Quaker Theology in Brief

Owning Our Theology

“Quaker theology” is sometimes said to be an oxymoron. But the belief that we have no theology is naïve. At least in our cultural context, to be involved in religion or spirituality is to hold a theology. To insist that one doesn’t is, therefore, to convey an unwillingness to acknowledge one’s own belief system qua belief system. Implicit in that is resistance to examining one’s world-view contextually and critically; ironically, such resistance is reminiscent of the rigid religion we thought we’d left behind. And of course denial does not alter reality.

The reality is that, although we’re not all theologians, we all do theology: each of us, even if not a theist of any sort, has ideas about what the word “God” means. And we each know what we accept and reject with regard to theistic belief. To believe in¹ a God — or “Spirit,” “Light,” “Source,” “Ultimate Reality,” “the Absolute,” “the Divine,” “the Infinite,” etc. — is to affirm that a particular set of mental formations accurately represents the nature of reality; not to believe is to doubt or deny that given concepts convey correct information. Those ideas and non/beliefs are our theo-logy, our God-reasoning.

In flight from owning our theology, we may seek refuge in what has been called experientialism, the belief that individuals may obtain meaningful but ineffable Truth directly through nonverbal, or “pure,” experience.² But “Truth,” too, is a mental formation, and a capitalized, sacralized one at that: it is already an interpretive concept. Even if “pure experience” exists, it cannot remain pure, devoid of interpretation, if it is to have meaning. Consequently, as a future essay will argue in detail, the notion of religious/spiritual experience that is wholly beyond language appears to be absurd.³ Further, a doctrine that truth is a matter of purely subjective revelation ignores the influence of culture — of the other – on our psyches and is akin to solipsism if not psychosis. We do better, with respect to honesty and clarity, to confess our “sin of theology”⁴ and commit to the work of enunciating and struggling with it. To that end, I will offer here a succinct theological foundation statement for present-day Quakerism, a statement that respects the nature and power of the faith of our founders while being informed by contemporary thought.

A Faithful Contemporary Foundation

Primitive Quakerism constituted a radical simplification of Christian religion; it was hyperfocused on the power for/of living righteously. To bring that vision into the 21st century requires no elaboration but, on the contrary, invites further simplification: mythic scriptural elements that carried the message can be (not discarded but) bracketed as we focus on the message’s existential core. Setting aside, too, the more modern, norm-limned self-caricature that produces “the testimony of simplicity” and other focal displacements,⁵ we find that Quakerism can be, so to speak, simplicity itself. A foundational Quaker theology for today needs but four brief points.

1. “God” signifies “love” — in biblical Greek, agape.⁶
2. “Love/agape” signifies behavior, empathetic encounter with and response to the actual other in her actual need.⁷
3. Each of us has, here and now, a degree (“measure”) of the power of agape.
4. That agape-power will shape our lives if we allow it to do so — if, that is, we commit ourselves to it, discern how we are impeding it, and get out of its way.

The essential Quaker message is, then, not only simple but also practical: commit yourself to God/love as that which moves you to respond justly and generously to the other, even at cost to you, and then pay attention to that love’s movement in your heart and allow it to guide and empower you; anything else is distraction and therefore anti-religion, anti-spirituality. In keeping with that, the first Friends announced the end of religion-as-we-know-it, emphatically including the end of teachers, techniques, and speculations. Their theology, like the biblical exegesis supporting it, served their belief that God-who-is-love had come to guide his people himself: it was but a sign directing human beings to the motive power of agape within. In our contemporary distillation of their theology, we follow in that spirit.

Faith and Practice

Because Quaker theology points directly to the working of agape in the heart, there should be no question of translating theory into action. As the apostle James reminds us, faith and practice cannot be separated. To be a believer, said George Fox, is to be — actually, not forensically — “passed from death [i.e., sinfulness, or living harmfully] to life [i.e., righteousness, or living justly].” The apostle John (recalling the story of Cain and Abel) says, “And we are aware that we have passed out of death into life because we love our brothers; whoever is not loving their brother is remaining in death.”⁸ In traditional terms, “believers,” those who put their faith in God-who-is-agape‘s guidance and power, enter into the divine life of love, become “partakers of the divine nature,” as they are made just through that faith: love is their resurrection and their life.⁹ In contemporary terms, it is through faith, commitment to agape as supreme value and trust in its continuing guidance, that we are saved from the darkness of destructive narcissism. A properly Quaker theology simply points to the possibility and nature of such faith.

Quaker theology is realized in the fidelity of individual Friends to the continuing influence of agape, in the fidelity of the community gathered in that love, and in the responsive work of agape in the world. Always, this faith-and-practice is one. And always, because of that oneness, it is simple, simplicity itself — as are our lives when we embrace it.

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NOTES for Quaker Theology in Brief

[1] “Believe” is polysemous, so the phrase “believe in” has multiple possible meanings. It can indicate that I accept the facticity of something; for example, that I believe in a god in the sense of accepting that the god exists. It can indicate trust, as in, “I know that you’ll come through for me; I believe in you.” It can indicate that I approve of something, as in, “I believe in the separation of church and state.” Tellingly, “believe” can also indicate uncertainty, as in, “I believe that her sister’s name is Mary, but I’ll have to check.” In this post, I am using the phrase “believe in” primarily in the first sense, but I recognize that multiple senses of “believe” may be present in a person’s thinking about God.

[2] Experientialism has become de facto doctrine in the liberal Quaker milieu, supporting an individualistic religion which meshes well with the contemporary consumerist mindset, at least in the U.S.A. For an example of that approach, see the 2012 draft Faith and Practice of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, pp. 19-21: “Certainly, each of us is encouraged to follow our individual spiritual path. [...] Your Truth informs my own, and I am not constrained to accept your Truth as my own, but I am encouraged to listen to your testimony, to discern the value of your approach and how it affects my own path.” (The capitalization is in the original.) Not surprisingly, the book offers an impoverished understanding of Quaker community and worship as a “safe … environment” for “individualistic search,” for speaking about our own experiences, and for patiently listening to others speak about theirs in hopes of getting something for ourselves (see p. 24) — a safe environment, in other words, for narcissistic self-indulgence and grasping under the guise of spirituality.

[3] Fuller discussion of ideas such as “pure experience” must await future essays. For now, I simply note that to feel that an experience is religious, spiritual, or mystical involves ascribing that quality or meaning to it. Such ascription, even if done subconsciously, is interpretation, shaped by culture and language. (Acknowledging those facts, by the way, we can stand aside from the seemingly endless debate over whether “pure experience” is even possible.) For an excellent introduction to critical thinking about, and application of attribution/ascription theory to, the idea of religious experience, see Religious Experience Reconsidered by Ann Taves.

[4] That felicitous phrase was recently used by a Friend when quitting, apparently in frustration at the group’s negativity, an online Quaker theology discussion group.

[5] When Quakerism is defined, as it sometimes is by liberal Friends, in terms of shared practices and values, then it has devolved — exaltation of subjective experience notwithstanding — into a religion of externals and of law. Becoming thereby the very opposite of what it was while pretending to be the same, it now qualifies for the epithet “Anti-Quakerism.”

[6] See the letters of John; e.g., 1 Jn. 4:8b: ho theos agape estin. On love as the nature of God, see Isaac Penington’s “Concerning Love.” That doctrine is taught as well by traditional Christian writers such as Augustine of Hippo, who wrote in his On the Trinity  that “Love … is of God and is God….”

[7] That divine love means beneficial action for the other, even the enemy, is amply documented in the Christian scriptures; see, for example, Matthew 5:38-48. Note that this is where traditional Quakerism — unlike the cult of the individual and his personal “Truth” — may break free of solipsism and linguistic regression as well: agape is not simply an inner feeling or a linguistic signified which becomes yet another signifier in a circle; it is empathetic action in the world, arising responsively in interpersonal encounter.

[8] On faith and works, see James 2. On what makes a “true believer,” see the Journal of George Fox, page 6 in the Penney edition. The quotation from John is 1 Jn. 3:14.

[9] “Partakers of the divine nature” is from 2 Peter 1:4. In the Quaker version of salvation by faith, when we trust in the Light, the guiding and empowering work of the spirit of Christ in the heart, we are incorporated into Christ here and now, “that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21), for “now the justice/righteousness of God apart from the law has been made to appear … through Jesus Christ’s faith into all and upon all the ones believing, for there is no distinction” (Romans 3:21-22). My final reference in the paragraph is to John 11:25, in which Christ the divine Logos, the visible form of God-who-is-love into whom believers are incorporated, says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he were dead, shall live….”

The Publican, the Quarisee, and Christ

During worship at Little Falls Meeting, I rose and said,

I hope you’ll forgive me if this is too bold. Using a story told by Jesus, I’m about to make a riddle that’s no joke. Here’s the story.

Two guys walk into a house of worship, one after the other. The first, a man whose job makes him complicit in state oppression, stops just by the door. He hangs his head, beats his breast, and sincerely acknowledges before God that he is a wicked person and very much in need of mercy. The second guy walks in, looks the first fellow over, and then continues to the front. There, he expresses his sincere gratitude to God that he has been blessed with right religion: what good people should do, he does; what good people should not do, he does not. He’s thankful that he’s not like the guy in the back.

My riddle is not about which one Jesus approves. As you already know if you’ve read the story in the Bible, Jesus says that God accepts the guy in the back and rejects the other one. My riddle is this: which one is the Quaker?

After worship, a Friend said to me: “My answer is: neither.” As I thought about that, I realized that I had been thinking of the question as being of the “either-or” sort: do we Quakers tend to be more like the first man – the publican, as Jesus told it – or the second – the Pharisee? But the story has three important characters, not two: I, at least, had excluded the narrator.

When Jesus is included, the story deepens. It speaks to me now of a complex, but perhaps not uncommon, Quaker conversion process. Let’s say that a person begins as something like a publican. As the Light of agape-love shines on her life, she becomes aware that she is complicit in an oppressive and violent social, economic, and political system. Thus “convicted” by the Light, she repents and becomes a Quaker, publicly affirming Friends’ religious ideals of peace, equality, and integrity. Now she can feel that she is no longer complicit; her Quaker values and practices lift her above the warmongers and other less enlightened, less virtuous, people.

As we’ve seen, Jesus would have preferred that she remain at the honest publican’s level. But she has found a way to save herself. She has become what I’ll call a Quarisee — a Quaker-Pharisee.

