that. Theology has supported every great crime of history, and has led many to...well, bad ends.
And as you may have read in my blog, it's not true that the Bible is the more "stable" guide. One can go as far off the rails with Biblical support as one can with the Light--if one is deluded or guileful in the way one uses either. One can lie using either as authority. Only the outcome will reveal the falsehood (intentional or delusional).
As, it is written, it was revealed of those who cried "Lord, Lord," only to discover they never knew him.
Notwithstanding "the Bible's summary" of atonement (and truly, I don't know what that is) there are many atonement doctrines, and they are all notions. They are unprovable intellectual constructs, abstractions, "rational" conclusions that people have come to in attempts to account for what it says about atonement (or seems to say) in the Bible.
The summary of which you speak as "the Bible's" may have been "given" by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may have taken someone aside at some point and explained how it works and told him or her to pass it along to the rest of us. If that happened the message was garbled in the retelling and it still amounts to "hearsay" and "second hand" religion as far as I am concerned and--thank goodness--whether I believe it or not (or heard the right version or not, or having heard more than one chose the right one) is not important to the project upon which all of Christ's work with me is centered--my spiritual and moral maturity.
None of the many "takes" on atonement has ever "prevailed" over the others (although religious establishments have certainly enforced conformity of belief to the limits of their power to do so) because. like all such ideas, they naturally give rise to counter ideas. Unlike the scientific process, where there is a means of establishing which of two or more ideas accounts for the data and which does not, arguments over such things as atonement are attempts only to determine which point of view best accounts for the limited "data" that's in the Bible--and that data is of a nature and an amount will never be settled.
Religious "doctrine" is a collection of theories within a limited and closed universe of data, at least in rational, enlightenment (as opposed to Light based) religion.
Yes, one can hold both rational and spiritual--but the rational theology has, thus far, managed to subsume the living Word and relegate it to the back benches. After all, if the leading of the Spirit takes you somewhere that the orthodox reading of the Bible won't then you can't go there--because the Spirit will never contradict scripture.
We hold all our doctrinal notions dear because, after all, we rely on our ideas about things we can never know, for sure, to fix our place in the universe, and we even reason from those notions for guidance about how to live our lives. To defend these speculations and abstract constructs when they are challenged, we can only speak more and more loudly in our attempts to "prove" them, go to further extremes in our attempts to prevail...and we go so far that we work ourselves into conditions in which it is impossible to say that we abiding with one another in entreaty. We are undeniably, rather, pushing one another around through contention.
And for what?
Do any Friends "believe" that one cannot work out one's salvation through the presence of the Light/Christ in our lives, through grace, if one does not believe in one or the other of these notions about what the death of Jesus "meant?"
I also agree that you have a point when you say that Hicks did not take "the Bible's word" for things that were not otherwise revealed to him. Two points about that:
First, much of what people say "the Bible says" actually comes down to doctrines that, as I say above, are actually ideo/theological constructs they have created from what is in the Bible. Rejecting those constructs is not rejecting what the Bible says, in such cases. It is, rather, rejecting what the some people say the Bible says. Atonement is an example, as I explained.
(Who can help but be simultaneously sad and amused at Barclay's denunciation of human reason as a governor as he merrily uses human reason--from the Biblical data base--to establish his propositions in the Apology. You may recall an analysis I posted to a newsgroup a few years ago about his doctrine of the day of visitation in which I showed that the verses he cited as authority for that notion did not, in fact, logically prove his case. Reason failed him as if fails us all--for a lot of reasons. For many purposes reason is a wonderful guide. For moral guidance or trying to figure out the nature, character and purposes of God...not so much.)
Second, I don't think that the one quote you provided from Fox re the Spirit not contradicting scripture "settles the argument." For one thing, it does not account for the way that Fox sometimes used the word "scripture" as being something we could "have," by the grace of the Light, rather than something we could hold in our hands and read. Also, you know, as do I, that there are times when he says things that don't equate the two, as the quote you provided does, and you are also aware, as am I, of the editing that went on during the beginning of the period of Quaker appeasement of (the "Great Walking Back" as I have called it) and coming to a modus vivendi with the Protestant/Anglican establishment.
