What’s the Point?

And the evil spirit answered and said, ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?’ — Acts 19:15.

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We know that Quakerism came into being as an intrinsically confrontational reaction against conventional Christianity in its various forms. Quakers acted against that Christianity for the sake of justice, justice denied by the churches with their “preaching up sin” and their doctrinal escape hatches such as “imputed justification.”¹ Christianity had long been a religion ordered to ends opposed by Jesus—and by anyone living in the spirit in which Jesus had lived, the spirit to which Quakers surrendered themselves. They recognized its condition as apostasy, defection, from its original life and truth.

Christianity, the Friends knew, had begun as the breaking into the status quo, into the world-system,² of something wholly other, something which was not only “not of this world” but which also, being just, constituted a radical critique and condemnation of the status quo in both the society and the individual. But the new movement had soon been subverted into its opposite. It became, and remains, a device by which injustice is rationalized, even sacralized, and the dark self-centeredness of human nature is excused by a malleable God who, even if sometimes angered by our misdeeds, forgives anyone who believes in his forgiveness.

Jesus had enacted a ministry of “answering that of God in every one,” i.e., of exposing and contradicting the injustice embedded in the religion-supported society, and in the hearts of individuals, of his time and place. The first Quakers did the same in their own day, confronting and overcoming evil, first within themselves and then in their world. “Primitive Christianity revived,” Quakerism irrupted into seventeenth-century England’s irreligious Christian milieu to disrupt its operation by insisting on honesty, justice, and mercy—and on a religion in which those virtues were crucial.

From that flowering of righteousness, we contemporary Friends have received a tradition rich in stories of spiritual power effective in the world, stories told in Quaker-Christian images such as “that of God,” “the inner light,” “continuing revelation.” Today, while we continue to speak them, we tend to invest those images with broader meanings, satisfied that we have translated the spiritual legacy of our ancestors into contemporary terms. For many of us, the first Quakers’ scripturally-shaped worldview seems irredeemably culture-bound, outdated, and maybe more than a little crazy.

So why study the words of the first Friends today? Why expound them as if they could be important for contemporary Quakerism? What’s the point?

There’s this: they offer us a challenge, one that a person desirous of a rigorously honest spiritual life may welcome. As we’ve seen, the first Quakers reacted against a religion that rationalized the unjust and hypocritical status quo. Studying their words and lives with open minds and hearts, we may come to question our own condition: do not we, too, use religion to make ourselves feel good (in both senses) while our manner of living supports the unjust system from which we benefit, even if we dissent on this or that issue (such as war or government aid to the poor)? Is it not possible that we are as hypocritical and harmful as the people whom the first Quakers angered by “answering that of God in them”—by echoing the cries of radical goodness in them to be freed from the unacknowledged darkness and evil in their hearts?

To be blunt: is it not almost always the “call to enjoyment”³ and not the call to justice to which we give ear? To take just one egregious example, let’s set aside the everyday and consider one special time: vacation. In a “developed” country such as the United States, where we casually consume a large percentage of the world’s resources, once or twice a year we like to take a vacation, to “go somewhere” and do something special, something that requires an even greater than normal expenditure of resources. Vacation is a time in which to enjoy ourselves as fully as possible, to have fun—to play. And many of us spend a relatively significant amount of resources on that special playtime. After all, we feel, we deserve it; we even need it. And what could be wrong with it?

Again, let’s focus on just one egregious example. While we’re using those resources for our vacation pleasures, we know—or could know, if we cared to inquire—that every day about 30,000 children die of starvation and preventable or treatable disease. And we know, if we think about it, that children don’t run out of food or get sick one morning and then die that afternoon: they suffer malnutrition, sickness, and pain for some time before their bodies are completely broken. In other words, it’s not that 30,000 suddenly sicken and die every day, but that such a huge number of little children are suffering continuously—from preventable and curable conditions—that the daily body count is in the tens of thousands.