In the Christian scriptures, “Pharisee” refers to a member of a religious group. The Pharisee publicly lives a spiritual life. He is committed to discerning and doing the right thing; he tries hard to know and follow the will of God, and he encourages others to do likewise. And he is, if more or less subconsciously, proud of himself for being a decent person. He doesn’t see that he continues to serve an unjust and violent system. As a member of organized religion, even if one that protests against unrighteousness, he helps maintain the status quo. Protected by state power, profiting from an unjust economy, he lives well while the poor starve. Meanwhile, he looks down on those whose values, he feels, are not as noble as his, or whose actions offend his (ultimately self-serving) sense of what’s right.

That is what our protagonist has become. After the good start of responding to the Light’s illumination of her situation, she has fallen into the insidious sin of self-satisfaction. If, as our tradition teaches, the first function of the Light is to convict us of the moral failure of selfishness, to reveal us to ourselves as we really are in relation to justice, peace, and mercy, then when we no longer see that selfishness — regardless of what we tell ourselves, regardless of what our Quaker community might affirm for us — we have turned away from the Light. And that, although she does not realize it, is what she has done, almost from the outset. She sees now, not herself, but what she believes herself to be.

If our new Friend abides at the Quarisee stage, which is the natural thing to do, then she gives her life over to hypocrisy. But there is, as the Little Falls Friend reminded me, another possibility, one which opens for us when we remember to include Jesus the Christ in our story. For, as we learn from the first Friends, the vocation of a Quaker is to be, like Jesus, the body of Christ in this world.

In the Bible story, it is Jesus, the Light enfleshed, who, free of the sin of both publican and Pharisee, can examine their situations from a critical yet compassionate perspective. Seeing the complicity of the hapless publican and the hypocrisy of the satisfied Pharisee, he pronounces judgment: God accepts the authenticity of the sinner who knows what he is, for such a person at least acknowledges what the Light reveals. But God rejects the complacency of the self-consciously spiritual person, because it is a result — and this would be especially ironic for a Quaker — of his failure to appraise himself and his life honestly and continuously in the Light.

This says to our Quarisee that if she can open her present condition to the Light’s critical searching, accept the continuing revelation that evil lives disguised as goodness in her heart, and allow the Light to lead her back into repentance, she can begin again. This time, however, alert to the allure of self-righteousness, she may learn from the example of Jesus that it’s not about her and her moral status but about the plight of the world and the individual beings in the world. This time, she may be able to go out of herself and enter into real relationship with others, responding not to her own beliefs and values but to the others’ suffering and need. This time, she may give up the project of making herself good and accept the call to be the body of Christ, broken for love of the world.

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NOTES for The Publican, the Quarisee, and Christ:

• As a noun, “riddle” can signify not only a puzzle or conundrum but also a sieve (useful, for example, for separating gold from mud). As a verb, it can refer to the posing of a puzzle but also to acts of sifting and of poking holes in something — or, in a twist not untypical of English, of filling something, usually with an unwanted substance. All of those meanings are harbored in my use of the word here.
• The story of the publican (tax collector) and the Pharisee is from Luke 18:9-14.
• The illustration at the top of this post is from a woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). Holbein has placed the story in his own time, depicting the Pharisee as a Franciscan friar; that is, as a contemporary person who is publicly committed to a spiritual community which celebrates virtues like simplicity and peace while its members live in relative security and comfort, protected by official force and subsidized by the sacrifices of the poor and donations from the wealthy that are tainted by greed, oppression, and violence.
• With regard to the final statement in this post: if the invitation to “be the body of Christ” seems to sneak egotism and self-righteousness back in, please note that Christ is archetypically the self-transcending one who would suffer and die for love of human beings, which is why his body is broken. Recall, too, Mark 10:18, in which Jesus says, “Why do you call me ‘good’? No one is good but God.”

A Reason for Persecution

The following is a transcription, modified somewhat for clarity, of vocal ministry I offered yesterday at Homewood Friends Meeting.

It’s sometimes said that what brought persecution on the first Quakers was their doctrine that everyone can have immediate experience of God. But I don’t think that could have been threatening enough to incite the beating, dispossession, imprisonment, torture, and murder of Friends. Even the Roman church, that much-maligned bastion of mediated religion, had taught that individuals have direct access to God: Christians could and should pray and contemplate, and they could receive consolations, revelations, and even mystical union. Mysticism may have begun as a Catholic phenomenon (and, despite some readings of history, mystical writers were not more subject to the Inquisition than others; even Meister Eckhart, the Neoplatonic Dominican friar sometimes used as an example of persecution, wrote, taught, and preached openly for decades^*), but Protestant mystics were active in 17th-century England. And Protestants in general believed in direct individual access to God. The idea would seem to have been a commonplace.

There must have been more urgent reasons for the persecution. While the situation was complex, I think that a major catalyst was the Quakers’ central doctrine that each of us has a measure of that spiritual power which was present and active, “above measure” as Friends might say, in Jesus.^† That power is dangerous: it leads us to live justice, peace and mercy right here and right now. There may not be any idea more threatening to the powers that be than that real justice, peace, and mercy are attainable in this world. I can see that proclamation bringing down the wrath of church and state. After all, a primary function of both is to preserve the status quo of injustice, violence, and, rhetoric notwithstanding, hardheartedness.

I think that the powers that be would much prefer to have us sit passively on our benches or cushions, enjoying our individual experiences of God, looking inward instead of at what is going on all around us. But I hope that before we turn inward we take a good look outward, allowing ourselves to really see the injustice, violence, and hardheartedness — and then look within to find and open ourselves to that in us which speaks, and moves us to respond, to our world’s condition.

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NOTES for “A Reason for Persecution”

* My statement about Eckhart raised an eyebrow or two, so perhaps a note is in order. Meister (i.e., Master: he was a professor and leader in the Dominican Order) Eckhart taught and preached openly until the last year of his life, at which time his work was questioned by the Franciscan Archbishop of Cologne. As the Eckhart Society notes, “at this time the feud between the Franciscans and the Dominicans was at its height.” Eckhart’s Dominican Order defended him consistently. It was not until after his death that some of Eckhart’s ideas were censured — by a pope who would later be condemned for heresy himself, and with recognition that the material had been sent without context. As far as I know, Eckhart was never incarcerated. He was never harmed, nor was he condemned personally — which is why a recent request from the Dominicans that he be “rehabilitated” could not be granted by the Vatican, which affirmed his orthodoxy. It should also be noted that some of the great canonized saints and “Doctors” of the Catholic Church, people like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, are among the most influential mystical writers in Christian history. Mystical religion has not been the outlaw movement it is sometimes made out to be: those who want to have a “spirituality” that has no connection with organized religion cannot honestly appropriate the likes of Eckhart, Teresa, and John.

† (See Jn. 3:34 — “for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto [the Son].”) Many early Quaker texts could be quoted in illustration of the belief that each person receives a measure of Christ’s spiritual power.. As an example, the following is from Proposition 7, “Concerning Justification,” of Robert Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Divinity:

We consider then our redemption in a two-fold respect or state, both which in their own nature are perfect though in their application to us the one is not, nor cannot be, without respect to the other.

The first is the redemption performed and accomplished by Christ for us in his crucified body without [i.e., outside of] us. The other is the redemption wrought by Christ in us, which no less properly is called and accounted a redemption than the former. The first then is that whereby man, as he stands in the fall, is put into a capacity of salvation, and hath conveyed unto him a measure of that power, virtue, spirit, life, and grace that was in Christ Jesus: which, as the free gift of God, is able to counterbalance, overcome, and root out the evil seed wherewith we are naturally as in the fall, leavened.

The second is that whereby we witness and know this pure and perfect redemption in ourselves, purifying, cleansing, and redeeming us from the power of corruption, and bringing us into unity, favour, and friendship with God.

I Am the Way

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8)

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Liberal Quakerism sometimes defines itself as a “big tent” religion, a community that welcomes (please pardon the jargon) all sincere seekers, regardless of the spiritual path they follow, and does not require or expect them to walk a specific path even if they become members of our community. Behind that is the doctrine that there are many paths up the mountain, all of them meeting at the top. Behind that, of course, lie the beliefs that there is only one mountain and it has only one summit — and behind even those is an assumption that the spiritual life is like mountain-climbing, a matter of ascent to the heights.

Some three and a half centuries ago, George Fox responded quite negatively to an earlier form of the “big tent” doctrine. In this meditation, we will examine his response and the powerful alternative that it offers us, whether theists or not,¹ to what we might call “mountain-climbing spirituality.” Along the way, we’ll briefly explore the Quaker concepts of perfection and measure.

The following excerpt is from Fox’s The Great Mystery.² In this passage, “P” is a principle asserted by an opponent of Quakerism named Magnus Byne, author of The Scornful Quakers Answered; “A” is Fox’s response to that principle. Byne’s assertion is similar to that which some liberal Friends make today. Fox will have none of it.

P. [Byne] saith, ‘There are many ways to Sion.’

A. There is but one way to God, out of the fall, into the paradise, to the tree of life, out of the condemnation, and that is Christ the light, the covenant of God. Now with the light the way to the Father is seen. In the first Adam are many ways, fighting about their ways, and destroying one another about their ways; but Christ the light, the way to the Father, teacheth otherwise, ‘to love enemies and to do good to them, and to overcome evil with good,’ and ‘heap coals of fire upon their heads’; which way is but one, which you who deny the light are out of, in the many ways, and names, horns, and heads, and images, which is the beast’s number, ravened from the spirit of God, and from the one way, Christ the light, in which is unity.

“Sion” signifies Jerusalem: in the Christian context, it is the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of God, a re-created world graced and governed by God-who-is-love. But a just, peaceful, and even prosperous world in which righteousness reigns is but one possible human desideratum. There are, of course, many others, even for religious people. One such is seen in the perennial quest for “direct experience” of God. How is such a quest related to the Quaker way? Does Quaker spirituality subsist in our climbing a path to peak experience? Are we essentially seekers (as Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s proposed new Faith and Practice book implies³), our living the divine life deferred as we seek the summit? George Fox would answer those questions with an emphatic “No!”

“Every Mountain Shall Be Made Low”

The Ascent of Mt. Carmel

In considering Fox’s perspective, we must distinguish his spiritual experience from what has come to be called “mystical experience.” George Fox was a righteous Quaker, not a mystical Carmelite: he would not produce a work such as John of the Cross’s The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Fox implicitly denies the very concept of climbing a mountain, or simply walking a path, to reach a destination; for him, path and destination are one. To set foot on the path to Sion is already to be in Sion, for the path itself is Christ, who is the Kingdom of God.

