About Quakers

[I was invited to talk about Quakers for my wife's adult Sunday school class at St Mark's Episcopal Church nearby, which I normally attend on my way to Meeting. What I told them is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, but is not a description agreed to by any official Quaker body.

This post was short enough to read in the first week's session, together with short portions of George Fox's Journal and Pacific Yearly Meeting's Faith and Practice. The next post is twice as long; I passed out copies and simply talked about it. The class has asked me back for a third presentation tomorrow in which I hope to respond more adequately to some questions raised by the first two posts.

I hope these three pieces, while far from complete, will be helpful to others trying to explain who we are and how we got this way...]
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Since our beginnings in the 1640's, almost everything one could truly say about Quakers has changed. Even the name 'Religious Society of Friends' was a late afterthought, for a movement which its adherents described variously as 'Children of Light,' 'Friends of the Light', 'Friends of Truth', 'Friends', 'The Elect People of God Who in Scorn Are Called Quakers', or simply those 'in the Truth.'

With 'Continuing Revelation' among our earliest doctrines, transformations would seem quite natural, but there's more to it than that. We have evolved an organizational structure and form of worship capable of accommodating practically any imaginable content, and within those forms we disagree drastically with one another and with our founders. At one end of the spectrum of Quaker faith and practice some of the Friends' Churches can barely be distinguished from 'Conservative' protestant worship services; other Friends' Churches and Meetings incorporate periods of silent worship ranging from most of the service down to a token few minutes. There are 'Conservative Friends', often politically liberal, upholding the practices of 18th and 19th Century American Meetings. The most widespread Meetings are those of 'Liberal' Friends, which generally maintain a strict one hour period, in which silence is the norm, but anyone who feels 'led' by the Spirit to speak must do so.

Many 'Liberal', 'unprogrammed' Meetings, such as my own, have been overwhelmingly secular-humanist for a very long time; it is only in recent years that we've acquired people and organizations proudly proclaiming themselves 'Nontheist Friends.' Some of these simply object to ways that people have habitually misinterpreted the word “God”; most of them are more-or-less frankly atheist. The Meetings themselves tend to a tacit 'Don't ask; don't tell!' policy that renders us practically incapable of saying what, if anything, we collectively believe.

I am left wondering: How did the greatest outpouring of Spirit in the English Reformation turn into the obsessively solemn, ingrown Quietist sect of the 18th Century, merge disasterously with the Evangelical movements of the 19th Century and split into hostile factions, one of which produced the smug and comfortable congregations of modern Liberal Meetings? And is this how we are meant to end?

Looking at all churches as failed religious experiments – I can say that this particular failure has been remarkably fruitful and illuminating.

Why Are We So Peculiar? Should It Matter?
We've called ourselves “a peculiar people” via a 17th Century usage of the term, meaning that we considered ourselves 'a people' who were God's personal property, a 'chosen people.' At the time, like many among the early Christians, we probably considered ourselves a replacement people, a new people who were being called into existence because the previous examples hadn't worked out.

For the founders, we also represented the recreation of the apostolic Christian church, as it had been “before the Apostasy” – one of many efforts the Puritan movement made in this direction, but one which read the Christian scriptures in a radically spiritualized sense to produce a universalist Christian perfectionist sect which affirmed an entirely different foundation for doctrinal authority. The resulting position was considered radically Protestant by Catholics, while patriotic English Protestants accused us of being closet Catholics.

Our unique solution to that question of human religious authority had put us squarely on a radical third side of the Reformation. In the 19th Century the major Friends' institution shied away from the implications of this earlier doctrine, and none of the major modern divisions seem altogether comfortable with them.

Specifically, our earliest traditions locate religious authority in Christ alive within each human being, ruling in us so far as we can remain attentive and loyal to that.

This stand might be traced to the decisive moment in George Fox's religious development, after he had studied the Bible to the point of knowing it almost verbatim, and consulted with the most spiritually-illuminated advisors anyone could recommend to him -- and still found himself with no firm sense of a revelation he could trust.

In a state of near-despair, he heard a voice saying: “There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to your condition.” Despite his familiarity with the Bible and the many contemporary Puritan insights that can be traced in his journal and many epistles, this is where he found his own insights: "This I saw in the pure openings of the Light, without the help of any man, neither did I know where to find it in the Scriptures, though afterwards, searching the Scriptures, I found it. For I saw in that Light and Spirit which was before Scripture was given forth, and which led the holy men of God to give them forth, that all must come to that Spirit, if they would know God or Christ or the Scriptures aright, which they that gave them forth were led and taught by."

In a nation haunted by expectations of Jesus' imminent return, the chief point of early Quaker experience and belief was that Christ was already here within each human soul, that “Christ has come to teach his people himself.” In Cromwell's England, linked to the popular resentment against paying tithes to a national Church which had not served people in many districts for years, this movement grew rapidly, was wildly popular in some areas but was also widely feared, despised, and persecuted, as likely to undermine and destroy all social order.

The doctrine that God's Spirit lives in each human soul seems to be embedded in all world religions; and Fox had found it implied by his readings of the Bible... but most religious traditions keep it disguised. As an abstract idea, it sounds like trying to put a big box into a little one... but as intuited fact, it's perfectly commonplace.

As a principle of Church government, it's quite tricky to embody. If Christ's government comes by Christ governing each person, who has the right to tell whom what that person should or shouldn't be doing?

