Only One Christ - A message in Meeting on August 23rd

The following message was given at 15th Street yesterday (in words pretty close to this, though I am writing now from memory).

Our minds sometimes trick us into thinking that we have to choose between two seemingly different and opposing things when in reality they are only two sides of the same thing. For instance, we may think that we need to choose between justice and peace, between contemplation and action, or between faith and works. We Friends, at various times in our history have been especially prone to fooling ourselves that we have to choose between an "inner" Christ or an "outer" Christ.

If we really did have to make this choice most of us would probably choose the "inner" Christ, if only because it is primarily within us that we are able to hear Him and feel His presence. The Jesus of history may seem far away and hard to be sure about. We like John's description of Christ as the Word that was with God from the Beginning, as the Life that wells up in us, as the Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world. But John also said of this same Word that at a particular time and place it "became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth". It is important to me to know that when I wait on the living Spirit of Christ in our meetings and feel his presence here that I am also touching at least the outer hem of the garment of that man who "dwelt among us" in the flesh, who got his feet dirty walking the dusty roads of Palestine, who touched people and let them touch him, who started out as a baby and had to "grow in wisdom and in stature" just as we do. Who knew about hunger and thirst and weariness. Who could be tempted. Who was moved by compassion. Who could rejoice with his friends at a wedding and who could endure suffering and even death when that was the price of faithfulness. In worshipping his living Spirit today I am also worshipping the man Jesus Christ, not choosing one over the other.

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Talk to an Ecumenical Gathering in NYC

I still intend to post some more about my Meeting's welcome leaflet and the issues related to it. However, my limited energies for writing were diverted for a time into the preparation of a talk I gave at an ecumenical prayer service in the neighborhood of 15th Street Meeting. I thought this talk might be of interest to my blog readers. Here it is:


Greetings to you, my brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. I am here as a member of the 15th Street Meeting of Friends, also known as Quakers. We are one of the many faith communities in this neighborhood that has endorsed this ecumenical worship service. I am pleased to join with you in prayer for Christian unity. I am grateful to Immaculate Conception Church for hosting this event, and I am grateful to the other participating faith communities for the part they are playing as well.

I would like to say, before beginning my reflection, that I extend my sympathy and condolences to all here who knew Richard J Neuhaus and who are grieving his recent death. I knew him only by reputation: as a respected and sometimes controversial public figure, and as a brave spokesman for the many causes he believed in. Those of you who knew him as a pastor, a spiritual counselor, and a friend must be feeling his loss all the more acutely. May God bring comfort and consolation to you.


I have been asked to reflect on the passage we have read from the prophet Ezekiel. It is a challenging passage, and it addresses precisely the subject we are praying about this week: the need for unity among God’s people. I will recap the passage briefly and then ask what it has to say to us today.

Ezekiel’s message in this passage - - and even more so in many others - - could be called a multi-media message or an audio-visual message. He not only heard a message from God: he also saw and felt it. He not only proclaimed that message to the people: he acted it out and performed it in front of them so that they would not only hear but also see what God was trying to tell them. In other parts of the book of Ezekiel, we learn that he had visions of flying creatures with four wings, visions of wheels within wheels turning in the air, and - - in an earlier part of the very same chapter from which we just read - - of a valley of dry bones which, when preached to, became clothed with flesh and came alive. Ezekiel was a very intense prophet and his message was nothing if not urgent and impassioned.

In today’s text the imagery is a little tamer than that but it is still very vivid. God told Ezekiel to take two sticks. I picture them as long poles. He was to label each stick with the name of one of the tribes into which the Hebrew people had been divided: Judah for the first stick and Joseph for the second. Then he was to join them together so that they would “become one in your hand”. I picture him here as holding the two sticks above his head for everyone to see, holding them end to end with his hand covering the place where they joined, and showing the people that when held that way they appeared as one long stick.

This visual teaching was to be backed up with a verbal explanation. When the people asked Ezekiel what he meant with his little demonstration, Ezekiel was to answer:

Thus says the Lord God: I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all. Never again shall they be two nations, and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms. They shall never again defile themselves with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their God. My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe my statutes

.

I am sure that when Ezekiel said and did all this he had the full attention of his audience. I am not so completely sure of how they felt about this message. Were they glad or not? On the one hand, he was promising them the very thing that we are praying for today. He was promising them a restoration of unity. They had been separated from each other and God was promising to bring them back together. They had been scattered among the people of other nations and God was promising to gather them in. They had been conquered and oppressed by foreigners and God was promising to give them back their own land with their own government. This must have sounded like very good news indeed.

On the other hand, this unity and ingathering was going to come at a price. The people were going to have to live by God’s laws again. God saw them as having “defiled themselves” and as having transgressed. They were going to have to change. I remember how eagerly I responded in my youth when Bob Dylan sang “The Times They are a’ Changing.” I also remember they very different reaction of some people in my parents’ generation. Every change that is experienced as a promise to some is also experienced as a threat to others, and perhaps as both to most of us.


What does this passage say to the people of today and particularly to the Christian people of today? Do we, like the tribes of Judah and Joseph, suffer from disunity and division? If so, do we sincerely wish to overcome these problems and are we in earnest when we pray to the Lord for healing, reconciliation and unity? If we are in earnest, do we dare to hope that our prayer will be answered? If it indeed is answered, are we prepared to embrace the changes that God may require of us in the process?

My answer to the first question is “Yes, we do suffer from disunity and division.” It goes almost without saying that this is true of the planet at large. We know that nation still lifts up sword against nation, with horrible consequences for soldiers and civilians alike. We know that social and economic classes are pitted against each other in a struggle for economic survival. We know that there is a growing gap between the poverty of the world’s poor and the wealth of the world’s elites. But what is true of the world at large is also true of our Christian Churches. Not only do our various denominations continue to be separate communities, many of them are also riven by internal tensions and divisions. Nor is this just a matter of honestly holding to different beliefs. All too often, these divisions are characterized by mutual suspicion and animosity. It is not yet universally true that people can tell we are Christians by our love for each other.

My answer to the second question is more hopeful: Yes, we do earnestly desire to overcome disunity and we are in earnest when we pray for reconciliation. There is something within us, no doubt sown in our souls by God himself, which yearns for brotherhood and sisterhood. This is felt by all kinds of people, not just Christians. I think it must be because of this yearning that people all over the world responded so hopefully to our recent elections here in the United States. I know that I myself yearn for Christian unity. I imagine that each of you, looking within, can say the same.

My answer to the third question is tentative, but also hopeful. I think we do dare to hope that our prayer for unity will be answered. God may not go so far as to make the Quakers into Roman Catholics or the Roman Catholics into Baptists. We may still need to put our own signs on the sticks that represent our different communions. But if we are willing to be lifted up by Him and to acknowledge Him as our Living God, it does seem possible that he can hold these different “sticks” together and wield them as one to do His work. What that work may turn out to be, I do not know. Maybe God wants us to become a people who are able together:

• To practice hospitality for the stranger and alien,
  
• To practice peace toward each other, our neighbors, and even our supposed enemies,
  
• To live the gospel in our daily lives, becoming channels of Peace and Reconciliation in the world around us.

How wonderful it would be to find ourselves used in that work, and to be able to give Him praise and thanks for the privilege of serving Him in this way.

As for the fourth question, the answer to that is at this moment still open. Let us hope that we are prepared to embrace the changes that God may require of us. We are by and large a privileged people living in a privileged land. We have been asking a lot from the earth, from our fellow human beings, and from our other fellow-creatures on this planet to support and sustain the life to which we are accustomed. God, in justice, may ask us to change this. If we are excessively attached to the things we own and the ways we live, it may be very difficult for us to accept these changes.

Likewise, our very divisions have in some ways become comfortable for us. We do not have to spend much time with people that we fundamentally disagree with, or even with people whose customs and habits are different than ours. The patience and tolerance it will take to achieve real unity and begin to work together may also be difficult for us to cultivate. My deepest hope is that with God all things are possible. Imperfect creatures though we are, we are nevertheless indwelt by something from God that can teach us, in the words of Quaker George Fox “how to live and what to deny”. We are meant to be in unity with Him and with one another. We are meant to be “one in His Hand”. And by his grace we can be indeed.

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My Meeting's Welcome Leaflet - -

I left a comment on a quakerquaker video yesterday, stating that I think it would be better if we Friends, when doing "outreach" or "advancement", would talk less about ourselves and more about God. The following text is an example of what I think would be an improvement. It happens that I wrote it myself, so bias cannot be excluded. Nevertheless, it has been used at 15th Street Meeting, a famously "liberal" meeting for several years. Currently we make it available both as a handout at Meeting and as a tri-fold leaflet kept on display in a box on the fence around our yard. I'd be curious as to how Friends elsewhere feel about it.

YOU ARE WELCOME TO WORSHIP WITH US

If this is the first time you are joining us – or even if it is not – you may be interested in the following questions about Quaker worship as it is practiced here.

Q: Who or what do Quakers worship?
A: Quakers worship God: the same God who is recognized by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and worshipped by billions of people throughout the world. Quakers believe that God is a living Spirit who can be known and worshipped by anyone.

Q: What sacraments, forms or rituals do Quakers use in their worship?
A: There are different kinds of worship services at different Quaker Meetings. The kind we practice at Fifteenth Street Meeting is called “unprogrammed worship” or “waiting worship”. Its premise is that God’s own Spirit will guide us in how best to give God the worship God is due. Therefore we do not plan any ceremonies or rituals or prepare any hymns, sermons or prayers of our own devising. We come together in silence and wait for the moving of the Holy Spirit.

Q: What do the worshippers actually do?
A: What we try to do is quiet our minds, open our hearts, and listen to the Spirit. There is no prescribed way to do this. The key is an attitude of expectant waiting and a willingness to obey whatever inner promptings God may inspire. We are also alert to hear the messages that may come to us through our fellow worshippers.

Q: Is there a minister or priest in the Meeting for Worship?
A: Potentially, all are ministers. Vocal ministry occurs during unprogrammed worship when someone present feels deeply moved by God to offer a message to the assembled Friends. The words of the message may be words of praise, thanksgiving, comfort, reassurance, moral challenge, or spiritual insight.

