Quaker Universalist Voice

??Interfaith Just Peacemaking: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives on the New Paradigm of Peace and War??: A Review

2013-05-07T22:25:35Z

Interfaith Just Peacemaking: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives on the New Paradigm of Peace and War, edited by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012)

This review was originally published by Anthony Manousos on his LA Quaker blog on April 22, 2013, and is republished with his permission.

The paradigm of “just peacemaking” is one of the most important recent developments in interfaith and ecumenical social activism, though it is not as widely known as it should be. This eminently practical as well as deeply theological approach is helping people of different faith perspectives to find common ground and work together for peace. As someone who has been involved with interfaith peacemaking for over a decade, I find this approach extremely exciting and hopeful.

The idea of “just peacemaking” originated with Glen Stassen, a professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Seminary and an Evangelical Christian who was a student of Reinhold Niebuhr (Obama’s favorite theologian). Niebuhr, one of America’s most influential theologians in the 1950s, gave up on pacifism during WWII and became a “Christian realist,” justifying war in situations where Christians must confront what he saw as inherently evil systems like Nazism and Communism.

Stassen has been influenced by both Niebuhr and by John Yoder, the Mennonite pacifist theologian. Stassen describes himself both as a “pacifist” and “realist” who is ardently anti-war—he earned a degree in nuclear physics as well as Christian ethics and devoted himself to nuclear weapons reduction and elimination from the 1980s on. He has also worked with the AFSC as well as with Evangelicals for Social Action to oppose war. On the door of his office at Fuller is the FNCL sign: “War is not the answer.”

Stassen argues that pacifists and just war theorists/Christian realists will never agree because they come from very different theological perspectives What all Christians can agree on, says Stassen, is that God calls us to do our utmost to avoid war and promote peace. After considerable study, Stassen has come up with ten “best peacemaking practices” that have been proven to work:

1. Support nonviolent direct action

2. Take independent initiatives to reduce threats

3. Use cooperative conflict resolution

4. Acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness

5. Advance democracy, human rights and interdependence

6. Foster just and sustainable economic development

7. Work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system

8. Strengthen the UN and international efforts for cooperation and human rights

9. Reduce offensive weapons and the weapons trad

10. Encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations

Stassen shows these techniques not only work in the real world, they are also consistent with biblical teachings. He published his ground-breaking book Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace (1992) when the Cold War ended in the early 1990s. At that time he was deeply impressed with non-violent resistance efforts he had encountered in Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of 9/11, when just war theorists and Christian realists were justifying the “war against terror,” and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Stassen questioned this response and put together an anthology by Christians of various denominations called Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War (2008).

As a follow up to this book, Susan Thistlethwaite, a United Methodist pastor as well professor and former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, published Interfaith Just Peacemaking: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives on the New Paradigm of Peace and War. This fascinating book contains chapters by leading Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars that explore the practical application as well as theological basis for Just Peacemaking from Abrahamic faith perspectives. These scholars don’t all agree on every point—God forbid!—but they are in general agreement that the practices of Just Peacemaking are consistent with the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran.

This is good news indeed. If Muslims, Jews and Christians of all denominations can work together for peace, certainly Evangelical and liberal Quakers can do likewise!

The only disappointment I have with this book is the lack of a Quaker perspective. All of the theologians included are “people of the book” who rely mainly upon scriptural authority to justify their views. I would have loved to have seen at least one theologian discuss the spiritual and experiential basis for just peacemaking. It is our Quaker conviction that our peacemaking efforts are most effective when they spring from an experience of inner peace, when we listen to our Inward Guide and follow the leadings of the Spirit. This inward experience leads to outward practices such as consensus decision making as well as to our social testimonies (simplicity, equality, community), a way of life that fosters peace and justice. Despite the omission of a Quaker perspective, I heartily recommend this book to Friends and to others who have serious commitment to ending war and promoting a just peace. I also look forward to a follow-up book that includes those of non-Abrahamic faiths, such as a Buddhists, Bahais, Hindus and others.