In 1656 James Naylor rode a donkey into Bristol, with a crowd of his admirers throwing their coats into his path, chanting "Holy, holy, holy" and clearly intending to reenact Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. Soon afterwards he was arrested and tried for blasphemy -- and though his answers to the authorities clearly show that he was not claiming that "James Naylor is the Messiah", that was how the incident was generally interpreted. As Naylor had been an eloquent and prominent preacher for the Quaker movement, our opponents were eager to see him in the worst light and impose the severest punishment possible, while his rivals among us were quick to distance themselves. Most modern Friends consider that Naylor gravely mistook his leading, and that his case showed a real need for the tighter forms of Quaker organization that began around this time.

Since that date there has been a continuing tension in Friends' customs and institutions, between the sanctity of individual inspiration, and the group authority people feel more safe within.

Relying on group processes to 'discern' truth and/or to "test leadings" is itself a dubious process; there are plenty of examples, Quaker examples among them, of groups which have simply amplified the mistakes of their members. But somehow Quakers seem more inclined to trust the validity of a statement "approved" by a Meeting, as though they'd hadn't just been trying to discern God's will in a matter, but had made it official.

Walt Whitman, heavily influenced by Quakers but never a member, wrote that one should "take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or any number of men" -- and this entirely opposite feeling is also a persistent element of the Quaker message.

Next week I hope to go a little deeper into these difficulties and how they have played out in our history and practice over the centuries.

About Quakers 2

Our main sacrament, the Quaker Meeting for Worship, has also changed considerably over the centuries, in accord with changes of doctrine and the balance between individual initiative and group dominance.

Most people, including most Quakers, would probably not think we had what other Christians call sacraments, but this terminology does help compare our practice to theirs. Along with the basic 'meeting for worship', I would include meetings for occasions such as marriage, death, or business -- while Dan Snyder titled a recent pamphlet (published by our study center at Pendle Hill) 'Quaker Witness As Sacrament' (ie political activism as a religious practice that can help connect and align us with God.)

The Quaker meeting for business has been traced to the customs of village government in northern England -- while the first meetings for worship were apparently those of people called 'Seekers' active in that same area.

These Seekers were one of several Christian sects who'd abandoned all church ceremonies except silently waiting for God (to clarify which practices He truly wanted of them.) How and when they'd begun this, how much they'd combined with prayer and discussion, was not recorded. People accused of being 'Seekers' had been subject to governmental persecution until Cromwell's reign, and some mob violence even then. But George Fox found himself at home among them. Some Friends in Nottingham wrote later that: "We never heard the name of the Children of Light given to us before the coming of George Fox amongst us," but had felt a "blessed fellowship" with him and those of that name ever since "George Fox preached the Light of Christ unto us as the Guide to eternal life from whence it came, to all that was willing to follow it..."

The first regular Quaker meeting in London was at the Bull and Mouth Tavern -- probably because this was a site open to religious debate, while people of the time (Fox included) drank ale as a matter of course. [Quaker attitudes toward alcohol changed considerably by the 19th Century, when Stephen Grellet resolved to hold a Quaker Meeting in every pub in Dublin.] Normally the first Meetings in a town might take place anywhere a travelling preacher was expected, or [if not expected] could arrange. He or (sometimes) she would wait silently, sometimes a considerable period, before speaking at all, and then might continue talking for hours afterwards.

If enough people were 'convinced', they would begin meeting together on a regular basis, probably in the home of a sympathetic local worthy. When the first Quaker meeting houses were constructed, they were built for a program in which certain people would be most likely to speak while others were expected to listen; the bulk of the group sat on benches facing forward while the 'facing benches' for recognized 'ministers' were built up like small bleachers.

A wooden partition could be drawn down the center of the room to separate the men's side of the room from the women's. This was not done in meetings for worship -- but to separate men's and women's meetings for business. Fox had insisted on instituting such women's meetings, against considerable opposition -- which women supporters responded to, on at least one occasion, with mooing & clucking sounds. (It was not until the late 19th Century that the partition was taken down in London Yearly Meeting, followed a few years later by the selection of their first woman Clerk.) Women's meetings typically undertook different sorts of business... but with fairly equivalent degrees of importance, responsibility, expenditures involved.

Upstairs there would typically be galleries where children would be decorously parked for the duration. There's a traditional rhyme I first heard from a 7th Day Adventist, a former Pennsylvania resident:
"Quaker meeting has begun:
No more laughter, no more fun."

We have a more favorable account from Rufus Jones, raised in a rural Quaker community in 19th Century Maine: " “Very often in these meetings for Worship, there were long periods of silence … I do not think that anyone ever told me what the silence was for. It does not seem necessary to explain Quaker silence to children. They feel what it means …
“Sometimes a real spiritual wave would sweep over the Meeting in these silent hushes, which made me feel very solemn and which carried me – careless boy that I was – down into something deeper than my own thoughts, gave me a momentary sense of that Spirit who has been the life and light of people in all ages and in all lands.”

But generally, passing a parent's religious fervour on to the children, who have grown up in entirely different circumstances, where different ideas are in fashion -- children to whom those convincing first hand experiences are merely hearsay -- has been as difficult for us as it was for the Puritans, and continues so to this day.

The earliest Quaker meetings were accused of being loud and emotional, with new converts literally groaning with remorse as they saw their ways and their conventional religious foundations undermined. Margaret Fell's account, of the effects of Fox's preaching when she first encountered it in her church: "And so he went on, and said, 'That Christ was the Light of the world, and lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and that by this light they might be gathered to God,' &c. I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine, for I had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the scriptures, and said, "The scriptures were the prophets' words, and Christ's and the apostles' words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord': and said, "Then what had any to do with the scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, "Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;" but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?" &c. This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, 'We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves.'"