We adults play; countless children cannot. We have excess resources, which we use to further enjoy our already luxurious lives; they have few or none, and therefore they live and die in misery and pain. It’s not inconceivable, is it, that instead of playing like spoiled children we could, adult-like, apply our over-abundant resources to saving the life, or at least to easing the pain, of one or two or ten or a hundred of them—even every day?

Well, yes, it is inconceivable. It is inconceivable because the structure of our worldview does not normally permit this question to come into consciousness, or, when it does slip past the ramparts, to be taken seriously. To care enough about unknown children that one breaks with social expectations and sacrifices customary pleasures is effectively unthinkable. And so, even if we give some money to a charity because we’re nice people, we don’t feel at all odd that many children are suffering and dying for lack of the resources that we’re spending on our play. To the contrary, especially when we’re happily using our own children’s resources and damaging their environment in the process of having our good time, to deprive ourselves of fun for the sake of the children of strangers—that would be very odd. And we don’t want to feel odd, particularly if it costs an annual trip to the islands (where, if all goes well, the poor will not be visible from a beach that has not yet succumbed to climate change or oil spills).

Is it lucky for us, then, that the ethical challenge of people like Jesus and the first Friends is issued in the language of religious mythology, of God and demons, heaven and hell, salvation and sin, so that we can rationalize dismissing the challenge along with the superstition? It seems so. But we do that only by closing our ears to the cry for justice harbored not only in their language but also in the depths of our own hearts. Otherwise, we could find that we’ve put things together backwards, that it’s not that the ethical call comes out of superstition but that the superstition is a more or less primitive incarnation of the heart’s reaction to injustice. We could find that those Quaker phrases we use, phrases like “that of God” and “the light in the conscience,” don’t mean that we can be nice people while enjoying our status in an unjust world-system, that they still point to a tiny, trampled yearning in our hearts for justice and mercy. We might even find that the nasty “original sin” idea harbors a truth: after all, can one really be a good person while withholding food and medical care from children so that one can have yet more fun? Or might such behavior point to a fundamental flaw, a root of real evil in us?

Will there be a “last judgment,” as described, for example, in Matthew 25? Probably not. But maybe Jesus was expressing a truth both timeless and urgent when he said that we who feast and play while the poor starve deserve unending torture. And maybe, as a George Fox can tell us, “nice” is the truly banal face of evil. But do we have ears to hear?

Do, then, even we spiritual descendants of Fox fail to to acknowledge and act on the reality of our self-loving into injustice? Is our attitude effectively something like this: “If the spirit of George Fox comes looking for us, tell him that we’re on vacation­—not sure when we’ll be back, but if it makes him feel better George can leave an anachronistic tract in the screen door before he goes”? If so, we’ve sold our heart’s treasure, Fox’s just and compassionate “Christ within,” and then left town to spend the silver on a good time, expecting that things will be back to normal when we return. And they will be, because, human nature being what it is and religion being one of our best defenses against truth and justice, the poor children we have always with us—even though they die by the tens of thousands every day.

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NOTES

[1] “Preaching up sin” refers to the doctrine that human beings must always be sinners in this world. In the popular sense, imputed justification (or imputed righteousness) means that believers do not actually become just but are treated by God as if they were just, even though in practice they will continue to sin. In other words, the righteousness of Jesus is “credited” to them despite their continuing unrighteousness, and thus they can be admitted to heaven after death. This pernicious superstition is expressed in such slogans as “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.”

[2] Scriptural Greek’s kosmos, usually translated as “the world,” conveys a sense of an ordered system. The first Quakers believed that the Logos, God’s creative love, was re-ordering the world, restoring us to the original purity of creation in the image of God.

[3] Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 299. (The MIT Press, 2006.)

Text and Antitext

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. — Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Sometimes we speak of those whom society neglects or rejects as being “marginalized.” It’s a revealing term. The margin is, of course, the area outside of the text. To be marginalized is to be written out of the text, out of the common narrative. It is to be subtracted, or excluded from the outset; to be relegated to the periphery; to be defined as an inessential footnote, even a meaningless mark. One may be noticed, but only as an adjunct to or distraction from the text, always and only in context of the narrative. Because the text, the narrative, defines reality for a society – not only explicitly, but, more importantly, in an implicit and therefore pervasive and immensely powerful way – to be marginalized is, effectively, to be made unreal.