A View of Quaker Universalism

2013-04-22T15:19:33Z

This essay was originally published in Universalist Friends, Spring 1997, v.26, p.10, and was republished in Universalism and Religions: Quaker Universalist Reader Number 2, 2007, pp.75-77.

The core belief of Quakerism as preached by George Fox is that God is not found in scriptures or sermons or churches but in the silence of the individual human heart. The divine Spirit exists in all of us, and if we look inward with enough earnestness and humility and persistence It will find us.

This belief places Quakers squarely in the mystical tradition that is common to all of the world’s religions, and this “perennial philosophy”—as Aldous Huxley called it—is, in my definition, universalism. Quite simply, there can be nothing more universal than the individual. If this seems paradoxical, then I would answer that all spiritual truth rests on paradox.

So, if in the end Quakerism is universal, isn’t the term Quaker universalism a redundancy? I would answer yes. Its meaning and usage have come from the fact that over the generations there have been many who would deny Quakerism its essential universality. Because it originated within the Christian tradition and within a society where biblical language and images were the common (and the only allowed) currency of religious discussion, Evangelical and some so-called “Christocentric” Friends would confine the ineffable, inexpressibly real experience of that which is outside the bounds of both time and space within the fence of Christian doctrine and metaphor.

If the direct experience of the divine is fundamental to Quakerism, then is not that manifestation just as well called the “Buddha nature” as the “Living Christ” or the “Inner Light”? That which distinguishes different religions is their language, their cultural setting, their structure, symbols, rituals, and history. All of these things are powerful, and they have helped humankind in various degrees and ways to reach toward that ultimate personal experience of the divine—to awaken people, that is, to their own true nature and the sacredness of all created things. Only if these religious and cultural distinctions impede our understanding is there a need to discard them. (In my own case, for example, the personalization of the All as a deity with male or female attributes is such a barrier.)

Personally, I wish we could find another term than “Quaker universalism” and stop defending our right to exist within the Society of Friends. We are Quakerism. The question of whether Quakerism is to be walled within the historical boundaries of the Christian tradition will be decided in the end by the vitality and true spirituality of those on both sides—that is to say, it will be decide by the Spirit itself.

Therefore, let’s turn instead to the desperate needs of our suffering planet and our own floundering, terrified species, seeking guidance toward God in fellowship, in compassion for all life, and in whatever inner practices we feel drawn to.

Do humanism and universalism differ? [3]

2013-04-08T01:41:21Z

The founding of a Universalist Group, if deliberately so named in an attempt to repudiate the symbolic forms which orient this human journey —it will become as sterile as that modern form of so-called humanism which imagines a complete foundation for human living can be established by ethics and reason.

But if the forming of a Universalist group is an effort to make articulate the profound unity of mankind’s spiritual search, in the light of the past as well as of the present—and covering the whole spectrum of human insights—then that is a quite different matter. (69) [emphasis added]

—Lorna M. Marsden [ Note 1 ],
“The Interior Life and the Universal,”
Universalist, January 1984, v.11, 6
(reprinted in Universalism and Religions:
Quaker Universalist Reader Number 2, 2007, 66-75)

In this 1984 article written for her fellow British Quakers, Lorna Marsden expresses two main concerns.

The first concern is couched in the assertion that it is not “possible to separate the experience of the interior life from the experience of the universal” (66). Universalism, for Marsden, is not merely an intellectual or ideological aspiration. It is an inward awareness, not of the mind but of the whole being. “If we possess a truth,” she writes, “we are surely suffused by it, we live it…” (67).

Marsden’s second and perhaps greater concern is expressed as a warning. She is not opposed to humanism per se, yet she mistrusts the sort of secularism which attempts to define the Real solely in terms of what can be contained by human reason. “The mind,” she writes, “works on the prior divinations of the human spirit. Out of these prior divinations the mind produces the working forms of its abstractions” (67). Human consciousness relies upon symbol, image and myth to express knowledge which cannot be framed literally in concepts and propositions.