Fox, of course, participated willing in this effort, consenting that his earlier writings (dangerous stuff!) be edited and "toned down." Barclay's position that the Light would never, legitimately, contradict scripture was one of the first steps in this Great Walking Back, and it amounted to a conflation of one of Fox's earlier statements. Fox said and wrote that many things were opened to him during his "re-education" in the Light and that afterward he found those things in scripture and although he had seen them before he had not understood them, as he did, afterward.
I don't think that saying that he found everything learned in the Light validated by scripture means that the Light will, in turn, validate everything that is in scripture--although that is where the idea was taken. My experience is that many things I have learned from this constant "hectoring" I experience in the Light are found in scripture. But there are a whole lot of things in scripture that are not confirmed by my experience in the Light. If I treated people (I should say, when I have treated people) in some of the ways scripture exhorts the reader to treat them I would be constantly in the Holy wood shed.
I don't really think that the Bible is clear on things and I don't think it is perfect, written by human hands guided into infallibility by God or the Holy Spirit or one or another angel standing there to make sure there were no errors.
My experience matches that expressed in some Friends literature that one can be saved, in the Light, by obedience to Christ, without ever seeing a Bible, let alone without "believing" whatever meanings someone can parse out of it. One need even know who or what it is that is guiding them. The point is to obey and be changed.
(see Sum and Substance quote, above, in the masthead of this blog)
You know, already, that it is my view that once Friends realized that they were living in the "mean time," rather than the "end time," they began to accommodate themselves to the world as dominated by "orthodox" Christianity. Seeing that the world was not passing away in the sense they thought it would they had to come to terms with it.
It's been a long pull into conformity with the rational, enlightenment form of Protestantism that prevailed and prevails--and it was (and remains) complicated among us by the fact that we do, to some degree, still look to the Light for guidance. It confuses us at times, looking to these two masters, and the rational authority doesn't always prevail over the Spirit. The Light will never be completely "comprehended" even among those who, unlike us, may not have a spiritual tradition whose experience has shown that.
It is true, of course, that many in the Quaker movement came by their Protestantism honestly in the sense that it was where they came from and what they brought with them. Much as those gathered to Iowa Yearly and drove out the Beans (and many others) brought in their concept of what religion looked like--the Protestantism that (even if they were not raised in it) they grew up with--so many "first Friends" brought their notion how religion worked into "Quakerism" when they came, notwithstanding Barclay's earlier (than the Apology) statement that it was not a theology that gathered Quakers together but an experience of transformation.
Gradually, in my view, that "built in" Protestantism (epitomized, perhaps by George Keith) and the exterior pressure to conform to Protestant norms--both official and unofficial) took Quakers--us--far too far into "rational religion," and, as I said, although it seems to me far too dominant, it has not totally eclipsed the Light.
I'll stop there, I've written about this in my blog over the past few days.
I do not intend or hope to persuade you that I am correct in all of this. I am just explaining where I am coming from in saying that the ideo/theological notions that separate us are not essential to Quakerism--that what is essential is the experience of transformation and that the validity of that experience is not "proved" by doctrinal soundness but by changes done in us, manifest by our moral and ethical behavior--summed up in the Fruit of the Spirit and the Quaker testimonies. Not only are these notions/doctrines not essential to this process of transformation, the issues they interpose among us are destructive of that process in and among us.
No, you know I don't think the Bible is useless. I read from it every day and it is of great value. But a very common way the Bible is used, in this age of rational religion, is as a "data" base from which one can draw to justify just about anything one wants to. It's a lot like that pouch David carried, it is written, into battle with Goliath. As he could reach in for the right stone to kill an enemy so the Bible can be used as a magazine where, among those who believe "it's all in there"-- the right "proof" can be found to win an argument.
That orthodox rational/notional, Protestant establishment that could take the property and even the lives of those who would not bend to its will no longer has the power to bind us in the chains of its theologies and doctrines and orthodoxies. The door is open, and we are free to walk out of the prison of our ideo/theologies and into the liberty of being guided to the green pastures, the still waters. We can trust living by grace, by the guidance we receive from Christ, what, it is written, is written in our hearts, rather than that we can divine in our own spirit and our own strength and our own understanding from second hand, hearsay religion. The proof of our guidance is not in our orthodoxy--it is in our outcomes. (See Matthew 5-7, et seq, not for authority but for illustration.)