Q: What is the difference between “vocal ministry” and other kinds of speaking?
A: Speaking that does not come from a sense of leading is not ministry. Discussion and debate are not ministry. Friends do not “answer” each other’s messages during a meeting. There is no strict limit on the length of messages, but usually “less is more”. It is easy to “outrun the Guide” when giving lengthy messages.A period of silence between messages offers the needed space for reflecting on what is said. Therefore those who offer messages should be careful not to rise too quickly after someone else has spoken.

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What if Bonhoeffer had been Quaker?

I have long been an admirer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: because of his clear-sighted theology in prewar books such as The Cost of Discipleship, because he championed the "Confessing Church" and resisted the Nazification of Christian churches in Germany, and not least because of the courage with which he endured imprisonment and met his death by execution at the hands of the German state.

As he himself recognized, however, there is a contradiction between his early radical pacifism, which is very evident in "The Cost of Discipleship" and his later participation in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Unlike the Austrian Catholic peasant Franz Jaegerstatter, Bonhoeffer believed that the unique challenge presented by the Nazis forced him to abandon absolute pacifism, precisely in order to be faithful. (Jaegerstatter, who was also executed by the Nazis, was punished because he remained a pacifist and refused to serve in the army).

I'd like to propose an unlikely scenario for the consideration of my readers and invite them to consider some questions it would raise:

Imagine that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been a Quaker instead of a Lutheran. Imagine that as he considered the possibility of trying to assassinate Hitler he had asked for a Clearness Committee from his Meeting. What do we think would have been the result? What do we think should have been the result? I ask this without having thought through my own answers. The ways we look at these questions might illumine more fundamental questions about discipleship, activism, faithfulness, testimony, and "effectiveness" as Quakers.

I invite people to respond either in comments on this blog or on their own blogs with links back to this one. I'm creating a "Bonhoeffer Question" label for this post.
- - Rich Accetta-Evans

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Our Condition in "the Fall"

NOTE: Some Further Comments on Chuck Fager's Response to my Review of "Without Apology" will appear eventually. Meanwhile, I have just finished the following post on an entirely different topic. I had been working on it for some time before Chuck sent me his post.- - Rich A-E

In a comment on my recent post about the Barclay Course at 15th Street Meeting, Marshall Massey says

Rich, I'd have loved to read more details about your Barclay course -- even at the level of my five-part report on the Bible study I led last summer at Baltimore -- so that I too could have learned from the course.

I'm afraid I'm not up to a report that thorough, but I do think that perhaps I can share some of the fruit of our discussions of Barclay's Proposition Number Four "On the Condition of the Man in the Fall". These are the things I brought away from the discussion.

I'll start by mentioning that we used the text of Barclay's own 1678 English translation of the Apology, as published by the Quaker Heritage Press. You can find the text of proposition 4 - and Barclay's Discussion of it - at this link: http://www.qhpress.org/texts/barclay/apology/prop4.html. It may be useful to glance at this whole chapter before reading the rest of the current post, but here is the proposition itself:

All Adam's posterity (or mankind), both Jews and Gentiles, as to the first Adam (or earthly man), is fallen, degenerated, and dead; deprived of the sensation (or feeling) of this inward testimony or seed of God; and is subject unto the power, nature, and seed of the serpent, which he soweth in men's hearts, while they abide in this natural and corrupted estate: from whence it comes that not only their words and deeds but all their imaginations are evil perpetually in the sight of God, as proceeding from this depraved and wicked seed. Man therefore, as he is in this state, can know nothing aright; yea his thoughts and conceptions concerning God and things spiritual, until he be disjoined from this evil seed and united to the Divine Light, are unprofitable both to himself and others. Hence are rejected the Socinian and Pelagian errors in exalting a natural light, as also of the Papists and most of Protestants, who affirm that man without the true grace of God may be a true minister of the Gospel. Nevertheless this seed is not imputed to infants until by transgression they actually join themselves therewith: for they are by nature "the children of wrath" who walk according to the "power of the prince of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience," having their conversation in the lusts of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind (Eph. 2)

Now this is not, on first reading, a terribly congenial proposition. Who wants to be told that he or she is "fallen, degenerate and dead", can "know nothing aright", and that not only his or her "words, and deeds, but all their imaginations are perpetually evil in the sight of God"? The language of the proposition reminds many people of the "original sin" idea so prominent in most of non-Quaker Christianity. For many Quakers it is an article of unofficial dogma that "Quakers don't believe in original sin", and some appear not to believe in "sin" at all. The idea of "the Fall" is closely linked in many people's minds to "original sin", so it may well come as a shock to see a discussion of "the Fall" in an early Quaker writer.

Another difficulty for many is that the whole concept of "the Fall" is centered around the Genesis narrative of what happened in the Garden of Eden. In Barclay's day, this narrative was widely understood as literal history. Today we do not understand it in that literal way, or least I do not, those of us who were studying Barclay at 15th Street Meeting do not, and most educated people do not. This being so, we may have more trouble than Barclay's generation did in accepting the reality of the Fall.

If we study Barclay's supporting argument and consult our own experience, however, several points become clear:

First, The doctrine described above is really quite different from the "original sin" doctrine taught by most other Christian Churches in Barclay's day and even in ours. Barclay himself rejected the term "original sin" and pointed out that it is not a scriptural term. He offers the words "death", "body of death", "old Adam" and "old man" as sounder terms taken from the Bible, and his discussion makes plain that these are not just different words, but words for a different spiritual reality. I will say more about this shortly.

Second, It is true that Barclay refers to and appears to accept the historicity of Adam, Eve, and the Garden, but there are hints in his discussion that the "mystical" significance of this story is more important to him than its supposed factuality. And certainly for us it is entirely possible to see a spiritual truth in the story of the Fall without having to accept its situation in a particular place and time.

Third, the key to understanding what Barclay is saying is to notice his distinction between people in the "natural and corrupted estate" which he describes as fallen and people "disjoined from this evil seed and united to the Divine Light". Indeed, this whole proposition cannot be fully understood until it is read in the context of Propositions 5 and 6 which are given the common title "Concerning the Universal Redemption by Christ, and also the Saving and Spiritual Light wherewith every man is enlightened". This dualism is somewhat problematic for modern people but it isn't for that reason necessarily or completely false. In fact, we really need to come to terms with it somehow, as it underlies much of Quaker practice, including our understanding of spirit-led ministry in worship (treated in Propositions 10 "Concerning Ministry" and 11 "Concerning Worship").

Fourth, Barclay's description of humanity in "the Fall" is - - if we are honest with ouselves - - a highly realistic description of humanity as it is. Our "sophistication" about our historical and biological origins are shallow if because of it we can't see the profoundly broken human condition that Barclay and the Bible call "fallen". Without an appreciation of this spiritual brokenness we are not equipped to receive with joy and gratitude the good news that through Christ's Light and Livign Spirit we are offered redemption from this state.

Let me expand on these points one-by-one.

1. The difference between "original sin" and the "old Adam"
In Barclay's proposition, quoted above, the statement that is perhaps least controversial to Friends of today is also the one that appeared most heretical to non-Quaker Christians of Barclay's day.

Nevertheless this seed is not imputed to infants until by transgression they actually join themselves therewith:...

In contrast to this Quaker position, many other Christians of Barclay's day (and all too many of our own) actually believed that infants are born guilty of sin and worthy of eternal punishment unless or until some spiritual sanctuary could be found for them, either through a ceremony like baptism or through a "salvation experience" of accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. This is a transparently cruel and inhuman doctrine. Where it has actually been accepted it has been a source of horrible fear and anguish to countless generations of loving parents. No doubt some people have been attracted to this doctrine precisely because its horror appealed to a streak of sadism, but others have accepted it reluctantly as an odd but inevitable corollary of a more general understanding of sin that in other respects seemed right, necessary, and implied by Scripture.

Barclay explicitly rejected this view. It's true he had just said that in our "natural state", which is presumably the state of the infant, we are subject to the "power,nature and seed of the serpent". But with his clarification that infants are not guilty of sin "until they join themselves therewith", we see that by "the old Adam" in our nature Barclay doesn't mean an inherited guilt for someone else's sin. He means, rather, an inherited natural disposition to commit sins ourselves. As infants we haven't yet acted on this natural disposition, but we all get our chance eventually. Barclay doesn't spell out at what age actual sins might take place, because this is not his interest. He is trying to focus attention on the reader's own spiritual condition, not on when and how a growing child becomes "of age". Barclay is able to argue the case for this doctrine from scripture, and to refute the scriptural arguments for the more conventional view.

It has always struck me that the "I am guilty of Adam's sin" point of view, while it seems so severe, actually lets the individual off the hook psychologically. It can tempt us to focus on Adam's sin in the past, which we can't do anything about, instead of our own conduct int the present. Barclay, in discussing our fallenness, focuses on what our fallenness causes us to actually do. I think this makes God's justice and our own responsibilities more comprehensible.

2. The real Fall, the mythical Garden
A number of otherwise intelligent people have patiently explained to me over the years that it is now impossible to believe in the Fall of man (and woman) because Darwin has demonstrated that we are in fact descended from other animals, not from ancestors who lived in Paradise. Ironically, the converse argument is sometimes used by Biblical literalists who insist that Darwinism can't be true because if it is then there was no Fall of Adam and no need for Christ. What can we make of this? Does all of Christian theology hang on a literalist reading of the story of the Garden?