“This I know experimentally” does not refer to knowledge gained from replicable outer-world demonstration. It refers, rather, to a sure inward conviction, grounded in personal experience, which each person must become open to herself, though it can be pointed to and shared with others through the languages of art and religion.

Marsden warns us of the loss of the “dimension of meaning” when we limit what we believe we can know to the rationality of the ideologically secular.

She writes:

To reject the basic symbols of Christianity (or any other religion) because of the failures of religious institutions is an act of blindness. It is also to experience a kind of deprivation which I believe to be dangerous to the future of mankind….

Today, the lives of most western people have been extended horizontally beyond anything known to our forebears. Yet at the same time western life as a whole has lost the heights and depths of what might be called the vertical dimension.

It is in the interaction of these two planes that human life acquires meaning and purpose in terms that reach beyond the sensational or the exercise of the analytical reason…. [Here is] what the early Quakers called “the heart.” (69-70)

Lord of the Dance, by Brother Robert Lentz [ Note 2 ]

Queries:

In what ways does humanism embrace and uplift truths which can be expressed only through art and religion?

How does this differ from the sorts of secularism (such as the so-called “new atheism”) which deny that symbol, image and myth refer to or inform humankind about anything real?

What differing traits are there which might separate humanism at its best from Quaker universalism?

What traits might bring the two sorts of faith and practice into Fox’s “experimental” unity with each other?

Note 1. For a further example of work by Lorna M. Marsden, see “Universality of the Image,” published as an e-Publication by Quaker Universalist Group in 2006. The publisher’s note reads:

Lorna Marsden is a Quaker whose writings are not only well known by Friends but are widely read by those with theological interests in other denominations and other faiths.

The first of these two essays (The Imagery of the Interior Life) is based on a talk given at the QUG Conference in Birmingham in April 1983, and the second (George Fox and the Light Within) is based on a talk given at Leicester in September 1984. They were first published by QUG in 1988 as Pamphlet No. 9 and reprinted in 1990.

Note 2: Br. Robert Lentz, O.F.M. (born 1946), is an American Franciscan friar and religious icon painter. He is particularly known for incorporating contemporary social themes into his icon work. He belongs to the Order of Friars Minor, and is currently stationed in Holy Name Province.

“Lord of the Dance” is an example of a type of iconography by Lentz which was ultimately suppressed by his Church, because it blends both Christian and Pagan mythic imagery into a portrait of Jesus the Christ. The following is from the website of Trinity Stores, which used to sell the icon:

One of the most ancient masculine images of God in Europe is a benign antlered figure. This image predates Celtic civilization, but was embraced by the Celts for its beauty and truth. The Horned God was a protector of all animal life. He was especially linked with the masculine sexuality and spirituality. He was considered Lord of the Otherworld and guided souls to their destination after death. In Celtic art he is usually shown sitting cross-legged and wearing a torque — the Celtic symbol of authority.

Christian missionaries tried to stamp out the image of the horned god when they came to northern lands. Monastic scribes re-told ancient legends with an increasingly sinister twist. In time, the Horned God was pictured in the popular imagination as a demonic figure who rode through the night skies in search of damned souls. There are still places in England, however, where Christian men don stag antlers and dance for ancient feasts.

In Celtic mythology, individuals like Merlin sometimes assume the personality of the Horned God. In this icon, the Horned God is connected with Christ. Christ sits before us in the posture of the Horned God, totally naked, but without shame. His confident nakedness emphasizes that what God has made is good. Behind him are ancient European petroglyphs of the Horned God. He bears the wounds of his crucifixion to signify that he has risen and has taken a more cosmic character than he had during his life in Palestine. He is beating a drum and inviting us to dance; reminiscent of a medieval English carol that describes him as the “Lord of the Dance.”

