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The name of God can be used to freeze our wonder, to make a
comforting and useful idol, or it can be the opposite: a name that
opens into continuing mystery.
(Thomas Moore, The Soul
of Religion)
We all know God the
idol; all-seeing, omnipotent, angry and male. For some, wounded by
authoritarian religious upbringings or in flight from evangelical
burnout, perhaps this is the only meaning the word ‘God’ can have
for them, and in that case they may do well to leave it behind.
Some of us, fortunate
enough to have avoided the crushing of our religious imagination by
fundamentalism, have come to understand God as a 'name that opens
into continuing mystery'.
The Quaker Way is part
of a current of religious mysticism that has always acknowledged the
limits of language to describe reality. Throughout history, people of
all religions and cultures have experienced God not as a supernatural
being 'out there', but as an indwelling presence, an inward guide, or
a source of inner healing and transformation. This mystical
understanding is not marginal to traditional religion. It is shared
by influential figures such as Rumi in Islam, Gandhi in Hinduism, and
Christians such as Julian of Norwich, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton and
countless others.
For many
Quakers today, this mystical understanding of God has been forgotten,
and 'God language' is identified with the most conservative and
simplistic Christian teaching. Even the idea of 'believing in' the
existence of God makes the concept of God into an intellectual
proposition rather than an experiential reality. Once we start
discussing whether we believe in some 'thing' out there called God,
we have lost sight of the point of the word, which is not to name
some hypothetical being, but to point towards an experience of
reality that cannot be fully captured in words.
It is difficult to
speak about God these days, because people immediately ask you if a
God exists. This means that the symbol of God is
no longer working. Instead of pointing beyond itself to an ineffable
reality, the humanly conceived construct that we call 'God' has
become the end of the story.
(Karen Armstrong, The
Case for God)
The concepts of
spiritual reality that people find helpful or intellectually
convincing will vary from person to person, depending on our
differing experiences and tendencies of thought. These differences
reflect alternative perspectives on the same ultimately nameless
reality. Framing these differences in terms of 'theism' versus
'nontheism' is irrelevant and unhelpful. It is unimportant whether
someone describes themselves as a 'theist' or 'nontheist', because
these are matters of intellectual belief, or 'notions'. The Quaker
Way is not grounded in beliefs, which have no power to help or to
change us. It is a matter of practice; looking deeply and attentively
at the reality of our experience and allowing ourselves to be guided
and transformed by what we discover there. The only genuinely
important question from the point of view of this practice is whether
we can experience a spiritual reality that is independent of our own
desires and decisions.
There are many Friends
who find the concept of an omnipotent personal God intellectually
impossible or unhelpful, but who know themselves to be profoundly
held by a deeper reality, or part of a greater interconnected
Universe, which they might call by a range of names or have no words
for at all. There are other Friends who argue that there is no such
thing as any spiritual dimension of reality; only human values and
concepts. For them, religious language can have at most only a
metaphorical meaning as a way of talking about our own personal
values. The principal spokesperson for this view is David Boulton,
who writes of his own experience:
I have never, since
I ceased to be a child in the mid 1950s, been persuaded of the
reality of supernatural forces or dimensions, even when they are
smuggled in under such euphemisms as “transcendence”, “the
numinous”, “the divine”, or “the mystical”. I can no more
entertain the notion of gods and devils, angels and demons,
disembodied ghoulies and ghosties, or holy and unholy spirits, than I
can believe in the magic of Harry Potter or the mystic powers of
Gandalf the Grey…
I fully understand
that belief in a transcendent realm and a transcendent god as the
guarantors of meaning and purpose have inspired millions. They do not
inspire me. Instead, they seem to me illusions we can well do
without, and I find myself raging at the toxic effects of literal,
uncritical belief in divine guidance, divine purpose, divine reward
and punishment.
(David
Boulton - 'Quaker Identity and the Heart of our Faith')
Friends who describe
themselves as ‘nontheist’ in this thorough-going materialist
sense, reject the possibility of experiencing a spiritual reality that
is independent of human choices and values. Instead, according to
David Boulton, 'God
becomes for us the imagined symbol of the human values that we
recognise as making an ultimate claim upon us.'
For them, the Religious Society of Friends is a
diverse community based on shared values which is (or should be)
equally accepting of every form of belief or theological opinion.