The fact is that the Christian understanding of Eden was implicitly taken as at least partly metaphorical or symbolic long before Darwin - possibly as long as the story has been told. Consider, for example, the fact that Eden can't be located anyplace on the map of the known world, much less than in the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where Genesis puts it. Remember that at the end of the Genesis story the garden isn't destroyed or lifted up to heaven. The man and the woman are expelled from it, angels with a flaming sword are placed at the gate to guard it, but the garden is left right where it is. Yet the "Biblical Literalists" we all presume our ancestors to have been did not go in search of this garden or place it on their maps. George Fox said of a remarkable spiritual experience he had, that he "came up through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God", but he didn't mean that he had travelled to the Middle East and set foot on a particular patch of earth. Barclay himself quotes Genesis about the expulsion of Adam and Eve and has this to say:

The consequence of this fall, besides that which relates to the fruits of the earth, is also expressed (Gen. 3:24), "So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." Now whatsoever literal signification this may have, we may safely ascribe to this paradise a mystical signification, and truly account it that spiritual communion and fellowship, which the saints obtain with God by Jesus Christ; to whom only these cherubims give way, and unto as many as enter by him, who calls himself the Door. So that, though we do not ascribe any whit of Adam's guilt to men, until they make it theirs by the like acts of disobedience; yet we cannot suppose that men, who are come of Adam naturally, can have any good thing in their nature, as belonging to it; which he, from whom they derive their nature, had not himself to communicate unto them.

We may accept this teaching or not, but whether we do so does not depend on whether we accept the theory of evolution. What the Garden represents to me is a vision of the world God fundamentally and originally intends for us: a world of harmony among all creatures and between them and their Creator. This is difficult for us to see or imagine because the world as it appears to us now is not like that. There are hints within empirical reality of the beaury and harmony that was and is intended, and sometimes this seems very close to realization. But then, somehow, something always happens. The bravest and most hopeful beginnings seem always subject to some flaw or defect. On the social level, utopian experiments go bad, hopeful movements burn out, revolutions are betrayed, good intentions go sour. In family life and individual life a very similar dynamic operates. Neither the vision of harmony nor the manifold disappointments of experience ever go away. The height and the depth are always with us. The distance between them is what I would call the Fall. The vision of Eden (and also the vision of the heavenly Jerusalem at the other end of the story) is our reminder that it is the height more than the depth that most represents God's intent for us. The expulsion from Eden represents the reality that we can't go back there on our own power. There's that flaming sword to get past - a sword that would separate us from the part of ourselves that has really chosen to leave the Garden's harmony. But more of that in point 4. I'm trying to keep to my outline here!

3. Barclay's dualism.
Is Barclay optimistic or pessimistic about human beings? If we read Proposition 4 without Propositions 5 and 6 he sounds pessimistic, with all of his warnings about our condition in the Fall. If we read propositions 5 and 6 without Proposition 4 he sounds optimistic, stressing as he does that there is a saving and Spiritual Light by which every human being is enlightened, and that the Redemption of Christ is a "universal" redemption. The resolution of this apparent contradiction lies in a recognition of Barclay's dualism. On the one hand there is an "evil seed" which is "natural". On the other hand, there is the "Divine Light" which is saving. Understanding this point of view requires a reshuffling of the thought-categories we are used to. In our vocabulary, "natural" is a positive word. We think of it as describing the-world-as-God-made-it. We contrast it to "un-natural" or "artificial", which we think of as the-world-as-people-spoiled-it. This way of dividing up reality has its own validity, but it does not easily map into Barclay's distinction between "natural" and "spiritual". For Barclay, the "natural" was not the world-as-God-made it, but the world that was fallen. And the opposite of this "nature" wasn't technology or art, it was all that proceeded directly from the Spirit. For George Fox this dualism was - if possible - even more pronounced. In his Journal he wrote:

I found that there were two thirsts in me -- the one after the creatures, to get help and strength there, and the other after the Lord, the Creator, and His Son Jesus Christ. I saw all the world could do me no good; if I had had a king's diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by His power.

Barclay's dualism is somewhat problematic for me. But I am not ready to write it off. It is problematic for me because I cannot fix the line as confidently as Barclay seems to between what is "natural" and what is "spiritual". It occurs to me that whatever I experience of the Spirit is mediated to me through the physical, created universe and through my own senses and body. Even my centering down in worship and my release of self-will is in some way a thing that my "self" does. The inward motions that I feel are from God are nevertheless felt in my natural body and recorded by my natural mind. There are times when I can in fact mistake a notion of my own mind for a motion from God's Spirit. And, on the other hand, there is surely something of God's Spirit at work in anything that I might describe as natural. After all, even the "natural gifts" of intelligence, feeling, and appetite are parts of the world that God created. Perhaps this is related to the difficulty, already discussed, of understanding "the Fall" without envisioning it as a specific event in the past. If I don't see Eden as a particular outward place, and I don't see Adam's life and Eve's life in Eden as an event in history then Adam, Eve, and the Garden are all part of present reality and notwithstanding the Fall they are all part of the created world as I find it now.

Yet the distinction between "nature" and "spirit" is surely still a real distinction, even if it isn't always as clear and sharp for me or you as it seemed to Barclay. Moreover, it is a highly important distinction in Quaker practice as well as Quaker theory. Consider, for example, the Friend who speaks in Meeting. We recognize that in one sense it is always a "creature", an individual human being with blood and breath and brain, who stands in a meeting rooms and utters something. Yet we also believe that what that human being utters can only be "ministry" if is also in some sense from the Spirit. We listen to people all week, and in Meeting we want to listen to God. We think that there is a distinction between merely human voices and the voice of God. We disparage a message if we sense it to be solely from "the creature" or from "the ego" or from "the intellect". Barclay makes explicit the connection between this proposition and the Quaker understanding of ministry: "Hence are rejected the Socinian and Pelagian errors in exalting a natural light," he says, "as also of the Papists and most of Protestants, who affirm that man without the true grace of God may be a true minister of the Gospel".

Moreover, I think that by and large we try to be guided by the Spirit - and not by the resources of the creature alone - when we make the truly consequential decisions in our lives. We pray. We wait. We convene "clearness" committees. Why would this be the case if we didn't understand that the creature without the Spirit truly is "Fallen"?

4. "The Fall" as a Realistic Picture of Humanity.
Even after we free it from a literal reading of Genesis, the idea that humanity is fallen will seem to many a hopelessly outmoded idea, one that it is supposedly impossible for enlightened modern people to affirm. But why is it impossible? Do we have new evidence, unavailable in previous centuries, that people by default are as good as God intended us to be? I would argue, on the contrary that the record of war, prejudice, oppression, misery and cruelty has become longer, more incredibly bloody, and harder to explain away. To argue that there is nothing deeply wrong with the heart of humanity seems like an exercise in massive denial and self-deception. We are, of course, a part of the Creation that the God of Genesis looked at and pronounced to be Good. We are also party to the spoiling of that Creation, and we are capable of evil and destructive acts toward one another - often cloaked with sincerely self-righteous justifications. This is not just a technical problem or political problem or even just a moral problem. It is a spiritual affliction.

Our fallenness doesn't make us loathsome to God, nor does it mean that we merit condemnation and punishment. Our fallenness calls forth the compassion of God, the offer of a helping hand, the promise to breathe new life into us. If we are able to see ourselves as we are and accept God's grace, then we can experience the re-birth mentioned in John's Gospel and receive "...the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God." But if we cannot be realistic about ourselves, if we cannot recognize that we are fallen, then we will not accept God's helping hand.

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Chuck Fager Responds

My review, not too long ago, of Chuck Fager's book Without Apology, sparked a spirited discussion on this blog. At the time, I expressed interest in hearing from Chuck himself about his view of the issues raised. He has now provided the following thoughtful response, which I am pleased to present as a guest-post.

A Response to Rich Accetta- Evans’s Review of “Without Apology,” by Chuck Fager

Sixth Month 21, 2007

Friends, what goes around comes around. “Without Apology” was written in response to a particular set of trends and circumstances, and it looks to me like many of these trends are converging again. So the timing of Rich’s posting of his review reminds me of the old proverb about how there are no coincidences.

The last major outbreak of this fever, by my reckoning, was in 1990-1992, and centered on what became known as the “Realignment” idea. (“Realignment” for those who have not yet read the book, was a plan to “realign” the FUM-related yearly and monthly meetings by dividing them between the “true Christians” and the non-“true Christians,” with the latter being obliged to go elsewhere. Exactly how this division was to be accomplished, by whom, and by what standards, was never made entirely clear. This proposal, to put it mildly, was controversial; and I was, again to put it mildly, against it.)

“Without Apology” was written in the aftermath of the “realignment” struggle. All through that period, I kept wondering why liberal Friends were putting up with the unending barrage of attacks on their sanity, morality, and legitimacy which was a major aspect of that struggle (and which occurred outside it as well), without speaking up assertively on their own behalf.

Some reasons for this relative silence seemed depressingly clear: first was the cowardly habit of conflict-avoidance which is one of our least attractive features. And second, there’s the equally embarrassing mass ignorance of our tradition, both its history and convictions, that often hides behind the pretense that we have somehow evolved “beyond all that.” Yeah, right; like we’ve evolved beyond breathing. Too much liberal religion, and not only among Friends, boils down to wanting everyone to “be nice,” and for their church time to be a “safe space” and let everything else go hang.

– “A safe space”; now there’s a term which rankles. Sure, we want our children to be “safe” in First Day School. But that’s not the main thrust of this counsel. Yet where did this heretical notion come from, that religious life is supposed to be”safe”??

Not from the history of religion, that’s for sure. “Safe” like it was for Jesus? Or Fox? Joan of Arc? Tom Fox? Or so many others? There are very good reasons why the Bible says “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31) And why the first words that need to be said when humans encounter angels is, “Fear not.”

And certainly much of American Quakerism was not a “safe space” in those years, unless one resolutely closed one’s eyes, listened to one’s breath, and then slipped out if something troublesome emerged. That’s a relatively easy stance to maintain in Quaker silence; at least until someone opens their mouth.

I knew all that. But there was something else in play here: in the early 1990s, as far as I could see, liberal Quakerism in the U.S., and maybe in England too, had not produced any scholar or thinker ready to take on this task in an orderly, intellectually serious fashion. To the extent that anyone was thinking out loud about it at all, they/we were still leaning on Rufus Jones, dead almost fifty years, or Howard Brinton, dead nearly twenty years, to do it for us.

But while bowing to their eminence, it was clear to me that these worthies were of another time. Who would advocate for us now? Did anyone even think liberal Quakerism was worth speaking up for?

