Gnosis of the Heart

The yearning for purification and transformation, which is especially intense today, has been with me for a long time. It often brings to mind the promise of Ezekiel.

A new heart also will I give you,
and a new spirit will I put within you:
and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you a heart of flesh.

More than once I have referred to that passage (Ezek. 36:26) in vocal ministry, at least once offering something like a prayer: “Take away this heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh.” But again today I wonder, as I do each time the passage comes to me, if such complete re-creation can ever really happen.

Ezekiel’s promise is interwoven in my mind with a passage from Ode of Solomon XI (trans. Barnstone). I once mentioned part of it — lines 1, 2, and 5 — in vocal ministry, and those same lines often come to mind during worship and at other times, such as now, when I’m feeling the weight of the world’s sadness. Here’s the entire passage.

My heart was cloven and there appeared a flower,
and grace sprang up, and fruit from the Lord,

for the highest one split me with his holy spirit,
exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love.

His splitting of my heart was my salvation,
and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth.

Picturing those lines, I usually see a rock being cracked open by the force of the world’s random suffering. I see a small stem emerge, blossoming: the flower of compassion. But then I remember the passage from Ezekiel, and the image freezes; I am unable to imagine how a small blossoming of compassion would lead to the removal and replacement of my heart. Today, however, perhaps because of the urgency of my feeling, which is tinctured with the intuition of nonexistence, I need to resolve this, to understand. But I don’t want to uncouple the two passages, which both speak to me powerfully and which together seem to form a gestalt. And so I read more carefully, noting that the ode’s author says, in the lines I usually overlook, that he or she was filled with the Lord’s love when her own love was exposed. And I look within more carefully, allowing imagination to illuminate.

Peering into the cleft, which is growing wider as I look, I see that the stone is hollow, a mere shell. Within the stone is earth, and I recall Jesus’ reference to the fertile ground in which the seed of the divine Kingdom of justice, mercy, and peace is rooted. I perceive that the flower of compassion proceeds not from a simple stem but from a vine, and I understand that this vine of the Kingdom is the Christ, “the hidden human being of the heart” (1 Pet. 3:4). The vine grows as I watch; it fills the empty space within the stony shell and begins to wrap around the outside. Soon it covers the stone completely, so that the shell is both filled with and covered by the life of compassion and justice.

“Seeing” that, I feel that my eyes have been opened.

In my naïveté and pride, I had imagined that my stony heart would dramatically be destroyed and replaced; that, as I thought Paul said in Galatians 2:20, I would be crucified and live no longer as I. But today I am edified and humbled by this vision. In my case at least, pace Ezekiel, the stone is not removed; it is covered, inside and out, by the spiritual vine Christ, the divine-human form of love — or is that equivalent to removal and replacement? And, pace Paul, I am not crucified; I am broken, yes, but I am also covered, knit together in my brokenness, by suffering love — or is that equivalent to crucifixion and resurrection? (Does not the risen Christ continue to bear his wounds?) The images, icons, take me beyond themselves into the reality of my heart.

As understanding deepens, I see and can say this: I have never had a heart of stone. My heart has a stony carapace, but by the grace of love it has never been fully enclosed within its shell. And the shell itself is increasingly opened and covered by love’s flesh and blood, the Christ-vine of compassion whose seed lives in the humus, the God-breathed earthly humanity, that has always been my heart of hearts.

Knowing that life and love are suffering and will always be so, I understand the shell’s formation and function: it is the original innocent transgression, the protective human sin that is with us from birth. I understand, too, that for now it must remain, although eventually it may crumble, no longer needed, within the vine’s embrace. No matter. “Blessed is he whose sin is forgiven, whose transgression is covered” (Ps. 32:1). The vine lives in me and offers its healing life to me: freely may I receive; therefore, freely may I give. As compulsion yields to compassion, I see the end of law; I know more fully the peace of freedom in the face of nonexistence; I feel the blessedness of a heart of flesh.

———-
[See the category "Death" for related posts.]

Antiquaker: Further Reflections on the Dark Side of Liberal Quakerism

Liberal Quakerism increasingly identifies itself with a small subset of Quaker vocabulary and practices, all loosely defined if at all. The Quaker metanarrative context which gave our vocabulary and practice meaning is ignored or intentionally rejected rather than faithfully developed, as if our selected slogans (“spirit,” “light,” “continuing revelation,” etc.) and practices (silent “worship,” consensus decision-making, etc.) could have meaning in themselves, outside of any contextual framework. But in reality they can’t exist in autonomous isolation; nothing can. In reality, when removed from their matrix they are assimilated into a dominant cultural metanarrative.

For, as minds like Derrida — and vital religious traditions as well — remind us, context is everything. Words out of context would become meaningless, so when ripped from their web they quietly take on new, unexamined meanings. Practices out of context would become empty forms, so they tend to do the same. But we liberal Quakers turn a blind eye to that inevitable process. Consequently, we no longer know what we’re talking about or why we do what we do, and we no longer acknowledge or even see that darkness in our psyches which uses our willful ignorance (and misappropriation of phrases like “that of God”) as cover. And we’re fiercely proud and protective of that ignorance, which we have substituted for the faith in “faith and practice.” As a result, we are increasingly spiritually vitiated, morally compromised, intellectually impoverished, and outreach-impaired. We are a plant without roots, withering in the success of our determination to do without them.

