Being true to the essence
Jan Arriens considers labels and meanings
Are we a post-Christian Society? Dutch Friend Kees Nieuwerth (‘People of Peace,’ 2 March) expresses his keen regret that a fellow conscientious objector felt the Religious Society of Friends no longer offered him a spiritual home as some Quakers were calling themselves post-Christian.
Without wishing to become embroiled in the meaning of words, I do wonder what we mean by the term ‘post-Christian’. As I understand it, Quakers – at least in this country – seek to be true to the life and teachings of Jesus, but have moved on from a belief in the virgin birth, atonement and redemption, and the idea that the unknowable force or presence we call God became incarnate, and that Jesus uniquely was divine.
Biblical scholarship has revealed the later, journalistic embellishments made to the Gospels, and many even in ‘mainstream’ Christianity do not feel comfortable with the interpretation imposed on Christianity by the Council of Nicaea in 325: churchgoing friends of mine, for example, find themselves unable to recite the Nicene Creed with any conviction.
What they – like, I suspect, the majority of Quakers – respond to is the metaphorical significance of the Christian story. The crucifixion may be seen in the same light as the ‘dying to the self’ that is so characteristic of the great faiths. In so far as we are post-Christian, our faith does not depend on any literal interpretation. Nor, I believe, did that of the early Friends.
It is no accident that the Peace Testimony that Kees Nieuwerth quotes talks about ‘the spirit of Christ’. It is this that guides us ‘and leads us into all truth’. We are talking here about what William Penn referred to in Primitive Christianity Revived as ‘the Light of Christ within Man, or Light within, which is their Ancient and most General and Familiar Phrase; also the Manifestation or Appearance of Christ the Witness of God, the Seed of God, the Seed of the Kingdom, Wisdom, the Word in the Heart, the Grace that appears to all men, the Spirit given to every Man to profit with, the Truth in the inward Parts. The spiritual Leaven that Leavens the whole Lump of Man.’
As Samuel Fisher wrote in 1661, God ‘is beyond all definition of ours at all’ but is revealed through Jesus and the prophets; and, indeed, through all of us: what we still refer to as ‘that of God’. In that sense, I believe that in stripping away so much of what has been imposed on the human story that was Jesus, we are much closer to the essence of Christianity and the Truth to which Kees Nieuwerth refers.
The danger, though, is that Friends can then turn against the whole Christian story and seek to place Quakerism in an entirely different context. But we arose out of the Christian tradition and live in a society and civilisation that are integrally bound up with their Christian heritage. Why, the Dalai Lama once asked, do we seek to adopt a totally different tradition when we have our own?
I was deeply saddened to be told by two Friends of long standing that they would be upbraided afterwards by others in their Meeting if they made any reference in ministry to God, Jesus or the Bible. I do hope this is an isolated case, and it is certainly not what I would mean by ‘post-Christian’. I do, though, sometimes feel the pendulum may have swung too far, and that we may have become unduly reluctant to draw on the riches of our Christian tradition. Conversely, a ‘post-Christian’ awareness of the love and compassion that run like a thread through the life and teachings of Jesus leads us seamlessly to the Peace Testimony.