This is the point of view expressed by a reader of this blog in a
comment on last month’s post:
Nontheist Friends have difficulties talking about discernment as "finding the will of God". Can we phrase it in a way which is acceptable to Christians, Nontheists, and all the other theological positions to be found within our Yearly Meeting?
Nontheist Friends have difficulties talking about discernment as "finding the will of God". Can we phrase it in a way which is acceptable to Christians, Nontheists, and all the other theological positions to be found within our Yearly Meeting?
This request, and the
similar ones being heard on all sides within Britain Yearly Meeting
at the moment, has a straightforward appeal as a claim to fairness.
Given that there are now many Friends who don't believe in God,
surely it is time to drop the use of 'God language' that is only
meaningful to 'theists', and substitute some other word that is more
universally acceptable?
Those nontheist Friends
who argue in this way are like people who have joined a
mountaineering club from a love of the history of mountaineering, the
social gatherings and interesting equipment, but who are not willing
to go climbing themselves. While accepting that some 'mountainists'
still claim to enjoy climbing, these 'non-mountainist' members
politely request that the club cease to describe its principal
activity as mountaineering, and instead adopt more universally
acceptable language.
The purpose of a
mountaineering club is to climb mountains. The purpose of the
Religious Society of Friends is to follow the guidance of the Spirit.
All of us have inherited Quakerism as a living tradition of religious
practice. Whatever good it has achieved in the past is a result of
Friends' willingness to be led and shaped by the Inward Light. In
becoming members we have accepted a responsibility to be faithful to
the guidance of the Spirit, and so to preserve Quakerism as a living
Way for others. This is not a matter of words. It doesn't matter
whether we call that source of inward guidance God, the Light or
anything else. What does matter is that we are willing to be guided by a spiritual reality
that is not dependent on our own choices and values.
The existence of this
spiritual reality is not primarily a matter of belief, but of
experience; either we know it by our own experience or we don't.
Clearly many contemporary Quakers do not know it by experience and
therefore have no adequate reason to believe in it. In response to
this, rather than changing the purpose of the Religious Society of
Friends, we might do better to encourage each other to make use of
the spiritual disciplines that Quakers have practised to experience
spiritual reality for ourselves. Once we encounter it we will know
for ourselves that it doesn’t matter what words we use, because any
concepts can only point towards the experience of this reality,
without defining or describing it:
Reality is finally
mysterious. Our little word 'God' tries to name that mystery... It
points but it does not describe. It offers no concepts or images that
enable us to grasp the reality in our minds. It can only invite us to
look and to see for ourselves.
(Rex Ambler, The Quaker
Way – a rediscovery)
I am keen to hear
readers' views on the points made in this post. Is it a fair
reflection of the views of those who describe themselves as
‘nontheists’ (in any sense)? Is it possible to reclaim the word
'God' from fundamentalism, or do we need to substitute a less
misunderstood word, such as 'Light', 'Spirit' or something else?
Craig, this is superb, and needed saying. I totally agree with you when you point out that "For some, wounded by authoritarian religious upbringings or in flight from evangelical burnout, perhaps this [idol God] is the only meaning the word ‘God’ can have for them, and in that case they may do well to leave it behind."
ReplyDeleteIt makes me sad to see so many Friends throwing out the Baby with the scum of received bathwater, when all that's needed is a dry towel.
I hope you don't mind if I reblog this post - you have found words I have been looking for for some time...
I agree with so much of this - what I find missing is the encounter with God in the person of Jesus, not as the only way where ultimate reality can be found, but as a principal way for those with roots in the Christian tradition, roots the earliest Quakers took for granted. The Spirit encountered in Quaker practice was, at the beginning of Quakerism, the spirit of Jesus, and we lose something central when we lose that - which is ultimately why I am an Anabaptist practising my faith in the Mennonite tradition, and not a Quaker.
