‘Real religion must be rooted in material reality.’ Photo: John MacMurray, by Howard Coster, 1933
Are you experienced? Joanna Dales looks at how Friends old and new have sought ‘real’ religion
‘We share with early Quakers the sense that religion should be based on experience.’
The philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976), author of the 1965 Swarthmore Lecture, ‘Search for Reality in Religion’, invited his audience to reject forms of Christianity that were ‘unreal’.
The distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is not the same as that between true and false, or sincere and insincere, nor between what does or does not feel right. It is more like the early Quakers’ distinction between ‘inward’ and ‘outward’. Real religion, said Macmurray, ‘lies in the depths of one’s own being’. It may co-exist with false beliefs, and true beliefs may accompany an unreal religion, but believers must check the soundness of their beliefs just as scientists must check the validity of their hypotheses. Dogma, or the attempt to impose beliefs on another, is destructive of reality. Moreover, a real religion must reject ‘idealism’, or the separation of a supposed ‘spiritual’ realm from material reality – real religion must be concerned with the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Macmurray’s experience in the first world war convinced him that the churches had forsaken their God-given purpose by identifying with the state and its objectives. They had abandoned real religion, so Macmurray abandoned them. It was only late in life that he joined the Society of Friends, which he felt could satisfy his need for community without requiring him to surrender his freedom of conscience.
Whether Macmurray knew it or not, the insistence on reality has long been a feature of Quakerism and indeed of Christianity. What mattered for early Quakers was the Spirit of Christ within, without which adherence to the letter of scripture and to the moral law was of no avail. They thought that their opponents, the clergy of their day, were trapped in a world of ‘figures’ and ‘types’ – the rituals of the Old Testament which had to give way to the reality that was Christ. They drew their inspiration in part from the New Testament epistle to the Hebrews. There they read that the law, with the sacrifices and rites it prescribed, possessed ‘only a shadow of the good things to come’, whereas Christ was the reality, able to bring about real freedom from sin and its consequences. The sacraments offered in ‘steeple-houses’, the prayer-book liturgies, the submission to scripture and its laws as the final word of God were all ‘shadows’ of the inward and living Christ as experienced within. It was not enough to believe the Bible’s account of the salvation of sinners through Christ’s ‘outward’ crucifixion. As James Nayler said, ‘had I not known him in me, my redeemer and hope of glory, I had not known him at Jerusalem’.
The language and worldview of present-day Quakers is far removed from that of our founders, but we share with them the sense that religion (if we use the term) should be based on experience. A real religion cannot be had at second-hand. But reality is not a fixed entity: it depends on where we are standing. It is different for each generation. ‘Nature’, for example, means something different for us from what it meant in the seventeenth century. This is true not only for succeeding generations but also for individuals, and even for each individual at different times of life. How we experience the world changes all the time. The more we test and renew our conceptions in the light of experience-based knowledge, the more reality they will possess.
If this is so of the physical world, it is yet truer of religious experience. Hence most people learn the doctrine and practice of their religion from others – it is much easier to take one’s religion on trust. Early Quakers tried to bring their adherents to trust in the Word which spoke within, not in the authority of text or preacher. It was not obvious to them that the Word of Christ speaks differently in different circumstances. Rufus Jones, the great US Quaker historian (1863-1948), on the other hand, used the word ‘dynamic’ to characterise Quakerism. He meant that it is responsive to the intellectual and spiritual currents of its time, the reality of the day, and is constantly remade.
After their earliest days, Quakers experienced the fate of most new religious movements: a loss of dynamism, along with a loss of inwardness. There was a tendency to emphasise outward aspects of Quakerism, like plain dress or speech. It was easier to retain a sense of Quakers as a distinct body through these behavioural peculiarities than through adherence to the Inward Light of Christ, even though this remained central, at least in theory. Moreover, it became evident very early that the Light might show different, contradictory faces of reality to different individuals. Many nineteenth-century Quakers sidelined or denied the Light altogether, and tried to bring Quakers to unity under the authority of the Bible. Of course this did not work: like reality itself the Bible means different things to different people. Attempts to codify ‘essential’ teaching led only to further dissension.
Those Quakers of the late nineteenth century who initiated the so-called ‘Quaker Renaissance’ found that the teaching they inherited was ‘unreal’. It seemed to substitute theological abstraction for true discipleship. This applied especially to doctrines of atonement. The authors of A Reasonable Faith, published in 1884, fulminated against those who ‘practically rob the word “Righteousness” of its reality, & reduce it to a theological fiction – an “imputedness”!’ John Wilhelm Rowntree (1868-1905), the leader of the Quaker Renaissance in Britain, found in early adulthood that the religion he had been taught was devoid of ‘reality’. He found it necessary to clear his mind of everything that he had taken on trust and find his way to a truth which was consonant with his experience. When he did this, he said, ‘an unreality seemed removed… and it was as if I had cleared my mental decks for action’. His experience was like that of George Fox, who found that he had to give up his reliance on the preachers of his time before he could find the Inward Christ, who alone could ‘speak to his condition’.
Macmurray made it clear that real religion must be rooted in material reality, not in some ideal ‘spiritual’ realm. It exists for the purpose of bringing about God’s Kingdom. He would have approved of how Rowntree and the Quaker Renaissance were fully engaged with their society, and worked tirelessly for justice and peace. He would have approved of their willingness to jettison dogma and rely on inward conviction.
In our day, some Quakers have gone further than either the Renaissance Friends or Macmurray in rejecting belief in God as a supernatural being. Their religion, if they accept the term at all, is of the earth and for the earth; they embrace a faith, in which the spiritual realm, including the deity, have their being only in the human heart and mind. Could it be that for some, non-theism has become the new ‘real religion’, a religion that rejects fixed belief and glories in diversity, a religion rooted in the real world and dedicated to making it better? Can Quakerism nurture such a religion?
Joanna’s Quaker Renaissance and Liberal Quakerism in Britain, 1895-1930: Seeking a real religion is out now.