But when the monarchy returned to power, while persecutions increased and the hopes of universal spiritual awakening diminished, Friends underwent a significant shift of emphasis. Preaching addressed to The World diminished; while more and more Friends were striving merely to live and worship together in separation from its ways.

The resulting Quaker orientation has been called 'Quietism', after a contemporary spiritual movement among contemplative Catholics, the best known of these being Fenelon and Madame Guyon. Their books became popular among Quakers, who shared their distrust of the natural human will -- but that distrust had also been a prominent element in Puritan theology and the Quaker doctrines that developed from it.

Robert Barclay (for many of us still The Authority on traditional Quaker theology) in Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 1678:

"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... " [Barclay included an elaborate argument in disagreement with the Calvinists, as to whether babies were born damned. He insisted that they would first need to commit some actual sin – but given those carnal little natures, such transgressions were all too likely.]

John Woolman, the best-known 18th Century Quaker (far better admired than Fox, these days) was engaged in life-long struggle against taking any action or decision "in his own will." During a crucial yearly meeting session: "I was deeply engaged in inward cries to the Lord for help, that I might stand wholly resigned, and move only as He might be pleased to lead me."

Later, coming out of a fever, he "heard a soft melodious voice, more pure and harmonious than any I had heard with my ears before; I believed it was the voice of an angel who spake to the other angels; the words were, 'John Woolman is dead.' " This, he gratefully concluded, "meant no more than the death of my own will."

But Woolman was only one of many 'Quietist' Friends actively engaged in reforming social conditions in the 18th and 19th Centuries. (His particular contribution was persuading American Quakers to give up slave-owning, which they did in the mid 1770's.)

The significant change was that The Light, for most Friends, had stopped being an experience and had become a doctrine.

The consequence was an increasing reliance on outward signs and practices. If a sacrament can be an outward sign of a spiritual reality -- Then that outward sign can easily be done in the absence of what it's meant to show -- a fact that had prompted the whole Puritan upheaval in the first place, and led the first Quakers to reject the various Puritan alternatives as well.

When Samuel Bownas was growing up as one of the first Quakers born into an existing Meeting, he says he "had little consideration of religion, nor any taste thereof." But one day "A young woman named Anne Wilson was there and preached; she was very zealous, and fixing her eye upon me, she with a great zeal pointed her finger at me, uttering these words with much power, 'A traditional Quaker: Thou comest to meeting as thou went from it (the last time) and goes from it as thou came to it, but art no better for thy coming; what wilt thou do in the end?'" Overwhelmed, Bownas went on to become a traveling preacher himself, and was imprisoned for this half a year in the American colonies.

When he returned, Bownas was puzzled to sense a new deadness in Meetings there, an obstacle to his own preaching. "I found it very hard work in many places, and in some meetings was quite shut up, but where the people who did not profess with us came in plentifully it was not so, there being an open door." He asked another Friend "why it seemed more dead amongst Friends in this nation now, than in some other places. He gave this as a reason, that ‘the professors of truth in that nation were very strict and exact in some things, and placed much in outward appearance, but too much neglected the reformation and change of the mind, and having the inside thoroughly cleansed from pride and iniquity, for thou knowest,' said he, ‘the leaven of the Pharisees was always hurtful to the life of religion in all shapes.'"

The doctrine that Christ's followers can and should be "perfect", that any contrary, 'reasonable' position was merely "preaching up sin", soon brought all Friends under the relentless discipline of their Meeting overseers -- who were necessarily limited to regulating outward behavior.

Backsliding was a fact of life, and overseers were typically patient and forgiving -- after sincere repentance, public confession, and the return to life in accord with Friends' principles. These were strictly upheld, sometimes at considerable cost and suffering, sometimes to great advantage, often with strange and ironic consequences.

When Quaker merchants first refused to ask for more money than seemed fair, it initially cost them business from people accustomed to friendly dickering. And then it brought increased business, people grateful not to worry about being cheated. Denied access to respectable professions, Quakers turned to banking, and prospered. Reluctant to deal in hard liquor, some got rich selling chocolate.

The witness against established, compulsorily public-supported clergy -- was popular, and no doubt facilitated the initial spread of the Quaker movement. It also demanded a principled resistance to paying tithes -- leading to widespread imprisonment and looting of Quaker possessions. Steadfast Quaker resistance then led to reluctant public admiration and trust. But this witness also contributed to Quaker isolation, since marrying outside the group implied accepting clerical services.  From an online local history: "One problem which continued to plague Third Haven Friends throughout the colonial period was the 'temptation' offered by the presence of Anglican ministers, especially where the youth were concerned. From time to time young Quakers would run to the priest to be married, especially those who were too young, those who did not have their parent’s approval, and those who were first cousins and therefore too closely related to receive Quaker permission to wed.  James Clayland, the Anglican minister at St.Michaels, and others from time to time, seemed to encourage the children of Quakers to come along for a quick marriage."