ReplyDeleteThank you Craig for articulating something essential about the Quaker way that we would do well to keep in mind. Like Veronica I too feel that I encounter God through Christ Jesus as a living spiritual presence and power. It is clear that the Quaker way, as it has been understood over the past 360 year, has given priority to a direct encounter with the living God/Spirit of Christ However this 'experience' does not occur in an entirely unmediated and isolated way. Friends have always interpreted and tested their experience using the ancient texts that describe the workings of this spirit among the people of God (i.e. scripture) and what the community of Friends has discerned to be true corporately in each generation (i.e. tradition). I think there is a need to maintain a careful balance in this relationship (a dynamic tension). When scripture and tradition is given too much weight God's revelation is frustrated and domesticated. When 'pure' current experience is given too much weight, rootedness, boundaries and identity tend to be lost. It seems to me that in the past 40 or so years in Britain Yearly meeting, 'new light' has been given priority over scripture and tradition. I woder whether we might be entering a phase in which the 'dynamic tension' is brought back into balance?
ReplyDeleteWe already have replaced the G word with various, more meaningfully precise terms that are not encumbered with so much baggage; slavery, authoritarianism, genocide, OneWay thinking and the communicative confusion it engenders. I take great exception with your analogy of the Mountainist, who only goes to the basecamps to hang out socially, reads the maps, talks, and drinks hot chocolate at the lodge while the real Mountaineers go climbing. It comes off as judgemental and lacking in understanding of the testimony of nontheists. Many times, you will find a nontheist already at the mountaintop, waiting for you to arrive, free of the excess baggage that slows down and hurts a Mountaineer. Think it possible that you may be mistaken, maybe even lacking in understanding, of non theist Friends.
ReplyDeleteDear Walter,
DeleteI am sorry for causing you offence with this post. I am quite sure that I am lacking in understanding on this subject, and am keen to learn more from non-theist Friends. In particular, I would be interested to hear about the more meaningfully precise terms you suggest, and whether these are for you words that are intended to point towards an experience of spiritual reality (as I suggest the word God is intended to function for Quakers), or describe human values, or something else?
In Friendship,
Craig
I have been moved by Veronica's and Stuart's comments. As readers of me earlier blog will be aware, I've prayed the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner..." - a prayer of repetition, sometimes referred to as a mantra by modern writers on contemplative prayer.) for many years now, since long before I became a Quaker, and yet I sometimes struggle with understanding what exactly I am praying.
ReplyDeleteIn a traditional Christian, creedal framework, complete with a (more or less substitutionary) theology of the atonement, the Jesus Prayer makes perfect sense. Yet it was in part precisely my uneasiness with such theories of the atonement, and with creedal formulations generally, that set me off on a path that's ended in Membership.
Quakers, being free from creeds and catechisms, can't (or shouldn't try to!) tell me what to think about such things and so I have to try and hold my unease quietly in the Light and hear what the Spirit has to say, as well as being open to new light mediated through the words and companionship of my sister and brother Quakers. Here for me is the great strength of the Society of Friends, that we can do such things without worrying whether we are stepping over some line that's not allowed in our church tradition. (Here of course is my concern with the more aggressive sort of non-theism, that speaks as if it would like to disallow Christian language altogether among Friends.)
Obviously I need to think and pray much more about this, and perhaps take part in more discussions like this one...
I too use the Jesus Prayer as a form of contemplative prayer. I certainly don't buy into substitutionary atonement and often feel uneasy with creedal formulations. For me, what the prayer does is to keep me focused on the fact that I am a frail and easily influenced creature who needs the guidance and empowerment of the Spirit of Christ. I am forced to recognise the darkness in me (e.g. the seeds of war) but also the availability of the Light that can overcome this (grace and mercy).
ReplyDeleteYes, thanks, Stuart. That makes a great deal of spiritual sense to me. Thank you again!
DeletePS to my earlier comment - sorry for the typing errors - I shouldn't try to post comments when I'm really short of time!
I agree that following the Way and participating in the Life are of primary importance, and can be done by people with very different notions about and names for God. I think this Way and Life are also open to people who have the conservative or fundamentalist views that some people on this site seem to deplore. My experience suggests that it is possible to see God as omnipotent, all-seeing and (in a sense) personal, and often to use male language for God (English having no neuter forms suited for personal or more than personal beings), without being an idolater whose imagination has been crushed.
ReplyDeleteI was part of a Meeting until a leading took me to work out of reach of most Quaker groups. I still worship after the manner of Friends with my family daily, and still find many Quaker writings and examples helpful in following the Way. I worship weekly with a small conservative Protestant church. I don't share all their theological ideas. I do find a dedication, a discipline and a delight in God in that fellowship.