Our root-text, the explicit Quaker religious worldview in which our practices had their identity and function, has effectively been cut off, but selected practices are continued, justified by a few ambiguous words and phrases pulled from the text, and made central and definitive. We have reached the low-water mark of defining ourselves not as people who share a beautiful and powerful metanarrative, a religious worldview finding expression in spiritually transformative disciplines and practices, but as people who perform together certain practices that have no real grounding in anything other than personal preference and liberal values. Consequently, the practices no longer function as disciplines of critical self-knowledge and self-transcendence; on the contrary, we use them as vehicles of self, for reinforcement, celebration, and expression of naively self-centered modernistic individuality. Liberal Quakerism, instead of functioning as a critically questioning corrective for self and society, has become an agent of the modern liberal identity and culture. We who refuse the name “church” have become in practice a tiny, ultra-liberal church, an organization based on forms and insupportable doctrines that furthers the aims of a powerful segment of society.

True, we differ somewhat in that we emphasize practices, keeping our doctrines to a minimum. But in doing so, we simply sever our practices from their intellectual foundations and make them available as vessels for the modernist liberal paradigm. Defecting from our beginnings as a people who rejected forms — which, again, are never really empty — we have become the community of forms par excellence. Abandoning the deeply transforming existential and spiritual, context-derived meaning that once gave life to the forms, we continue in the forms for comfort, companionship, and a feeling of being “spiritual.” Meanwhile, we continue also to despoil the planet, hoard resources, and enjoy all the benefits, including protection by a huge and aggressive military establishment, of the oppressor class to which we pretend not to belong — even as we affirm our “testimonies” of simplicity and peacefulness. We simply make ourselves feel better, and better than others, by spiritual pretense. But outside of our Quaker mini-culture, our pretense is increasingly transparent, and our testimonies are increasingly, and justifiably, seen as hypocrisy.

We assert, for example, that we want the military disbanded, as if we’re really desirous of living with no protection against the appalling violence and poverty in which much of the world lives now while we sip lattes behind the lines.* We project our guilt onto the powerful bodies, such as corporations and governments, our true selves writ large, that satisfy our cravings for security, comfort, pleasure, and power, and then we come together on Sundays to feel good about ourselves for our pretense of spirit-led protest — although we can’t say what “spirit” means, in part because we reject any “limiting” definitions. We are now moving into the position which apostate Christianity occupied for the first Quakers: we have the forms and (some of) the words, including the word “spirit,” but we do not actually know the spirit — or the spirit we know is not the spirit that created and animated the Quaker movement. We, along with some other Friends from whom we imagine we differ greatly, are becoming the present-day Antichrist, the Antiquaker.

Although Friends originally were united in a common metanarrative, and while other subsets of Quakerism continue to be so, ultimately we are held together not even by our common use of words and practices, which mean different things if anything to different liberal Friends, but by the reactive belief that to come together in such a manner, unmoored from a Quaker metanarrative that would question, challenge, and change first self and then society, is a salutary, even ideal, thing to do. Ignorant of the irony, we insist that the word “Quaker” stand for this vacuous, status-quo-perpetuating middle- and upper-class inversion of what was once a revolutionary faith and practice. And yet, although we reject the claims of historic Quakerism when they challenge our prejudices or lifestyles, we do not hesitate to appeal to any elements, apostate or not, of Quaker history that we might use as justification of what we are and do.

And that is today’s report, from one liberal Friend, on the dark side of liberal Quakerism.

At best, what I have described is only a transitional condition, a correctable misstep in our journey through the modern to the postmodern world. At worst, it is evidence of the impending death of liberal Quakerism as a Quaker movement — a death that some liberal Friends actively seek. Although hope is sometimes battered by sounds of victory celebrations coming from within as well as without our community, I continue to hope that it is the former. And I am encouraged by the hunger for a deeper and deeply-transforming spiritual life, and the desire to raise the treasure of our torpedoed tradition, that many liberal Friends and worship-attenders continue to express. The light, though beaten down and covered over, still shines in the darkness.

———-
*Driving to meeting one day around twenty years ago, I heard a news report about debate in Japan’s Parliament on Japan’s constitutional prohibition of a military establishment. (Japan has a self-defense force but lacks a military establishment and has constitutionally rejected war and war potential.) One member argued that Japan was not truly pacifist but simply a hypocritical freeloader that relies on others, such as the United States, to do the military dirty work that keeps it secure. “What are we,” he thundered, “a bunch of nouveaux-riches Quakers?”

———-
[For related posts, see the "Liberal Quakerism" category.]

“That of God” Means No Excuses — A Quaker Interpretation of Romans 1:16-25

Welcome, Friends, to an experiment in reading and thinking; to the inspirited play of Quaker theopoetics; to a paralogy of a Paul, two Georges, and thee.

The popular Quaker phrase “that of God in every one” has its source in a passage in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. Although the first Friends were familiar with apostates’ tendentious translations developed from the Textus Receptus, the Friends’ hermeneutic, or principle of biblical interpretation, allowed them to enter into the spirit of the passage and to understand it as referring not to outward signs of God in the world but to the power of the light of Christ present within them. I find that by using the NA26/27 Greek text, with interlinear English and a variety of reference materials, I can provide a rendering of the passage that conveys Quaker thinking and experience quite effectively.

I’ll also offer two brief commentaries, each from a different Quaker perspective: one (verse-based) from the traditional, and one from the universalist/postmodern.

The passage is Romans 1:16-25.

[16] For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God unto saving for all who have faith in it, to the Jew first and even to the Greek, [17] and because God’s justice is being revealed in that power, from faith into faithfulness, according to what has been written: ‘the just shall live by faithfulness.’

[18] For God’s indignation is being disclosed from heaven over all ungodliness and injustice of human beings who are restraining the truth in injustice, [19] because that which is known of God is known within them, for God shows himself to them. [20] For, apart from what is perceived in the ordering of the world for the created things, that which is unseen of him — his eternal power and divine nature [i.e., love*] — is being discerned, and thus they are without excuse [21] inasmuch as, not recognizing God as God, they give glory or thanks but are already idolatrous in their thinking; thus their unwise heart is darkened.