“There is but one way to God,” says Fox, for to go to God is to move “out of the fall, into the paradise, to the tree of life, out of the condemnation.” In other words, it is to reverse the fall from innocence that is symbolized in the myth of the loss of Paradise by Adam and Eve (i.e., man and woman). That reversal is accomplished simply in our turning from the tree of knowledge – whose fruit is our narrowly narcissistic⁴ ideas of right and wrong – and back to the tree of life. Christ, the spirit of justice and mercy, is that tree of life. Thus turned – converted – we are joined with Christ, becoming, as it were, branches of his spiritual body, living by the same life and power, the same spirit, by which Jesus lived.

To go to God is, then, to turn and begin to live in and as a “new creation,” having been “born again” into a new, divinely-ordered life.⁵ That new life in God is the authentic spiritual life of perfect love, for “God is spirit,” “God is love,” and God-who-is-love is seen to be perfect because he “makes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.”⁶ For the Quaker tradition, spiritual life is that “universal love” (John Woolman) through which the basic needs of all are met because the spiritually-reborn, who are of one nature with God, love their neighbors as they love themselves.⁷ And we all, despite the self-loathing that some of us feel, love ourselves in the sense in which Jesus spoke of love: we all try to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves; to comfort ourselves when sick or confined; to bind up the wounds that a violent world inflicts upon us. To do the same for others is to be spiritual, to be godly, to be righteous. That is the condition which, historically, Friends have considered to be the one thing necessary. Righteousness – the living of justice, peace, and mercy — is the path we walk.

Thus Fox says, “There is but one way to” that divinely spiritual life, “and that is Christ the light, the covenant of God.” That is a remarkable assertion: the path or way to the life of Christ is Christ – not a journey to Christ, we should note, but Christ himself. Thus the Johannine Christ, who is the sign (eikon) of the Logos, the creating and right-ordering power of God, declares, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). And thus the apostle Peter avers that “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12) — which we understand in context of James Nayler’s assertion that “the name of Christ consists not of letters and syllables, but in righteousness, mercy and judgment, &c.”⁸ In the Quaker tradition there is no duality between means and end. (Our business meeting process, in which loving each other takes precedence over efficiency, is a practical outcome of that unity.) Path and destination are one in the spiritual life and power we call Christ: that is of the essence of the Quaker experience.

“The Light, the Covenant of God”

Fox spoke of Christ not only as the light but also as “the covenant of God.”⁹ What might that signify for Friends? A bit of postmodern analysis may be helpful here. According to Robert Magliola in his Derrida on the Mend,¹⁰

the beginning of “history” is the “rupture” within God whereby God chooses not to continue His “speech,” but to write (to write the Tables of the Law). …[T]he writing of the Tablets by Yahweh is already a departure from the “conventionally formulated” unity of God, whose Being and Voice are one. Writing is God “at a remove.” … It is precisely the remove, the “silence” of God’s voice, this interval, this difference … which constitutes the writing whereby we know Him, but this writing is not God. This writing is a trace ….

The tablets of the law signify the “old covenant,” the mythic postlapsarian contract which is but a written trace of God’s Logos, of the divine “Voice” by which God created and ordered the world.¹¹ A religion based on that trace is a religion of law, at a remove from the divine life; such a religion Friends would contrast with that of the spirit, of immersion in the divine life – a contrast of bondage to freedom and of alienation to the unity of love.¹² Magliola, continuing his explication of Derrida’s thought, will go on to say that “God [is] infinitely postponed by graphic signs” (emphasis original). But the world-changing experience of the first Friends, an experience encoded succinctly in Fox’s “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,” is that the trace is no longer all that we have: God is fully present to us by his indwelling Logos, the new and living covenant, which we recognize as Christ, the voice and light of righteousness that guides us to itself and shares its nature, its “Being,” with us.

“Now with the light, the way to the Father is seen.”

We should remind ourselves here that the light, which is the love we call “Christ,” is the way: it does not illuminate a path that is other than itself. And because “I and my Father are one” (Jn. 10:30), “the way to the Father” is itself unity with the Father who is love. Thus Fox tells us that

Christ the light, the way to the Father, teacheth [us] ‘to love enemies and to do good to them, and to overcome evil with good,’ and ‘heap coals of fire upon their heads’; which way is but one ….

We are being called not to walk a path that will lead us into unity with divine love but to walk the path that is divine love here and now. To walk that path is to actively care for our neighbors as we care for ourselves. Thus we say that to set foot on the path is to arrive at the destination: to love is already to walk with God in Paradise. For there is no path that can lead us into Paradise, the gate to which is blocked by an angel with a fiery sword. Responding to the invitation of love, dying to the delusion of self-centrism, we are reborn there, and from that time forward we dwell there (although we may sometimes forget where we are); there is no question of following a path to a spiritual summit. When we make ready the way of the Lord, when we submit to the baptism of accepting the truth of ourselves and our spiritual ambitions for love’s sake, then our turning to love levels the mountains and plows up the paths. To allow ourselves to love as Jesus taught, to act in accord with the self-sacrificing (kenotic) love already present in our hearts as Christ the “seed,”¹³ is to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), which is by definition perfect love. That is the Quaker doctrine of perfection.

“Our Conversation Is in Heaven”

According to the first Friends, then, it is quite possible to live “in the Paradise of God” (Fox),¹⁴ the divine perfection that is righteousness, here and now. Yet there is no summit to be sought. This is where the doctrine of the measure becomes important. Each of us, it teaches, has at this moment a certain measure of divine life, of “universal” love, a measure that we trust will increase as “we all come into the unity of the faith and of the realization of the Son of God, into a perfect man, into a measure of stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). To be reborn in spirit is simply to turn and be re-centered in that measure of self-giving love. To the extent that our selves and lives are shaped and led by that love, we are living in perfection. We need climb no mountain nor travel any path in search of that perfection: it already abides in the human heart, if only as an obscure and fragile seed. Nor, however, need we attempt to nurture that seed.

In the book of Luke, Jesus tells a parable of the Logos-seed. It goes like this:

“A sower comes out to sow his seed, and some that he sows falls by the path and is trampled, and the flying creatures of heaven devour it. And other seed falls upon the rock, and, after sprouting, is withered because it has no moisture. And other seed falls in the midst of the thorns and, sprouting together with the thorns, is choked by them. And other seed falls on the good earth and, sprouting, produces fruit a hundredfold.” Saying these things, Jesus cried out, “The ones having ears to be hearing, let them hear!”

Walking our precious spiritual paths, climbing our mountains of mystical experience, we risk trampling the seed (a favorite metaphor of early Quaker writers): we prize our path and our apparent progress over the tiny germ of God’s righteousness that lies ready to grow and blossom in our hearts. But if we remain still, our hearts, prepared by the work of love’s light, will permit the seed to mature and bear fruit. To borrow a Buddhist verse:

Sitting quietly, doing nothing.
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.¹⁵

The God who makes the sun to rise and the rain to fall doesn’t need our help in nurturing the Christ-seed: the seed grows of itself when we stop stepping on it. Perhaps our new life begins, then, with the simple realization that walking a spiritual path gets us nowhere, that what we need to do is, as Fox tells us, to “be still awhile from thy own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires, and imaginations,” to “stand still in the light.”¹⁶ Our standing still is our saving act of faith, for it takes faith to stop our seed-trampling travel toward a goal, to accept that we are citizens of the Promised Land here and now if only we have ears to hear the voice of love in our hearts.

There are many paths, Fox tells us — perhaps 666 of them!¹⁷ — but they are not the one way of truth and life. But to walk the way of righteousness is to walk anywhere, even in the valley of the shadow of death, with and in God-who-is-love. “Christ,” the image and likeness of God,¹⁸ is that way’s name, the only name that is salvation from the dark delusion of self-absorption, for “the name of Christ consists … in righteousness, mercy and judgment, &c.” To walk the path of righteousness is to walk in Paradise, even when the walking is painful. For there is no way to Paradise: Paradise is the way.

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NOTES for I Am the Way

[1] Nontheists are asked, as always, to read my God-talk as referring to inner possibilities and conditions, not to any kind of metaphysical entity. That would be to read the text in the spirit in which it was written.
[2] George Fox, The Great Mystery of the Great Whore Unfolded; and Antichrist’s Kingdom Revealed unto Destruction, Vol. 3 of the 1831 edition of his Works, page 157.
[3] See, for example, the historically inaccurate “Today we are still a community of Seekers” in the draft Faith and Practice, Baltimore Yearly Meeting, 2012. The draft also promulgates the “many paths” doctrine: one example is, “The passion of Friends is not in limiting or directing Seekers [sic] to a particular Truth, a common path….” Both statements are from page 20 of the 2012 draft.
[4]“There is not narcissism and non-narcissism. There are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming and hospitable narcissism. One that is much more open to the experience of the Other as Other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the Other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the Other, even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation, must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of one’s self for love to be possible. Love is narcissistic.” — Jacques Derrida, Points (Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 199.
[5] See 2 Cor. 5:17 — “If anyone is in Christ: new creation! Old things are passed away; behold, all things are new.” See also Jn. 3:3 — “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
[6] Jn 4:24 — “God is spirit.” “God is love”: see 1 Jn. 4. Mt. 5:44-48 — “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
[7] “Partakers of the divine nature”: see 2 Peter 1:4. “Love your neighbor as yourself”: Mk. 12:31 and par.
[8] James Nayler, Weakness above Wickedness and Truth above Subtlety (originally published in 1656). From The Works of James Nayler, Vol. 3 (Glenside, Pennsylvania: Quaker Heritage Press, 2007), p. 458.
[9] See Isaiah 42:6 — “I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles.”
[10] Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (Perdue University Press, 1984), p. 30. An intriguing aspect of the passage, not mentioned in the body of this essay, is the image of history’s beginning in a split that silenced the Logos, for first Quakers believed that they were living at the end of history, that the new world had already dawned as the Logos had become incarnate in them. (Interestingly, Magliola is a Third Order Carmelite.)
[11] “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God” (Jn. 1:1).
[12] Paul speaks of a “new covenant, 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).
[13] The image of the seed goes back to the Genesis story of God’s promise to Adam and Eve that the seed of the woman would bruise the tempter’s head. God later promised Abraham that his seed would be innumerable as the stars: “That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Gen. 22:17-18). That seed, Paul taught, is Christ, who is one and yet whose members, those who share his nature of love, are innumerable, a great people who are a blessing to others. See also Fox, Works, Vol. 1, page 365: “So that all might come up into this seed, Christ Jesus, walk in it, and sit down together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus ….”
[14] Fox used the phrase “in the paradise of God” a number of times; see, for example, his Journal, p. 84 (1831 edition of Works).
[15] Zenrin-kushū. See Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (1957), p. 134.
[16] See Fox’s letter to “the lady Claypool (so called).” Fox often advised people to “stand still in the light”: see, for example, his beautiful Epistle X.
[17] In referring to “the beast’s number,” which is 666, Fox has of course identified all paths except Christ himself as Antichrist. In more contemporary terms, Fox’s idea of “antichrist” signifies anything that presents — and probably believes — itself to be spiritual when in effect it denies or leads people away from the life and power of the Christ-spirit that is already present and available in their hearts.
[18] According to Genesis as read in light of the gospel book of John, human beings are created in the “image and likeness” of God through the Logos who is Christ. Paul reminds us that Christ is the image of God (Col. 1:15). In the Christian myth, then, human beings were created in Christ, which is why they dwelt in the Paradise of innocence. It was when they lost that image, by turning from it to seek nourishment elsewhere, that they lost righteousness, which is regained through rebirth into Christ’s spiritual body.