To be clear--I do think there is a danger of idolatry, of letting our ideas of God get in the way of faithfulness to God and love and justice for our neighbors. So far as I can see this danger is present across the theological spectrum.
ReplyDeleteDear Joanna,
DeleteThank you for these comments. I agree that people of all theological views and religious backgrounds may be faithful followers of Christ. I have certainly learned a lot from the sincerity and selflessness of many evangelical Christians. My comment about 'the crushing of our religious imagination' was intended to refer to the experience of those people who have rejected the idea of God as a result of painful experiences with authoritarian religion, rather than Christians who are theologically conservative.
Without making judgements about individuals though, I do think that fundamentalist types of religious theology and organisation (by which I mean ones that rely primarily on authoritative interpretations of scripture) are inconsistent with the Quaker understanding of Christianity. This is not the same thing as saying that Christian (or Muslim) fundamentalists are bad people, or that some of them may not have a much deeper spiritual insight and more faithful witness than I do.
In Friendship,
Craig
Dear Craig,
DeleteThank you for taking time to reply, and thank you for clarifying; I see I had misunderstood you. I also have known people who had been deeply wounded by others speaking and acting in the name of God, and who consequently developed an aversion to that name or to the entire idea of religion.
I also perceive that there is a great difference between the Christian theologies of the Quakers I have read and met and the authoritative and literalist understanding of Scripture which I find in the local church where I now worship. I don't think it's possible to hold both theological views at once. I am not sure that the very real theological difference is necessarily a bar to common worship, deep shared prayer, or--up to a certain point--the sharing of support and accountability as we attempt to live faithfully. Beyond a certain point the different standards which we use for accountability do become problematic.
I'm still wrestling with this. I think I understand the importance of having a larger body with whom to share the Way. I have found many bodies from whom I could learn, with whom I could worship. I have not yet found a larger body with which I can fully unite. I find in the writings of some earlier Friends an understanding of the Way that is both rigorous and open, that seems to be what I long for...but in practice, like Alice, I find that I bump up against different class and cultural assumptions that make unity and shared accountability difficult beyond a certain point. I have not yet understood what to do with this.
Dear Joanna,
DeleteYou name the challenge for Quaker communities here very helpfully - to be 'both rigorous and open'. Hoping that a way will open for you to find the faith community you are looking for.
In Friendship,
Craig
It's at a different angle to most of these other comments, but I have been reflecting recently on the lack of particularly social class, but also poverty of racial diversity amongst the Meeting I am currently attending. We travel to a wealthy area to go to Meeting at the moment. I have been noticing when I feel that I would only feel welcome and included as long as I understand and agree with certain ideas, political and aesthetic, although those ideas have nothing to do as I understand it with the Love and power which heals and transforms and calls us forth. This is such a shame.
ReplyDeleteI sense something in the simple and transformative way of Friends that can reach and help many. Yet somehow the people in the Meeting House are a cultural gathering of people diverse only in opinions, and largely sharing a fairly wealthy and middle class way of being, and almost exclusively from white european ethnicities, in the UK. I hope that when we keep our eyes on the mystery who calls us into transformation and shows us the way, we get beyond worldy ideas of class and station, and learn how to see beyond the racism of our society, and start to reflect God's world, in which rich and poor are equally welcome, equally valued.
Yes yes yes! I see the whole God-language theist/non-theist thing as a sort of red herring. Sometimes in Meeting I feel like we're the Greeks in Acts with a monument to an unknown God. With all the traditions and experiences of our forbears surely we're in a position to really get on with the hard graft of building the Kingdom?
DeleteThanks jolly Quaker! Yes, that was where I was attempting to go with this comment, thanks for being clearer. Bit incoherent above.
DeleteAs a Quaker who sees simplicity at the heart of faith, just as it is at the heart of our lives, I am happy to use the word 'God' and the word 'Christ' pretty much as I interpret them being used by early Friends in testimony and journal. Several non-theist Friends have told me that they have no belief in God, but do believe in some creative power in the universe. To me this is just playing with semantics and rejecting the fine Anglo-Saxon word 'God' for something less comprehensible, less beautiful, and less simple. As a Quaker I take it as a pretty basic idea that Quakers worship God, I fully accept that personal definitions of God will vary from person to person ~ that's why we are Quakers.