[22] Professing to be wise, they are made fools, [23] and they change the glory of the incorruptible God in a likeness of an image of a corruptible human being, and flying things, and four-footed beasts, and reptiles. [24] Thus God also surrendered them into uncleanness in the desires of their hearts, to despising their bodies within themselves — [25] those who alter the truth of God in the falsehood, and are venerated, and worship the created things above the creator, who is blessed in the ages. Amen.

* * *

A brief, more traditional Quaker commentary:

16, 17. The gospel is the power of God. Christ is the power of God (1 Cor. 1:24). Both are the power of God, whose nature is love.* Therefore, gospel = Christ = power of love, the one salvific power for everyone. Those who trust in that power and are faithful to it reveal in their lives the justice of God. (Based on Paul’s reference to Habukkak 2:4 — “… for the just shall live by faithfulness [emunah]” — I am interpreting Paul’s phrase “ek pistews [pistis] eis pistin [pistis]” as a play on words.)

18. In the working of the light of Christ in the heart, God’s rejection of injustice is revealed, and, as we have seen, power is given to overcome injustice and become just (justified). Those who are “restraining the truth in injustice” are the false teachers, Antichrist, who will be discussed in verses 21 through 25. Some of them will teach the ungodly doctrine of “imputed justification”; all of them will divert people’s attention from the power of love in the heart to images of created things.

19-20. That which can be known of God by human beings is the power of love in the heart: we know God directly, immediately, only in that power. Even if we can deduce God’s existence from the order of the world, we can directly know God’s nature (and thus know the true God), “that which is unseen of him,” only as the power of love within. Everyone has that power — the light enlightens everyone — and so there is no excuse for not knowing God in the power here and now; i.e., no excuse for being unloving, unjust, idolatrous.

21-23. Those who do not trust in the light of love nor recognize it as the power of God will offer worship and thanksgiving, thinking that they are doing the right thing, but in fact they are worshiping idols, whether their deluded minds and hearts have imagined God with the characteristics of a human being or an animal of some sort. Genesis 1:26 says, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”: but they reverse the divine creation, which was done through Christ the Logos, by making God in the human image; therefore, they are the Antichrist. And in 1 Cor. 15:52, Paul says, “… the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed”: thus they also reverse the divine re-creation, which is also done through Christ, by exchanging the glory of God, which is Christ in them, for something corruptible. Their identity as Antichrist is twice confirmed.

24. Given that their hearts are in thrall to an imaginary idol-God, their desires become increasingly disordered, and they dishonor or despise their own bodies within themselves — which may well be a reference not simply to unjust or unsafe behaviors but to dishonoring the spiritual body of Christ within, “the hidden man of the heart”: “But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price” (1 Peter 3:4).

25. Such people may think and speak about God and Christ, but they are altering the gospel, attempting to make it a matter of words rather than the power of God in the heart — this is “the falsehood,” the teaching of Antichrist, the attempt to justify themselves and their way of life by choosing words over the self-sacrificing power of love within. Although they think of themselves, and are venerated by others, as holy, in fact they are idolaters, thieves using the language of religion, “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” And because they could know God in the power of love in their hearts but will not open themselves to that power, even though they feel its pull, they have no excuse.

A briefer, universalist/postmodern Quaker commentary:

Whether we are theists or not, if we are faithful to our Quaker tradition then we are united in the faith and experience that the phrase “that of God in every one” points to the power of love in the heart. We are united in the faith and experience that it is by the light of love that we see the delusion, idolatry, and injustice in ourselves; that it is by the same light of love that we see the just person we could be; and that it is by the power of love that we become that just person, that our hearts and lives are “justified” (i.e., made just) according to the ever-growing “measure” of love in us each day.

Our practices and testimonies develop from that faith and experience. We worship in silence not because we are simply calming ourselves or want to think clearly about things but because we are opening ourselves to feel the “unseen” searching, guiding, and empowering work of love in our hearts — an experience that, as Paul tells us, is inaccessible if we are not focused on love’s light and power of justice within. We live honestly, simply, and peacefully, and we conduct our business in unity, not because we believe that we should or that other people have divinity in them, but because love leads us to do so, leads us to live justly, leads us to allow it to express itself in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Despite our diversity of beliefs, which love teaches us to hold loosely lest we fall into some form of idolatry, we are one in being people whom love has claimed.

In the emptiness of our own self-centered hearts as much as in the suffering of the world, love calls to us. We have no excuse for not opening ourselves to its transforming power within us, and we need no excuse for doing so: love is its own justification — and ours.

———-
* Isaac Penington (“Concerning the Seed of God, or the Seed of the Kingdom”): “As God is love, so the seed that is born of him partakes of his love. There is no enmity in it, and no enmity or ill-will springs from it. This is it that makes it so natural to the children of God to love; because they are born of that seed which came from the God of love, whose nature is love.” See 1 John 4.

Concerning Love

Another perspective on the heart of Quakerism: Friend Isaac Penington speaks to us about love, which is the nature of God and the happiness and salvation of human beings, in a section of his “Some Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Glanced At” (1663).

This needs no commentary. I’ve simply broken up Penington’s two long paragraphs and provided explanatory notes for archaic usages.

CONCERNING LOVE

Quest. What is love?

Ans. What shall I say of it, or how shall I in words express its nature! It is the sweetness of life; it is the sweet, tender, melting nature of God, flowing up through his seed of life into the creature, and of all things making the creature most like unto himself, both in nature and operation. It fulfils the law, it fulfils the gospel; it wraps up all in one, and brings forth all in the oneness. It excludes all evil out of the heart, it perfects all good in the heart. A touch of love doth this in measure; perfect love doth this in fulness.

But how can I proceed to speak of it! Oh that the souls of all that fear and wait on the Lord might feel its nature fully! and then would they not fail of its sweet, overcoming operations, both towards one another, and towards enemies.

