Christian, Not Christo-Centric

Back from Annual Session and I have a lot to think and write about in the coming weeks.   I want to start with something of a personal concern.  It is a fairly small thing, but it challenges my peace because it is symptomatic of one of the reasons our Society has reached its current, much reduced condition.

A Friend, a good friend, referred to me as "Christo-centric" at Annual Session.  She meant nothing negative by it and surely did not know that to call a Christian Quaker Christo-centric was similar to calling a Sunni Muslim a Shia, although the differences between those two groups is far less than that between Christo-centric and Christian Friends.

There are many fine explanations of what Christo-centric Christianity is about and the Google machine can give more subtle distinctions than I can in my summary to draw the contrast.  Christo-centrism is a Protestant notion that moves the "person" of Christ to the center of religious practice (or makes it the main notion of belief) but only in certain offices.  Given the uncertain state of our pre-destined souls, Christ is the only agent who can punch our ticket for the afterlife and so that is where the Christo-centric are led to concentrate, to the diminution if not exclusion of all others of its offices.

Christo-centric theology goes beyond that, at least among those concerned with nuances, but on the steeet tends to keep Christian minds pre-occupied with "everlasting life" and sends the message that they have been given a pass on righteousness in the here and now.  Can't help ourselves, you know, the Powers run the world.  Sermon on the Mount is a great set if ideals but, really, the best we can do is "believe" in Christ (that is, affirm one set or another of "orthodox" notional propositions about "his" nature, character and the "work he did" for us while walking around among us).  If we accept the validity of those propositions we can be saved.

A faith and practice quite different was opened to Fox and Friends.   Sure, they affirmed an afterlife, but they believed that living in the Kingdom of God, here and now, would take care of whatever lay beyond the grave.  Christ, The Light, was to be "believed in," but that meant actually doing what Christ told us to do, what the Light showed us we needed to grow out of, in this life.   The Powers were to be confronted and redeemed by living as guided, and their experience was that this guidance pulled them closer and closer to living lives exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount, more and more described by the Fruits of the Spirit.  Friends of the Lamb's War generation rejected the institutions and doctrines of Christo-centric Protestantism--explicitly.  They set out to confront the Powers (including the church), to redeem them.  And it cost them.

The fact that 300+ years later there are many Christo-centric, Protestant Friends, so many, in fact, that most Friends don't know there is a difference between their faith and practice and that of Fox, can be explained.  First, that founding generation was comprised of people brought up as Protestants so that many of those notions came into the Society with them and were never completely eradicated in them.    They left marks that could be used later (by Friend Gurney, for example) to legitimize their later amplification.  Second,  the relentless heat brought on Friends by the hostile Protestant establishment finally, in succeeding generations, caused Friends to at least  appear to pull back to the mainstream as they retreated into Quietism behind their hedge.   Much of the effort of second and third generations of Friends (Barclay and Penn, for example) was aimed at showing that Quakers were harmless, not so different, and hammering out "compromises" that obscured distinctions and gave the establishment the satisfaction of believing that Friends conformed to their notional norms.  "Affirming" rather and "swearing" did not confront the idea that there could be two standards of truth and that one had some latitude to lie if one was not "on record" as telling the truth.

I am among the Friends who have found themselves brought to that faith and practice, not to "Christo-centric" or "Christ centered" belief.  I am not preoccupied with heaven and "believing"  but with hearing and obeying, living in the Kingdom of God on earth (although I more often call that "living in the Life").  I do what I can and hope/expect to be able to do better in the future, as what I have done in the past has enabled me to do better, now, than I did then.

That this confusion exists about the difference, or that there is little awareness that there is a difference, is due to the gradual invasion, growth  and legitimization of the Protestant faith and practice among us which, culminating in the 19th Century in the United States, keeps many Friends in the dark today.

The suffering and hardships endured during the decades of persecution of Friends by the Protestant establishment of its day was not some kind of tragic misunderstanding.   That establishment understood with clarity the threat the Quaker faith and practice posed to the Power they called a church and the wages they received by serving that Power.  They set out to destroy that faith and practice and, looking around, it's apparent they have almost succeeded.  But, as it is written, the darkness cannot comprehend (eclipse) the Light.

Some interesting Quaker process questions came to the fore during the business plenaries at Annual Session and I'll be addressing that next time.