Like the Ancient of Days in Blake’s wonderful illustration, the common narrative, that which we hold together, takes a compass to the face of the deep, to the surface of what looks like primal chaos. With that compass, it circumscribes, from infinite possibilities, a more manageable set. All outside the circle is declared void; all within is arranged in patterns or subsets, named, assigned to categories of meaning. We who are created by and absorbed in the narrative call this circumscribed set “the world,” “the universe.” We believe that the circle is somehow all-encompassing, that its area comprises all of “what is.” We believe so because the narrative, of necessity, tells us so.

The narrative is, after all, our Father God. What he has included, we include; what he has marginalized, we marginalize: otherwise, we could find ourselves in the primal chaos. And so we who are on the inside gratefully accept the circumscription of his compass. We thank our God for enclosing us within the circle of meaning. And if we should see a crack in the wall that surrounds us, we automatically repair it, because living inside the circumference of what we hold together is how we “hold it together” in the face of chaos.

But sometimes we encounter one who calls all of that into question, someone who bears the name of Christ. He is not a reviser of narratives, nor is he the bringer of a new, competing text: he is himself the Anti-narrative, the Antitext. If we attend to him, we soon sense that he will break the circle beyond repair. So we turn away, tame him into objects and images, or replace him with a narrative-friendly dead ringer (Antichrist, a.k.a. religion and spirituality), because we are instinctively afraid. For we know that the text, in creating and sustaining the universe, creates and sustains us. If this new man destroys the narrative, we will no longer know names and places. Chaos will claim us. We will perish.

But we cannot wholly avoid him. Even if we succeed in blocking his presence in our hearts, his words won’t pass away. And although those words have been woven into the common narrative and thus rendered popularly impotent, they still harbor a ray of light, a spark of power. Now and then, some of us are curious about what his light might reveal as it filters weakly through cracks in our enclosure. Venturing trust in his wisdom and power, we stop patching the cracks awhile, and they widen. And when in his brightening light we see and feel the oppressive nature of our constructed, constricted universe, we are open to his offer of hope for a real world without walls, without margins – a world beyond the text.

Paradoxically, then, he raises us out of the text by means of words. According to our scriptures, Jesus the Antitext relied on story as a primary teaching tool. He used narrative against itself – that is, not to take a stand in one place or another within the circle, but to deconstruct the circle itself and thereby to bring down the walls, indeed the entire world, in which we and our marginalized exist. A case in point is his story of the rich man and Lazarus. It goes something like this.

The rich man lives in a gated estate, surrounded by a wall. He has everything he could want and more, including a social subnarrative that not only justifies his manner of life but praises him for it, even decrees it a sign of divine election. Just outside his gate, relegated to the margin of the text, lies the beggar Lazarus, bleeding and starving. The rich man, who never leaves the estate, knows that someone is suffering out there. But that anonymous someone is beyond the pale, outside of the narrative that both creates and justifies his condition; ironically, the wretch’s failure to be included confirms the narrative’s determination that his reality is defective. The rich man feasts with a good conscience. Although I believe that I, being morally superior, would occasionally toss a piece of bread over the fence, he doesn’t do even that. Lazarus dies and is carried away by his kind; as is usual in our world, justice is relegated to the (marginal) hereafter. Life goes on.

For millions or billions of people who hear that story, life within the narrative does indeed go on. Where else could life take place? But for some, those for whom it serves as a visitation of judgment here and now, the story breaks the narrative world apart, revealing that its life is death. As the story goes on to make clear, Lazarus, socially marginalized but spiritually innocent, dies in and into life; the rich man, socially accepted and admired but spiritually guilty, lives in and into death. Ultimately, implies Jesus, turning the common narrative upside down in a Zen-like trope, Lazarus is real and the rich man is not.