The great healing, the great conquest, the great salvation is reserved for the full manifestation of the love of God. His judgments, his cuttings, his hewings by the word of his mouth, are but to prepare for, but not to do, the great work of raising up the sweet building of his life, which is to be done in love, and in peace, and by the power thereof.

And this my soul waits and cries after, even the full springing up of eternal love in my heart, and in the swallowing of me wholly into it, and the bringing of my soul wholly forth in it, that the life of God in its own perfect sweetness may fully run forth through this vessel, and not be at all tinctured by the vessel, but perfectly tincture and change the vessel into its own nature; and then shall no fault be found in my soul before the Lord, but the spotless life be fully enjoyed by me, and become a perfectly pleasant sacrifice to my God.

Oh! how sweet is love! how pleasant is its nature! how takingly doth it behave itself in every condition, upon every occasion, to every person, and about every thing! How tenderly, how readily, doth it help and serve the meanest! How patiently, how meekly, doth it bear all things, either from God or man, how unexpectedly soever they come, or how hard soever they seem! How doth it believe, how doth it hope, how doth it excuse, how doth it cover even that which seemeth not to be excusable, and not fit to be covered! How kind is it even in its interpretations and charges concerning miscarriages [i.e., misdeeds]! It never overchargeth [i.e., exaggerates the misdeed], it never grates upon the spirit of him whom it reprehends; it never hardens, it never provokes; but carrieth a meltingness and power of conviction with it.

This is the nature of God; this, in the vessels capacitated to receive and bring it forth in its glory, the power of enmity is not able to stand against, but falls before, and is overcome by.

———-
Source: http://www.qhpress.org/texts/penington/mysteries.html.

The Heart of Quakerism

I want to speak about the heart of Quakerism. In order to do that, I must speak about Jesus, Christ, God. I am not a theist. So when I speak in those terms, I’m not pushing a standard Christian, or even theistic, belief agenda; I’m using the religious metaphors of our tradition to point to the heart of our identity as Friends. That heart is a very specific, ongoing experience that is, as Quakers have insisted from the very first, available to believers and nonbelievers alike, an experience that is, in fact, as our ancestors pointed out repeatedly, very often blocked by religious belief. So I’m not talking at all about belief, or what normally passes for belief, but about the experience of transformation, of having our fundamental ways of thinking and feeling be “turned around” — converted — from the normal, commonsense “wisdom of the world” to the foolish wisdom of the spirit of Christ.

If the question then is “how do we know what we mean by ‘the spirit of Christ’?” then the otherwise meaningless slogan is correct: Jesus is the answer. The spirit of Christ is the spirit that animated Jesus, that is shown to us in his life and death and teachings.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus, “the visible form of the invisible God” who is love, announced the coming of the Kingdom of God, the wisdom of which is not of this world. What does that image, “Kingdom of God,” mean? The evangelist Luke has Jesus define the Kingdom clearly, at the very outset of his ministry, in words borrowed from Isaiah, a great prophet of social justice: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor….” He continues, but I think it’s highly significant that the very first phrase Jesus uses to describe the new order, the Kingdom of God, is “good news for the poor.” That’s the agenda of the spirit of Christ in nutshell: “good news for the poor.”

And what would be good news for the poor, except that those of us who have more than enough would learn to share much more than we do now, so that justice would be realized? In another place, Jesus tells the story of two men. One, well off, relaxes comfortably in his spacious home every evening, enjoying his plentiful and delicious dinner, perhaps planning his postprandial pleasures while he eats; the other, the poor man Lazarus, lies just on the other side of the well-off man’s locked gate, bleeding and starving to death, hoping for crumbs from the other’s table — as if human beings can survive on crumbs, as if we well-off should consider ourselves generous if we give our crumbs to the poor. If you don’t know the rest of the story, you can find it in the same Gospel of Luke (and read George Fox’s “sermon” on it here): briefly, it graphically illustrates just what Jesus thought of that well-off man and those like him, who use the rationalizations of accepted worldly wisdom to justify their pleasures while the poor lie bleeding at their gates.

[T]he Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor, healing for the broken-hearted, freedom for the imprisoned, sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed: to preach the year of the Lord’s favor.

“The year of the Lord’s favor” is the Jubilee year, the year in which the commonsense, private-property economic rules of society are set aside for the sake of justice, a year in which land is taken back from those who have hoarded it, slaves are freed, and debts are forgiven. In the Kingdom of God, the Jubilee year is now. Justice, healing, liberation, vision: the agenda of the spirit of Christ.

So we’re talking about a man who put the poor first, who fed the hungry when he could, healed the sick when he could, associated with sinners and outcasts, insisted that we care for the just and the unjust alike, openly challenged religious people whose religion is a mask for unacknowledged self-centeredness and aggression, turned on their heads the commonsense rules of conventional morality — which always favor those who have and hoard wealth and power — and was therefore tortured to death. But he passed on his vision of the Kingdom, and he passed on the Spirit of Christ, and he became the key to our realizing that Kingdom and Spirit in our lives.

Some sixteen hundred years later, our ancestors, too, were tortured, sometimes to death, because they dared to assert their right and their obligation to be possessed of and by the Spirit that was in Jesus — the spirit that gives and then gives more, that forgives and then forgives more; that willingly sacrifices for justice, for love of the other, and that calls on all of us to do the same, to open our hearts to the suffering of the world and to be moved to action.

They, in their turn, passed that Spirit on to us. And they handed down to us this institution called Quakerism, all of the accomplishments of which come out of that transformation of individual hearts. They gave us our unique forms of meeting: for worship in silence, and for making decisions in the Spirit of Christ — both expressions of the unique gift which Quakerism offers the world. And these forms of gathering together have deep and serious purpose and meaning: the crucifixion of the “natural” person, the raising of the spiritual Christ in our hearts, and the manifestation of that spirit in and among us and, through us, in the world.