In looking for a response to these queries, mine was a name which did not occur to me. Not, that is, until it seemed clear that nobody else was likely to undertake the project. I did have a smattering of theological studies and a batch of Quaker journalism under my belt, but there was one qualification which tipped the balance: by God, I felt liberal Quakerism was worth speaking up for, warts and all. So I decided to have a go at it, and “Without Apology” was the result. And I note that, eleven years later, it still pretty much has the field of such advocacy to itself, for better or for worse.

The book seems to have struck a chord with many readers, selling out a number of small press runs, and evoking mostly favorable responses. One doesn’t get rich peddling books to Quakers, but "Without apology" has held its own, and orders continue to trickle in. Such that I prepared a Tenth Anniversary edition in 2006, and its first printing is close to sold out as well.

While working on the book, one thing I learned and re-learned was that, as the opening phrase above states, what goes around comes around. It turned out that “Realignment” was but one skirmish in what had been a century-long contest, many episodes of which had not been well-documented. So the work perforce took on a provisionally historical character, making initial forays into some of these musty corners of our collective attic. I knew then, and know better now, that there is much more to be explored.

By the time the book was finished, I figured that one of these years, the struggle would erupt again. The gray spectre of “realignment” would likely rise from its coffin, in a new guise, brandishing new (and behind them, old) issues.

And so, in 2007, it has. Much is familiar about the current appearance of the ghoul, not least that it seems to hover most over what remains of a much-enfeebled FUM. I won’t repeat here the thoughts about this current conflict posted on my blog, www.afriendlyletter.org . That posting also includes a number of links to other reports on the developing situation.

Rather, I’ll only note here that for Friends wanting to get “up to speed” on this latest dispute that “Without Apology,” whatever its shortcomings, is probably the main available piece of background reading. (Though here I must also add a plug for my more recent collection, “Shaggy Locks & Birkenstocks,” which includes a number of more recent pieces which fill in some important gaps in the earlier tome.)

As to Rich’s comments on “Without Apology” itself, I’m grateful for his many kind and respectful words about it, and the friendly spirit in which even the criticisms were offered. As to the latter, two points seem to me worth addressing briefly.

First, Rich’s complaints turn largely, as such critiques usually do, on Barclay. Rich feels I have misused Barclay’s thinking about the church in service to my effort to legitimate a “universalist” agenda.

Here the response is simple: in my view, I have not misused Barclay, because Barclay is not consistent. When it comes to the church, he speaks, not to put too fine a point on it, with forked tongue, or pen. In his “Apology,” the “true invisible church” is indeed not limited to professing Christians. He said that explicitly, meant it, and I quoted him on it accurately. This “true invisible church” idea is basic to the ecclesiology – the concept of the church – advanced in my book.

But as Rich and others have also pointed out, Barclay also states that in a particular Christian church, everybody ought to be Christian, according to the specific definition of Christian the particular church adheres to. He said that too, meant it, and he has been quoted on that point accurately by Rich and various others.

I noted this in the book, and quoted a fine piece by the late Francis Hall, who knew Barclay backward and forward, and concluded that “Barclay makes no attempt whatsoever,” he admits, “to resolve the difficulties presented by these two sets of beliefs, both of which he fully holds....It is clear that Barclay did not succeed in truly synthesizing these two elements of his faith, but the problem is a profoundly difficult one for the Christian theologian.” (My page 31)

I believe Hall had it exactly right; Barclay is on both sides of this issue, so it's just as fair to me to pick one side of it as it is for Rich to choose another. Thus I meet complaints like the one Rich raises mainly with a shrug. To say a Christian church should be Christian is a tautology. It begs the questions of what “Christian” means, and what kind of church the Society of Friends or its meetings can or should be. My book argued that liberal Quakerism attempts to manifest the “true invisible church” part of barclay; I argued further that this wider approach preceded Barclay, and could be traced all the way back to the words of Jesus.

Rich and some others evidently want the Society to stay within the “particular church” schema. To me that’s an option, not a mandate. Moreover, in my experience there are lots of Christian-identified Friends who are content with the “true invisible” model, so I’m persuaded that it is not inherently oppressive to them. To be sure, there are recurring cases of what my book called “christophobia,” but I am on record there as being opposed to this, and won’t belabor the point again here.

The other main complaint Rich raises is the suggestion that I made “straw men” out of some of the people my book challenges, and failed to do justice to the “Christian” identity of several historical figures claimed there as pioneers of modern liberal Quakerdom, such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Hannah Barnard, and Joel & Hannah Bean.

He also wishes I had paid detailed attention to a list of ten or so other notable twentieth century Friends of special interest to him. As to all these other Friends – I agree they are interesting; but Rich, give me a break – if I’d taken them all on, I’d still be writing it! (Maybe a Quaker in Brooklyn could write the book about them . . . ?)

For the ones I did consider, I’m not sure Rich gives me sufficient credit. The living persons described and quoted were major players in the events the book reports, and I have cited chapter and verse in all instances. This research has not been shown to be erroneous in any of these cases. So I don’t find a lot of straw sticking out of these sketches.

As for the dead, I plead more nuance than Rich allows. For instance, of course Whittier was a “Christian,” Rich – and I said so (cf. Page 52). But I also described him as being part of an evolution of that concept, both in Quakerism and broader Protestant circles, an evolution which flows directly into modern liberal Quakerdom.

This portrayal of Whittier as a transitional figure I stand by, and could cite numerous other sources beyond those in the book, which I have explored since then, to reinforce it. It is enough, though, to simply quote a telling stanza, from his poem “Miriam”:

“And I made answer: Truth is one;
And in all lands beneath the sun,
Whoso hath eyes to see may see
The tokens of its unity.
No scroll of creed its fulness wraps,
We trace it not by school-boy maps,
Free as the sun and air it is
Of latitudes and boundaries.
In Vedic verse, in dull Koran,
Are messages of good to man....’”

As for Joel & Hannah Bean, Rich properly points out that they were not “liberal” Friends, and wanted nothing more than to be left alone in their Quietist Orthodoxy. Yet again, my book says this too (cf. Pages 55-57).

But history (and perhaps the Spirit?) had other plans for the Beans. They were pushed into their role as the foreparents of west Coast liberal Quakerism. And if, as Rich insists, some of their spiritual offspring in today’s polyglot Pacific Yearly Meeting might find the Beans’ later mentions of the “living Christ” problematic, that possibility hardly diminishes the Beans’ actual formative role there. Besides which, I am personally acquainted with some very seriously Christian Quakers in that body, who are nonetheless content with its mixed character.

Finally in this connection, a word about Hannah Barnard: Rich again alleges that I paint her as not being “Christian.” But I do no such thing. Instead, I properly describe her as a proto-Hicksite. She is less a transitional figure than a forerunner, or even a prophet, of the changes in the liberal direction that were to come. When Elias Hicks himself came and preached in her home town of Hudson New York twenty years after her disownment, he paid a personal call on Hannah, and according to her they parted in perfect agreement on matters of religion.

Rich then turns to my effort to sort out some of the persisting value of Christianity to Quakerism, even in my liberal and inclusive sense of it. He dislikes my neologisms: “Christogenic,” “Christomorphic,” and so on. Alas; I liked them, and more important, thought them useful. But his basic objection to the passages in which they appear is not aesthetic or based on a lack of euphony. Rather, he asks rhetorically,

“What relevance does the Christian content of Quakerism have, unless we continue to experience Jesus as neither a dead man of history nor a distant figure in Heaven, but as one who has “Come to teach his people himself?”

And here perhaps we come upon a point of substantive difference.

The “Christian content” remains relevant, Rich, because the plain fact is that there are LOTS of ways Jesus can be relevant and experienced in Quaker circles other than the notion of his being “a present teacher.” The “present teacher” formula is one particular approach, which works for some Friends. I respect it, but am unable to accept it as the only way to either think about Jesus or "experience” him and his possible meanings for our community.

Let me quote, in this connection, the section from “Without Apology” describing Quakerism as Christagogic:

“that is, it continues to have much that it can learn from Christianity, its founder, and its larger biblical context.
“This feature may well be the most important, because it seems to me closest to Jesus’ own method. I have argued in my book, Wisdom and Your Spiritual Journey, that Jesus acted above all like a teacher-sage in the mold of biblical Wisdom. Teaching, particularly by example, was what wisdom sages did; and learning was above all the proper response of wisdom’s pupils. Certainly Jesus’ teachings, as recorded in the Gospels, and particularly the parables, continue to repay reflection and study. Further, such study is consistent with the attitude of independence of dogmatic systems which is also a feature of both biblical wisdom and liberal Quaker faith.”

I cite this passage because this way of relating to Jesus has for many years been the most meaningful to me personally, and I must insist on its legitimacy as a path for such Christian and Quaker experience.

Yes, it differs significantly from other such approaches, such as mysticism, prophetism, or “present-teacher”-ism. So what? I didn't invent it; it's there in the Bible. I would also suggest to Rich that the track record of adherents of this approach meets Jesus’ own test in Matthew 7:16 (“by their fruits ye shall know them”) as well as the others, and caution against insisting on more than this.

As many yearly meetings face the new challenges to their legitimacy raised by the new round of difficulties, I hope that “Without Apology” could still be useful to many in orienting them to some of the background and issues involved. Again, I appreciate Rich’s taking the time to give it such close attention. I'll be interested to see what further comments readers might want to make.

Peace,

Chuck Fager

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15th Street Meeting's Seven Week Course on Barclay's Apology

A while ago, I used this blog to post this announcement that Fifteenth Street Meeting was offering a course on Robert Barclay's "An Apology for the True Christian Divinity as the Same is Held Forth and Preached by the People Called in Scorn Quakers." In a comment on that post I said that "I do intend to post about how it goes, and in fact I intend even before the course to throw some of my own questions about Barclay out to the blogosphere in order to get others' perspectives." As it turned out, I did not post about how it went and did not throw my questions about Barclay out to the blogosphere to get others' perspectives. Another reality, also alluded to in that comment, intervened. Namely "...everyone, including me, will be balancing Barclay with busy work lives, family lives, and social lives (including our lives as Quakers with all our worship meetings, business meetings, and committee meetings). A big part of my "preparation" for this coursae has been trying to discern whether I was up to the expenditure of time and energy." Nevertheless, the course did take place, and it was - at least in my own biased eyes - a huge success.