If it is outcomes that count (the way we live), outcomes that we demand from ourselves, then we can all be together, working out our salvation in support of one another. If we continue to talk to one another about our own takes on orthodoxy and make agreement there the bar we must clear for fellowship, then, well, we can see the future by what is, today, in our hands.
In Love
Timothy
Friend
We are in the "agree to abide and disagree place." I'll explain where I am coming from about ideo/theological discussions and spiritual authority but please do not consider this an attempt to convince you of anything.
I do not agree with you that we should continue to discuss the issues that divide us, as Friends. I do not think, as you suggest, that continuing to do this will lead us to unity.
Most of the the issues that divided our Society are questions that could be discussed for years, even in the best of faith, and the facts at issue would never amount to truth. The nature of those issues, however, seems to me to rule out such "best of faith" discussion. At least, the history of talking about such issues has shown the fruit to be bitter and divisive.
The saddest part of it is that even if we could "know" the right answers, someday, through hashing it all out, those answers would be no more essential or even material to our salvation than they are as they elude us, today.
Re-consider the questions Iowa Yearly sent to Friends in San Jose, and the spirit/power at work in the sending. Consider, too, the outcome of that exercise.
All of those questions were notional (in the sense that they were/are abstract ideas about the origin, nature, character and plan of God--things we can believe about but not know) and all completely unnecessary to being in that transformational relationship with Christ that has been Quakerism from the beginning. One must go beyond charity into lack of integrity to deny that the lives of many--very many--who know all kinds of answers to all kinds of such ideo/theological questions show a meager measure of the fruits of the spirit. Coming back into the realm of integrity, one must mourn the number of such people whose lives testify far more to the works of the flesh.
I don't know what you mean by "summaries of the Bible's message" about the doctrine of atonement, but I do agree--with great sadness for the irony of it--that something so unimportant as what atonement "means" was pivotal in the rift between Hicks and the Orthodox--getting it "right"--it being something no one can really know--was more important than the unity of f/Friends and families. All the deep wounds inflicted on each other--the degraded condition of the Society, itself--was "worth it" to make sure that no one who wasn't "sound" was allowed on the "sound" side(s) of the hedge.
I don't know what you mean, either, by saying that this summary was "given" by the Holy Spirit. Do you mean that the Spirit took some Friends aside in worship and prayer (as the Christ communicates to me about my behavior toward others that is in need of change) "Such-and-such is the way that atonement works?" Or do you mean, along with my mother-in-law the Presbyterian, that the office of the Holy Spirit being to help us read and interpret the Bible "correctly" that many Friends in one part of the Society got it right and many in another part didn't? (And that the Holy Spirit was far more successful among Friends in one geographical part of the country than the other?) Does this mean that when we do "get it right" the conclusions we reach are "revelation" on par with God, as it is written, calling out to young Samuel (as we have both experienced such direct callings frequently, in our time)? Is this reading and reasoning through which we are led by the Holy Spirit "revelation" in the sense that some consider the conclusions they draw about the character of God from meditating on (or in) and oak tree to be revelations from God?
Sadly, I once said to my mother in law, in jest (and I got firmly "held in the Light" for doing so), the Holy Spirit is not able to get us in the place where we can all read the Bible "correctly," and the only thing that is working for re-unification of divided Protestants is that the doctrines over which they were willing to cause suffering for one another are less important to people than once they were. My own mother, I am sure you have seen me write, moved us from a Congregational to a Presbyterian church in my youth because she didn't like the new pastor and didn't want to build a new church. Imagine what it would have been for a member of a Congregational church to slip into the Presbyterian church back in the day over such issues.
Do we really suppose that God told the Presbyterians that "top down and back up" is the gospel order that is correct and that the Congregationalists just didn't get the memo? Or vice versa? Or do we suppose that the founders of both movements figured out what they thought was best, and (quite sincerely) believed that in all this figuring was revelation from God? Or do we suppose God told each group something different for some reason?
God has never spoken to me about doctrine, although I used to spend a lot of time thinking about it and trying to figure it out. God has never let me know in any way that any doctrine is "correct" or "incorrect." (The only thing I know about doctrine from my personal experience with God that is that, if leads me wrong, that's no defense.) God only deals with me about my behavior and how I should treat others. God has never revealed to me anything about God's origin, nature, character or plans. I may speculate about such things (and I have, at great cost to me and those around me), based on what the Light shows me I must do, how I am led to live (on the pain of having no peace, whatsoever), but anything I "believe" about atonement or the trinity is my speculation--my notion--not "revelation."