I’ve been told that Quaker meeting is a place where all opinions are respected and can get a hearing, and that Quaker decision-making is a process of arriving at truth through attending to each person’s expressed opinion. Our ancestors, however, tell us that the only place personal opinions have within the meetinghouse walls is on the cross, as we courageously allow them to be crucified by love so that the spirit of Christ, which they have been trampling and trying to destroy while telling us they’re doing the opposite, can be raised in us. As the first Friends read Paul, “if Christ be not raised [in us], then our faith is in vain.” Our faith, our coming together, our going out into the world under the name of Quaker: all vanity unless we allow our worldly wisdom to die in silence so that the spirit of love can be raised in our hearts, can break open our hearts and make us new — unless we help each other set aside our cherished opinions and ways of seeing the world in order that we may, as Paul said, “have the mind of Christ,” that we may be brought into one mind, one heart, one body.

That is not easy. The logic of the Kingdom of God is illogic to the natural mind; the agenda of God seems to be madness. But I ask myself which is more of madness: an open life of giving and forgiving, filled with the joy and pain of love, or a life centered on the smallness of self, a life that closes its heart to Lazarus at my gate. Certainly, the life of love is very difficult and costly. But I can only echo Paul, who said that “Our present sufferings I count as nothing compared to the glory that us now unfolding within us.” Our ancestors taught that each of us has a measure, more or less of the divine glory of love within us. May we be faithful to that measure, help it grow, and help each other in that process.

———-
The little essay above is reprinted, with minor changes, from the current section of my journal, where it was originally published in April of 2008. I post it here in order to offer it to a new readers and to permit comments and discussion. — G.A.

Confessing Together that Christ Is Come

Is the confession that “Christ is come in the flesh” at the point of convergence for theistic and nontheistic Friends? As Bierce might ask, “Can such things be?”

The phrase “Christ is come in the flesh” is from 1 John 4:1-4.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.

A “professor” named William Jeffries attempted to use that passage against the primitive Quakers, writing, “The spirit of antichrist denies Christ come in the flesh, and says the light within is Christ, when at the best it is but the light of nature.” As do his responses to other such charges, George Fox’s response to Jeffries implies a sharp distinction between the belief that Christ came to earth (lived, died, and was raised) 2,000 years ago, which is apostate Christianity’s basis of faith, and the Quakers’ experience that Christ is come here and now in his saints, in the reality of the inner Light, by which his flesh is known in our own.

Before looking at Fox’s response to Jeffries, which will tell us more about what the phrase “Christ is come in the flesh” means in primitive Quaker exegesis and theology, a few words of caution and preparation are in order.

It’s all too easy for us to read Fox under the influence of 2,000 years of the apostate (i.e., defective!) Christian worldview. It is helpful to remember that truth is not a cognitive datum for primitive Quakerism, but is the living Christ himself (who, it bears repeating, is not a cognitive datum). Because, as Fox often said, Christ is the power of God (e.g., The Great Mystery, hereinafter GM, p. 464; see also 1 Cor. 1:24), we can say that “truth is power.” We know Christ by being empowered in his divine life of love here and now. In that intimate union, his flesh and ours is one: we are “flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone” (see Gen. 2:23 and Eph. 5:30).

The church — we saints — is, then, the very body of Christ. Another traditional image of the church, that of the bride of Christ, also tells us that we are formed, as was Eve of Adam’s, of Christ’s own flesh. Fox puts the two together and tells us how to become thus incorporated into Christ: we are, in the mythic and paradoxical language of scripture, to spiritually eat the flesh of Christ. “[T]he saints are ‘flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone,’ and the church which he is head of, is his body. And every one that eats his flesh, knows his body given for the life of the world …” (GM, p. 51). To “eat” Christ’s spiritual flesh (cf. Gen. 9:4 and John 6:53) in holy communion means to be “partakers of the divine nature” through “his divine power” (2 Peter 1: 3-4) — to become, through living in the light and power of love, the living flesh and blood and bone of Christ here and now. This is not what the world knows as Christianity.

Here now is the heart of Fox’s response to Jeffries:

[No one can] know him in the flesh, confess him ‘come in the flesh,’ or know his flesh, or the flesh of the son of man, but who are in the light that comes from him that ‘doth enlighten every man,’ &c…. And walking in the light, it leads into the day, where there is no night, which light is Christ the covenant of God; and such come to know the darkness past. Now I say [none who have their] eyes closed to that of God in them … can ‘confess Christ come in the flesh,’ but only from the letter; for these know not his flesh. [...] The apostates must come all to that which they have ravened from inwardly, before they come to know Christ’s flesh, and are of his flesh, and eat his flesh, and ‘confess that Christ is come in the flesh,’ who is the offering, and the sacrifice of [emphasis added; as this post's endnote demonstrates, Fox knew some Greek] the whole world that makes the peace between God and man, and ‘perfects for ever them that are sanctified.’ — GM, pp. 246-247.

“Christ the covenant of God” refers, of course, to the New Covenant (or Testament) of which the Hebrew scriptures speak:

And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it. For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever. (Micah 4:3-5)

and

[T]his shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

This is the new covenant/testament of peace and toleration which Paul said is “not of words [gramma: the letter; the written word; the scripture], for words kill, but of spirit, for spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). “The new covenant is Christ” (GM, p. 507), who is himself the way, the truth, the life, the gospel, the power of God (again, see GM p. 464).