We met from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Thursdays (April 12th, April 19th, April 26th, May 3rd, May 10th, May 17th and May 24th.) Attendance varied from 8 to 14, with some participants having to miss one or another session because of other commitments, but most sessions had at least 10 present. Those who came included two or three of the "usual suspects" (Friends already known to have a strong interest in early Quaker writings and/or in a Christocentric view of Quakerism), but many others came out of a less predictable curiosity. (The "usual suspects", I hasten to add, were extremely helpful, highly engaged with the text, and always ready with insightful comments). One man who made a good contribution came because he had seen a poster about the class and was curious. He is not himself a Friend, though he works for our Friends' school here as a security officer.

One Friend who I thought would be interested did not come because he thought my use of the Quaker Heritage Press edition of Barclay's Apology was somehow a slight of Dean Freiday, who prepared Barclay's Apology in Modern English. This disappointed me, as I think he could have added a lot. In fact, we wasted none of our limited time in critiqueing Freiday or anyone else, but concentrated on Barclay himself. If anything, our struggles with Barclay's syntax and sentence structure tended to increase my respect for the labors Freiday must have undergone to render as much of this as he did into "modern English". As it was, each of us in the course had to be our own Dean Freiday. In our own labor to understand, we may have avoided some of the errors that Larry Kuenning attributes to Freiday here, and we may have committed some of our own. But I remain glad that we engaged with Barclay's own translation of his original Latin prose. That way, the impressions we came away with were only first-generation-imperfect. That is, each of us has our own mental copy (however imperfect) of what Barclay meant to say, and not our own mental copy of Dean Freiday's interpreatation of what Barclay meant to say.

The schedule I laid out in the original announcement did not hold up. We spent more time than anticipated on the prefatory address to Charles the second, which I felt helped establish Barclay's historical context, on my own introductory overview of the 15 propositions, and on Propositions I and II.

As a result, we split the third session between "Concerning the Scriptures" and "Concerning the Condition of Man in the Fall" and by the end of the fourth class we had only gone as far as Propositions V and VI ("Concerning the Universal Redemption by Christ and also the Spiritual and Saving Light, wherewith every man is enlightened"). We therefore, very reluctantly, skipped over propositions VII, VIII and IX (dealing with "justification", "perfection", and "perseverance" respectively), in order to have enough time for a good discussion of the propositions on ministry, worship, baptism, communion, the limitations on the state's power over conscience, and the final proposition (on "Salutations and Recreations") where we met many familiar Quaker "testimonies", including the testimony againt war, in an unfamiliar context.

For some of these classes I asked the participants (if they felt so inclined) to come in with their own paraphrases of the propositions to be discussed that day. This generally provided a good starting point for discussion. In some cases, I distributed some excerpts from the chapter that had captured my attention and we discussed those. Often, participants came with particular passages in mind that were either especially edifying or especially troubling and we would discuss those. Throughout, I tried to maintain the stance that it was worth understanding what Barclay was saying whether or not we agree with him, that we are under no obligation to accept his judgement, but that we will be poorer as a Society of Friends if we don't understand something of where he fits into our tradition.

Frankly, there were some weeks when my own busy-ness at work or events in my personal life crowded out the time I had hoped to spend preparing for the class, so I had to "wing it" more than I had intended and to rely much more on the fact that the other participants had been reading and thinking that week, even if I had not. As far as I could tell, the class went just as well in those weeks as in the others, which is both reassuring and humbling. I suppose it did help that at least I was pretty familiar with Barclay already, having read him many many times.

My final conclusion? That Barclay is still relevant, and that Friends willing to read him carefully will find the effort worthwhile. When 17th century Latinized English gets in the way, it helps to read carefully and for readers to compare notes with each other on what he seems to be saying. Looking up the scriptural passages he quotes can also help. His views on some things (like "The condition of Man in the Fall") will seem completely surprising to some. His views on others (like "the Spiritual and Saving Light") will seem familiar yet somehow different than some of us at least in the more liberal meetings expected. In places Barclay's academic style is off-putting and discouraging for most readers. In other places, such as the propositions on worship and on ministry, his words still have power to inspire.

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Review of Chuck Fager's "Without Apology"

The following review has been resting on my hard drive for at least a couple of years. I have not published it before as I was intending to look more deeply into assertions I make about Hannah Barnard and Joel Bean, in order to increase my assurance what I said is actually true. In the meantime, I did show the review to some Friends here in New York, and one mentioned it during a recent session of our course about Robert Barclay's Apology. I looked it over, found that it still says some things I think worth saying, and decided to post it here. As always, comments are welcome.

Chuck Fager’s Without Apology
Reviewed by Rich Accetta-Evans

Chuck Fager’s book Without Apology: The Heroes, the Heritage and the Hope of Liberal Quakerism is available from the Kimo Press of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. I recommend it as a very good read, both for those who recognize themselves as “liberal Quakers” as the book defines this term and for Friends like myself who emphatically do not. One does not have to endorse its conclusions to recognize that this book, like many of Fager’s previous writings, exhibits both a love of the Quaker movement, and a refreshing willingness to view it critically. He is also a good storyteller and is able to give us a sympathetic understanding even of people whose views he rejects. Chapter 8, which recounts some of the troubles of our own Yearly Meeting, includes remarkable accounts of conversations between the author and two quite different people: the evangelical pastor Dan Whitley, of Clintondale Friends Church, and the feminist Quaker Carolyn Mallison.

Liberal Quakerism (however defined) has certainly taken its lumps from various quarters over the years. There is, after all, a glaring contrast between the radical but flamboyantly Christian rhetoric of Quakerism’s heroic early period and the bland theological equivocations of Friends’ bodies that see themselves as “liberal” today. So much so that liberal Quakerism has come to seem to many outsiders (and to many thoughtful Quakers themselves) like a movement that is losing touch with its historical memory and its spiritual roots. Chuck Fager wants to remedy this by demonstrating a connection between liberal Quaker faith and certain strands of thought and action that have been present among Friends since the days of George Fox. More than that, he wants to show that in some respects liberal Quakerism can claim to be the most faithful embodiment of what was always best in Quakerism. His story has not only liberal heroes but orthodox and evangelical villains (the Conservative or Wilburite branch of Quakerism is almost entirely ignored, however). By giving a voice to these ideas, Friend Fager’s book may initiate a dialogue that is long overdue and thereby assist other Quakers in understanding what makes their liberal cousins tick.

None of this is to say, however, that Without Apology is or ought to be the last word on these subjects. The very clarity of its assumptions and arguments will make it easier for some readers to articulate what seems to be wrong with them. Here are some of my own critiques:

There are at least some Friends, who might like to identify ourselves as Liberals, too, but who are excluded by the “inclusive” definition of the term that Chuck Fager offers (more on this definition below). We value the peace testimony, we prefer to worship without pastors or ordained human leaders, we embrace critical studies of the Bible and scientific theories of human origin, we believe in social and economic justice, in gender equality, and in the civil rights of homosexuals. We rejoice in the separation of Church and State. We advocate tolerance by the state toward people of all religions and toward people who reject religion. But we believe these things in the name of our living Lord and Teacher, Jesus Christ, and we find in Him the central reason that we are Quakers. It is this last point that makes us not-Liberal according to all too many of our Friends, and now according to Chuck Fager as well (though he does at least concede that it is OK for us to be Quakers.)

There is a mismatch of some kind between the book’s two kinds of definition for what he means by “Liberal Quakerism”. His “institutional” definition is that

“it primarily includes a network of yearly meetings in North America and Britain. Many of the North American Yearly Meetings are associated with Friends General Conference; several others…are unaffiliated.”

Although he does not list the Yearly Meetings he is talking about, it seems clear to anyone who knows the territory that they include Pacific Yearly Meeting, Britain Yearly Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, New England Yearly Meeting, and our own New York Yearly Meeting. This seems pretty much in line with what we would expect. Most Friends would certainly list these as “liberal” Friends’ bodies, while they would acknowledge that the membership is diverse. Chuck Fager’s “theological” definition of liberal Quakerism, however, contains terms that would be very controversial among Friends in these bodies – even, if not especially, among those who self-identify as liberals.

“Theologically”, he says, “I define Liberal Quakerism as: An ongoing effort to make visible a particular portion of the true Church, by means of the specific traditions and disciplines of the Religious Society of Friends. This very idea of manifesting the true Church is, we believe, rooted in the early Quakers’ unique and inclusive understanding of the Society’s Christian background and origins…”

This is not the whole definition, and much that I have omitted is important to the book’s overall argument. But in this passage, it seems to me, Chuck Fager’s familiarity with Quaker tradition has put him out of step with the rank-and-file Quaker liberal for whom he would like to speak. The very term “church”, much less “True church” is almost a taboo among many liberal Friends, so it would seem to me like a bit of a stretch to include it in a definition of who they are. Indeed, I think it will come as a shock to many of them to find that George Fox, Margaret Fell and the Valiant Sixty thought of themselves as part of a Church at all, though they emphatically and certainly did.

Notwithstanding that his very use of the term “true Church” may well mystify his fellow liberals, it will hardly endear him to students of what the term “Church” meant to early Friends. Fager leans heavily on certain ideas found in Robert Barclay’s “Apology”, which is a work of Quaker theology written by a contemporary of George Fox in the 17th century and widely used by Quakers to explain their faith to others throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and even into the 20th. Fager appreciates and enjoys the irony of basing a book called “Without Apology” on another one called “Apology”, but it seems to me that he is not really clear about the gulf between Barclay’s views and his own.