When we Friends sit down together for worship, we form a smaller circle within the narrative circle. Comfortable there, we may be tempted to celebrate the place we’ve staked out, which seems morally superior to others, within the universe of the text. But sometimes, allowing the text to subside into silence, we hear the weak cry of Christ’s Lazarus who lies bleeding at our gate, and our hearts begin to crack, to break open. It is then that the light shines in, the light known to the world as Christ. It is then that, if we can find the courage to stop making repairs, the power of the light will widen the cracks and shake the foundations until the wall begins to come down. Waiting through that awful experience in faith, in trust, we enter the sacramental heart of Quaker worship. Our world and our identities having been deconstructed by the light, crucified by the power of love, we are buried with Christ in spiritual baptism. Living now in Christ, no longer in the text, we are “raised a spiritual body,” formed and fed not by words but by the silent life and power of God-who-is-love. In this new being, which no words can wall in, we know experientially the truth of the apostle Paul’s observation that “the text is of killing, but the spirit makes alive.”

When there is no text, there is no margin. No one is encompassed within, and no one is written out. In the life and freedom of Christ the power of love, all are included.

Eye Hath Not Seen

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. — 1 Cor. 2:9

[I]n the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage. — John Steinbeck¹

Every subject is guilty of all the good he did not do. — Alex Ling (on Badiou)²

Hope, not violence, drives human progress. – Andrea Riccardi³

In anticipation of the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War’s beginning, National Public Radio recently presented a feature about “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”⁴ I heard the program on a Sunday evening, a few hours after participating in Quaker worship during which the messages had focused on simplicity of life. When I heard the hymn’s first lines,

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword ….

“How I wish it were so!” was all that I could say.

Of course, I wasn’t wishing for the coming of a Christian army, much less for that of a cosmic cowboy riding on a cloud while trumpets blare. I heard and felt the lines from an informed Quaker perspective, a perspective in which biblical drama depicts inner events. And, as the first Friends often did, I framed the idea of a divine advent in the context of Paul’s “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”⁵ In this inglorious world of oppression, a world ruled by genteel parasitic sociopaths who seize and hoard the resources that all beings need to survive, subjecting their countless victims to unspeakable misery and early death, that’s the resplendent, this-world-ending coming of the Lord that I long for. Not Dies Irae, the day of ultimate violence, but day after day of courageous and peaceful witness and work for human-heartedness — the living light of liberation illumining, transforming, and leading us in this dark world of social-Darwinist domination.

“Christ in you.” Does that mean that an imaginary friend resides somewhere inside me, dispensing comfort and validation? Not from the Quaker perspective. Quakerism began as a thorough re-visioning and re-creation of Christianity, a resurrection of an ancient radical movement made possible by a radical reinterpretation of scripture. And the Quaker reinterpretation involved a redefinition, from the roots up, of essential Christian concepts and terms. In his writings, George Fox frequently tells us exactly how he is redefining — from his perspective, reclaiming the original meanings of — the basic Christian vocabulary. Even the name “Christ” has a meaning for Fox and Quakerism that is very different from that given it by Christianity (a fact we should remember when we think of Fox’s famous “there is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”). For the first Friends, the following signifiers, among others, all have the same signified:

Christ, Jesus, the cross, the gospel, new testament/covenant, light, life, truth, that of God.⁶

Often quoting the apostle Paul,⁷ Fox tells us specifically and repeatedly in his writings that all such words and phrases point to the same dynamic reality, effectively known in its working in the heart: the power of God.⁸ For Quakerism, all of religion is distilled into this one evental reality: that human beings actively partake of the power of God.⁹