This was by far the most common of the many deviations that could lead to Friends being 'disowned.' A geneological site lists: "fiddling, dancing, drinking intoxicating liquor to excess, serving in the militia or other armed forces, using profane language, fighting, failure to meet financial obligations, marrying contrary to the order used by Friends, deviation from plainness in apparel or speech, joining another religious society, etc."  Another site: "It would be necessary to make amends in writing to the satisfaction of a committee of members of the monthly meeting if they wished to remain Quakers. Sometimes the spouse adopted the Quaker faith and was received by request. If the Quakers were unwilling to make amends for their actions they would be dismissed from the monthly meeting." If they really couldn't regret their action, this would be hard to do honestly, and by the mid 1850's British Friends noticed that disowning young members for marriage was causing a significant long-term decline in numbers. In 1859 they abandoned it, an example soon followed by yearly meetings elsewhere.

The Free Quakers, a splinter group of Quakers disowned for participating in the Revolutionary War, dissipated over several decades as members died off and/or returned to their original Meetings. In the Civil War, some southern Quakers died in prison for refusing to fight, while many northern Friends enlisted in what they considered a necessary war against slavery. After the war, they were generally welcomed home without censure; and since then Quakers have largely left such decisions to the individual conscience, a significant number of us being conscientious objectors and a significant number fighting.

The witness against slavery -- first led to the most fervent advocates being disowned for stirring up dissention in Meeting. When the Society of Friends did renounce slavery, those in the southern United States often became estranged from their neighbors; and significant numbers migrated northwest into Ohio and Indiana. There, isolated from larger Quaker organizations, heavily influenced by Methodist neighbors and the tent meetings of travelling preachers, they often adopted worship practices -- even the hiring of pastors -- typical of Protestant Christianity.

But the schisms that eventually split the American Quaker bodies reflected a different conflict: between rural congregations focused on traditional practices, vs those same evangelical movements at work among the increasingly wealthy leadership of the major bodies. [A large, cluttered wall chart of the resulting branches is available for anyone who wants the full story.] Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's history site observes that: "No definitive account nor interpretation [of the schisms] has gained universal assent among Friends even today," precisely because the differences that produced them remain, as any reader of Quaker websites and mailing lists can confirm.

Online, you'll find that most Friends today are pretty traditional Christians -- even in the United States. Outside of a few heavily-Quaker areas, however, the typical practice will be silent meetings for worship, everyone on chairs facing the same forward direction, or else facing inward in a square or round arrangement, for roughly an hour.

This is apparently typical of modern Conservative Friends as well, although they do keep up the traditional practice of "recording ministers" -- officially recognizing individuals unusually gifted in preaching, seeking to train them in distinguishing and giving true messages, while (so far as possible) restraining any erratic personal impulses that might seem briefly plausible. In rural communities, in past centuries, says Lloyd Lee Wilson: "Friends used to attend two meetings for worship on First Day, each considerably longer than an hour, and gathered as well on Fifth Day mornings... Beyond this, daily devotions including reading the Bible and waiting worship were the standard practice in every household."

It's pretty clear that one hour a week isn't enough to achieve ongoing intimacy with God. It's also clear that studying the scriptures, or maintaining traditional Quaker practices, or taking part in church services won't necessarily do it either. God has provided 'sacraments', 'yogas' -- practices that can make it possible -- but what people typically want instead is far too modest: to find dependable, safe ways to control the universe as if it were an insensate, mechanical object. Magic was one way of doing this; science is another. Religious movements start when a few people encounter the universe as a living, conscious Being -- but each such movement so far has soon ossified into what Walter Wink called 'methodolatry'. Friends and our practices have followed that pattern all too well, and now, like many other contemporary religious groups we stand in serious need of renewal. Many of us are yearning and striving for that; many others just want (as John Rowntree once put it) to have Christ "leave me alone in this life, and save me in the next." Only God can bring hope to this situation -- but God keeps right on working on us.

About Quakers 3 (Some questions)

I've been asked two questions about these discussions: What did I mean about "failed religious experiments"? and Could I say more about the schisms? Finding these questions intimately related, I'll try to respond to both together.

George Fox's mission as he described it:

"Now when the Lord God and His Son Jesus Christ sent me forth into the world, to preach His everlasting gospel and kingdom, I was glad that I was commanded to turn people to that inward light, spirit, and grace, by which all might know their salvation, and their way to God; even that divine Spirit which would lead them into all Truth, and which I infallibly knew would never deceive any.

"But with and by this divine power and spirit of God, and the light of Jesus, I was to bring people off from all their own ways, to Christ, the new and living way; and from their churches, which men had made and gathered, to the Church in God, the general assembly written in heaven which Christ is the head of: and off from the world's teachers, made by men, to learn of Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life, of whom the Father said, "This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him"; and off from all the world's worships, to know the Spirit of truth in the inward parts, and to be led thereby; that in it they might worship the Father of spirits, who seeks such to worship Him; which Spirit they that worshipped not in, knew not what they worshipped. And I was to bring people off from all the world's religions, which are vain; that they might know the pure religion, might visit the fatherless, the widows, and the strangers, and keep themselves from the spots of the world; then there would not be so many beggars, the sight of whom often grieved my heart, to see so much hard-heartedness amongst them that professed the name of Christ. And I was to bring them off from all the world's fellowships, and prayings, and singings, which stood in forms without power, that their fellowship might be in the Holy Ghost, and in the Eternal Spirit of God; that they might pray in the Holy Ghost, and sing in the Spirit, and with the grace that comes by Jesus; making melody in their hearts to the Lord, who hath sent His beloved Son to be their Saviour, and caused His heavenly sun to shine upon all the world, and through them all, and His heavenly rain to fall upon the just and the unjust as His outward rain doth fall, and His outward sun doth shine on all, which is God's unspeakable love to the world..."