ReplyDeleteWhy do many non-theist friends want to change the nature of an already well developed religious group and change it? Better to start something completely different from scratch, after all the best way to make a stool is not to take a chair and chop the back off!
Great stuff Craig. We Quakers really do need to get this 'god' thing sorted, and the 'Mountainist' metaphor is brilliant. Unfortunately in the argument it is aimed only at the so-called 'non-theists'. In my experience, the metaphor is apposite for the 'theists' as well, or rather at those in both groups who are looking at the words and the not the experience. Since becoming a Quaker this has been my interpretation of my time with evangelical and charismatic Christianity, as noted at the end of my blog 'Does anything go in Meeting for Worship?'. The priests and ministers went up the mountain to find the 'correct' interpretation of the scriptures and passed them down to us as law. Meanwhile we waiting at the bottom of the mountain were afraid and quickly turned to making idols for ourselves. Now, as Jesus and Paul and Fox actually told us, we can go up the mountain and see God face to face for ourselves and receive the truth directly into our hearts, and there is no need to be afraid or to turn to idols.
ReplyDeleteThe Jews had the right idea – never write the word 'g-d' down, for as soon as you do it becomes the subject or object of a sentence and before you know it we are theorizing about the existence of some externally entity, instead of discerning the spirit directly from our experience. As for finding 'meaningfully precise terms', this is impossible in language except in some very tightly defined and highly objective and totally impersonal circumstances making using of logical propositions. - and even then it is very hard. When it comes to acting in and relating to the world, language is at least twice removed from any experience of reality – we are using language - as I am now - to communicate ideas that are in turn formed in our heads on reflection in turn of imperfectly formed knowledge of partial experiences of reality. This is why we meet in silence. We look to be taken out of ourselves into a fuller and deeper relationship – not with some external other-world realm, but into the full realization of the world of which we are an intimate part. And we find at the moment of transcendence that the world is revealed to us and our true selves are reflected back to us, which we call immanence.
As I moved deeper into the Quaker Way, I found that my old evangelical Christian friends were calling me a rabid atheist, whilst my rationalist and materialist friends were calling me a religious nutter. I find this a comfortable place to be, in the midst of the never-ending paradox, surrounded by metaphor upon metaphor. The sort of 'dynamic tension' that Stuart Masters mentions, where the truth that is beyond words is to be found.
As for the 'theists' and 'non-theists', if they are going to build barriers and want us to be separated by the constructs of language, I say 'A plague o' both your houses!'.
“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
So lets just love one another – 'and all these things will be added to you.'
Thank you, Gordon, and thanks especially for the link to your excellent post "Does Anything Go..." I hadn't seen that, and it's very good.
DeleteThanks for this Gordon. The kind of Christianity that makes faith a matter of conformity to external authority is, of course, very different to the way that early Friends understood and practised it. I'm not sure that anyone ever describes themselves as 'a theist' though (I certainly don't). It seems to me more like a term applied to others for polemical purposes.
DeleteIn Friendship,
Craig
There is What There Is, and it's gathered us for its purposes. I'm not sure why those purposes involve collecting atheists (except that I was one once; and I'm glad I'm not.)
ReplyDeleteIt's true that "God is not an idea of God" -- any more than 'Dog is an idea of dog.' But it's conceivable that someone might encounter a furry being with floppy ears and a friendly damp tongue in the middle of the night, without having any idea what a dog was. And be thereby hampered in knowing what to expect from one.
That's unlikely, of course, so imagine a future in which the dogs have gotten tired of being treated like dogs and have gone into hiding until people get a clue.
Meanwhile, of course, the dog has come to be considered a mythical beast, explained away as a bygone superstition, a symbol for "Anything that makes one feel wet and loved!" Many tomes get written on The Idea of Dog and The Meaning of Dog and some people feel a strong urge to Believe in Dog -- but not too many actually meet a dog; and they aren't quite sure what it is that's left them with a wet nose and... a sort of happy feeling! I imagine they might write some very silly things before they could finally realize and agree: "Oh! That's a dog! People had some funny ideas about them in the past, but look!"
"It is difficult to speak about God these days, because people immediately ask you if a God exists." I agree with this. We should believe in God. We may not see Him but he's always there for us. We just need to have faith.
ReplyDeleteSpiritual insights