In the theopoetic imagery of 1 John, it is the spirits in us that make confession, and anyone in whom the spirit is confessing that “Christ is come in the flesh” is of the spirit of God. How does the spirit make that confession in us? Again, it is not in words; as Fox points out repeatedly, the devil, the antichrist, the apostates believe and say those words. As we have seen, truth is power. Christ is come in power (GM, p. 449). To confess that “Christ is come in the flesh,” then, has nothing to do with words or beliefs: it is nothing other than to live in the power of the God who is love, to be the living presence of Christ here and now.

As Quakerism has always recognized, one need not know the words “God” and “Christ,” or the story of Jesus, in order to do that, whereas “many have the words, and [yet] deny the word itself [e.g., the divine Logos, the creating, illuminating, enlivening power of God]” — and “the word is Christ and God” (GM, pp.364 and 463, respectively). To actually “confess that Christ is come in the flesh” is to surrender to the searching and empowering work of the light of love in the heart. Then one’s life is the divine spirit’s confession, a confession not in words but in the Word, which is “the true light that enlightens every one,” the creative power of love “made flesh” in us.*

Principle. He [i.e., Samuel Eaton, "who calls himself a teacher of the church of Christ"] saith he doth ‘not believe that there is any substantial, essential, or personal union betwixt the eternal spirit and believers.’

Answer. [But] the scripture saith, the spirit dwells in the saints, 1 Cor. 6, and, ‘He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.’ 1 John 1. As though the saints had not union with God, which the scripture saith they have. — GM, p. 34.

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits….” The spirit of the God of love is Christ, the head of the body of saints, we saints who, abiding in love, are “flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone.” Christ is come in our flesh. In light of the reality expressed in those theopoetic images, we see that words and beliefs are mere pointers, pointers that lead to delusion and death when spirits are poorly discerned. The world believes that it knows Christ, that it confesses Christ come in the flesh, but that confession, in words of belief, leaves evil rampant: the bloody “man of sin,” the spirit of self, still dominates the world. It is only in our effective life-confession, our living in the power of love, that evil is overcome. “Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.”

Here, again, in our living in the unity of the holy spirit of perfect and perfecting love, not in the words “Christ is come in the flesh” but in their actualization, is the point of convergence for Friends. We do well to keep that before us, to live and celebrate our unity in the “universal love” that many of us name “God,” “till we all come, in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

——
* From “Several scriptures corrupted by the translators” in Fox, The Great Mystery, p. 582 (punctuation and emphasis edited): “John i. 14: ‘The word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us’; in the Greek it is in us …. By true interpretation it is, ‘the word became flesh, and pitched his tent in us.’”

To Bridge or Not to Bridge

My 8/21/09 post on “Worship, Nontheism, & Convergence” proposed a bridge by which theistic and nontheistic Quakers might come together, a bridge that I have found in my ministry to be eminently useful for that purpose (with the welcome effect, by the way, of helping some of us to better obey the advice to “take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts”). The post applied a standard reading of a scripture passage — and I am grateful for seasoned Friends’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of that reading — as a hermeneutical key to unlock the reported primitive Quaker experience qua text, a key that the texts themselves harbor as well.

Comprising only about 1,300 words and being shaped to its purpose, the 8/21 post is not a tiny theological or philosophical treatise or the prelude to one; it is simply a light on a way forward in the sometimes stalled, often acrimonious, always peculiar interfaith dialogue between theistic and nontheistic Friends. As interfaith dialogue requires, it is an attempt to point to a commonality, to a place where we might be together in peace, might even work and worship together, while we explore other commonalities and differences. It’s understandable that such an endeavor would arouse anxiety, and, not unexpectedly, I have received a number of complaints — that I am attempting to reduce God, to distort Quakerism, to rewrite scripture or history, or to do some other irresponsible thing — that, being pressed, seem to want to justify switching off this light, shutting down this bridge. They’ve kept me busy. And in addition to those conversations, other corre­spondents have helped develop the topic, while yet others have written about further interesting, more or less related, material, and it’s easy and all too enjoyable for me to walk down that road with them.

I am very grateful, if a bit overwhelmed, for the dialogue, for the sharing of concerns and information, and for the challenges that have helped me think more clearly and carefully. I’m even grateful for some opportunities to respond to adamantine opinion; if nothing else, they fired up the little gray cells, and sometimes they brought out additional aspects of the topic as well. I have tried to reply to everyone, but I may not be able to continue that: I lack the time now, I have increasingly frequent Internet access problems (thanks, Verizon), and I want the post to serve as intended and not be lost in clouds of (again, more or less) related conversation, however much I have learned from my correspondents in these threads.

So while further comments on that post are certainly welcome, I can’t promise to publish or reply to those that rehash issues already discussed or that carry us into philosophical or other areas much beyond the scope of the post. I want to use the time I can give to that post to focus on its ministry of reconciliation for those who are open to the message. And I have more posts in me; for one thing, I’d like to get back to my analysis of George Fox’s metanoia.

I’ll leave you tonight with this from Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island (1955, p. 165):

Charity [i.e., caritas, love] alone is perfectly free, always doing what it pleases, since it wills nothing except to love and cannot be prevented from loving. Without charity, knowledge is fruitless. Love alone can teach us to penetrate the hidden goodness of the things we know. Knowledge without love never enters into the inner secrets of being. Only love can truly know God as He is, for God is love.

Worship, Nontheism, & Convergence

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.” (Acts 2:1)

In seventeen years of online discussions with other Quakers, I have found that Friends who hold belief in the personal God of Western tradition may have a difficult time understanding even the possibility of worship for a nontheist. Their assumption seems to be that Quaker worship is, like other forms of worship, an act of reverence toward an object of worship, and that therefore a person who does not believe in God has no divine object and cannot worship. If the assumption were correct, then the conclusion — that nontheist Quakers do not actually engage in Quaker worship — might follow. But the assumption is erroneous. It does not reflect the unique Quaker understanding of worship as taught, for example, by George Fox.