Shaking off the soot [6]

2013-03-18T10:49:28Z

Michael Elkin, our guest author for this post, says he writes from “the perspective of a non-Quaker who finds the Quaker educational system incredible.” We welcome his encouraging commentary.

Michael Elkin is a features and op-ed columnist writing for papers nationwide.

To paraphrase Robert Fulghum, all I ever needed to really know I learned in kindergarten.

Which is why I’m going back there.

But as a father of a toddler, I’m not doing it for my daughter; I’m doing it for me.
For as I attend parent-teacher conferences and meet and greet fellow new dads and moms at Abington Friends School, I’ve come to realize there is something about childhood surroundings that brings out the child in adults—not the obnoxious, me-me-me kick-in-in-the-knee kind of kid, but the innocent niceness that one associates with newbies to the world.

And it all shows up in their parents.

As the dad of a pre-K about-to-enter-K kid, I mix and match with grown-ups of all walks of life at AFS, nodding and smiling “good days” to strangers I would normally grump at if I saw them on the street. Not that they deserve the grumps; far from it. But the mean streets of Real Life really can turn the expression “let a smile be your umbrella” inside out faster than a gale wind.

Here, I hold open doors—and have them held open for me—when a person is not even close to walking through it; yet, hold it open I do. In Real Life, I would probably slam the door in that person’s face when they were within inches of grabbing it, my uttering an “I’m sorry” expiating me from sin.

And I’m not a bad person. Really. I’m actually, I’ve been told, a pleasant, nice man.

At school, hustling my daughter to class, I find that time stands still. Even if I’m late, I stop to chat with this father, that mother—people I would barely acknowledge in Real Life out of fear of being trampled over by time.

But here we unwind; we shake off the soot of urban urges and allow each other seats in a crowded classroom where we are finding out about our children’s progress. Bonfires of the vanities do die down into ashes when children are concerned and there is a veritable niceness that comes out when laughing and gloating over our kids’ accomplishments.

Is it because we’re serving as role models so that our children won’t be corrupted early on by the evil influences of the cold harsh truth that is the world? Or is it that our children are actually the role models, allowing us to dig down deep into souls that have been steel traps for years, allowing their innocent perspectives to spring those traps open and let the sun shine in?

Whatever it is, it feels good. And nice—fostered by the Quaker ethos. And as I prepare to leave a concert put on by the pre-Ks one day, I see in the distance someone I know from the Real World, a curmudgeon if ever there was one. This is my chance to get even after all these years, which I decide to do.

And as I am about to pass him in the hall, he turns and says, “Good Morning.”

And what can I do but say, “The same to you.”

See, I think, what happens when you mix with kindergarteners?

They’ve ruined me for good, I smile, holding open one more door for a mother maybe two miles away from the entrance.

"Are Quakers Christian, Non-Christian, or Both?" -- Anthony Manousos in ??Friends Journal??

2013-03-03T19:02:44Z

In the February 2013 issue of Friends Journal, Anthony Manousos offers valuable leadings about practical universalism within the Religious Society of Friends.

Friend Manousos begins with familiar historical observations about the “Universalist Christian” core of early Quakerism, as seen in the writings of Barclay, Penn, Penington and Woolman.

Then follows a beautifully concise summary of divisiveness among Friends during the past two centuries over “whether Quakerism should be inclusive or exclusive—conventionally Christian or faithful to the Inward Light.”

Manousos writes:

Given this history of divisiveness, I can see why Friends are wary about identifying themselves as Christian or non-Christian. It seems safer, and saner, to keep Christ and God talk to a minimum…

[We] can be better Quakers if we are honest and admit our differences and have respectful dialogues about theological issues. We can learn much from each other when we open up and share our beliefs and spiritual experiences.

And I think we can communicate with those in the ecumenical and interfaith movement, as well as our neighbors of other faiths, when we feel comfortable talking about theology among ourselves in a Friendly, non-exclusive way. (21)

This passage points ahead to the heart of Manousos’ personal testimony, the story of his “leading to reach out to Evangelical Quakers,” his recent marriage to his Evangelical Christian wife Jill, and the openings into the international world of Evangelical Quakerism which have followed.