Just because the consistent message I get from God is to treat people with love and charity doesn't even justify the conclusion on my part that God is loving and charitable. That's just speculation--"common sense"--stands to reason.,,Helpful? No. Harmless? Hardly. As soon as I say God is a loving God someone brings up childhood cancer and then off I go into the high weeds of notions to try to square that with a loving God. Yeah, I know, "mysterious ways" and something about not being around when the alligators were made. Really, though, why do we do that? Does "believing" God to be a loving God--or not--make any difference in how I live? Isn't what matters that I live as I am guided to live?
I hear people say that theology improves people I have to shake my head and wonder upon what they base that. Theology has supported every great crime of history, and has led many to...well, bad ends.
And as you may have read in my blog, it's not true that the Bible is the more "stable" guide. One can go as far off the rails with Biblical support as one can with the Light--if one is deluded or guileful in the way one uses either. One can lie using either as authority. Only the outcome will reveal the falsehood (intentional or delusional).
As, it is written, it was revealed of those who cried "Lord, Lord," only to discover they never knew him.
Notwithstanding "the Bible's summary" of atonement (and truly, I don't know what that is) there are many atonement doctrines, and they are all notions. They are unprovable intellectual constructs, abstractions, "rational" conclusions that people have come to in attempts to account for what it says about atonement (or seems to say) in the Bible.
The summary of which you speak as "the Bible's" may have been "given" by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may have taken someone aside at some point and explained how it works and told him or her to pass it along to the rest of us. If that happened the message was garbled in the retelling and it still amounts to "hearsay" and "second hand" religion as far as I am concerned and--thank goodness--whether I believe it or not (or heard the right version or not, or having heard more than one chose the right one) is not important to the project upon which all of Christ's work with me is centered--my spiritual and moral maturity.
None of the many "takes" on atonement has ever "prevailed" over the others (although religious establishments have certainly enforced conformity of belief to the limits of their power to do so) because. like all such ideas, they naturally give rise to counter ideas. Unlike the scientific process, where there is a means of establishing which of two or more ideas accounts for the data and which does not, arguments over such things as atonement are attempts only to determine which point of view best accounts for the limited "data" that's in the Bible--and that data is of a nature and an amount will never be settled.
Religious "doctrine" is a collection of theories within a limited and closed universe of data, at least in rational, enlightenment (as opposed to Light based) religion.
Yes, one can hold both rational and spiritual--but the rational theology has, thus far, managed to subsume the living Word and relegate it to the back benches. After all, if the leading of the Spirit takes you somewhere that the orthodox reading of the Bible won't then you can't go there--because the Spirit will never contradict scripture.
We hold all our doctrinal notions dear because, after all, we rely on our ideas about things we can never know, for sure, to fix our place in the universe, and we even reason from those notions for guidance about how to live our lives. To defend these speculations and abstract constructs when they are challenged, we can only speak more and more loudly in our attempts to "prove" them, go to further extremes in our attempts to prevail...and we go so far that we work ourselves into conditions in which it is impossible to say that we abiding with one another in entreaty. We are undeniably, rather, pushing one another around through contention.
And for what?
Do any Friends "believe" that one cannot work out one's salvation through the presence of the Light/Christ in our lives, through grace, if one does not believe in one or the other of these notions about what the death of Jesus "meant?"
I also agree that you have a point when you say that Hicks did not take "the Bible's word" for things that were not otherwise revealed to him. Two points about that:
First, much of what people say "the Bible says" actually comes down to doctrines that, as I say above, are actually ideo/theological constructs they have created from what is in the Bible. Rejecting those constructs is not rejecting what the Bible says, in such cases. It is, rather, rejecting what the some people say the Bible says. Atonement is an example, as I explained.
(Who can help but be simultaneously sad and amused at Barclay's denunciation of human reason as a governor as he merrily uses human reason--from the Biblical data base--to establish his propositions in the Apology. You may recall an analysis I posted to a newsgroup a few years ago about his doctrine of the day of visitation in which I showed that the verses he cited as authority for that notion did not, in fact, logically prove his case. Reason failed him as if fails us all--for a lot of reasons. For many purposes reason is a wonderful guide. For moral guidance or trying to figure out the nature, character and purposes of God...not so much.)