That leads us, of course, into further definition. (Readers of previous discussions here will know where I’m going.) To begin, what does “God” signify? The first epistle of the apostle John states unequivocally that “God is love.” Not has, but is. (Thus Quaker Isaac Penington, for example, joins many traditional Christian thinkers in asserting that love is the nature, the essential being, of God.¹⁰) And we know that, in the context of the Christian scriptures,¹¹ love refers to agápē; namely, that disinterested love which, as Jesus taught, actively and “blindly” brings justice — the justice that provides the basic needs for survival — to all, regardless of their characteristics and behavior.¹² God, says scripture, is that agápē-love. And God’s power, as Paul tells us,¹³ is seen in weakness, in the loving which, as the Quaker James Nayler wrote, “takes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with contention.”¹⁴ The power of God is, then, the nonviolent working of love which makes justice a reality. As we’ve seen, that power is “that which can be known of God in [us].”¹⁵ It is what the first Friends meant by “Christ.” To know Christ is, for Quakers, to know — to partake of, to live in and by — that power. “I told them that I lived in that life and power which takes away the occasion of all wars.”¹⁶

“Christ [the power of agápē] in you.” And in me. “I live now, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”¹⁷ That power’s becoming incarnate in human beings is the glorious coming of Christ. Our being able honestly to “confess that Christ is come in [our] flesh”¹⁸ is the confession that brings salvation — salvation not of an immortal human soul, even if such a thing were to exist beyond fantasy,¹⁹ but of the world. And not after death, but now, while it is needed by actually existing beings. As we learn from Paul, the whole creation longs for the manifestation of the children of God, longs to be able to sing that the Logos, the creative and redeeming power of love, “was made flesh and dwelt in us” — as, George Fox noted, the scripture actually says.²⁰

And that is the “glory of the coming of the Lord” which my eyes and heart long to see: the parousia-advent of the spiritual Christ flashing illumination from his “terrible swift sword,” the sword of Paradise that cuts down the socially-sanctioned selfishness which leads some of us to exalt ourselves by humbling, even murdering en masse, our fellow beings. What can I do to participate more fully in that parousia, that glorious coming-in-power? Can I shake free of the impotent, self-focused spirituality that the self-anointed powers-that-be have sold us, so that “the glory of the coming of the Lord” becomes not merely a hope but a present reality as I am “changed into [Christ's] image from glory to glory”?²¹ Can I find the courage to surrender to the Christ-spirit of justice in my heart, the spirit that leads me to risk changing myself and the world under the guidance and by the power of agápē?

At this moment, I don’t know how that courage and I will find each other. I do know that it’s all too easy, and even rewarding, for me to repress the rising of compassion and justice, the resurrection of Christ, in my heart. It’s easy and rewarding for me to distract myself from the pain of those who are much more oppressed than I, those who are brutally trampled by the wealthy but are in some ways beaten down by me as well — not only by my relatively comfortable, resource-​heavy “lifestyle” but even more by my compartmentalization and complacency. When I trample the oppressed, I trample Christ, and in so doing I cripple my own heart: this, scripture and Quakerism tell me, is when the coming of Christ means judgment rather than glory.²²

But judgment means that Christ — the power of love — is already risen in me; “he” is the light that shows me the suffering of the world, the voice that calls me to answer, to respond to that suffering.²³ Now that Christ has begun to reveal himself in me, I cannot escape love’s judgment. But love’s present power and call also awaken hope. “Christ in you, the hope of glory”: hope for my own guilty heart; hope against hope for the broken hearts of the oppressed and the hard gilt hearts of the oppressors. Hope even for the worst oppressors: while many sociopaths may be incapable of becoming moral, their brains lacking the capacity for empathy, it may be that (riffing on Matthew 19:12),

[T]here are some moral eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb, and there are some … which were made moral eunuchs of men, and there be some which have made themselves moral eunuchs for the kingdom of Mammon’s sake.