Resurrection?

Was Jesus raised bodily from death after his crucifixion? And is belief that he was raised necessary for Christian faith and practice? Compelled by those questions, in 1989 I made a critical analysis of the biblical resurrection testimony. I concluded that Jesus’ body probably corrupted in the earth some two thousand years ago, but I was able to affirm that my faith does not depend upon an ancient miracle-story. The following is a more polished version of the essay I wrote back then. The essay presumes the historical existence of Jesus, about which I am now agnostic; I hope that it will prove interesting for readers regardless of their opinion on that question.

Biblical scholars have spoken of two aspects of the resurrection, the objective and the subjective. The former usually refers to the question of what, if anything, happened to Jesus after his death, while the latter refers to the rise of the resurrection belief in the minds of his disciples. In examining the Christian scriptures’ testimony to the resurrection of Jesus, I found that the texts provide keys to understanding both aspects in a way that does not require belief in supernatural interventions. I also found that the two aspects constitute a unity.

Critical examination of the Christian scriptures reveals that the authors did not share our modern concept of history: they shaped narratives and even the words of Jesus to suit their theological and literary purposes, and they invented apparently historical events to serve as vehicles for the communication of religious messages. Such activities can be seen in, among other things, textual developments from earlier to later works (compare, for example, the Jesus of Mark to the Jesus of John), and they resulted in contradictions among the various books. The historicizing tendency in particular provides us with a key for understanding the two forms of resurrection testimony that seem to point to objective, historical events; namely, the story of the empty tomb, and the accounts of appearances of the risen Jesus.

The meaning of the empty tomb has been debated since early Christian times. Certainly the fact that someone’s tomb is discovered to be empty does not prove, or even suggest, that the person has been raised from the dead. If Jesus’ tomb was in fact found empty, there are reasons other than his resurrection why it may have been so. Perhaps there was confusion about where he’d been buried. Perhaps someone removed the body. The evangelists recognize the ambiguity of the empty tomb: all of them provide one or more messengers to reveal the meaning of the scene (although in John’s book, Jesus himself appears before the angels can explain). Matthew even provides unsympathetic witnesses in the form of guards – witnesses not to the resurrection itself, for the scriptures never assert that anyone witnessed the resurrection, but to the rolling away of the stone by an angel.

The empty tomb, then, is at best ambiguous; it may also be apocryphal. Like other victims of Roman crucifixion, Jesus may have been thrown into a common grave after his death. According to Acts 13:29, it was those who had Jesus crucified who buried him. That presents the possibility that the burial in a tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, whom Luke 23:51 explicitly excludes from those who had Jesus crucified, is a legend, and that the empty tomb tradition is a product of the Christian scriptures’ historicizing tendency. Mark, the earliest of the canonical gospel books, originally included no appearance narratives, but ended with the young man’s revelation of the resurrection to the women, who “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk. 16:8) and whose testimony may have had little weight in a patriarchal society. The story of the empty tomb, with its messenger of revelation, is reminiscent of theophanies in the Hebrew scriptures. In the absence of appearance stories, it could have served the Markan tradition as a narrative vehicle for the belief that Jesus had been raised.

Unlike the earlier Mark, the other gospel books do provide narrative accounts of appearances of Jesus. There are, however, unresolvable contradictions among them. (See “A Comparison of N. T. Resurrection Accounts” for details.) Further, those relatively late compositions are replete with elements of myth and legend. We cannot simply assume that they record what we would consider to be objective history; on the contrary, they appear to be instances of historicization.

Earlier than those narratives – and in contradiction to them – is 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, where Paul gives us a sequential listing of appearances with no narrative detail. The list seems to be part of a liturgical or credal formula that predates Paul’s letter. Consequently, the passage is often cited as a proof-text for the historicity of appearances of Jesus. However, it is possible that the passage is a composite of a pre-existing formula and additional elements. The original formula would have proclaimed simply that Jesus died in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised from the dead in accordance with the scriptures. The list(s) of appearances, including the appearance to him, would have been appended by Paul (and, perhaps, a redactor). While this view does not preclude a relatively early date for the appearance tradition, it does suggest that the earliest proclamation of the resurrection, as represented by the formula Paul quoted, may not have included it.

Some scholars have held, therefore, that the appearance stories represent a visual model for experiences of forgiveness and vocation that implied the continuing presence of Jesus. I agree that “appearance of Jesus” was probably an articulating model for the disciples’ experience. However, it seems likely to me that it was the idea of Jesus’ resurrection which first dawned upon the disciples; from that revelation came the confidence that neither the forgiveness and vocation Jesus had offered them nor the Kingdom he had proclaimed had been nullified by his death. That, I think, is a more natural sequence of events. In either case, however, it was the revelatory experience of Jesus that was primary; the appearance accounts would serve as a common narrative vehicle for communicating that experience.

We find, then, that we can be confident of the historicity of only one event: somehow, some disciples came to believe that Jesus had been raised from death. In attempting to understand that event, we must give full weight to the transformation it effected in those disciples. People who had fled in fear at Jesus’ arrest, and who may at first have believed that the crucifixion was God’s rejection of Jesus and his message of the Kingdom, began to proclaim that Jesus had been exalted to God and would soon bring in that Kingdom in power. I don’t think that locating the rise of that faith solely in the disciples’ continuing to be inspired by Jesus’ message does justice to their transformation. The disciples staked their salvation and possibly their lives on their resurrection belief. As Paul says, they understood that anyone who would fabricate such a story would be guilty of misrepresenting God (1 Cor. 15:15). It seems to me that their belief in the resurrection of Jesus could not have arisen without some objective event or reality as a catalyst.

I submit, however, that we have only to look to the Hebrew scriptures for that reality. It has been established that, then as now, it was not unusual for scripture to be applied to current events as if it had been written specifically about them. The disciples of Jesus had experienced the Kingdom of God breaking into history in the person and ministry of Jesus — in other words, they had experienced themselves as living in the eschaton, the end-time that heralded the resurrection of the dead and the birth of God’s new world. They had trusted that what had begun in a small way in their lives would inevitably and soon become a reality for all the world. But the idea of the Kingdom of God, and the expectation of its imminent arrival, would have come to Jesus and the disciples through scripture and through their interpretation of events of their time in light of scripture. When the Kingdom seemed threatened by the crucifixion, the disciples would have looked to scripture for the meaning of that event as well. It was, then, scripture itself that provided the objective basis for belief in the resurrection.

If scripture was the objective element, then the disciples’ application of scripture to current events is the key to the subjective aspect of the resurrection belief. The disciples found revelation in scripture that God’s eschatological servant would suffer and die but would not be abandoned to the power of death. One source of that revelation would have been the psalms. In Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46, for example, the dying Jesus quotes the beginning of Psalm 22, crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That psalm goes on to describe how the psalmist, “dry as a potsherd,” watches ruffians cast lots for his clothing (v. 18) — a scene that Matthew has historicized in 27:34. Psalm 22 ends with a paean of praise to God; evidently, God did not abandon the sufferer in the end. The theme of deliverance is sounded in other psalms as well. In Psalm 18:4-19 we read, “When the cords of death held me fast … then in anguish of heart I cried to the Lord … [and] he reached down from the height and … rescued me because he delighted in me.” Psalm 16:10-11 declares, “… for you will not abandon me to Sheol [death] nor suffer your holy one to see the pit. You will show me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy, in your right hand delight for evermore.” And Psalm 116:3, 16b says, “The cords of death bound me, Sheol held me in its grip. [But] you have undone the bonds that bound me.” The psalms, then, pointed to Jesus’ deliverance from death. But they were not the only scriptural sources of light on the fate of Jesus.

Among other scriptures, the book of the prophet Isaiah was a rich source of material for primitive Christianity. That complex and composite book contains marvelous visions of the Day of the Lord and the Kingdom of God. It asserts that the dead will rise (see Is. 26:19), although the idea of an eschatological resurrection is more fully developed in apocalyptic books such as Daniel and Enoch. More importantly, the book of Isaiah describes a “suffering servant” in terms that were later applied to Jesus. It speaks of the innocent servant of God who is despised by his people, suffers and dies for the sins of many, is buried, and is brought back from death and rewarded by God. Scripture revealed to the disciples both the meaning of Jesus’ death and the fact of his vindication by God through his resurrection. Thus their earliest proclamation was that Jesus had died and been raised in accordance with the scriptures.

In scripture and its interpretation by the disciples, then, the objective and subjective aspects of the resurrection are united. They coalesce in a divine revelation received through sacred writings as interpreted in light of the disciples’ experience of the incipient Kingdom. Scripture disclosed that Jesus had not died a failure; his death was a part of the process of the Kingdom’s arrival. That process had begun with his ministry and reached a climactic point in his resurrection to God’s right hand, and it would continue on to its inevitable and imminent conclusion – the coming of the Kingdom in fullness and power. The revelation prepared the disciples to open their hearts to the spirit of Jesus and to continue his work of proclaiming the Kingdom and living out its implications.