Starting with some things that Barclay actually said and believed, Chuck Fager extrapolates from them and draws his own conclusions. The reader not previously familiar with Barclay may have a hard time discerning where Barclay’s actual teachings leave off and Fager’s begin. A full discussion of this topic would not easily fit within this brief review, but the gist of it is this: Barclay taught that Christ’s spirit is alive and active within every human being and that those who “have become obedient to the holy light and testimony of God in their hearts” are thereby included in the true and invisible Church whether or not they have ever even heard of Jesus’ earthly ministry, teaching, crucifixion and resurrection. This much is true. The conclusion Chuck Fager extrapolates is that the Society of Friends should try to make this invisible church visible by embracing people as members without regard to whether they are Christians, and thus to be as inclusive on Earth as God presumably will be in Heaven.

Barclay himself rejected such a position, though to see that he did you will have to read his “Apology” for yourself, rather than rely on Chuck Fager’s selective quotations. For Barclay, the visible church (as distinct from the subtle and invisible church which he also talked about) was simply the community that openly and explicitly experienced, worshiped, listened to and obeyed the living Christ. Moreover, it was also quite simply the body that has since come to be known as the Religious Society of Friends. He, like other Quakers of his time, believed that a major problem with most Christian denominations was that they were too inclusive, allowing membership to people who professed belief in Christ but did not actually trust him, listen to his living voice, or obey him. I know of no Quaker in Barclay’s generation or for decades thereafter who argued that either meetings or other churches should include non-Christians as members. When Friends welcomed newcomers to join their meetings, they did so on the basis that these newcomers had heard the Quaker message about Christ, had been “convinced” by it and intended to live by it. It would be vain, of course, to argue that something has to be true if Barclay or Fox believed it. But it seems quite unfair to implicitly invoke their authority in supporting views that they rejected.

The orthodox and evangelical villains of Fager’s history lesson are in some ways straw men and straw women: not that they are not real people, but that they are far easier to knock down rhetorically than other representatives of Christian Quakerism he might have chosen. In some cases they are not even the best exponents of evangelical and orthodox Quakerism itself (why no discussion of T. Canby Jones, for example, or John Punshon, or Richard Foster, or Thomas Kelly?) But more to the point, for me, is that the evangelical and orthodox movements themselves are far from the only representatives of Christian Quakerism. I would have liked to read a serious treatment of the lives and ideas of contemporary Friends like Bill Taber from the Conservative tradition, Licia and Larry Kuenning of the independent Glenside Meeting, and Lewis Benson, John McCandless, Chris Stern and the whole New Foundation movement. These are Friends whose Christian vision is informed by authentic Quaker tradition, far less diluted by protestant fundamentalism than those whom Chuck Fager wants to take on in debate.

The “liberal heroes” whose stories are told in this book include many Friends who were not in fact “liberals” at all under the definition which the author has offered, though clearly they were liberal in the broader sense of being open-minded, generous, and loving – in the sense, that is, that any genuine follower of Jesus would hope to be. The kind of liberal Quakerism, which Chuck Fager is advocating, however, (the kind which says the Society of Friends should not be explicitly Christian) did not arise in these Friends’ lifetimes and there is no reason to think that they would have embraced it if it had.

For example, Friend Fager counts Hannah Barnard as a “foremother” of liberal Quakerism apparently because she was disowned in 1802 for denying the literal truth of certain passages of scripture: notably those in which God is presented as commanding Israel to wage wars. Although this position offended the evangelicals of her time, it was apparently based on her understanding of other passages of scripture – such as the commandment by Jesus that we should love our enemies and do good unto those that hate us. Nothing that Chuck Fager tells us about her supports his contention that she thought the Society of Friends should equivocate about the central importance of Jesus. Perhaps it is a hopeful sign that Christian faith has a future in liberal Quaker Meetings, if liberal Friends take inspiration from a woman who was as courageously loyal to Jesus’ teaching as Hannah Barnard seems to have been.

It may be that a subtext of this story is that just as Hannah Barnard is a ‘foremother’ of liberalism so her persecutors are forerunners of conservative or evangelical or otherwise “Christo-centric” Quakers of today. I would say, rather, that insofar as they were persecutors they were forerunners of the persecuting spirit wherever it appears – even when it appears in a “liberal” meeting that winces at “exclusive” Christian messages.

John Whittier, whom Fager acknowledges to have been part of the Orthodox wing of Quakerism, is nevertheless presented as a hero of liberalism because he spoke out against creedalism and in favor of the primacy of the Spirit over the letter as a guide to Truth. This, again, could be called a “liberal” attitude in the broadest sense, and some non-liberal Friends would no doubt dispute it. Yet Whittier was a Christian and I know of no evidence that he thought the Society of Friends should be anything other than a Christian body. Certainly there is no such evidence in this book.

Even Joel Bean, who Fager embraces as a liberal Friend is really not a liberal at all under Fager’s own definition, despite his important role in the history of the liberal Pacific Yearly Meeting. The book recounts how Bean was hounded out of Iowa Yearly Meeting by the Holiness Revival Quakers because of his adherence to more traditional quietist principles, and then hounded out of the meeting he fled to in California. It says that he then founded a new Meeting called the College Park Association of Friends. This Association’s Purpose, according to its own statement, was “To promote the interest of Christianity and morality and to disseminate religious and moral principles,” (italics added). Chuck Fager counts this as a “liberal” statement because of its relative brevity and simplicity. I’m afraid, however, that if Joel Bean were to form such an association among the Quakers of New York Yearly Meeting or Pacific Yearly Meeting today then someone would take him aside and elder him for his “exclusive language”.

Finally, I think that this book carries the weight of unrealistic and contradictory expectations for Quakerism. It wants us to retain a connection to the spiritual vitality and social radicalism of our ancestors, while rejecting as narrow and exclusive the faith and belief that nourished them. In a section of Chapter Four, the book gives us some terms to help us see “How Quakerism Is, and Isn’t Christian”. He tells us that Quakerism is “Christogenic”, “Christomorphic”, “Christogogic”, and “Christophilic”.

Notwithstanding that these quasi-Greek neologism sound ugly to the ear and look pretentious on the page, I found myself gathering enthusiasm when I first saw them. Apparently, I thought, Chuck is here acknowledging that Friends’ faith and practice were born in Christ, shaped by Christ, taught by Christ, and steeped in the love of Christ.

But no. For Chuck, “Christogenic” Quakerism is Quakerism that “emerged from the religious experience and cultural history of Christianity” - - quite a different thing than emerging from a direct experience of Christ himself. Likewise, “Christomorphic” Quakerism is called that because “its institutions and processes reflect explicit efforts to recreate and practice what Friends like William Penn regarded as ‘Primitive Christianity revived’”, and Quakerism is “Christagogic” in that it has “much that it can learn from Christianity, its founder, and its larger Biblical context”. But how and why will Friends who do not believe that Jesus is a living teacher want to keep their focus on the traditions that refer to him? What relevance does the Christian content of Quakerism have, unless we continue to experience Jesus as neither a dead man of history nor a distant figure in Heaven, but as one who has “Come to teach his people himself?” Don’t we already see that some Friends find any ministry that refers “too much” to him as an imposition and even as unQuakerly?

Judging by “A Modest Postscript”, which appears in the stapled typescript version of this book, but not in an earlier bound edition, Chuck Fager himself is aware of this problem. “Our near-universal ignorance of our heritage-Quaker, Christian and biblical-is appalling” he writes.

In summary, if I were to coin a term for the kind of Quakerism that Chuck Fager calls “liberal” and “inclusive”, I think I would call it “inclusivist”. It is almost too new an ism to be recognized as one. By articulating its premises as well as he has, Chuck Fager has made it possible to learn from this ism, but also – I hope – to begin to move beyond it. The best alternative to this inclusivism is not necessarily its direct opposite, “exclusivism”. Rather, I would hope that the future lies with Friends who are less concerned with the boundaries of Quakerism (whether by erasing them or reinforcing them) and more concerned with strengthening its central core.

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Still Converting - A Message from "Rich Evans"

Sifting through my jumble of papers the other day, I happened on an article I wrote in December 1976 (before I married and changed my name). I wrote it in response to an invitation from the Quarterly Meeting for Friends to write something about their spiritual experiences. I found in re-reading this piece that this "Rich Evans" had something to say to Rich Accetta-Evans. I have reproduced the article here in case it also has something to say to someone else.

FROM RICH EVANS
When I first joined Friends in 1969, I felt that I had arrived on a kind of spiritual mountain top, and I expected to climb no further. I felt that the Inner Light was guiding me; that it was sustaining me in a radical lifestyle redeemed from the evils of war and materialism. I was profoundly moved in meetings for worship and often felt the Power of the Spirit like a flood of warmth or a strong rushing stream within me. I was a draft resister, I had very little money, and expected to be in prison soon, yet my predominant mood was joyful.

Jesus, at the time, did not seem to have anything to do with these experiences. He was simply a man who had lived long ago and had perhaps been in touch with the Spirit. The Spirit itself did not seem like a man or a woman but more like an imperonal force. My religious life consisted of trying to tune myself to "It," not of praying to "Him."

Now, a mere 8 years later, I am suprised and happy to report that, for all this excitement and richness, those experiences of 1969 were really only the beginning. I no longer feel myself to be at the top of the mountain because I have seen more of what towers above me. I have gained a deeper sense of how awesome and inexhaustible the Lord our God really is, of how small we are beside Him, and yet of how intimate, tender, personal and sensitive His love for each of us is.

Along the way from there to here I descended all the way from that mountaintop into the deepest despair, weariness, self-disgust. I discovered an element of false pride and self-righteousness which corrupted even my best impulses and blinded me to my worst. I didscovered that my passionate beliefe in "love" did not prevent me from hurting people close to me. I discovered that some of my most cherished views about life were deeply wrong and dangerous to my spiritual health.

At the lowest part of this journey I became involved in a painful separation from someone very close to me. In one especially difficult afternoon, while the pain was sharpest, I found myself feeling not only grief and loss, but angry hatred. This discovery overwhelmed me with disgust for myself, giving way at last to a great bleakness, weariness and heaviness. I felt that there was no way to continue living.