Briefly, Fox was called to turn people away from all previous ways of embodying worship, which had proved futile, towards complete reliance on the spirit of God at work in them, which would lead them into all truth.

Within his own lifetime, estranged followers were accusing Fox of imposing his own improper constraints on the Spirit. And by 1907, Warren Wilson remarks [Quaker Hill: A Sociological Study]: "Of religious ceremonies the Quakers claim to have none. But they are fond of ceremoniousness beyond most men. The very processes by which they abolish forms are made formal processes. They have ceremonies the intent of which is to free them from ceremony. The meeting is called to order by acts ever so simple, and dismissed by two old persons shaking hands; but these are invariable and formal as a doxology and a benediction."

Now if such ceremonious ways embodied the work of God's spirit effectively, more effectively than those practices Fox denounced, their ceremonious nature would not be a significant issue -- But the existence of schisms within his movement implies that its simple new ceremonies are not uniformly effective.

I'm not saying that God objects to differences in religious concepts, or friendly conflict about them, or fragmentation of human religious "authority"; all these things are probably within God's intention, and certainly have proved useful for God's purposes. What schisms demonstrate is that our practice has not uniformly convinced Friends that it alone can do the job -- because we divided on the issue of whether certain beliefs were also necessary, and remain so divided.

Worse, our history doesn't just undermine Quaker interpretations which I know to be true; it casts doubt on an essential piece of Christianity: that the Spirit of God will lead believers "into all truth". This isn't just the obvious loophole: that Jesus doesn't say 'how fast' or 'when' we are to receive such truth, or whether this means "every bit of it in one chunk" or merely "truth continuing to grow without limit." This is the same apparent lapse in God's universal benevolence that allows for the existence of "false prophets" -- and thereby undermines all assurances that anyone whatsoever can have valid faith in God's revelations to himself or anyone else.

Some false prophets might be psychopaths or con men, lacking faith or scuples -- but I would expect self-deception to be more common; and that's the most plausible explanation for the two examples I'm acquainted with among modern Friends.

In one case, a member of the Meeting had gone missing. He'd led an erratic life before becoming a member; and his friends were worried. The story is that another member rose to deliver a message: that ____ was dead but his spirit was happy and at peace, he blamed no one and they should not feel any guilt for his leaving. He was surprised to hear about this when he returned to town a few weeks later.

In the other case, a respected scholar and publisher of early Quaker writings, an emphatically devout Christian, announced a place and date on which Jesus would return to locally establish the Kingdom; all ailments would be healed and no one would die within the Farmington, Maine city limits from that date forward. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who would have been pleasantly surprised if this had happened; but I doubt that anyone but the prophet herself actually expected it.

The common element I see in both examples was a craving for certainty, on matters where it just wasn't available. 'Faith' can mean trust, whether appropriate or misplaced -- but as Jesus uses the word I see another meaning: having implicit faith in what one knows intuitively, faith in the 'word' which God continually speaks within each person. That is really the essence of the Quaker belief system -- but it is not a belief system, or faith in a belief system. The fact that Friends could condemn and separate from each other, in defense of differing belief systems, shows that in some sense we really didn't get it.

I've heard Quakerism defined as an "orthopraxy, not an orthodoxy." That is, Liberal Friends consider us a movement based on 'right practice' rather than 'right doctrine.' But by the time of the first major schism in 1827, we had been practicing over a hundred years, two days a week and twice on Sundays, daily at home with the Bible. "Quaker worship" as a formally-practiced form of worship, was unmasked as yet another 'vain form.'

The triggering event was controversy over the popular preaching of Elias Hicks. The 1827 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was divided on whether he should be disowned; and by 1828 there were two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings: 'Hicksite' and 'Orthodox.'

As one of my teachers at Pendle Hill pointed out, the disagreement was largely a matter of emphasis. The trouble was, that tiny difference of emphasis was about where a person should find ultimate authority. Hicks placed this squarely on the inner Light; his opponents agreed that the Light was a good thing in its place -- but only so far as it confirmed their beliefs about Jesus and the authority of Scripture.

The best known advocate for the Orthodox position, the banker Joseph Gurney, did not actually visit the United States until years later -- but when he preached to the Orthodox remnant of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, many of his opponents fled to form 'Conservative' yearly meetings, to continue more traditional Quaker ways and understandings. Gurney's return to England triggered the separation of his more extreme followers there, although that movement dissipated over the next several decades. Belief in 'The Authority of Scripture' -- that is, belief in some authoritarive person's interpretation of Christian scriptures -- seems innately productive of schisms, most notably among small Anabaptist sects.

Gurney himself -- even in person -- could hardly have split the movement singlehandedly. But particular Quaker families that had "done well by doing good" had increasingly come to dominate Quaker institutional structures. Although Meetings could and did provide for the travels of recognized ministers -- including care for their families if that became necessary -- the absence of any professional clergy had tended to leave most tasks of church government to those members least encumbered with making a living. Upholding traditional Quaker theology, for such people, was less important than reconciling their differences with wealthy colleagues from other denominations, with whom they were often allied in charitable & reform projects. Their theology, like Gurney's, tended to see beliefs about Jesus as the essentials of salvation.