I believe that this analysis of the rise of the resurrection faith has much to commend it. It accepts the evidence of critical research that the writers of the Christian scriptures were concerned with proclamation (kerygma), not with objective history. It respects the integrity of both the primitive Christian and the twenty-first-century, post-Christian world-views, as well as that of the biblical texts themselves. And it understands the events narrated in those texts in terms of natural, human processes – in a way that does not, however, rule out the possibility of revelation.

Of course, this view means that Jesus’ resurrection, while it may have mythic and spiritual truth, is not historical in the same way in which — presumably — his life and death are. For some, this conclusion is unacceptable. Paul, for example, felt that “if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Consequently, those who have gone to repose in Christ are perished. If it is for this life only that we have hope in Christ, then we are the most forlorn of all” (1 Cor. 15: 17-19). Paul and other primitive Christians, believing that they lived in the “last hour” (1 John 2:18), expected the imminent completion of the eschaton — “the end, when [Christ] gives the kingdom to God the father, nullifying all [worldly] sovereignty, all authority and power” (1 Cor. 15:24) — when the dead would be raised to eternal life in Christ. Without a bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, “the first-fruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20), their faith would have felt groundless.

But our horizons are necessarily broader. We know that the eschaton was not fulfilled some two thousand years ago: the simple fact of our existence in a world of injustice, pain, and death tells us that that expectation, held by primitive Christians and apparently even by Jesus himself, was wrong. The outward Kingdom did not appear as promised; the parousia, the coming on the clouds of the Son of Man in power and glory (see Mt. 24), failed to occur. If the scriptures are to speak meaningfully to us as critical thinkers today, we must read them, as our Quaker forebears (following the evangelist John) have taught us, in the inward sense: Christ can be raised and revealed in power within us, defeating the spiritual death in our hearts, lifting us into a new and different life. The scriptures direct us not so much to the past or future as to the present, in which they open for us a way to authentic being, a way out of self-absorption and into compassionate and just relationship. Almost two millennia after the failure of the parousia, the scriptures point to the inner revelation of the spiritual power that was in Jesus. Giving ourselves over to that power, we know the resurrection.

Judged by Jesus

As Jacques Derrida said of himself, I “rightly pass for an atheist.”¹ So I don’t expect ever to experience the event that traditional Christianity calls the Last Judgment. Nonetheless, because I find Jesus to be the archetype of what we rightly call divine love, love that leads us to justice, peace, and mercy, the question of how Jesus would judge my life is an important one.

Jesus answers that question in the 25th chapter of Matthew, where he speaks of judgment by “the Son of Man.” The phrase son of man has various uses in the scriptures; here, it is a title referring to Jesus himself as king and judge.² Imagine this scene, Jesus says: at the end of the world as we know it, the Son of Man is seated on “the throne of his glory,” and arrayed before him are all the peoples of the world. Somehow, he divides them into two groups: we’ll call them the blessed and the cursed. The blessed, who stand at his right hand, he invites into God’s Kingdom. The cursed he sends to “the fire prepared for the Adversary and his messengers.”

Jesus’ One Criterion

Why are some blessed and some cursed? Is it, as Calvin taught, because the Father-God had predestined some to salvation and some to damnation? Is it because some believed correctly and others did not? Neither: Jesus has a very different, we might even say unchristian, criterion of judgment. He explains it first to the blessed ones.

Then shall the [Son of Man] say to those on his right hand, “Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the reign that has been prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I did hunger, and you gave me to eat; I did thirst, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you received me; I was naked, and you covered me; I was infirm, and you looked after me; I was in prison, and you came to me.”³

And when he condemns the cursed to their punishment, Jesus tells them that they are being consigned to the fire because they did not do those same things.

That’s it: either you addressed the basic human needs of the Son of Man, the Offspring of Humanity, or you did not. You get no credit for believing the Bible, having Jesus as your lord and savior,⁴ belonging to the right religious community, holding high ideals, having spiritual or mystical experiences, etc. None at all. Jesus’ teaching is starkly other-oriented, dismissive of our narcissism, “spiritually incorrect” in being dualistic, judgmental, and conditional. One criterion determines whether we are worth being saved for God or being thrown on the burning trash heap called Gehenna: did we or did we not help the oppressed? In the end, he says, nothing else matters.

Persons, Not Beliefs

And there’s even more in the story to spark our wonder. The people of the world, being literal-minded, don’t understand the theopoetic connotation of the “Son of Man” title, so, in what is for me the most powerful and profound statement in all of scripture, Jesus spells it out for them.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungering, and we nourished you? Or thirsting, and we gave you to drink? And when did we see you a stranger, and we received you? Or naked, and we covered you? And when did we see you infirm, or in prison, and we went to you?” And he, answering, shall say to them, “Truly, inasmuch as you did for one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did for me.”

We’re quite familiar with that saying now, but when the Son of Man tells the blessed that in helping the oppressed they were helping him, the blessed are learning something new. They had not helped the oppressed because they’d believed that Christ was present in others, that “there is that of God in everyone”; clearly, they hadn’t known that at the time. They must have acted because their hearts were open to the other: when they encountered a desperate person, they felt the plight of that person and, like the “good Samaritan,”⁵ responded generously despite the cost to themselves. And therefore they were righteous; therefore they were blessed; therefore they were worthy of God.

Neither Faith Nor Works

Despite having the plain words of Jesus in front of them, Christians have for centuries argued “faith versus works”: am I saved simply by believing in a propitiatory sacrifice by Jesus, am I saved by doing good works, or must I exhibit both behaviors? Although his demand that we care for the poor may appear to argue for salvation by works, Jesus approves neither side in that debate, and for good reason: “What must I do to be saved?” is the wrong question, because it’s about saving me, and

Whosoever would be seeking to save his soul [psychē] shall be destroying her, and whosoever would be seeking to destroy his soul shall be nurturing her.⁶

In other words, the spiritual life is not about me: it’s about getting me out of the way and saving the other, the one who addresses me in her dire need, the Lazarus who lies bleeding at my gate. My life is worthwhile, says Jesus, if my solicitude is for the suffering other — if, like Jesus, I am willing to give of, even to sacrifice, myself in order that she may experience justice, peace, and mercy. It is then that I am living the divine life of love, sharing in the nature of “the event harbored in the name of God.”⁷ By trusting in and being faithful to that love, “that God may be all in all,” I may be saved from the living death of self-centeredness, but such salvation is a by-product: sought for its own sake, it escapes me. “In Christ Jesus, [what matters] is faith being enacted through love.”⁸

A Passion for the Impossible?

That’s a powerful invitation and challenge, perhaps especially for a nontheist who is not prodded by the demands nor coddled by the comforts of religion: to live in authentic and responsive relationship, to allow myself to be moved by the plight of the other, to yield again and again to empathetic and even sacrificial love. But can it be done? Is the suffering of beings not infinite? To care for the other, as Jesus demanded, as solicitously and generously as I care for myself, as if the world were about to end: is such a life not impossible?

That brings me back to Derrida, who knew the impossibility and the necessity of giving beyond calculation of cost or return. According to John D. Caputo, “‘God’ for [Derrida] is given not in theological analysis but in religious experience, in a certain passion for the impossible.”⁹ Perhaps Derrida, like Jesus but in his very different way, may rightly pass for passionate, but I find myself drawn out slowly and somberly by and into the pain and struggle of the world; quietly and sorrowfully inspired by, if not (yet?) aflame with, desire for justice, peace, and mercy. My “God” is given not so much in passion as in patient, halting work in the power of the impossible future, hidden like leaven in the present, which Jesus called the Kingdom of God. My faith is given not in insistence that the impossible not be the impossible, as if hope were not a house divided, but in realistic praxis that raises small moments of the Kingdom out of the kairos,¹⁰ the present pregnant with im/possibility, in response to real persons’ real need.

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NOTES for “Judged by Jesus”

[1] Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, pp. 154-55: “My religion about which nobody knows anything, any more than does my mother who asked other people a while ago, not daring to talk to me about it, if I still believed in God … but she must have known that the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I quite rightly pass for an atheist, the omnipresence to me of what I call God in my absolved absolutely private language being neither that of an eyewitness nor that of a voice doing anything than talking to me without saying anything, nor a transcendent law nor an immanent schechina, that feminine figure of a Yahweh who remains so strange and so familiar to me ….”

[2] The eschatological (appearing at the end of the world) Son of Man is seen in books such as Daniel (a canonical scripture) and 1 Enoch (not generally canonical, but quoted in the canonical Letter of Jude and thought to have been influential in the primitive Christian milieu). Scholars debate whether Jesus identified himself with that apocalyptic figure, but the church has identified the two from early on. As noted, it is clear that the Son of Man represents Jesus in the judgment parable: see also Mt. 7:2-23, quoted below in note 4. And in any case, the story is Jesus’: it reflects his values.

[3] Mt. 25:34, based on Young’s Literal Translation. Note Young’s rendering of basileian as “reign” rather than “kingdom”; it could be that Jesus here refers not to the blessed ones simply entering a place of reward (say, a static Heaven for disembodied souls), but to their reigning with and in Christ over “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1). That could be seen as consistent with passages, favored by George Fox and others, such as Mt. 19:28 (“And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”), 1Cor. 6:2a (“Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world?”) and Eph. 2:6 (“And [God] hath raised [us] up together [with Christ], and made [us] sit together in heavenly [places] in Christ Jesus”). Perhaps the Quaker business process, in which the group reaches decisions by becoming one mind and heart, exemplifies how such group rule by the saints might work.

[4] “[B]y their fruits you shall recognize them. Not every one saying to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ shall be entering into the Kingdom of the heavens, but [only] the ones doing the will of my father in the heavens. Many shall be saying to me in that day, ‘Lord! Lord! Have we not prophesied in your name, cast out demons in your name, done many powerful deeds in your name?’ And then I shall be avowing to them, ‘I never knew you! Depart from me, outlaws.’” (Mt. 7:20-23)

[5] See Lk. 10:29-37. The Samaritan, whose beliefs also were considered incorrect (which presumably is why Jesus uses him as an example), saved a wounded man after orthodox believers had passed him by.

[6] Lk. 17:33, my translation following the Concordant Greek Text Sublinear. (In the Greek, the word I have translated as “soul” is psuchen, or psychen, which is an accusative — objective — case form of psuchē or psychē. I have used the more familiar nominative form psychē in the text for clarity.) Parallel sayings, each a little different, are at Mt. 10:39, Lk. 9:24, and Jn. 12:25.