At a Friends General Conference gathering a few years ago, theologian Marcus Borg startled him by saying, “The real challenge is not interfaith dialogue, but intra-faith dialogue,” because “some of the bitterest misunderstandings are among people within a faith tradition.”

Manousos describes joining Friends World Committee for Consultation, marrying Jill, who “opened me up to a world of Evangelical Christians who share many of our Quaker values,” and, most recently, spending time with Evangelical Friends in Kenya and reading Kenyan theologist Zablon Isaac Malenge’s Early Christianity Revised in the perspective of Friend in Kenya.

Commenting on Malenge’s writing, Manousos concludes:

If Friends cannot unite around theology, could we instead unite around practices like peacemaking and social justice?

George Fox said we need to be “salt” and “light”; Jesus urged us to be a “Light to the world”… To be “salt and light,” we need to transcend our differences. We need to share our stories, listen to those we disagree with, and be open to a change of heart. We also need to seek common ground wherein we can put our faith into practice.

One important lesson I have learned from my marriage to an Evangelical is we don’t have to agree about everything in order to love each other.

Read Manousos’ whole article for a richer opening.

The universalisms

2013-02-28T00:13:39Z

Readers of the What is ‘religion’? post will remember the citation of Donald K. Swearer’s Harvard Divinity Bulletin article about Wilfred Cantwell Smith. As Swearer writes, Smith’s controversial “personalism” approach to the study of religion upholds the view that

Religious truth does not lie in religious systems, but in persons….

It involves a knower—not simply the human context in which a person knows and an object is known. Knowing the truth… is not a question of subjective versus objective, internal states of mind versus external objects, but an organically whole “act of truth.” (23)

Among other things, Smith’s perspective helps to clarify the sometimes misleading word usage which equates the terms “faith” and “religion.” When someone says “people of other faiths,” we tend to hear “people of other religions,” and we tend to understand that as meaning “religious systems.” Yet Smith insists that real faith is not a belief system but a personal orientation.

For Smith, one’s faith is the heart-deep, experiential way by which one transcends boundaries between self and others. It moves one into a living community of faith whose lack of boundaries may seem suspicious or threatening to institutionalized religious systems.

People who share a faith share, not the outward structure of a religious system, but the inward assurance that a blessèd connection with each other is possible.

By distinguishing the concepts “faith” and “religious system” in this way, we may also begin to sort out the confusion among various uses of the term “universalism.”

In 2004, Friends from the Nordic countries gathered for a conference on Quaker universalism in Oslo, Norway. Their Open Letter from the Religious Society of Friend, Quakers, in Norway (see Note) offers a critical insight:

Each person has their [sic] own way of understanding and describing universalism. This does not simply refer to abstract definitions, but is a feature of the individual narrative, such as when Friends tell about their ways into membership in the Society or about where they find inspiration.

We need to listen to the individual narratives with devotion and respect. They express the faith experiences of others and may form a common ground for dialogue.

Smith would welcome that phrase “individual narratives.” He would say that faith can only be manifested at the personal level. It is not an abstraction. Nor is it a doctrinal or institutional matter. It is the inward driver of our human interaction with the cosmos.

From this perspective, the most crucial questions to ask are not about definitions or theologies of universalism. They are about doing universalism.

Queries:

How do you describe to yourself whatever it is that you identify as your personal universalist leadings? How do you describe those leadings to others?

How do you act out those leadings in your daily life? In worship? In witness to others?

What helps you to be true to those leadings? How can other Friends support you, even if they do not share the same understanding of what “universalism” means?

Note: Originally published in Universalist, February 2005, v.73, p.7, and reprinted in Universalism and Religions: Quaker Universalist Reader Number 2 (2007), edited by Patricia A. Williams (pp.44-47).