Second, I don't think that the one quote you provided from Fox re the Spirit not contradicting scripture "settles the argument." For one thing, it does not account for the way that Fox sometimes used the word "scripture" as being something we could "have," by the grace of the Light, rather than something we could hold in our hands and read. Also, you know, as do I, that there are times when he says things that don't equate the two, as the quote you provided does, and you are also aware, as am I, of the editing that went on during the beginning of the period of Quaker appeasement of (the "Great Walking Back" as I have called it) and coming to a modus vivendi with the Protestant/Anglican establishment.
Fox, of course, participated willing in this effort, consenting that his earlier writings (dangerous stuff!) be edited and "toned down." Barclay's position that the Light would never, legitimately, contradict scripture was one of the first steps in this Great Walking Back, and it amounted to a conflation of one of Fox's earlier statements. Fox said and wrote that many things were opened to him during his "re-education" in the Light and that afterward he found those things in scripture and although he had seen them before he had not understood them, as he did, afterward.
I don't think that saying that he found everything learned in the Light validated by scripture means that the Light will, in turn, validate everything that is in scripture--although that is where the idea was taken. My experience is that many things I have learned from this constant "hectoring" I experience in the Light are found in scripture. But there are a whole lot of things in scripture that are not confirmed by my experience in the Light. If I treated people (I should say, when I have treated people) in some of the ways scripture exhorts the reader to treat them I would be constantly in the Holy wood shed.
I don't really think that the Bible is clear on things and I don't think it is perfect, written by human hands guided into infallibility by God or the Holy Spirit or one or another angel standing there to make sure there were no errors.
My experience matches that expressed in some Friends literature that one can be saved, in the Light, by obedience to Christ, without ever seeing a Bible, let alone without "believing" whatever meanings someone can parse out of it. One need even know who or what it is that is guiding them. The point is to obey and be changed.
(see Sum and Substance quote, above, in the masthead of this blog)
You know, already, that it is my view that once Friends realized that they were living in the "mean time," rather than the "end time," they began to accommodate themselves to the world as dominated by "orthodox" Christianity. Seeing that the world was not passing away in the sense they thought it would they had to come to terms with it.
It's been a long pull into conformity with the rational, enlightenment form of Protestantism that prevailed and prevails--and it was (and remains) complicated among us by the fact that we do, to some degree, still look to the Light for guidance. It confuses us at times, looking to these two masters, and the rational authority doesn't always prevail over the Spirit. The Light will never be completely "comprehended" even among those who, unlike us, may not have a spiritual tradition whose experience has shown that.
It is true, of course, that many in the Quaker movement came by their Protestantism honestly in the sense that it was where they came from and what they brought with them. Much as those gathered to Iowa Yearly and drove out the Beans (and many others) brought in their concept of what religion looked like--the Protestantism that (even if they were not raised in it) they grew up with--so many "first Friends" brought their notion how religion worked into "Quakerism" when they came, notwithstanding Barclay's earlier (than the Apology) statement that it was not a theology that gathered Quakers together but an experience of transformation.
Gradually, in my view, that "built in" Protestantism (epitomized, perhaps by George Keith) and the exterior pressure to conform to Protestant norms--both official and unofficial) took Quakers--us--far too far into "rational religion," and, as I said, although it seems to me far too dominant, it has not totally eclipsed the Light.
I'll stop there, I've written about this in my blog over the past few days.
I do not intend or hope to persuade you that I am correct in all of this. I am just explaining where I am coming from in saying that the ideo/theological notions that separate us are not essential to Quakerism--that what is essential is the experience of transformation and that the validity of that experience is not "proved" by doctrinal soundness but by changes done in us, manifest by our moral and ethical behavior--summed up in the Fruit of the Spirit and the Quaker testimonies. Not only are these notions/doctrines not essential to this process of transformation, the issues they interpose among us are destructive of that process in and among us.
No, you know I don't think the Bible is useless. I read from it every day and it is of great value. But a very common way the Bible is used, in this age of rational religion, is as a "data" base from which one can draw to justify just about anything one wants to. It's a lot like that pouch David carried, it is written, into battle with Goliath. As he could reach in for the right stone to kill an enemy so the Bible can be used as a magazine where, among those who believe "it's all in there"-- the right "proof" can be found to win an argument.