We can read about George Fox’s understanding of worship in various places in his collected Works. But grasping it is difficult, because we tend to approach Fox’s words with unrecognized preconceptions about his meaning. It’s easy to forget the fact that Fox and other Friends, convinced that everything that had come between the apostles and them had been cunning distortions of the Antichrist, completely re-defined Christianity. Those distortions, which continue to shape almost all of Christian thought, color our interpretation of both Fox and scripture in ways that we fail to see. And so we are quite confident that we read Fox and the scriptures aright (as he might say), and we don’t realize that our confidence is blind.

But even to justify that assertion, much less to explicate Quaker worship from the writings of Fox and other primitive Friends, would require quite a bit of space (and time). So I’ll just wade in now and define Quaker worship as succinctly as I can, assisted by a couple of passages from an epistle by George Fox. If anyone feels that I am in error, we can examine the primitive texts together. I can say, however, that I have studied those texts sufficiently to be confident of the fidelity of my definition. I do my best to apply the testimony of integrity to my explications of historic Quakerism. And I am a realist who avoids anachronism; I don’t pretend, for example, that primitive Quakerism was somehow not theistic.

I said above that it is erroneous to assume that Quaker worship is, like other forms of worship, an act of reverence toward an object of worship. But if it is not that, then what is it? Simply put, Quaker worship, modeled on, among other passages, the biblical story of Pentecost, is “silent waiting upon God.” That’s a very different thing.

Before letting George Fox speak to us about silent waiting, I want to help nontheists as well as theists to hear him — and to hear each other. Because, as 1 John 4 asserts, God is love and love is God, and because, as Paul asserts, Christ is “the image [in whom we are made; see Gen. 1:27] of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), we can define worship in a way that speaks to theists and nontheists by simply substituting the word “love” for “God” and “Christ” in the source texts. That substitution has been made (except when the meaning would not be clear, or when mythological agency is attributed) in the following passages from Fox.*

And this is to all that would learn silent waiting upon [love] and silent meeting; for none shall ever come to [love] … but as they do come to that of [love] in them, the light which [love] hath enlightened them withal; and that is it which must guide everyone’s mind up to [love], and to wait upon [love] to receive the spirit from [love], and the spirit leads to wait upon [love] in silence, and to receive from [love].

Other than waiting patiently and trustingly for the working of love in our hearts, then, we perform no action in Quaker worship. Our worship is essentially passive. Therefore there is no object toward which our worship is directed, toward which we proffer reverence. We’re simply waiting to feel the motions of love directing our lives. Thus do we avoid the error of attempting to objectify, to reify, God. And thus do we, if we are theists, avoid the error of secretly thinking that we are pleasing God by the work of worship.

Such worship is proper for Friends because Quakerism is about leaving behind all “types and figures” — i.e., words and mental images (which “are spoken to the carnal part of man”**) — and entering the “substance,” which Fox said is Christ — i.e., love. So there is no need for one to be a theist in order to join in Quaker worship, because silent waiting upon love’s working in the heart is the whole of it.

Keep to that of [love] in you, when you are still from your own thoughts and imaginations, and desires and counsels of your own hearts, and motions, and will; when you stand single from all these, waiting upon [love], your strength is renewed; he that waits upon [love], feels his shepherd, and he shall not want: and that which is of [love] in every one, is that which brings them together to wait upon [love], which brings them to unity, which joins their hearts together up to [love]. … [F]or the light is the door, the light is the power, that doth enlighten every man that cometh into the world, that all through the light might believe, and he that believeth is entered into his rest [i.e., sabbath], hath ceased from his own works as God did from his [after creating the world], and he hath the witness in himself. And he that is born of [love] overcometh the world, he does not make haste: he knows a silent meeting and waiting upon [love]; and knows that … Christ ([love's] covenant of peace, of light with [love] and man) they must come into; then all flesh must be silent before [love]; so the life of [love] comes to guide.

We talk about being “convergent Friends,” yet even in our converging we continue to push each other away, breaking the body of love with words, dividing the “substance” by “types and figures.” George Fox has something to say about that, too, in the same epistle:

And you that think yourselves above the world … giving names one to another, throwing dirt one to another, where the enmity is … and they that do so, mock one another; and here is the generation of mockers, out of the life, and out of the light, and every one striving for mastery and lordship and authority one over another: but it shall not be so with you who are children of light, disciples of [love], not of this world, whose kingdom is not of this world, and who come out of strife, come into peace.

The shared, traditional understanding of Quaker worship as silent waiting upon and submission to the working of love in the heart can and should be the point of real convergence for all Friends.

This time, dear reader, I leave the word substitutions to you:

[A]nd all people, know the mind of Christ (which none can but who come to the light he hath enlightened them withal), that you may come to be of one mind, heart and soul; and all people wait to receive the spirit of Christ Jesus, which if you have not, you are none of his; and all people come to live in the power of godliness … and you will come to live in the gospel [which, as Fox often reminded us, is the power of God-who-is-love].

———-
Notes:
* Except as indicated below, all passages from George Fox are adapted, as described in the text, from “An Epistle to All People on the Earth,” which begins on page 119 of Vol. 4 of the 1831 edition of Works.
** Fox, Works Vol. 4, p. 34

Wrestling with Nothingness

The intuition of nonexistence, which I wrote about recently, continues. It has a definite Buddhist flavor, as in these lines from Ryōkan (1758–1831), a Zen Buddhist poet and hermit.*

This is an old truth; don’t think it was discovered recently.
“I want this, I want that”
Is nothing but foolishness.
I’ll tell you a secret:
All things are impermanent.

But given my bi-spirituality, I acknowledge a Christian aspect as well. Zen and Christianity come together in the religious experience of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who, through his writings, was my spiritual guide for many of my younger years, and who in the latter part of his life studied and wrote about the Zen experience. Here is a statement from an interview with Brother Paul Quenon, a Trappist who studied under Merton at Gethsemane Abbey.