[7] John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: a Theology of the Event. The phrase appears many times in the book. See for example page 294, where it is followed by this: “When I desire God or love or democracy, democracy or love or God are not what I desire, because what is desired is an unconditional event, the event or the advent of the tout autre that is astir in these names, which means the unconditional promise of the event contained in these names.” In my sentence, Caputo’s phrase is preceded by a reference to 2 Peter 1:4b: “… that by these [promises] you may be sharers of the divine nature, having escaped the destruction that is in the world because of craving.”

[8] “For God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God in them”: 1 Jn. 4:16. “That God may be all in all”: 1 Cor. 15:28. “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails, but faith being enacted through love”: Gal. 5:6.

[9] John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, pp. 288-289.

[10] See the post Kairos: a Meditation on a Poem by Mary Oliver, which offers a number of definitions, including this: “Kairos, which is thematically related to krisis, is extraordinary time, a time of judgment and decision, the present moment as profound opportunity.”

A Peculiar Priesthood

Christ the High Priest
Saint Sophia, Kiev

——————–

Quakers have been known as “a peculiar people.” Although even today we have some unusual ways, the phrase refers not to oddness but to vocation (i.e., calling), and it is closely related to the idea of priesthood. Its source is the first letter of Peter in the Christian scriptures.¹ Here’s the King James Version’s rendering:

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.

“A peculiar people” renders the phrase laos eis peripoiēsin: “a people into possessing/preserving.” In the scriptures’ few instances of similar wording,² what we are given to possess or are preserved into is salvation or the glory of Christ. With that in mind, and borrowing a bit from Paul’s vocabulary, here’s an alternative translation of the passage:

But you are a chosen family, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people gathered into Christ, who should be showing forth the virtues of him who calls you into his wonderful and fearsome light.

Chuck Fager has written an excellent essay on the topic of Quakers as a peculiar people, a group selected for God’s purposes.³ In this post, I will focus more narrowly on Peter’s characterization of us as called into priesthood, contrasting Quaker and Catholic ideas of how that priesthood makes Christ physically present in the world. Please note that, as always, I use religious images in a theopoetical,⁴ not metaphysical, sense.

A priest is one who is called to offer sacrifice on behalf of a people; by extension, a priestly people is one that is called to offer sacrifice on behalf of the world. Quakers are a peculiar and priestly people in that, gathered into the body of Christ, we are members of the mythic cosmic king crowned with thorns, the royal high priest who sacrifices himself for the Kingdom of God. Our identity is constituted — founded and enacted — by our sharing in the self-sacrificing love of which Jesus the Christ is the archetypical icon.

The Catholic tradition, however, has defined priesthood as thaumaturgy and concentrated it in a clerical caste. And it has defined the people’s participation in Christ’s self-sacrifice not as real transformation of their own hearts and lives but as the reception of merit through the magical transformation of inanimate objects by anointed priests.⁵

Through the bishops who ordain them, that tradition asserts, Catholic priests receive the supernatural “power” of the apostles of Jesus, and Catholicism has insisted that “Christ conferred on his Apostles and not on all the faithful the power to offer Sacrifice, distribute the Eucharist, and forgive sins.”⁶ Only the priests, therefore, can perform the Eucharistic rite (the Mass), which is said to be the very self-sacrifice of Christ on the cross, albeit “in an unbloody manner under the appearances of bread and wine.”⁷ In performing that ritual, the priest, whose ordination (another rite) is said to have caused an ontological change in him (i.e., a change in his very being or nature), acts in persona Christi — in the person of Christ. The laity (laos: people) are said to receive merit from that propitiatory sacrifice by “assisting at” or even simply by “hearing” the ritual.⁸

By repeating words attributed to Jesus, it is claimed, the priest converts (ontologically changes) the elements of life, food and drink, into the physical body and blood of Jesus Christ, which, having been offered to God as sacrifice, are then consumed by priest and people.⁹ By drinking the blood of the sacrificial victim, they violate an “old covenant” proscription: “Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.”¹⁰ Their drinking of the blood (which for centuries was reserved to the priest alone in the Latin Rite) is, then, an attempt to partake — quite materially — of the divine life of Christ. But that gross materiality tends to suppress the sacrament’s theopoetic and spiritual potential.

As Friends and others have recognized, the Eucharistic ritual does not reliably produce evidence of divine life, agape-love, in the participants. When it does appear to produce such fruit, the cause is likely in the participant’s desire and belief: she wants the life of love, believes that the ritual will convey it, and so feels that a measure of it is communicated to her by the sacrament. But the desire to love more perfectly is itself the movement of love in us; in Quaker theological language, we may say that the light of Christ already shines, if weakly, within each of us, and to turn to it is to be transfigured to some degree.¹¹ In other words, the rite is unnecessary; moreover, by claiming to deliver spiritual life and power through thaumaturgy and to localize the physical presence of Christ “under the appearances of bread and wine,” it can divert and even alienate people from the Christ-light, the life and power of love, in their hearts.¹²

For the Quaker tradition, then, the Catholic cultus is a misappropriation of priesthood and a potentially harmful similacrum of sacrifice. The Quaker call is to participate in Christ’s life and sacrifice in actual praxis rather than in ritual re-enactment. In consonance with passages such as that from Peter’s letter, Friends have understood self–sacrificing priesthood to be an essential characteristic of all members of the body of Christ.

We are born into that body when, acknowledging the essential nothingness of self,¹³ we offer as sacrifice to love our (normal but nonetheless delusional) belief in self-centrality: communion follows baptism. Living then as members of Christ, we do indeed act in persona Christi, continually consecrating the elements of life — all of them, but in particular, food and drink for the poor — to love’s service. In so consecrating and offering ourselves and our goods, we, not a cleric reciting a formula nor bits of bread in a temple built with hands,¹⁴ are the physical presence in this world of Christ the high priest. As we live in fidelity to what the Quaker tradition calls our measure of Christ’s light and life within,¹⁵ we serve as theophanies of sacrificial love, as inbreakings of light into a dark, oppressive world. To act always in the person of Christ is our calling as a peculiar priesthood.

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NOTES for “A Peculiar Priesthood”

[1] First Peter 2:9. The verse reflects older passages such as Exodus 19:5-6a (“Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation”) and Deuteronomy 7:6 (For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth”), and it is reflected in other passages (e.g., Rev. 1:6) in the Christian scriptures as well.

[2] See Eph. 1:14; 1Thess. 5:9; 2Thess. 2:14; and Heb. 10:39.

[3] Chuck Fager, “Friends as a ‘Chosen People.’”

[4] The term “theopoetic” goes back at least to Amos N. Wilder: “[T]heopoetic means doing more justice to the role of the symbolic and the prerational in the way we deal with experience. We should recognize that human nature and human societies are more deeply motivated by images and fabulations than by ideas.” (Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976], p. 2.) According to Scott Holland, “[T]heology in our postmodern condition must be understood as a poetics, not a metaphysics…. [W]hether theology is inscribed in the genre of poetry, in the form of narrative, or in a thicker, theoretical style of prose, it remains a poiesis: an inventive, imaginative act of composition performed by authors.” (“Theology is a Kind of Writing: The Emergence of Theopoetics,” CrossCurrents, Vol. 47 No. 3, [Fall 1997], p. 319.) Both references are from an unattributed essay titled “Liberating Language: Rubem Alves, Theopoetics, and the Democratization of God-Talk” at theopoetics.net, a Web site managed by a Friend named Callid Keefe-Perry.

[5] More exactly, the Church claims to possess an infinitely large treasury of merits, earned by Christ and the saints, due to which various types of divine “grace” are available. (It can be said that Catholicism rests on a conceptual tripod of sin, redemption, and grace.) The grace is applied through sacraments and other actions. “Our Lord died to merit grace for us, and the sacraments are the chief means by which it is given,” wrote Thomas L. Kinkead in An Explanation of the Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine (p. 153). The Treasury of Merits doctrine supported the use of indulgences, in which one person’s merits are applied to reduce or remove the penalty for another’s sins, and was a factor in the Reformation.

[6] The Baltimore Catechism, Q. 1002, p 262.

[7] “The Mass is the sacrifice of the New Law in which Christ, through the ministry of the priest, offers Himself to God in an unbloody manner under the appearances of bread and wine. The Mass is the sacrifice of Christ offered in a sacramental manner …. The reality is the same but the appearances differ.” — The New Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism, p. 168.

[8] The phrase “to hear Mass” is used repeatedly in the Baltimore Catechism, in wide use in the U.S. from 1885 shortly until after Vatican II and still being used in places today. (A modernized version, The New St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism, was published as recently as 1995; see previous note.) During the book’s heyday, the Mass, as it had been for centuries, was almost universally read in Latin, a “dead” language which many people did not understand. When I was a child in the pre-Vatican-II Latin Church, it was not unusual to see people praying the rosary or reading silently from prayer books, which may or may not have included a translation of the Mass prayers, during the ritual. Indeed, the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on sacraments taught that intention, not attention, is necessary: “By the intention man submits himself to the operation of the sacraments which produce their effects ex opere operato [that is, 'by virtue of the action'], hence attention is not necessary for the valid reception of the sacraments. One who might be distracted, even voluntarily, during the conferring [of a sacrament] would receive the sacrament validly.” Even more interestingly, “In adults, for the valid reception of any sacrament except the Eucharist, it is necessary that they have the intention of receiving it. … The Eucharist is excepted because, in whatever state the recipient may be, it is always the body and blood of Christ.”

[9] The Catholic priest is said to “confect” the Eucharist: “As has already been recalled, ‘the only minister who can confect the Sacrament of the Eucharist in persona Christi is a validly ordained Priest’” — Redemptionis Sacramentum, Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacrament, 2004 (quoting the Code of Canon Law). See also Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church [Lumen Gentium], Chapter III, which states that “acting in the person of Christ [the ordained priests] renew and apply in the sacrifice of the Mass … the only sacrifice of the New Testament[,] namely that of Christ offering Himself once for all a spotless Victim to the Father.”

[10] Relevant passages include the following. The second, from Leviticus, is especially interesting in context of the Eucharist.

Genesis 9:3-4: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Leviticus 17:10-14: And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood. And whatsoever man there be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, which hunteth and catcheth any beast or fowl that may be eaten; he shall even pour out the blood thereof, and cover it with dust. For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.