Hope suggests that at least some of the wealthy, although seduced by security, luxury, and power, have not yet thoroughly killed the spirit of agápē in their well-defended, dissociated hearts.²⁵ It may be that, if we are pure and brave enough, we can “answer that of God” even in some of those unfortunate oppressors. And if we can’t convert their hearts, then at least, working together in the solidarity of the spirit of agápē, we can find a nonviolent way to restrain them, as we would with any person whose mental disorder manifests as violence. “That’s what the war of love [i.e., the Lamb's War] is for.”²⁴

If, then, the Christ-spirit — that of God — within me speaks judgment, it speaks hopefully of possibilities as well, perhaps even the possibility of the impossible.²⁶ “For with God, all things are possible”:²⁷ perhaps the hard hearts of wealthy people can be softened by the spirit of compassion; perhaps even my angry and frightened heart can be changed by that spirit. Can I allow the holy spirit of agápē to give me the courage and the clarity of vision to significantly reduce my complicity in this civility-veneered brutality, this system of anti-Christ under which much of humanity, and much of what we call “nature,” struggles, suffers, and dies? Can I allow that spirit to raise me up “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,”²⁸ to increasingly make my life a sacrifice of salvation for the oppressed world? Can I join with others who are doing the same, working as part of the body of Christ for the increase of justice? It is only then that I will be able to say:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!

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NOTES

1. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, p. 477 (Chapter 25).
2. Alex Ling, “Keeping the Faith: On Being Good And How Not To Be Evil” – a review of Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil in Cosmos and History in The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 1-2, 2006. Ling is paraphrasing Voltaire as a way of summarizing Alain Badiou’s ethic.
3. Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, in “Faiths Key to Peaceful World,” Catholic News Service, 10/2010.
4. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” words by Julia Ward Howe, 1862.
5. Col. 1:27b
6. See George Fox’s epistles, Vol. 7 and Vol. 8 of his Works.
7. See, for example, 1 Cor. 1:24 and Rom. 1:16.
8. See Rom. 1:19.
9. 1 Jn. 4:16.
10. See, for example, Penington’s “Concerning Love.”
11. Note that Quakerism, again following Paul, cannot use the phrase “New Testament” to refer to scriptures – see 2 Cor. 3:6: “[God] also made us sufficient ministrants of a new covenant, not of writing [grammatos], but of spirit; for the letter is of killing, and the spirit makes alive.”
12. See Matt. 5.
13. See, for example, 2 Cor. 12:9: “for [God's] power is perfected in weakness.”
14. James Nayler’s final statement. See the full statement here.
15. Rom. 1:19.
16. George Fox’s Journal, p. 113 of the Works, Vol. 1. Note the use of the singular verb form: life and power are one.
17. Gal. 2:20.
18. See 1 Jn. 4:2. See also my 8/29/09 blog post.
19. “And dost not thou speak of a human soul, an earthly soul, and is earthly, immortal?” George Fox, “The Great Mystery,” Works, Vol. 3, p. 181.
20. See Rom. 8:22, Jn.1:14, and George Fox, “Some scriptures corrupted by the translators,” Works, Vol. 3, p. 582.
21. 2 Cor. 3:18.
22. See Matt. 25:31-46.
23. See, for example, George Fox’s Journal in Works, Vol. 1, p. 289: “Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.” Also, p. 381: “Now is that made manifest, unto which all must answer, and appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.”
24. “The war of love”: Justin Hayward, “Question” (song performed by the Moody Blues). The Lamb’s War: early Quaker phrase taken from the book of Revelation. See, for example, James Nayler, “The Lamb’s War”: “And as they war not against men’s persons, so their weapons are not carnal, nor hurtful to any of the creation; for the Lamb comes not to destroy men’s lives, nor the work of God, and therefore at his appearance in his subjects, he puts spiritual weapons into their hearts and hands: their armor is the light, their sword the Spirit of the Father and the Son; their shield is faith and patience; their paths are prepared with the gospel of peace and good will towards all the creation of God.”
25. See Barclay’s Apology, The Fifth and Sixth Propositions, §XII: “So that many men may outlive this day [of visitation by God], after which there may be no possibility of salvation to them, and God justly suffers them to be hardened, as a just punishment of their unbelief, and even raises them up as instruments of wrath, and makes them a scourge one against another.” Available at QHP.
26. See John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God.
27. Matt. 19:26.
28. Eph. 4:13b.