Expanding the Peace Testimony
Terry Hobday reflects on peace and the natural world
Many of us have been attracted to Quakerism by the Peace Testimony, feeling intuitively that it was at the heart of the teaching of Jesus. I wonder if it is now the time to expand this insight to consider our violence toward the natural world.
The words ‘God so loved the world’ is an affirmation, expressed in the third chapter of John’s gospel, which reminds us that divine love is indivisible – a universal love that embraces the whole of creation and not just the humans who dwell here. The Peace Testimony, in its original form, seems to confirm this:
The Spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it.
‘A Declaration from the harmless and innocent people of God, called Quakers’, 1660
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