Christian theology has raised disturbing questions from our beginnings. Opponents intent on blasphemy charges pressed early Friends to specify how this Light they spoke of related to their personal opinions, loyalties, and consciences -- and to the actual historical man called 'Jesus.' Fox himself was definite that this word refers to Jesus Christ, who (variously) "is" the Light, or with it "enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power." But there was no effort to impose uniform terminology, to limit anyone's preferred name for the divine influence at work within each human being.  Fox, like other early Friends, insisted that it "enlightens every man who comes into the world" -- before or after Christ, whether raised in a church or in far corners of the world where no one ever heard the name 'Jesus'.

While Fox filled volumes with intricate theological rants -- he characteristically described people who left Friends over theological disagreements as having "run out after notions." That is, for Fox the primary source of Truth was the Spirit -- as the Bible itself told him -- rather than the Bible itself. He read the Bible diligently, and found truth in it; but believed this resulted from the Spirit "opening" its true meaning to him. If someone were "following notions," this meant relying on the text alone, working out meanings intellectually -- rather than being spiritually guided to true interpretations. It was not 'words about' Jesus that led to salvation, but Jesus himself wielding the Light within each person. It was not words about the Light that mattered, but whether one turned to follow it, or away.

Early Friends did not make it clear what, if anything, this had to do with a certain 1st Century Hebrew prophet. If they knew the Light, and followed it, they would be doing what Jesus had commanded; and this was what they considered necessary.

In the 19th Century controversy, Hicks had considerable reverence for Jesus the man, though his understanding of Jesus had a mystical flavor; and he shocked his contemporaries by not believing in the virgin birth. "[Jesus] had loved righteousness, you perceive, and therefore was prepared to receive the fullness of the spirit, the fullness of that divine anointing; for there was no germ of evil in him or about him; both his soul and his body were pure. He was anointed above all his fellows, to be the head of the church, the top stone, the chief corner stone, elect and precious. And what was it that was a Savior? Not that which was outward; it was not flesh and blood: For 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of Heaven;' it must go to the earth from which it was taken. It was that life, that same life that I have already mentioned, that was in him and which is the light and life of men, and which lights every man, and consequently every woman, that comes into the world. And we have this light and life in us; which is what the apostle meant by Jesus Christ; and if we have not this ruling in us we are dead, because we are not under the law of the spirit of life. For 'the law is life and the reproofs of instruction the way to life.'"

Gurney, on the other hand, was not one to deny the reality of the Light. "Now with Friends (and probably with many persons under other names) it is a leading principle in religion, that the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul is not only immediate and direct, but perceptible. We believe we are all furnished with an inward Guide or Monitor, who makes his voice known to us, and who, if faithfully obeyed and closely followed, will infallibly conduct us into all true virtue and happiness, because he leads us into a real conformity with the will of God... Under the Christian dispensation, the Holy Spirit is poured forth in pre-eminent abundance, as has already been observed, and as the Scriptures testify, on the souls of true believers in Jesus Christ..."

but then: "While it may be hoped that the spiritually-minded Christian will readily admit the force of these scriptural evidences, and will cheerfully embrace that profitable truth which they so clearly unfold; it is not to be forgotten that the human imagination is very active and delusive, and that persons who are superficial in religion, or who are not sufficiently watchful, may sometimes mistake the unauthorized dictates of their own minds, for the voice of a divine and unerring guide."

Here we are, right back at that fear of false prophecy -- and also, right back to what I consider the root cause of false prophecy: the need to shore up a precarious faith by external evidence.

Certainly, true faith will find confirmation in the external, physical world -- but it can't be based on finding any substitute whatsoever for God's ongoing revelation within each person. What we think we're seeing may be illusory. What we tell ourselves to believe might be simply wrong. What we thought last week may be have been mistaken; what we think at this moment may be mistaken -- but God continues to bring forth truth, in whatever form, to whatever extent we're able to understand it. How do we recognize that in ourselves? -- Do we, as Gurney implied, need to be somebody special in order to rely on it?

People in the gospels were often asking Jesus to perform a sign so they could have some reason, besides the unauthorized dictates of what they knew in their souls, to believe what he was saying. But at some point, those dictates are all we have. To find truth through new facts and better ideas, to understand the world so well that we'd never be mistaken, that would require someone special. What is needful is much simpler, to keep turning within for God to renew our minds.

Over the years since the 19th Century schisms, Friends have gradually and increasingly been talking across the divisions. We've found considerable kinship and significant disagreement with one another. And as I see it, most of us still haven't found our way back to that original insight.

We shore up our sandcastle notions by different means -- by the name of Jesus, by authority of scripture, by loyalty to tradition. Liberal Friends seem to rely on the practice of silent worship and what we call "Quaker Process," a toolkit of techniques for settling Meeting business. We all acknowledge the importance of the Light, all with different fears and different reservations about giving it our trust.

The results of our experiment are still coming in; but we aren't raising the dead yet. We have a valuable religious practice, of worshipping silently -- which really should be included among every religion's practices, as a means of leaving the door open to further revelations. It simply isn't enough on its own. So far as we're treating it ceremonially, as a way for everyone to have a nice, peaceful experience of silence, it leaves most Liberal Friends with spiritual malnuitrition. We leave Meeting each week with the same ideas we brought in, our emotions blanded over to avoid disturbing one another, relieved at the end to escape into refreshments and small talk with nice people. Many of us are satisfied with this -- but it isn't the reign of God; and many of us still want to see that.

What Approach to Poverty Does Christianity Imply?