[Merton and I] were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness.

Wrestling with nothingness seems to be a good description of where the intuition leads me. If I possessed the kind of theistic faith that sustained Merton, I might be able to frame the intuition as apophatic mysticism. When I am just coming out of the experience, I can sense how easily my perception of it could be changed by such faith. But while I don’t rule faith out on a priori grounds, each time I consider it I see that the world makes less, not more, sense from the perspective of theism. And so I wrestle, trying to come to terms with the experience, learning to accept the unacceptable and to allow this reality to shape my remaining time.

For without God, emptiness is truly empty. In Buddhist thought, the term “voidness” is not always reframed as “plenitude”: sometimes it is permitted to mean what it says, and that’s how I must use it now. This all seems most ironic to me, that a man who is grasped by the moral vision of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus comes, as he approaches the end of his life, to this Buddhist-like experience of voidness, of emptiness — without even the escape hatch of a substantialist interpretation of the doctrine of Buddha-nature, sometimes used to pretend that emptiness isn’t really empty.

Ryōkan again:

The village has disappeared in the evening mist
And the path is hard to follow.
Walking through the pines,
I return to my lonely hut.

When I was young, the Catholic Church was my village. (See “The Making of a Quaker Atheist.”) Leaving there discouraged, I found this poor heart-hut at hand and stayed here, thinking that it would be but a temporary abode. It became my base for exploration. After wandering about and staying awhile among other communities, I discovered the Quaker village, and it is there that I continue to visit when I leave my inner hermitage. But that village, too, is swallowed by mist at the end of the day, and I see no path elsewhere. In the obscurity of age, I return to my lonely self. I will visit the village again, but I understand now that this temporary hut is my spiritual home. And I am beginning to understand that no one lives here. But if that truly is the case, I wish I could learn it fully while no one is still someone.

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.” — Ryōkan

In the physical house in which I bide my time, there is a beautiful, although damaged, Buddhist shrine, in which reside images of the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Thích Quảng Đức (who immolated himself in Saigon when I was 13 years old). For a couple of years, the shrine, facing a space too small for sitting in meditation, has been closed. The shrine is something like my heart: beautiful, intricate, Bodhisattva-harboring; broken, misoriented, latched. Today, I think I will turn both of us around and open the doors.

———-
*Note: passages from Ryōkan are from “Zen Poetics of Ryokan” by Meng-hu, reprinted at The Hermitary.
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[Related post: "I Know What It's Like to Be Dead"]

That of God, Spirit, and Light, Lite

Almost a month ago, I quoted F. S. C. Northrop in a post on modern liberal Quakerism.” (I use “modern” to refer to the Enlightenment-influenced worldview that was undermined by the events of the twentieth century.) Northrop wrote that “the truly important thing” for the modern person is either material “substances” or

the blank, purely spiritual, intrinsically unemotional, introspectively given mental substance with which … he communes on the Sabbath. … Thus the Quaker, sitting in silence without a professional preacher in his unadorned meetinghouse, most directly, completely, and perfectly exemplifies the religion of [the] modern Cartesian and Lockean man.⁽¹⁾

I went on to point out that the subjectivism (“truth = what’s true for me”) of contemporary liberal Quakerism remains tethered to the modernist paradigm. But I didn’t explain why I thought so. I want to write a little about that now.

We liberal Quakers talk about “that of God,” Spirit, and Light as if we agree on the meanings of those terms. If asked to define them, however, those of us who can answer at all tend to take refuge in fuzzy God- (or non-God-) talk: “the divine,” “the Spirit of God,” “a spark of the divine in each of us.” If asked to define our defining terms (i.e., “God,” “the divine”), we get even fuzzier, and our subjectivism becomes apparent: a typical response begins with, “For me, ….” We began speaking about something we hold in common — belief in Spirit, the Light, that of God — but within seconds we’re talking about individual notions, because what we hold in common has very little content.

What has happened to us?

We’ve forgotten narrative. We’ve forgotten that a society, especially a religious society, is a community of a narrative. And we’ve forgotten that, as Jacques Derrida said, there “there is nothing outside context.”⁽²⁾

In their proper context, Spirit, Light, and that of God are characters in a narrative. Within the narrative they have well-defined characteristics and roles. They have life. And they have evocative power. Ripped from that narrative, they become vague metaphysical notions that stir no one: Northrop’s “blank, purely spiritual, intrinsically unemotional, introspectively given mental substance.” On that blank canvas, each of us paints a more or less impressionistic picture of what they mean for me — a process that may take care of “me” but does not “answer that of God” in the other to whom we speak.

But that modern, individualistic avoidance of “indebtedness to the other”⁽³⁾ seems to be what many of us want, although we may resemble a certain egghead.

Alice: I don’t know what you mean by “that of God in every one.”
Quaker: Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “people are basically good.”
Alice: But “that of God in every one” doesn’t mean “people are basically good.”
Quaker: When I use a phrase, it means just what I choose it to mean — for me. You may choose to use it in some other way.

Characters in a narrative, indeed.

———-
(1) F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West. New York, Macmillan, 1964. Page 92.
(2) Quoted in James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2006. Page 52.
(3) From Frans van Peperstraten, “Displacement or composition? Lyotard and Nancy on the trait d’union between Judaism and Christianity.” Int J Philos Relig (2009) 65:29–46. Available here under Open Access. Describing Lyotard’s views, van Peperstraten says, “Modernity, … according to Lyotard, no longer requires any dispossession [of self]. Christianity means that man becomes ‘taken into possession by’ … an alterity, whereas modernity holds that one can be freed from all indebtedness to the other ….”

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[For related posts, see the "Liberal Quakerism" category.]