The latter is a Quaker Universalist Fellowship collection of essays which gives a broad introduction to the differing understandings of universalism. It is available through the QUF online bookstore.

??Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation?? — A Review [3]

2013-02-17T17:00:40Z

Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, by Philip Cafaro and Eileen Crist (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2012)

Life on the Brink asks the question, “Do humans have a right to take all resources of the earth?” The book reflects a universalist perspective that extends beyond humans to include all biological species. It is the problem of human overpopulation that threatens the existence of other species.

Is this assessment of human population fair? Is it necessary to include other species in our area of concern? If we include other species in our area of concern, should we treat other species as equal or unequal in importance in our behavior and public policy? Do other species have interests that should be recognized as rights that are enforceable within human institutions?

The authors of this collection include some 25 important and diverse environmentalist voices, including Lester Brown, Paul Ehrlich and Richard Lamm. The several authors, with their several specific areas of expertise and concern over the effects of human population size, all agree on a common assessment that humans are a destabilizing cancer on the ecology of the Earth. The human swarm is overwhelming biodiversity through human appropriation of habitats and resources. Only human restraint can stop this, and restraint requires curbing human numbers.

Humans have a genetic compulsion to reproduce, but the earth is finite and humans cannot flourish (in land, health or biodiversity) without limits on human reproduction. To move this conversation forward, the editors have engaged the environmental community in the discussion. This discussion involves addressing racist, sexist, speciesist and colonialist views in us all.

Population growth is a major force behind all of the serious ecological problems of the earth (climate change, habitat loss and specie extinctions, air and water pollution, food and water scarcity). From 7 billion to 12 billion humans on the globe is not sustainable or compatible with human flourishing.

In history, humans as a species have shown self-control in modest quantity, but self-control is not presently engaged regarding human over-population. Unfortunately, the book is soft on suggestions for specific policy solutions to strengthen human self-control. The Chinese one-child policy hovers in the background.

A particularly challenging essay is that by Staples and Cafaro, “For a Species Right to Exist”, which makes the practical implementation of a universalist perspective concrete and practical. It is doable with the will, to the benefit of all species including humans. The editors provide a helpful index for the book, and modest endnotes and short bibliographies after each essay.

Queries for our readers:

The easy way is to dismiss or ignore the idea that human overpopulation is the problem and hope that it will fade away. However, if you are persuaded by these essays that human overpopulation is the problem, what is the Quaker universalist response? What is the Quaker universalist testimony about public policy to implement population limits? Is there a place for Quaker leadership?

Several suggestions include:

Live simply, but propagate at will?
National human population quotas that preserve the ratio of ethnic groups to the current status quo?
Limit propagation to one child per woman, with saleable permits?
Expand birth control technology research?
Expand access to birth control tools to all?
Curtail neonatal survival efforts by suppressing research and use of special measures for premature births?
Promotion of abortion?
Immigration is neutral regarding population, except for the need for birth control?

If Quakers do not like one or more of these suggestions, what can we say as effective alternatives to meet the goal of limiting human population?

Cafaro and Crist’s book is provocative, and it pushed my thinking toward 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

What can you say?

Theory and history, faith and practice

2013-02-16T06:40:01Z

Here are some observations drawn from the comments for What is ‘religion’?.

One Friend offers this definition:

Religion is an authority which intermediates between a community or set of communities and the object of that religion – i.e., that which is sought.

This is a common connotation of the term, suggesting a focus on “organized religions”—both the lore of those religions and the human manifestations of their authority.

Friend Larry’s definition expands upon those traits of authority and community:

[Religion is] a corporate category of human community and can be quantified. It is not fundamentally personal or subjective. Religion is human spirituality expressed in community in a particular cultural and historical context…. It includes a distinctive behavior discipline, ritual and practice, a shared vocabulary and a shared approach to identifying what is true about reality….