The Bible is a good starting point, because it's among God's better teaching tools, connecting us with ancient civilizations sufficiently different to challenge our assumptions – as well as being remarkably like our own in ways we are likely to miss.

Poverty, and wealth, and the power relations that bring them about, were universal features of these civilizations.

Farming entailed risks, and the need to borrow. Village and family solidarity would sometimes cover the need; but when it did not, a borrower might have to pay interest and put up collateral – a family member's labor, his land, his own freedom. Interest, as a customary practice, was generally ruinous. For a trader with a reasonable expectation of using the money profitably it was a fair cost of doing business. For a small farmer it was a recurrent risk of homelessness and enslavement.

Michael Hudson, a financial economist with an active interest in the history of economic thought, says (in michael-hudson.com/1992/03/the-lost-tradition-of-biblical-debt-cancellations/) that: “discoveries of Bronze Age Near Eastern royal proclamations extending from 2400 to 1600 BC throw a radically new light on [the Biblical debt] laws... Mesopotamian royal edicts canceled debts, freed debt-servants and restored land to cultivators who had lost it under economic duress. There can be no doubt that these edicts were implemented, for during the Babylonian period they grew into quite elaborate promulgations, capped by Ammisaduqa's Edict of 1646. Now that these edicts have been translated and their consequences understood, the Biblical laws no longer stand alone as utopian or otherworldly ideals; they take their place in a two-thousand year continuum of periodic and regular economic renewal.

“Radical as the idea of canceling debts and restoring the population's means of subsistence seems to modern eyes, it had been a conservative tradition in Bronze Age Mesopotamia for some two millennia. What was conserved was self-sufficiency for the rural family-heads who made up the infantry as well as the productive base of Near Eastern economies. Conversely, what was radically disturbing in archaic times was the idea of unrestrained wealth-seeking. It took thousands of years for the idea of progress to become inverted, to connote freedom for the wealthy to deprive the peasantry of their lands and personal liberty. ”

Whenever, wherever the Torah took its final form -- Its laws on debt and property were based on practical ancient custom. But as David's monarchy was established, with the aid of a small professional army, the need for a large peasant infantry was lessened. From here on, we find prophets increasingly denouncing an elite class whose wealth is apparently gained at the expense of their poor neighbors. In the one example of jubilee practice we're specifically told of, Jeremiah convinces King Zedekiah [faced with a military threat from Babylon] “that every one should set free his Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should enslave a Jew, his brother... but afterward they turned around and took back the male and female slaves they had set free, and brought them back into subjection as slaves.” After which the Babylonians return to conquer.

After the Exile, tension between needy neighbors, greedy neighbors, and Torah continued. Deuteronomy had said: “You shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take heed lest there be a base thought in your heart, and you say, 'The seventh year, the year of release is near;' and your eye be hostile toward your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and it be sin in you.” But in Herod's day, Rabbi Hillel had to institute the prosbul, an arrangement that allowed borrowers to sign away their traditional rights, because in actuality the poor were not finding anyone willing to lend without interest and the option of foreclosing. And under Roman administration, their Hellenistic economic practices – which were dispossessing their own small farmers in Italy – became the rule in Israel as well. By Jesus' time there were many of his people dispossessed, indebted, eking out a desperate living by agricultural itinerant labor until malnutrition and illness reduced them to beggary.

It was these people Jesus spoke of when he said, “Blessed are the destitute, for God's reign is theirs.” It was their debts he went about promiscuously forgiving, most often their diseases and injuries he healed, their petty crimes he overlooked. The story he tells in Luke, about 'Dives and Lazarus,' suggests that poor people have a nicer afterlife than rich ones...

And now I'm in this adult Christian Sunday school class, discussing 'What are the most helpful ways of helping poor people?'

This is very rich, for one assumption has been that we should be “developing” their economic possibilities, “curing” them of poverty. Not even Jesus tried to do this...

What do we want to accomplish? – Why? – What should we?

We can't doubt that poverty is a bad thing. The material lacks, the intellectual deprivation that normally accompanies it, the associated emotional pains and afflictions all demand to be alleviated. But if, by some wild stretch, we should make a significant difference in poor people's lives, do we want them to seek to achieve what our own culture calls success?

Shouldn't we want this? Should we be sentimental about “the poor”, romanticize them and their ways of life? Are they better than us; does God like them better? What have they got that we don't? Only poverty.

What's that about? The theological difference, between 'rich' and 'poor' is elusive. But church traditions from James to Dorothy Day, including some profoundly confusing observations from Jacques Ellul, insist that it matters.

Certainly poor people aren't “better.” In general they “play the same games” as the rest of us, merely for different stakes. If some of them will give their last dime to help a person who needs it, some will eagerly rob or cheat him of it.

Does God like them better? That's not it either. We may need to give the poor preferential treatment, because they need more help and have a harder time getting any at all, but from a larger perspective this is merely correcting an imbalance. While Jesus does imply that rich people's “wealth” reflects mistaken priorities, poverty is no sign of freedom from misplaced greed.

Rather than think of “two sorts of people,” it helps to think of two states of life in one fallen world.

Both states do, as our book insists, belong to God's perfect Creation; but this Creation is the sort of perfection that develops, like a plant or a growing child; and while it remains immature we remain subject to death. That subjection takes many forms; one is our addiction to violence. Another is the desire for forms of “wealth” that imply poverty for other people. Dorothy Day rightly described the resulting state of affairs as “this filthy, rotten system.”