Just then, however, I was "saved", if I may use that word, from my self-inflicted spiritual death. A vision was presented to me. In the vision, Jesus appeared in my path, stretched out His arms to me and said "Come unto me, you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." I knew, as I was seeing this, that Jesus was speaking with the Authority of a fellow-sufferer, a deeply human person, and yet as an example of purity and goodness. Then, although I did not in any obvious way "come" to Him, my weariness and anxiety left me at once. I did not feel elated or ecstatic, nor suddenly sure of what I wanted to do, but I felt rested, relaxed and able to continue living. It was appropriately symbolic that I was able to sleep that night for the first time in days. The rest I found was also a preview of that deeper "rest in the Lord" which I now enjoy in greater measure.

Perhaps surprisingly, this vivid exeperience did not immediatley "convert" me either to the thorough practice of a Christian life or to belief in Christian teachings. I did, however begin to convert. That is, I began to change, to grow, and to turn - however gropingly - toward Christ. I believe that to this very day I am still converting, still emerging into Life from Death, into the "Ocean of Light" from the "Ocean of Darkness".

Such an experience does not, of course, "prove" anything erxcept to whoever has had it. Nor should it be taken as somehow essential to the Christian life. Perhaps it is only when someone is really off the beam, really desparate, that God condescends to use such dramatic and unusual events to get His point across. For me, however, it was a decisive experience which led me eventually to learn several important things, of which I will here mention two:

First, I learned about the reality of sin. I came to see that humanity needs to be rescued from its own destructiveness, both outward and inward. Anyone can see this without adopting speculative views about the after-life. We can see it in the symptoms of spiritual death which abound around us. We can see it in the harvest of war, destruction,l hunger and fear being reaped by people all over the world. But we can see it most plainly of all in our own souls when they ae held to the Light.

Even George Fox, who never reoprts that he outwardly sinned, clearly went through a prolonged struggle with inner weakness and was only rescued by a vioce which said: "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition."

We therefore do the earliest Friends a great injustice, and sap this message of its power, if we suggest that they did not believe in sin or in salvation from sin. More importantly, we do ourselves great harm if we complacently refuse to see the potential for evil within us and shrug off the horrors of the 20th century as if we had no responsibility for them in any way.

The real message of early Friends about sin is more urgent today than ever: not simply that it exists, not simply that Christ will forgive it, buty that through Christ we can overcome it. We can be changed, we can turn away from death and choose life: perhpas not in the thorough and final way that Fox seemed to envisage, but certrainly in a way that makes a real difference, a way that starts us growing instead of dying.

The whole point of early Quaker testimonies was to confront the world with its bondage to sin by demonstrating the alternative: a life in servie to Crist. We cannot maintain a living, relevant, radical testimony today unless we keep in touch with the same Saving Power who was known to our spiritual ancestors.

Second, Ilearned about the reality of "incarnation". On this point it took my theology a long time to catch up with my experience. Even now, the questions reason asks have not been fully answered in my mind. Perhaps they need not be. The important point is this: I no longer think it unworthy of God to become a human being. My vision of Jesus gave me a new picture of God. The effort to define God through negatives as non-personal, non-rational, non-spatial, etc. haslost all appeal to me. I "define" God not at all, but accept His self-revelation, through Jesus. I rejoice in God's willingness to suffer, to love, to care, to forgive, and to lead us.

I suspect that themodern rejection of this idea, among Friends and others, has roots in an unconscious hatred of the created world in general or of the hyuman body in particular. If the material world is made by God, why should he not inhabit it? If the human body is a beautiful temple of the Spirit, why should Jesus not appear in one? Western philosophy has troubled itself a good deal about the proper way to distinguish body from spirit in theory; I think we can take a cue instead from Jesus and concern ourselves with integrating them in practice, and seeking the redemption of both.
- - R.E. December 1976

It is suprising to me that so much of what "Rich Evans" said in 1976 still seems new and fresh to me 30 years later. I've had to relearn some of the same lessons more than once. I might phrase some things differently today - but not as much as you might think. I definitely think I'm still converting.
- - Rich Accetta-Evans

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Responding to Pam

In order to cope with the larger task of responding to the comments on my recent post What This Christian is Looking for in Quakerism, I am going to break it down into the smaller and more agreeable task of responding to some of the individual people who wrote one or more of those comments. I would like to start with Pam, also known by her blogger name of earthfreak.

It was Pam who inspired this post in the first place by asking why I, as a Christian, chose to affiliate with Quakers rather than with some other denomination where I could "cleave to Christian doctrine". After I answered this question to the best of my ability with the new post, Pam continued to participate in the dialogue. One thing she said she wanted to make clear was

...I didn't ask it [i.e. the original question] so much as a challenge, but more out of really wanting to understand your christianity (and come to trust it) and also perhaps in hopes of inspiring understanding of what it feels like to have someone say something that can be interpreted as "I'm not sure you're a real quaker..."

I did understand this and I hope I responded in that spirit. I think it's a good thing for us to ask questions that force each other's unspoken assumptions to become explicit and discussable. In the latter part of the quote above, I guess Pam is saying that some of my own earlier comments could have been interpreted as my saying "I'm not sure you [read: you nontheist, or you non-Christian] are a real Quaker." This is a real problem in this type of dialogue. If any of us has a strong concept of what Quakerism essentially is, we risk offending folks who have come into the same Quaker community with a different concept of what Quakrism essentially is.

Roman Catholics don't have this problem; nor do most Protestants or most kinds of Moslems. I sometimes attend a Roman Catholic church with my wife or my son, and I am on friendly terms with the parishoners. However, I know for certain that I am not a Catholic, and they know I am not a Catholic because the question "what is a Catholic" has been pretty clearly answered over the past 2000 years and there is little chance that either they or I could be confused about it. For example, I do not believe that their bishop in the city of Rome is Christ's vicar on earth, nor that certain of his pronouncements "from the chair of Peter" are infallible. Nor - to take some older and more stable aspects of Catholicism - do I believe that bread and wine are transmuted into the body and blood of Jesus during the ceremony of the mass. I still think that many Catholics are wonderful people, and I am impressed with their Church's stand on certain social issues such as immigration, poverty, capital punishment, and war. (Their official positions on birth control, the roles of men and women, and the dignity and rights of homosexuals are another matter, but I know that many Catholics themselves think differently about those matters, and I imagine that the official position will evolve). My point here is that it would be very unfair for me to accuse the Roman Catholic Church of being "exclusive" because it won't accept me with my present beliefs as a member. My experience is that they are very "inclusive" and open - much more so than any Quaker meeting I know of - and that they would be more than willing they would even be eager to embrace anyone at all who wanted to adopt their faith, undergo the prescribed rituals of baptism and confirmation, etc. There does not seem to be anything snooty or snobbish about social class, education level, or ethnic background in the Roman Catholic Church. It's only because I don't want to be included in that particular faith that I have not been included.

For Quakers in the present historical period, it is more complicated. We lack a common understanding of what constitutes the essence of the faith-community we would or would not like to invite people into. We all want to be accepted by each other, even though we don't necessarily want to accept each other's visions of what it is we are joining. This leads to awkward situations. For example, I recently gave a message in Meeting about engaging with rather than retreating from the world. In it, I referred in passing to the world itself as "the world God made and the world God loves". After Meeting, a Friend told me that I should have clarified this was only my belief and not a Quaker belief. She was upset that someone might equate it with "scientific creationism". If I weren't already pretty confident of my status as a Quaker-in-good-standing I might have thought "ooops. made a mistake. I guess this isn't a Christian religion after all. I don't belong here." Conversely, if that particular Friend had read my article "What Is It With the Quakers and Jesus Christ?" she might have thought "ooops. I thought this was a non-doctrinal group. I didn't realize it was a bunch of Christians. Guess I'd better join someone else." The fact is that both she and I have already been accepted into the Quaker community. Neither of us has particular standing to define Quakerism for the other. But both of us have freedom to witness to the Quaker faith as we understand it. We both also have some responsibility to understand the tradition that was handed down to us, and not to promulgate mistaken notions about what that tradition was orginally. I think it is an essential and often-neglected task of our Ministry and Counsel or equivalent committees to give people information about that tradition.

Where does that leave Pam and me? I don't think Pam wants to exclude me from her vision of Quakerism, but I think she might (I say might becaue obviously I don't know) be a little uneasy with me if I were part of her Meeting. I also don't want to exclude Pam. If she moved to New York, I would welcome her into my Meeting, but I would not stop testifying about Christ in Meeting even if she, as a non-theist, found this testimony off-putting (Again, I am not saying she would find it off-putting; some non-theists do and some don't).

Pam went on to comment on the vision of the "church", a vision articulated by George Fox and early Quakers, that I had pointed to in my post. Pam said:

You [i.e. I, Rich]said:

no Christian denominations even trying to be the "church" as I understand that term, whereas the Quaker movement at least started out with that aim.

That resonates with me. It's pretty much why christianity never 'grabbed' me in the first place. I guess what I wonder is how much it matters whether others use the same language to discuss building the church (of course, in a real building project, it's easier if everyone agrees on what's a brick as opposed to a nail, but then, you could call a board a plank and probably still get it done) I personally feel called to build "the chruch" - but not to worship Jesus (which I believe that he himself wouldn't want) My question is whether we can still work together, and my hope is that we can

It sounds here as if maybe Pam and I are coming pretty close to each other's vision, with just a minor terminology problem remaining in the way. And maybe we are much closer than our rhetoric would suggest. I certainly recognize that there are lots of traps in words. But I confess I am quite confused about what Pam is saying here. The heart of my description of the church was this:

...it is a body of people who are so united to Christ Jesus (the "true head" that Fox referred to) and to each other that they have become one body, able as a body to serve Him and witness for Him, and to do the kind of prophetic and reconciling work (not to mention humble service) that He did in the flesh before his crucifixion and resurrection. They will do His works because they allow Him to guide them.