A religion is a spiritual community of notable social cohesion, with a shared history and current ritual, vocabulary and practice that provide a sense of control and comfort to participants for living a good life in the face of death.

Friend Libbie offers a different perspective:

Too many organized religions have missions of discriminatory practices and mission statements to block certain groups from belonging to their church or even worshipping in their church. Jesus Christ showed us by example in his earthly ministry how wrong this is. He demonstrated that we are to accept all peoples as His Children regardless of any differences in lifestyle or beliefs….

While those first two comments approach “religion” from the perspective of theory and history, the third speaks more intimately from the perspective of faith and practice.

These observations suggest a way of framing all of this blog’s exploration of Quaker Universalism.

One dimension for our discussion views “universalism” in terms of our theories about it and how we see it manifested in human history—universalism which is “not fundamentally personal or subjective,” to borrow Friend Larry’s terms.

The other dimension is explicitly personal and subjective. It has to do with how individuals and communities experience and express their own universalist awareness—the faith and practice of universalism.

We welcome you to join in this exploration.

Blessings,
Mike

What is "religion"? [3]

2013-02-07T00:26:10Z

We have been exploring the possible connotations of the term “belief” from the perspective of various readers of this blog. The exploration was sparked by Katie Kent’s comment that, for her, being a Quaker is “a spiritual discipline and practice, rather than a set of beliefs.”

The various responses to What is ‘belief’? and More on ‘belief’ suggest that the commenters use the term “belief” to refer to a changing and growing inward certainty, rather than to a “set of beliefs”—what I have called a “normative set of doctrinal statements.”

The commenters’ usages seems in keeping with the thread of faith and practice which originated in pre-19th century, pre-evangelical Quakerism. That thread understands certainty of belief as an evolving experience, given to us incrementally by the Inward Light, rather than through the authority of Scripture or of outward doctrines.

If “belief” is an evolving inward knowledge rather than a set of doctrinal statements, then what is “religion”?

Many of us modern Friends came to Quakerism as refugees from “religion.” In fact, many modern folk of all sorts are so wary of or even hostile towards the historical authoritarianism and violence of what gets called “religion” that we shy away from the word itself.

If an essential dimension of our experience is our deep interaction with Mystery, we tend to call this dimension “spirituality” rather than “religion.” We don’t want to be misperceived as subscribing to the institutional religions which, over the millennia, have acquired the bad name of being tools of power, used for the abuse of humankind and of all other life.

Yet there are good reasons for reclaiming the term “religion” and giving it a powerfully positive connotation.

Donald K. Swearer introduces us to a valuable different perspective in his 2011 Harvard Divinity Bulletin article about Wilfred Cantwell Smith [see Note], a renowned and controversial American historian of religion.

As a critic, Smith attacked contemporary philosophical discussions of religious language for failing to reckon with its religious and historical quality within a comparative context, for failing to treat religious statements as essentially human and personal, and for a lack of sensitivity to the profound, elusive, and complex quality of human life….

[He] thought that many professionals in the field treated religion as a system, an “ism,” a simplistic and sterile, overly conceptualized, static entity which had little to do with the personal and historical reality that we label “religion.” (22)

Perhaps this is the same error which we Friends want to avoid, without recognizing it, when we avoid the word “religion.” We are aware of the “essentially human and personal,… profound, elusive, and complex quality” of our own wrestlings with Mystery. We are also aware of the often inexpressible experience of sharing these wrestlings and this Mystery with our fellows in meeting for worship.

Yet we stumble over calling these experiences “religion.” We stumble over terms such as “belief” and “faith,” because we do not trust the religious language which has been wielded for ages as a weapon against those submit to the Inward Light rather than to outward authority.

