The End of Progress

A key part of the liberal Quaker tradition is the idea of 'continuing revelation'. The important insight behind this phrase is that God’s revelation to humanity did not stop with the New Testament. Instead the divine Spirit continues to guide and inform everyone who is attentive to it. This means that authentic religion is not simply a matter of interpreting and following historical texts, but more importantly, of reading and responding to the word of God as it is written on our hearts now. It suggests that we should expect to receive new insights, and that we should be continually open to changing our attitudes and actions in response to them.

But it is common for Quakers to assume that the revelation of the Spirit is not just continuing, but also progressive; that newer insights are always better than older ones, and that our spiritual understandings today are necessarily superior to those of former generations.

This is another version of faith in progress – the idea that human history has a built-in direction towards continual improvement. Belief in progress is a secular faith that has powered most of the ideologies of the last couple of centuries across much of the world. Faith in the inevitability of humanity’s social, moral, intellectual and technological advancement has been central to the worldviews of humanism, socialism, liberalism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, among many others. It has provided a powerful secular motivation for self-sacrifice, appearing to replace religious motives for virtuous behaviour with a rational faith in human destiny.

But the idea of progress is far from strictly rational. It is actually a lightly secularised version of mainstream Christian ‘salvation history’ – the religious narrative that presents all of human history as leading up to the second coming of Christ. According to this belief, Christ is due to return to earth at some point in the future to judge humanity and to abolish war, poverty and every other social and moral evil. In just the same way, many modern liberals, socialists and humanists have believed in a coming utopia, ruled by universal reason, where prejudice, war, poverty and inequality will be abolished. Over recent decades this faith has taken an increasingly technological direction, so that fantasies about colonising other planets, eliminating disease and mortality, and uploading human consciousness into omnipotent computers are treated as rational aims rather than unconscious retreads of traditional religious apocalyptic.

But this centuries’ old faith in human progress has worn increasingly thin as industrial civilisation has entered its long descent. The perennial appeal of fanaticism and xenophobia, the ever-more visible side-effects of unrestrained technology and unravelling ecosystems, have highlighted for growing numbers of people the absurdity of claims for the inevitability of progress.

I am not convinced that there is any progress in morality or religion. Societies do not inevitably become wiser or better, they do not evolve towards any particular state. Human cultures are always changing, sometimes drastically, but not necessarily or reliably in any particular direction. Any reduction in violence or gains in status by excluded groups are always contingent and vulnerable to reversals.

It may be that modern Quakers see some things more clearly than previous eras, for example our contemporary recognition of sexual and gender equality. But there are other moral issues where we seem to be far less perceptive than former generations, such as our relative indifference to lying compared to the scrupulous truthfulness of earlier Friends. It seems that sensitivity to particular ethical issues may be more a consequence of current social and political relationships, rather than any overall expansion of spiritual insight.

This suggests that greater humility is called for in relation to the religious teachings and traditions of the past, instead of simply dismissing them as 'out-dated'. Continuing revelation means that past insights are just as valid as our own. They have not been superseded; they simply offer alternative perspectives on the same reality. The question for us is not how ‘up to date’ we are, but how attentive and faithful to the Light that is, and always has been, continually available to all people.

Many of the first Quakers had a radically different vision of salvation history to the teaching of the official Church. They put their faith in a new revelation of the power and illumination of the ‘Inward Christ’, which they understood as the fulfilment of Christ’s promised return, expressed in the startling claim that ‘Christ is come to teach his people himself’.

In other words, there is nothing to expect or wait for; this is it. If Christ has already come again in our bodies and spirits then there is no future utopia of peace and harmony waiting for us at the end of history. Instead, the Inward Spirit of Christ is working through us (and through all people who are receptive to their Inward Teacher) as a healing and reconciling presence within the world’s ever-continuing conflict, injustice and irrationality. There is no reason to expect that humanity will ever finally abolish war and inequality, or grow out of prejudice and bigotry. Perhaps our task as a People of God is not to build a perfect world, but to perfect our love for the world and humanity as it is. As we are led by the Spirit of peace, we aim to overcome violence and division wherever we find them, but we should not count on a future that is better or wiser than the past. God's reign of peace is not somewhere else at the end of history. It is present here and now, wherever enemies are reconciled and the poor and excluded regain their dignity. In Jesus' words, 'The kingdom of God is among you' (Luke 17:21)