That orthodox rational/notional, Protestant establishment that could take the property and even the lives of those who would not bend to its will no longer has the power to bind us in the chains of its theologies and doctrines and orthodoxies. The door is open, and we are free to walk out of the prison of our ideo/theologies and into the liberty of being guided to the green pastures, the still waters. We can trust living by grace, by the guidance we receive from Christ, what, it is written, is written in our hearts, rather than that we can divine in our own spirit and our own strength and our own understanding from second hand, hearsay religion. The proof of our guidance is not in our orthodoxy--it is in our outcomes. (See Matthew 5-7, et seq, not for authority but for illustration.)
If it is outcomes that count (the way we live), outcomes that we demand from ourselves, then we can all be together, working out our salvation in support of one another. If we continue to talk to one another about our own takes on orthodoxy and make agreement there the bar we must clear for fellowship, then, well, we can see the future by what is, today, in our hands.
In Love
Timothy
Thursday, June 03, 2010
The Light and the Enlightenment
Maybe my problem is that I'm not really a Liberal Quaker. The Paine/Burke thing doesn't sit easy with me. But it's not because it doesn't apply. It's because I mourn how Quakerism got to where it does apply.
Both Paine and Burke were (and are) talking about how self governing people should deal with change. They were products of the Enlightenment--worshipers of reason--riding the early waves of the industrial revolution and coping with what it was doing to society. They were talking about the "best" way to manage cultural change.
But the Society of Friends isn't governed by that model of self government.
Is it?
OK, it is.
Should it be?
I think Doug Gwyn depicted the Lamb's War as a losing effort, with Quakers failing to establish a counter-narrative to that of the Anglo-Protestant capitalist class system that eventually emerged from the English Civil War.
That winning narrative was all about the Enlightenment, with its "rational Christianity," the handmaiden of both the capitalist industrial revolution and the modern imperial nation state.
Moral guidance, here, is not a function of spirituality--direct engagement with God. It is, rather, a function of engagement with ideas about God, from scripture and the authority of the church. The transforming experience with God is replaced by manipulation of second hand, hearsay ideas about God that, far from changing us, tends to validate us in our worldly condition.
Quakerism was subversive to this theo/ideology and the establishment upon which it was based and, as fractured as it might have been from time to time, that establishment was united in persecution and suppression of them. In time, though, it was not necessary to persecute or suppress Quakers. They did that to themselves.
Accommodating themselves to "the world" sufficiently to be allowed to live with whatever peculiarity remained among them, over the centuries Quakerism has pretty much gone over to this theo/ideology, accommodating itself gradually to the "reality" of the world of rational Christianity and, beyond that, rational religion and/or philosophy.
This began early when "certain writings" of Fox (with his permission) were revised and "toned down." Friend Barclay stated the first necessary proposition upon which this movement to the mainstream was predicated--the idea that nothing revealed by the Light could contradict scripture (which is a conflation of Fox's statement that everything he learned in the Light was confirmed in scripture--nice rational sleight of hand).
By the 19th Century, in America, there were domains in the Society where the "doctrine" of the Light was deemed an un-Biblical blasphemy. Short of that extreme, the Light gradually became subordinate to Biblical and other kinds of theological reasoning--whether that was "owned" or not, it was true: the divided condition of the Society testified to this reality.
With scripture set up as the ultimate authority, the only legitimate "data" upon which one could draw to rationally create and un-create notional theology that suited the institutional needs of the moment (both within the Society and American society at large), the road was paved for Paine and Burke. Re-interpreted scripture was "continuing revelation," as reasoning religion had created an obsession not with abiding in and with God for guidance but an obsession with enforcing "belief" in propositions about God and insuring a uniformity in that belief, trending ever toward rational Christian orthodoxy. If one wants to rule by reason one must control what data is legitimately used in the "rational" process of establishing and maintaining power over others.
With some saying that God was revealing "new light" more fit for a new age, and others maintaining that "old light" meant something different in new situations than it meant in situations it originally shined, Friends used the doctrine of continuing revelation to move farther and farther into the rational Protestant Christian consensus and the world it created and maintained. Coming around to living out the capitalist narrative, Quakerism, once the spirituality of people known as Children of the Light, became largely another "choice" among available churches in which could be found Children of the Enlightenment.