Deuteronomy 12:22-23: Even as the roebuck and the hart is eaten, so thou shalt eat them: the unclean and the clean shall eat of them alike. Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.

[11] “As you trust, so let it become for you” (Matthew 8:13). To “believe in the Light,” as early Friends would say, to trust in the work of love within you, is to be changed. “While you have the light, be trusting in the light, that you may be becoming children of light” (John 12:36).

[12] I am noting that, in general, Catholic conceptions of priesthood, presence, and sacrifice tend to externalize spiritual life and power and thereby substitute ritual for inner change. However, I am arguing not that the Eucharistic ritual cannot be part of a faith that values and leads to sacrificial love, but that such loving is a result of the faith, which turns us to and gives us confidence in the love in our hearts, rather than a supernatural effect of the rite. An example of the phenomenon is found in an absorbing blog post called “Approaching the Death of God: A Good Friday Reflection” by a Catholic writer: it is evident there that, despite the author’s devotion to the Eucharist, the sacrament constitutes a supplementary element in a comprehensive, life-directing, narrative-based belief system — a perspective with which I’m sure many Protestants would agree. (I was initially intrigued by that post for another reason; namely, its presentation of the doctrine that God experienced death on the cross — which seems to suggest that a being could experience itself as not experiencing anything. But that would be a topic for a different post here.)

[13] I am reminded of Simone Weil’s “If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought. And this knowledge is extended to our sensibility only through suffering and death.” (Gravity and Grace, p. 37) — and of course Paul’s statement in 1Corinthians 1:26-31 (emphasis added): “For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, [are called]: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, [yea], and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence. But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: that, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”

[14] “God, the one making the cosmos and all things in it, being the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped by human hands, as if he demanded anything, he who is giving life and breath to all, who makes from one blood every people dwelling on the face of the earth … that they should be seeking the Lord and surely therefore feel him and find him, he being inherently not far from each of us, for in him we live and move and are … for we are his family.” — Acts 17: 24-28, my translation.

[15] The Quaker usage may harken back to Ephesians 4, particularly verses 7 (“And unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ”) and 13 (“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 fulness of Christ”). In verse 13, the Greek lacks the definite article (“the”) before the word rendered “measure,” as it does before the phrase rendered “perfect man”; a closer translation of the concluding phrases could be “into a perfect (or mature) person, into a measure of stature of the divine fullness of the Christ.”

By His Wounds We Are Healed

The story of “doubting Thomas”¹ is a memorable mythic narrative that images our spiritual lives in a powerful and even surprising way.

According to John the evangelist, late in the day of his resurrection Jesus appears to some disciples who have gathered together. He shows them the wounds in his hands and side, and so they recognize him: “then the disciples were made joyful when they perceived the Lord.”²

Their need for a sign to connect the apparition with the Jesus they’d known reminds me of Luke’s story of disciples who walk and speak with the risen Christ on the Emmaus road but fail to recognize him until he breaks bread as Jesus had done. I’m reminded, too, that, according to John, Christ had earlier appeared to Mary Magdalene, who also talked with him but “perceived not that it is Jesus” until he called her by name.³ The cosmic Christ, while not simply identical with him, is recognized by a manifest continuity with the Jesus of history.⁴That’s an important message for us today. But there’s more to come.

Having been recognized as Jesus, Christ gives peace to the disciples, extends to them the commission he had himself received from the Father, and breathes the Spirit of God into them. The obvious parallel is to God’s breathing of life into the newly-created human race in the Genesis creation story:⁵ by breathing his spiritual life into them, we may understand, Jesus the Christ re-creates the disciples in the image of God, which is himself.⁶ Receiving the Spirit of holiness, they are reborn in Christ, as innocent now as the newly-created Adam. (As a result, they bear the responsibility of judging the morality of the world.⁷) Jesus then departs.

One of their number, “Thomas, called Didymus,”⁸ is absent during that time. When he returns later, the others excitedly tell him, “We have seen the Lord!” Presumably, they tell him that they recognized Christ when shown the wounds. But Thomas cannot believe them. He replies, in effect, that “Unless I can put my finger in the place of the nail in his hand, and unless I can push my own hand into the wound in his side, I can’t believe this story.”

About a week later, when Thomas is with the group, Jesus appears among them again. After again imparting peace, he shows his wounds to Thomas and invites him to touch them.

“Bring here your finger and touch my hands; bring here your hand and thrust it into my side, and be not faithless, but faithful.” And Thomas says to him, “My Lord and my God!”⁹

As had the others, Thomas recognizes Christ — and his divine character — by the wounds.

The evangelist next has Christ draw the lesson that we should have faith (or be faithful) even when we cannot have direct experience of him. That’s an interesting conclusion, but I don’t want to follow the author there today; I want to ponder the astonishing teaching that the risen Christ bears open wounds.

It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written [Gen. 2:7; see note 5, below], “The first human Adam became a living soul”; the final Adam [i.e., Christ] is life-giving spirit.¹⁰

The body which the disciples encounter is, then, a manifestation of the spiritual body of Christ, the “life-giving spirit” of God. It is divine and therefore perfect. And that which is perfect is complete, whole. Yet the perfect body of Christ, the spiritual body into which the disciples — and, according to our tradition, we — are incorporated in the Spirit,¹¹ bears open wounds. Moreover, they are the wounds suffered by the historical Jesus as a result of his proclamation and praxis of the Kingdom of God, of a new world, created and sustained by self-sacrificing love, of mutual support, justice, and peace.

What might this mean for our spiritual lives? I can only begin to answer that question here.

In the story of Thomas we see that the spiritual body of the cosmic Christ is eternally wounded for the sake of the other. And because the body of Christ is the body of the faithful — that is, the body of those of us who trust in love and who live in fidelity to its leadings — those wounds are ours. In the well-known “kenotic hymn” of Philippians 2, Paul says that Jesus Christ was lifted up, exalted above all because, rather than grasp at the divinity that was his, he emptied himself and became a fully human servant to divine love, “even unto death on the cross.” Again, there is an evident parallel to Genesis, in which “the first human, Adam” sinned against love in attempting to seize divinity. When we give up our Adamic pursuit of self-aggrandizement, surrendering instead to the leading of love, we are wounded by the plight and for the sake of the poor and the oppressed. And in being so wounded, we are lifted up into the spiritual body of Christ, the body of those who live in the spirit in which Jesus lived.

This, then, is the paradoxical wholeness, the perfection, offered by our tradition: a sharing in love’s suffering. We may initially come to religion in flight from pain, but the image of Christ in the “doubting Thomas” story warns us that to flee from love’s wounds is to flee from “the way, the truth, and the life.”¹² To be godly, to be the presence of Christ in the world, is to be divinely human by living love, and that entails suffering with and for the other. Our healing, our salvation, is not, then, the elimination of suffering and weakness¹³ but their transfiguration. Accepting the pain of love, we are raised to new life, a life much deeper and richer than we had known. “By his wounds we are healed.”¹⁴

Christ in Glory
San Giovanni (St. John), Florence

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NOTES for “By His Wounds We Are Healed”

[This post is an amplification of vocal ministry offered at Little Falls Meeting on July 8, 2012.]

[1] The story appears only in the book of John, 20:24-29. For a comparison of the resurrection appearance narratives in the various canonical books, see the Quaker Electronic Archive.

[2] John 20:20b.

[3] John 20:11-17. In John’s account, the appearance to Mary is Jesus’ first, and the appearances we are considering are his second and third.

[4] By “Jesus of history,” I mean the Jesus of the canonical gospel books: in using such phrases, I do not intend to take a position regarding the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth.

[5] See Genesis 2:7: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

[6] Colossians 1:15: “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature….”

[7] See Matthew 19:28 and 1 Corinthians 6:2.

[8] Thomas, who would later be said to have written a gospel book and to have established Christianity in India, is also notable for his courage in following Jesus: when the other disciples were afraid because people sought to stone Jesus, Thomas said, “Let us also go [with Jesus], that we may die with him.”

[9] John 20:27, 28. Note that on the morning of the resurrection Jesus had said to Mary Magdalene, “Noli me tangere” (in the well-known Vulgate rendering): “Jesus said to her, ‘Do not touch me [or, do not cling to me], for I have not yet ascended to my Father. Go on to my brethren, and say to them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and to your God.’” (John 20:17) The implication is, then, that Jesus had “ascended” to God by the time he invited Thomas to touch him: the open wounds are not temporary. (We see that reflected in Christian iconography such as the Christ in Glory, above, in which the ascended Christ is depicted with wounds.)

[10] 1 Cor. 15:44-45. The word translated as “natural” is psuchikon (psychikon), more literally rendered as “soul-ish.” Again, Paul is referring to Genesis 2:7.

[11] See 1 Corinthians 12.

[12] John 14:6. Interestingly, Jesus’ statement “I am the way, the truth, and the life” was a response to Thomas’ “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?” — strikingly similar to Hebrews’ 11:8, “Abraham … went out, not knowing whither he went.” For discussion of Jesus’ statement and Abraham’s journey in context of Quaker worship, see Understanding Quaker Worship.

[13] See, for example, Mark 8:34 and parallels, and 2 Corinthians 11 and 12.

[14] Isaiah 53:5; NIV.

The Zen of Quakerism

If, when I’m feeling a little playful, someone were to ask me to summarize Quakerism in a sentence or two, I might say this:

You have a heart. Use it.

If the person looked puzzled or expectant, I might say more:

It’s not the heart your parents gave you. Perhaps you would ponder a Quaker koan awhile:

What is your original heart before you were born?

Sometimes you have a fleeting feeling that is deeper and more embracive than the heart you think is yours; sometimes you experience a sharing in the suffering of other beings and a desire to help them, even if doing so is painful or dangerous. That is the stirring of the prelapsarian heart, your pure heart before your parents, “Adam and Eve,” gave you birth. It is your treasure-house. As Baso’s student Daiju liked to say,

Open your own treasure house and use those treasures.

But you may fear to do that: just to open the house is to risk losing, or spending, the treasure. But is treasure really treasure if never used? And does your original heart, which knows that “love can be kept only by being given away,” not long to give itself?

And does Lazarus not lie bleeding at your gate? Do you not long to plunder your treasure for him?

Master Jesus said,

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Your original heart already does that. Why not live in that heart? Why settle for a lesser life?