Here is how Swearer describes Smith’s understanding of “religious truth”:

Religious truth, truth in the most profound sense, truth that emerges from those intersecting moments of our mundanity and transmundanity, cannot be so quantified. Truth in this sense is fundamentally personal. It involves a knower—not simply the human context in which a person knows and an object is known. Knowing the truth, then, is not a question of subjective versus objective, internal states of mind versus external objects, but an organically whole “act of truth…”

Knowing the truth in this sense is an art requiring a series of human qualities, including “faith….” (25)

Perhaps a genuine religion is an undefinable community of people who recognize each other through their shared approaches to seeking the Truth. If, as Smith says, Truth involves a knower, then a religion involves the gathering of knowers. Knowers who, to borrow Katie Kent’s terms, share a discipline and practice of waiting for knowledge.

Consider these queries:

What are the ways in which you usually use and understand the term “religion”? What positive and/or negative connotations do you associate with the term?

If you are comfortable with calling yourself “religious,” what does that mean to you? What does it mean to you if you are uncomfortable with that term?

What are the ways in which you could imagine reclaiming the term “religion,” in order to use it as a positive term for what Wilfred Cantwell Smith calls an essentially human and personal experience?

Blessings,
Mike

Note: See also Toward a World Theology: Wilfred Cantwell Smith and the Center for the Study of World Religions, April 16, 2010, a lecture by Donald K. Swearer, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies, Harvard Divinity School, and director of the CSWR, was part of the CSWR 50th Anniversary Symposium.

More on "belief" [4]

2013-01-31T22:37:48Z

Breakfast at the Victory

The ego is the dualist in us. It is the habit we have of seeing ourselves over and against someone else. As ego, my inwardness remains inward because it is completely closed off to you by my outwardness…

In fact, belief and unbelief are strictly issues for the ego; you can’t be an unbeliever unless there are some believers against whom you are an unbeliever. All such oppositions are creations of the ego.

From the perspective of soul, however, we see each opposing either/or as a conjoined both/and… I can be separate from you only because at a deeper level we are joined in something inseparable. I cannot be alone alone…

As soul, we do not act; we are…. When we become aware of the still-point in a person, of a deed that has no doer, we are aware of soul; we are in the presence of presence. (11-12)

—James P. Carse,
Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience
(Review By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat)

In What is ‘belief’?, we began to explore the connotations of this deceptively simple term and the ways in which conceptions of belief might inform the practice of universalism.

In the conventional world, answering “What do you believe?” is often understood to mean answering “What belief system do you confess?” The John Carse passage above addresses this usage of the concept in terms of the opposition of believer to unbeliever.

However, readers of our January 23rd post tended to use the concept differently in their responses to the queries:

Alex – Belief is that which does not succumb to reason. In this sense, belief is unreasonable. However, not all beliefs are equal…. [One’s] belief may not affect her/his life while the other’s may change it profoundly. Religious belief, I believe, is the latter.

Joanne – Belief is an evolving life force. It is born in the form of nascent concepts revealed to us, and as we develop and experience life, so too do our beliefs change and morph into our growing awareness of the meaning of life, itself.

Rolf – I found [an amazing] revelation in [Barclay’s] An Apology for the True ChristianDivinity…. Namely, the universalism of John 1:9 that the Lord/Light/Spirit is He “who enlighteneth EVERY man that cometh into the world.”

Libbie – My belief comes from prayers being answered. My belief comes from life’s hardships that help me grow in my maturity and well-being, especially in forgiving those who may have caused these hardships. My belief grows out of the caring of others and the caring for others. Following the words of Jesus Christ in how I deal with others makes me grow in my belief. This is my proof of the Lord’s existence.

Larry – Belief: Tentative assertions of truth in light of recognition of continuing revelation…. Faith: Recognition of trust in the tentative assertions of truth (belief).

What resonates for you in the various comments excerpted above? How might your own use of the concept of belief be informed by their offerings?

In his writings, James Carse emphasizes the contrasts between “belief systems,” which he describes as conceptual efforts to define boundaries, and “religions,” faith communities which transcend time and space and focus on a shared sacred mystery. How well does this distinction work for you?

How about Carse’s contrasting of ego and soul?

What do you understand by his phrase, “in the presence of presence”?