Eventually "truth" from the scriptures of other religious (and non religious) traditions became fruit of "continuing revelation" for some Friends, providing rational Quakerism with new "legitimate" data (at least to some) to be used in "figuring out" (as opposed to "working out") our salvation.
And so Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke walk among us, as Quakers everywhere use whatever data they consider legitimate in this grand reasoning process known to us as Quakerism. Should we hurry forward as we adapt to the world of reasoning religion, or should we go slowly, carefully, so as to not throw the baby out with the bathwater? Opinions come and go, depending on what we are aware of and where our human nature (pushing us toward what is most convenient and in our short term interest) guides us at one moment or the other. It's not to be wondered, then, that the "revelations" of our "reason" should keep us divided. Moment to moment, after all, any scripture can be used to piece together an argument to support pretty much anything after which one might lust, anything one might covet, anything one might want to do to placate one's anger, anything in which one might want to take pride...
This is a hard realization for me. It causes me a dissonance in that I have always thought that we were led by the Spirit, not by our own notions and reasoning. But what, if not notions, abstract reasonings about things we can never know, could have separated Friends one from the other and kept us separated, now? If we were abiding in that transformational experience, led by the Light, would we be in this condition?
What is the spirit in which we abide? Is it Paine? Is it Burke? Is it a spirit of self government, instead of being governed by the Light? Is this not the same struggle of which Friend Penington wrote (see masthead)/
See? There I go: "reasoning" and speculating about the nature, character and purpose of God instead of staying low, listening to the guidance about how I am supposed to be living and obeying.
Notwithstanding all of our reasoning, direct encounters with the Spirit, with Christ, go on daily. The Light is never totally eclipsed, in the world or in our hearts. All of us continue to be confronted about how we live, everyone hears the pleadings to change and to endure the difficulties of learning to lie down beside that still water, in those green pastures. This is the struggle within.
Who can look around and say that this reason based world of the Enlightenment, and our notional, rational Quakerism as part of it, is filling or creating holes in our hearts? Isn't it really in so far as we lay down our rationality about morality and go with what we have learned in our hearts that we are matured?
Most of us live with an alloy of spiritual and rational religion, struggling with the confusions that arise where the two compete for our attention, our allegiance.
Confused.
Separated.
Gossiping about the neighbors--gossiping about ourselves.
Neither Paine nor Burke is a guide to living in that peaceable kingdom, to being "in world but not of the world."
Paine and Burke, and the rational notion/delusion of self governance they represent, put us in the position that the world changes us, we do not change the world.
Whether we hold hands with Paine or with Burke, go at one pace or the other, our rationality will take us to the same place: deeper and deeper into the quicksand of our own imaginings and notions, further and further under the sway of the powers, more and more confused about why it is that each time we hit ourselves in the thumb with the hammer of our thinking it doesn't stop hurting.
Both Paine and Burke were (and are) talking about how self governing people should deal with change. They were products of the Enlightenment--worshipers of reason--riding the early waves of the industrial revolution and coping with what it was doing to society. They were talking about the "best" way to manage cultural change.
But the Society of Friends isn't governed by that model of self government.
Is it?
OK, it is.
Should it be?
I think Doug Gwyn depicted the Lamb's War as a losing effort, with Quakers failing to establish a counter-narrative to that of the Anglo-Protestant capitalist class system that eventually emerged from the English Civil War.
That winning narrative was all about the Enlightenment, with its "rational Christianity," the handmaiden of both the capitalist industrial revolution and the modern imperial nation state.
Moral guidance, here, is not a function of spirituality--direct engagement with God. It is, rather, a function of engagement with ideas about God, from scripture and the authority of the church. The transforming experience with God is replaced by manipulation of second hand, hearsay ideas about God that, far from changing us, tends to validate us in our worldly condition.
Quakerism was subversive to this theo/ideology and the establishment upon which it was based and, as fractured as it might have been from time to time, that establishment was united in persecution and suppression of them. In time, though, it was not necessary to persecute or suppress Quakers. They did that to themselves.
Accommodating themselves to "the world" sufficiently to be allowed to live with whatever peculiarity remained among them, over the centuries Quakerism has pretty much gone over to this theo/ideology, accommodating itself gradually to the "reality" of the world of rational Christianity and, beyond that, rational religion and/or philosophy.