When the “rich” game the system to perpetuate unfair, unproductive advantages – while the system works to reward that kind of behavior – we have what is called 'systemic injustice'. John D Crossan sees this concept as underlying Jesus' first beatitude: “If... we think not just of personal or individual evil but of social, structural, or systemic injustice—that is, of precisely the imperial situation in which Jesus and his fellow peasants found themselves—then the saying becomes literally, terribly, and permanently true. In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations.”

A church can offer people help toward escaping poverty – but escape into what? The system we're embedded in is neither humane, just, honest, very much functional – or even guaranteed to remain viable for the next twenty years. We ought to take care, not to fall into or promote illusions about finding anyone a secure place in it. And yet – this system does not permit anything or anyone to exist freely outside itself.

I've been forced to concede that 'the rich' and 'the poor' include good people and bad, happy and unhappy, sophisticated and clueless, with a wide range of blessings and afflictions... and that both conditions entail being implicated in “this filthy rotten system,” whether securely within it or painfully entangled. What then, is the difference?

Jacques Ellul – like William Stringfellow – considers money to be 'a Power.' That is, 'Money' is a spiritual influence which people can quite literally worship. When Jesus says that we can worship God or Mammon – but not both – this is precisely what he is talking about.

We pray to God, participate in worship services addressed to God. We don't do anything of the sort for money. But which object of worship do we devote the most time to? Which do we worry most about, take most seriously as a force of practical import in the world? Which do we most rely on for our security?

You are 'poor' in the sense Ellul values: when you can rely on God for your security, knowing you have nothing else to depend on. This is not a theoretical sort of knowledge, but something people recognize deeply and automatically – or not. The people we call “rich”generally feel, and often believe, that they have something else to keep them safe. The actual amount of money anyone does, or doesn't have – while significant in other contexts – is not the issue. “Wealth” works to blunt this awareness; while poverty renders it obvious.

A friend wrote me once, that “hardships and suffering of many kinds have left me with an unshakable faith – in Something.”

That is not a recommendation for hardships and suffering, but it does serve to clarify their purpose. That “unshakable faith”, so far as we can acquire and convey it, can do far more to promote happiness and mitigate suffering than anything more concrete we have to provide. That is, a church can and should serve whichever needs people find most pressing – but its specific mission is to promote the distribution of spiritual goods. Why is that so much harder than handing out bread?

Why?

My heart has fallen open
to bleed truth.

Already the wound has scabbed over;
already I've almost returned
habitually again wading through universal
sticky wet outpour of normal
life as we do it to ourselves

and I want to know how it happens
that hearts can fall open but
hearts just keep themselves clutched shut
There is so much truth,
so very very very very...

Questions on How Best to Meet for [Quaker] Business.

Margaret Jones & I were invited to lead an after-Meeting "worship-sharing" session this afternoon, which drifted quite a ways from normative "worship-sharing" forms-- but we believe that everyone involved found the session illuminating, encouraging, quite possibly useful. We hope other Meetings may find our handout helpful:

Questions on How Best to Meet for Business
We two members have recently felt called to raise a concern about how our Meeting’s business is being conducted. While changes in formal procedures may help in addressing that concern, the issue is one of spiritual orientation: whether our way of following such procedures is meeting their object.

That object, as we understand it, is to work together in harmony with what some people would call ‘God’s will’, or ‘the Tao’―or what Lloyd Lee Wilson here calls ‘gospel order’:
“The perception of gospel order is a spiritual exercise, rather than an intellectual one, and the intellectual processes or physical procedures by which we look for discernment are aids to the spiritual process, rather than the process itself. The fundamental means by which a meeting or an individual discerns gospel order is by centering down into waiting worship, to listen and receive what the Spirit will offer to enlighten the circumstance…

“As individuals or as a meeting community we should go about answering the question, ‘What is gospel order in this situation?’ by listening to the Inward Guide, and learning to set all things aside except that guidance. If we do, we will see over time that there is an internal consistency and pattern to our actions in gospel order, though seeking after consistency or intellectual logic would not have led us in the paths we have traveled with the Holy Spirit.”

We hope that worship sharing on the following questions will be worthwhile [Quotes are from (Pacific Yearly Meeting)Faith & Practice sections: ‘Friends Process for Making Decisions’ and 'Meeting for Worship for Business'] :

1) “Friends conduct business together in the faith that there is one Divine Spirit, which is accessible to all persons. When Friends wait upon, heed, and follow the Light of Truth within them, its spirit will lead to unity. This faith is the foundation for any corporate decision.”

Do we have sufficient confidence in that foundation to make it our first consideration, not an afterthought?

2) “Friends begin meetings in which decisions are to be made with a period of silent worship.
In the stillness, they realize that a business or committee meeting is in fact a Meeting for Worship to deal with certain matters of importance.”

Can we strive to maintain a spirit of worship throughout, treating business in a manner more like ‘worship sharing’? What would that be like?

3) “Friends who stand to speak find that their ministry is more faithful, concise, and better heard.”

Although our meetings are too small to require anyone to stand to speak— would that practice effectively remind members that anything said should be, essentially, a ‘message’?

4) “Although Friends study and discuss issues in advance, they should not come to Meeting for Business with minds made up. Seeking to be reverent to that of God in themselves and others, Friends should offer their personal perspectives and avoid taking fixed or adversarial positions.”

While no one can be expected to arrive at Meeting in a state of blank ignorance— can we hold our fixed ideas lightly, subject to revision, reframing, new inspirations? How can members best cultivate that readiness?