When an armed thief entered Shichiri Kojun’s house, the master interrupted his sutra chanting to say, “Don’t disturb me. The money’s in that drawer. Help yourself.” As the thief opened the drawer, the master said, “Leave me a little for tomorrow’s taxes.” The thief took most of the money and approached the door. “You didn’t thank me,” said the master. The thief thanked him and left, shaking his head. Later, at the thief’s trial, the master gave testimony: “I gave him some money, and he thanked me for it.” Upon his release from prison (for he had stolen from many), the former thief studied Buddhism under Shichiri Kojun.

Master Jesus said, “Take no thought for the morrow.” But Master Shichiri knew to keep something for tomorrow, lest he, too, lose his liberty; being, like Jesus, a teacher, he had work to do. Love gives by nature, not by law. Therefore it is free. Therefore it is perfect.

Be you therefore perfect, even as your Father in the heavens is perfect.

Not believe that you are perfect, but really be perfect? And act like it? Who can do that? One who real–izes the perfection already in her, however small its present measure; one who puts her faith in the Christ-nature and so expresses that nature in thought, feeling, word, and deed. For “Christ” is the name of your perfect original heart, the power and wisdom of love.

To find that heart and abide therein is to have life and have it ever more abundantly. It is to “come into the unity of the faith and of the real–ization of the Son of God, into a perfect person, into a mature measure of the fullness of the Christ.” The Christ-heart is the priceless spiritual life that no one can give you nor take from you. It is your eternal treasure, but only if you spend it.

You have a heart. Use it.

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NOTES for “The Zen of Quakerism”

Rather than pepper that brief piece with note numbers, I’ll identify non-biblical references here and leave the biblical quotations and references, including Jesus’ story of Lazarus and the rich man, to the reader’s knowledge, search engine, or apathy. (Note that in my translation of Eph. 4:13 I have, following the scripture4all.org interlinear rendering, used “realization” — which I have hyphenated in order to bring out the sense of “making real” — instead of the usual “knowledge” for epignoseos.) In order of appearance:

• “What is your original heart before you were born?” is a play on a famous Zen koan, or meditation paradox, attributed to the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-Neng, who asked (according to D. T. Suzuki), “When your mind is not dwelling on the dualism of good and evil, what is your original face before you were born?” — see Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, p. 104;
• Daiju’s statement is from story # 28 in Reps & Senzaki, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, p. 48;
• “Love can be kept only by being given away” is from Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, page 1;
• The story of Shichiri Kojun and the thief is adapted from story # 44 in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, p. 59.

Understanding Quaker Worship

In this post I continue my presentation of experiential, psychological aspects of Quaker faith and practice in their original context; namely, the founding Friends’ interaction with scripture. I believe that this approach can deepen our practice by enriching our understanding of it in a way that is both faithful to tradition and meaningful to 21^st-century, even post-Christian, minds. I ask that the reader reserve judgment while the latent image develops in the progress of this post; if all goes well, the negative will become a positive. In that spirit, let’s have a look at Quaker worship, which, as many readers will know, is grounded in silence of body and mind. Worship, which may begin in formal gatherings but comes to permeate one’s life, can be understood as founded on a passage in the gospel book of John:

But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.¹

“In spirit and in truth”? “Spirit” is not threatening, but the word “truth” tends to make many Quakers cautious; after all, every fanatic believes that she possesses the truth. We might ask with Pilate, “What is truth?”² But, as the reader of John’s book knows, Jesus had answered that question before it was asked: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”³ (There’s more to his statement, but we’ll deal with that later in this post.)

To worship in truth is, then, to worship in Christ. And to be in Christ is to be re-created, to become a new person in a new world: “If anyone is in Christ,” says Paul, “new creation! Old things are passed away; behold, all things are new.”⁴

What does that mean in practice? A passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans can help make that clear.

I entreat you, then, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God: this is your spiritual worship. And don’t be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the re-making of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God — that which is good, well pleasing, perfect.⁵

To present one’s body as living sacrifice is to enter that new life in which, as Paul put it, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”⁶ One continues, of course, to live an embodied existence, but one’s sense of self has changed. The body has been turned over to God-who-is-love in order that it may be, as George Fox would say, “restored into the image of God”⁷ — that is, into the spirit that is called Christ, the spirit that we encounter in the life and teachings of Jesus. Thus one becomes a new creation, the Kingdom of God in human form; one becomes, as our myth would have it, part of the risen spiritual body of the savior-sanctifier of the world.

To be in Christ is, then, to be animated by the spirit of Christ, and to be, therefore, a member of Christ’s body; that is, it is to be Christ in this present world.⁸ As Paul tells us, we come into that new identity by deconstructing ourselves, by discerning and breaking free of our conformity to the ways of the world — our normal ways of thinking and feeling — and allowing our minds to be re-made in the imago Dei. In doing that, we are sustained and guided by the universal love — the will of God — that had lain hidden in our hearts, flickering weakly beneath our own will and wisdom, beneath our burden of self-love and self-deception.

Echoing Paul, Isaac Penington puts it in this way in “A Brief Account concerning Silent Meetings”:

For one is to come into the poverty of self, … into the nothingness, into the silence of one’s spirit before the Lord; into the putting off of all one’s knowledge, wisdom, understanding, abilities — of all that one is, of all that one has done or can do outside of one’s measure of life. And one is to travel into that measure of life in order to be clothed with the nature, spirit, and power of the Lord. [...] Now in this measure of life, which is of Christ, … there is the power … to work in and for the soul that which God requires, that which is acceptable in his sight.⁹

Discerning our current “measure” of universal love, which we may be surprised to find is much smaller than we’d thought, we recognize its priceless value and, despite the cost and the incalculable risks, give up everything to enter and abide in its life and power.

Writing elsewhere on the doctrine of justification,¹⁰ Penington reminds us of the journey of Abraham, who “acted not of himself, but by faith, and by living to God, and obeying his voice in that land to which he was led.” Like that archetype of faith, we go out from our (psychological) home, “out of [our] country, kindred, and father’s house,” not knowing where we are going but entrusting ourselves to the love that leads us, coming finally to dwell in a new and very different land. As a result, we become sons and daughters of God, living in “the nature, spirit, and power of the Lord.”

Worship, then, is a journey in which we travel from the ersatz light of self into the darkness of faith in love, there to be transfigured in the “true light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world.”¹¹ In that movement, we experience baptism and communion — our dying to the old self and our being raised into Christ, the image of God.

But when Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he finished with “no one comes [or, is coming] to the Father except through me.” Does that point to a necessity for belief in traditional Christian doctrine? The scripture says that Abraham was justified by faith,¹² but surely he did not hold such belief. Nor need we. If Christ is truth, and if to “worship the Father in spirit and in truth” is therefore to live in and as Christ, then Jesus’ concluding clause can be read as including all who so live.

To surrender our bodies and minds to God even as Jesus did is to “come to the Father” by becoming members of the body of Christ, “partakers of the divine nature.”¹³ And the divine nature of which we partake is love, “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.”¹⁴ No one comes to love unless through self-surrender to its hidden glimmer in one’s heart, the “true light that enlightens everyone.” “For God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God in them.”¹⁵

And there, in that well-known but often deprecated passage from the first epistle of John, is the interpretive key to our effective “translation” of the ancient images into our less, or differently, mythological thinking. That we may allow the pull of love to separate us from the patterns which a systemically unjust world has imposed upon our thinking and feeling, patterns that have defined who we are and how we live; that we may empty ourselves of that mind and submit to being, as it were, re-created ex nihilo¹⁶ in the image of God-who-is-love, so that we now “have the mind of Christ”¹⁷ and incarnate love in this world: this is Quaker worship.

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NOTESfor “Understanding Quaker Worship”

 

[1] John 4:23, KJV. I will simply note here that the passage is one of many that raise gender issues, exploration of which is not appropriate to this post.

[2] John 18:38a, KJV.

[3] John 14:6a, KJV. Hodos, translated as “way,” means a road or a journey.

[4] 2 Cor. 5:17, my translation.

[5] Romans 12:1-2, my translation and emphasis.

[6] Galatians 2:29, KJV (updated).

[7] George Fox, Epistle XXXII, pp. 38-39 of Vol. 7, Works, 1831 edition. “Restored” refers to the myth of the fall: in Christ we are restored, says Fox, “up into the state man was in before he fell”; namely, the perfection of innocence. (Same volume, p. 269.) See also Colossians 1:15a, which speaks of Christ as “the image of the invisible God.”

[8] See 1 John 4:17b: “as he is, so are we in this present world.” George Fox liked to quote the phrase with regard to the Friends: he does so, for example, at least nine times in The Great Mystery.

[9] Isaac Penington, “A Brief Account concerning Silent Meetings; the nature, use, intent, and benefit of them” (1680), my close paraphrase for readability and inclusion. Penington’s brief essay on worship is part of a longer work called “A Further Testimony to Truth, revived out of the ruins of the apostasy.”

[10] Isaac Penington, “An Addition concerning the Doctrine of Justification,” in “The Way of Life and Death Made Manifest and Set Before Men” (1658). Penington’s biblical point of reference is Hebrews 11:8-10.

[11] See John 1:5-9.

[12] See Romans 4:3 and Galatians 3:6. Penington (see note 10) says, “Mark, then, [that] the justification or redemption is not by believing of a thing done without [i.e., external to] man (though that also is to be believed), but by receiving him into the heart. For the virtue [i.e., the power] of all [that] Christ did without [i.e., did outwardly] is within him: and I cannot be made partaker thereof by believing that he did such a thing without, or that he did it for me, but by receiving the virtue of it into me, and feeling the virtue of it in me. This is that which saves me, and makes that which was done without to be mine.”

[13] See 2 Peter 1:4.

[14] Isaac Penington, “Concerning Love,” in “Some Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Glanced At” (1663).

[15] 1 John 4:16b, my translation.

[16] Creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, is actually not specified in the book of Genesis (or anywhere else in scripture). I use the phrase here with a nod to Penington’s “nothingness.” More strictly, we could speak of the biblical correspondence between the original ordering of the cosmic chaos and the contemporary ordering of our inner chaos, both accomplished by the Logos, “Christ the power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). For more on that, see “Answering That of God as Revolutionary Praxis.”

[17] 1 Corinthians 2:18, my translation: “For who has known the mind of the Lord, to be able to walk in unity with him? But we have the mind of Christ.”