Pam's response is that she wants to build this church but not to worship Christ. It sounds as if the identity of the "true head" of the church is pretty much a side-issue for her. But in my description it was the issue. I am not really hung up on the name. Call him Christ, call him Jesus, call him Yeshua, call him Moshiach, call him Son of God, call him Son of Man, call him Rabbi, call him Prophet, call him Carpenter, Call him Servant: just so we know we're talking about that guy who gave his life and took it up again sometime around 33 C.E. I'm sure we can work together on all kinds of good causes even if you have no interest in this particular person. If you believed in God but didn't believe in Jesus I'm sure we could even worship God together. I myself worshipped God before I came to see a unity between God and Jesus, and I'm convinced that I was worshipping the same God all along. But if you don't want to worship God and you don't want to worship Jesus, if you don't even think that God or Jesus are alive and available to worship, then I don't think you want to build the "church" that I was talking about.

Again, this is the kind of issue that is important or not depending on what side of it you come down on. If you don't think Christ Jesus is alive, it really isn't all that important whether the rest of your faith community believes in him or not. If you do think he is alove, nothing else is more important than finding a faith community in which all can listen to him together and unite in his service. It's as if you wanted to visit your mother on mother's day and wanted to welcome your partner to come along. Your partner wouldn't be "getting it" if his or her answer were "Great. Let's go. But let's drive to the beach instead of your hometown. What does it matter if we call it 'Ocean' or 'Mom'?"

Pam went on to discuss the fireside chat analogy in which in which I compared the voice of Christ in the Meeting to the voice of FDR on the radio during WWII. The purpose of the analogy was to explore the question of the speaker's identity was imoprtant to how/whether we gather together to hear his voice. She identified herself as one of the "mechanical voice" people in the analogy, and rejected those (i.e. the theists or Christians) who think there is "some kind of magic going on and are attentive to that, rather than the truth or non-truth of the message". I think this really is the nub of all that is different between Pam's point of view and mine on this issue. I really do think there is "some kind of magic" going on in Quaker meeting (though I'd prefer the term "miracle" to "magic").

Pam went on to explain that she would not want to base her acceptance of a message on who its speaker was, but on its inherent truth and goodness. She puts this very well as follows:

So, if Jesus says "love your neighbor" and you are inspired to do it because he's Jesus, and I'm inspired to do it because it sounds like a damn good idea, I'm not doing it as well? I suppose I can understand that, because I think just the reverse. I think Jesus said a really lot of good stuff, but if he came back and retracted it, I wouldn't give it up just cause he said so (unless some new revelation made it clear to me, I guess.)

This points at a very deep issue of theology that could get the inquiring mind running in circles for centuries: Are good actions good because God wills them, or does God will them because they are good? I despair of a good logical answer, becaue the reality of "goodness" and the reality of "God" are so entwined with each other at a deep level that I can't see how to separate them for analysis. But in practical terms, if I thought I heard "Jesus" recanting His own basic teachings I think I would doubt my "hearing" before I doubted the teachings. The early Quakers' letter to Charles II said "the Spirit of Truth by which we are guided is not changeable so as to move us away from a thing as evil and again to move us unto it." (quoted only from memory, apologies for any departure from accuracy).

I set out to respond to all of Pam's comments in response to my post. I have spent so long on just the first comment she posted, that I'm afraid I'll have to postpone my responses to the others.

I expect I'll be hearing from Friends in the meantime.

Peace and Good Will,
- - Rich Accetta-Evans

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An Oasis - Not a Fortress

Friends,

I have had to be away from my blog for awhile because of other absolutely overwhelming real-life events. Last Saturday, sensing the light at the end of the tunnel, I sat down to write a humongous post basically catching up on all the comments re my last post What this Christian Is Looking for in Quakerism, but after I'd been writing for over two hours I saw the futility of even trying to respond to everything everybody said. There were just too many good comments for that. And, besides, I realized that I don't really have to have the last word in every conversation.

Today, I'd like to comment more briefly on some of the major themes. Then next week I'll try to go back and answer some particular questions people have asked me in more detail.

First, some people from varying points of view responded tenderly and respectfully to what I had said about a vivid personal experience of Christ more than 30 years ago. I just want to say that I appreciated these comments very much. Robin said something particularly meaningful to me about how learning of this experience made her feel "less unbalanced" about her own. Robin has written elsewhere (I can't find it any more but surely it was on her blog?) about what her experience was and I recall thinking at the time that it was really very similar to mine. Robin also said something about me "ministering to [her] personally" by telling about this experience. Since I am a great admirer of Robin and her husband Chris, perceiving that they seem to have a more consistent real-life spiritual practice than I do, it was very gratifying to me to hear that I may have in any way been a "minister" to Robin.

Second, I thought it was fascinating how different people riffed on the theme of my analogy between listening to the Light or Voice of Christ and listening to FDR's fireside chats. Some people elaborated the metaphor, others changed it in various ways so that it conveyed their own differing understandings of the real situation. I think all of this must have helped us understand each other a little better. To me, it does matter whether the voice we hear in worship is Christ or not, though I'm sure that I would still know it was saying good things even if I couldn't identify the speaker. I think there are other voices we could be listening to, as Marshall suggested, that would be less benign. These other voices might be the voices of things like nationalism, materialism, etc. They might be the internalized voices of our parents, our peer groups, our nation, etc. In theory, I think they might be the actual voices of other "spirits", though I have no experience of any such thing. At the same time, I felt a tad uncomfortable with some of the critical discussion of other religions. I really don't know anything about Krishna, and I accept Marshall's testimony based on his experience of Hinduism that there may be some Krishna-worshippers who are into some bad things. But Hinduism is such a vast religion with so many hundreds of millions of followers that I feel totally unqualified to make generalizations about it. It seems likely to me that many Hindus are truly guided by God (and hence - as I see it - by Christ). That doesn't mean that Hindus are Christians, of course, and I doubt that in practice a serious Hindu would want to join a group of people who saw themselves as looking for guidance from the living voice of Jesus Christ. I don't think there are many groups of either non-Christians or non-Quaker-Christians who even claim to base their practice on listening to the living, speaking voice of God, under any name, so in a sense it's pretty theoretical to drag other religions into the conversation when we're discussing voices and names of same.

To revert to the fireside chat analogy, this is where I think we are as a group of Friends: We all came to the fireside chat of Quakerism by explicit or implicit invitation from someone or something. For example, some of us came because we were invited by our parents, some by other Friends, some - less explicitly - by learning of the existence of Quakers through their public testimony, through reading about them in history books or whatever. The problem is that we came to the chat with different expectations. I came wanting to listen to FDR (the unlikely Christ-representative of our analogy) because I see him as a person who I love and trust and look to for guidance. Some came wanting to listen to whoever-that-guy-is (or whoever-or-whatever-that-voice-is) on the radio and they are willing to trust and follow him as long as what he says conforms to beliefs they already have about right and wrong and what is going on in the world. There may be still others who just want to spin the dial and see who else might be on the radio. All of us are a little befuddled about this situation, but here we are together and we have to make the best of it.

I very well understand how one might not think that it was important to identify the One who speaks to us as Jesus Christ. If I did not identify Him as such, I probably wouldn't think it was important either. But since I do believe He is Christ -- that He is a Person who loves us and who suffered for us -- then I do believe it is important to acknowledge Him. For me to not acknowledge Him would seem ungrateful and disloyal. In other words, this is an inherently asymmetric question. How you regard its importance may well depend on what you think its answer is.

On the other hand, my need to acknowledge Christ doesn't in itself create a need for anyone else to do so. If I need a group in which we can acknowledge Him and listen to Him together (as I do) this doesn't mean that others can't also sit in on the group while thinking of its purpose somewhat differently. But it will always be an awkward situation.

Another theme I'd like to comment on is Marshall's idea (actually, the classical Quaker idea) of "the hedge". This is the idea that one goal of some Quaker practices is to create a protected space for our faith - one where we won't be overexposed to non-Quaker influences that might be harmful. These outside influences might be "unsound" theological ideas, worldly attitudes toward war, toward hierarchy and inequality, toward consumerism, or whatever. In certain periods of Quaker history and perhaps in certain pockets of Quakerism today (such as the Iowa Yearly Meeting Conservative that Marshall belongs to) this has been part of the reason for Quaker disciplinary practices, for separate Quaker schools, for "peculiar" Quaker dress and speech, and so on. Although in other respects I suppose I am much more of a "conservative" than "liberal" Quaker (how oddly either of those labels fits with Quakeism!), I am not much of a proponent for the "hedge" idea. To me, it feels like a defensive and fear-based approach to maintaining our identity. The very earliest Quakers weren't trying to protect a little enclave from the world: they were trying to launch an offensive on the world. They assumed that in interactions between "the people of God" and "the world's people" the "people of God" would be perfectly safe and the "world's people" would be challenged and maybe changed. The "hedge" became a central concept after Quakerism had stopped expanding, after the most blatant persecutions had ceased for the most part, and when succeeding generations sought just to live in peace among themselves. John Woolman's ministry thrived during this period, as well as that of many others less well known, so one can hardly generalize that the "hedge" always led to spiritual deadness. Yet in the long run I think that was its tendency. People who were brought up with Quakerism as a "tradition" that was never really questioned or tested against others' beliefs gradually lost a really vital conviction of its truth, or a sense of connection to what motivated its founding. So then, when new ideas arose in the world around or when new challenges presented themselves, the Quaker tradition itself was no longer supple enough to adapt from within. In the long run no hedge is high enough to keep out the world. Challenges to our faith will come, and it's better for us to meet them with a tested, living, flexible faith than a protected and brittle one.

So, since I've had some luck with proposing analogies that get people talking, here's another one: Can we think of Quakerism as indeed having a boundary and identity, but not one that is either sharply drawn or marked by a fence or hedge or wall? A fortress has a wall. An oasis in the desert is a bounded place, easily distinguished from the surrounding barrenness, but it needs no fence. Its character comes from the water that bubbles up at its center, and from the life that grows around it. I want to settle with other water-lovers around the well of living water which Jesus spoke of to the woman of Samaria.

I could elaborate at greater length (and probably will eventually) but this post, too, has now taken quite a while to write. I am closing it now and will await any comments.

Peace of Christ,
Richard

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