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

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

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

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

The passage is Romans 1:16-25.

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

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

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

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A brief, more traditional Quaker commentary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A briefer, universalist/postmodern Quaker commentary:

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

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

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

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

Concerning Love

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

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

CONCERNING LOVE

Quest. What is love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart of Quakerism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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