The Quaker Meeting. Photo: By Egbert Van Heemskerck, c1685.
Experience the best teacher: Roy Payne on notions, creeds, and ‘travelling documents’
‘True Christianity came out of an experience of God, rather than a set of beliefs.’
When Friends try to recount our experiences of the divine, we are trying to describe the indescribable. I use terminology that is meaningful for me, but you may need to translate it. It is the experience itself that matters. Since the time when Quakerism arose, Friends have been concerned with enabling people to have this experience, which I would describe as the transforming power of God’s grace – you use your own words. But however we depict this experience, it was the manner in which early Friends went about enabling it that would cause so much conflict.
Roman Catholics believed that ordinary, lay people should be present at a service while other, separated individuals enacted rites and rituals on their behalf. The aim was to strengthen their awareness of God’s presence in their lives and relationships. Catholic practice also necessitated that the faithful believe in certain doctrines that the church had laid down, and that these were essential for what was understood as salvation after death.
For Protestants, the requirement was that ordinary, lay people be present to hear the Bible expounded and interpreted, by someone who had devoted themselves to its study. The aim was that people’s understanding of what was revealed would strengthen their awareness of God’s presence in their lives and relationships. Again, salvation after death required believing in certain doctrines, derived from the teachings of the Bible.
Into this environment came the people who became known as the Quakers, with their insistence on a form of worship that involved ordinary people coming together, being still, and seeking an immediate sense of divine leading. The aim was to know at first hand the presence of the living Christ, as a way to strengthen an awareness of God’s presence in their lives and relationships. This form of worship might involve words; it certainly involves silence, and is not in our hands. But what of the beliefs required by the previously mentioned groups as passports to salvation?
Firstly, early Quakers most definitely did not reject doctrines. What they rejected – and what we should continue to reject – are what they called ‘notions’. Notions are doctrines held without experiential confirmation.
What does this mean? Arising from their encounters with the divine, Friends did, and do, feel an understanding of the relationship between God and humanity. You might call it an understanding of the life and relationships we are called upon to live out in the world. It speaks to the place of love, compassion, peace and justice in those relationships, as well as the nature of evil and the way of meeting it and overcoming it.
When such understandings are formulated in words, however inadequate, and are shared with others and found to be commonly held, they may be said to become doctrines. A doctrine is an expression that is true for us at this time, but not set in stone for ever.
Some examples of this serve to show why Quakers infuriated the mainstream church. Take the ‘second coming’ of Christ, a concept accepted by the main faiths, and expected and waited-for as the culmination of God’s plan for humankind. Churchgoers lived with need to be ready for it when in God’s good time it arrived.
The Quakers, however, took the view that the second coming was already happening to them – ‘Christ had come to teach his people himself’. They lived daily with a glorious experience that had transformed their lives. Furthermore, it was available to all – Christian, Jew, Muslim, and those considered beyond the pale.
This, then, was a doctrine, held because of something experienced rather than taught or instructed.
‘Salvation was taking place in people rather than for people.’
By the way, this view of the second coming meant that salvation was not something to qualify for after death. It too was happening now, to those who communed with Christ. Salvation was taking place in people rather than for people; they were being saved from the power of sin now, rather than from the consequences of sin in eternity. This was a transforming experience in the soul, rather than a means of escape. Puritans claimed that no soul, though redeemed, could be sin-free in this life, but Friends challenged this, since they saw it as a denial of the operations of the Spirit they felt within.
Friends often used words like ‘windy’ or ‘airy’ to describe these notions. One example would be the doctrine of the virgin birth. What on earth, they thought, had this got to do with the everyday life of the individual with Christ alive in their heart? Quakers also rejected all other doctrines that seemed like mere human speculations as to the intentions and mind of God.
All this stemmed from the Quaker insight that true Christianity came out of an experience of God, rather than a set of beliefs about God and God’s requirements.
Creeds were even worse. It can help an individual to have a worked-out set of beliefs. But when a set of beliefs becomes a requirement – a test, to decide whether the individual is one of the blessed or a heretic – then that was totally unacceptable.
This brings me to the concept of a ‘travelling document’. I was introduced to it by a wise old Westminster Friend. Many years previously she had been influenced, as had Margaret Fell, by Fox’s ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?’
My Friend had decided that she should write down what she could say, after her experience of communing with the promptings of love and truth in her heart. Then she put it away in an envelope.
After several years she once again wrote down ‘what she could say’. Comparing what she had written previously proved instructive in showing her how her further encounters with the Divine had led to changes in her understanding of the ‘things that are eternal’. Thus, throughout her life, she repeated every few years the updating of her ‘travelling document’. It became her own personal ‘creed’, expressed in language personal to her, and by no means set in stone. She invited the rest of us to adopt this practice. A number of us did so – in fact, a set of these travelling documents was printed and published anonymously within the Meeting.
It seems to me, given the wide range of expression within our Society – ‘you use your own words’ – that now might be a time when this idea finds favour among us again.