This began early when "certain writings" of Fox (with his permission) were revised and "toned down." Friend Barclay stated the first necessary proposition upon which this movement to the mainstream was predicated--the idea that nothing revealed by the Light could contradict scripture (which is a conflation of Fox's statement that everything he learned in the Light was confirmed in scripture--nice rational sleight of hand).
By the 19th Century, in America, there were domains in the Society where the "doctrine" of the Light was deemed an un-Biblical blasphemy. Short of that extreme, the Light gradually became subordinate to Biblical and other kinds of theological reasoning--whether that was "owned" or not, it was true: the divided condition of the Society testified to this reality.
With scripture set up as the ultimate authority, the only legitimate "data" upon which one could draw to rationally create and un-create notional theology that suited the institutional needs of the moment (both within the Society and American society at large), the road was paved for Paine and Burke. Re-interpreted scripture was "continuing revelation," as reasoning religion had created an obsession not with abiding in and with God for guidance but an obsession with enforcing "belief" in propositions about God and insuring a uniformity in that belief, trending ever toward rational Christian orthodoxy. If one wants to rule by reason one must control what data is legitimately used in the "rational" process of establishing and maintaining power over others.
With some saying that God was revealing "new light" more fit for a new age, and others maintaining that "old light" meant something different in new situations than it meant in situations it originally shined, Friends used the doctrine of continuing revelation to move farther and farther into the rational Protestant Christian consensus and the world it created and maintained. Coming around to living out the capitalist narrative, Quakerism, once the spirituality of people known as Children of the Light, became largely another "choice" among available churches in which could be found Children of the Enlightenment.
Eventually "truth" from the scriptures of other religious (and non religious) traditions became fruit of "continuing revelation" for some Friends, providing rational Quakerism with new "legitimate" data (at least to some) to be used in "figuring out" (as opposed to "working out") our salvation.
And so Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke walk among us, as Quakers everywhere use whatever data they consider legitimate in this grand reasoning process known to us as Quakerism. Should we hurry forward as we adapt to the world of reasoning religion, or should we go slowly, carefully, so as to not throw the baby out with the bathwater? Opinions come and go, depending on what we are aware of and where our human nature (pushing us toward what is most convenient and in our short term interest) guides us at one moment or the other. It's not to be wondered, then, that the "revelations" of our "reason" should keep us divided. Moment to moment, after all, any scripture can be used to piece together an argument to support pretty much anything after which one might lust, anything one might covet, anything one might want to do to placate one's anger, anything in which one might want to take pride...
This is a hard realization for me. It causes me a dissonance in that I have always thought that we were led by the Spirit, not by our own notions and reasoning. But what, if not notions, abstract reasonings about things we can never know, could have separated Friends one from the other and kept us separated, now? If we were abiding in that transformational experience, led by the Light, would we be in this condition?
What is the spirit in which we abide? Is it Paine? Is it Burke? Is it a spirit of self government, instead of being governed by the Light? Is this not the same struggle of which Friend Penington wrote (see masthead)/
See? There I go: "reasoning" and speculating about the nature, character and purpose of God instead of staying low, listening to the guidance about how I am supposed to be living and obeying.
Notwithstanding all of our reasoning, direct encounters with the Spirit, with Christ, go on daily. The Light is never totally eclipsed, in the world or in our hearts. All of us continue to be confronted about how we live, everyone hears the pleadings to change and to endure the difficulties of learning to lie down beside that still water, in those green pastures. This is the struggle within.
Who can look around and say that this reason based world of the Enlightenment, and our notional, rational Quakerism as part of it, is filling or creating holes in our hearts? Isn't it really in so far as we lay down our rationality about morality and go with what we have learned in our hearts that we are matured?
Most of us live with an alloy of spiritual and rational religion, struggling with the confusions that arise where the two compete for our attention, our allegiance.
Confused.
Separated.
Gossiping about the neighbors--gossiping about ourselves.
Neither Paine nor Burke is a guide to living in that peaceable kingdom, to being "in world but not of the world."
Paine and Burke, and the rational notion/delusion of self governance they represent, put us in the position that the world changes us, we do not change the world.
Whether we hold hands with Paine or with Burke, go at one pace or the other, our rationality will take us to the same place: deeper and deeper into the quicksand of our own imaginings and notions, further and further under the sway of the powers, more and more confused about why it is that each time we hit ourselves in the thumb with the hammer of our thinking it doesn't stop hurting.
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