God willing: Clive Gordon on Quaker Christianity

‘I humbly invite Christian and theist Friends to be more visible.’

I recently read Derek Guiton’s A Man that Looks on Glass: Standing up for God in the Religious Society of Friends. It has helped me to better understand Quakerism as it is practised today. An old Anglican prayer comes to my mind: ‘Thou, O Lord, art the author and finisher of every good work; without thee nothing is strong, nothing is holy; without thy preventing and assisting grace we are but as dust before the wind, carried to and fro.’

I recall visiting one Meeting years ago, where I felt moved to minister for Christ. Afterwards, several elderly members of the Meeting expressed their concerns about the trend away from Christianity within our Society here in Britain. They asked me to do what little I can to stem the tide of secularism. Friends will be aware, doubtless more than I am, of these changes, and the need to protect the right of Christians to have a voice that is heard and remains relevant within Quakers in Britain today.

It is all very well keeping silent out of a fear of offending anyone, but how then can we approach God with a clear conscience? It seems to me that, just as we respect the diversity of others, so we may expect the same in return. Indeed, I am happy to say that this does seem to be the case as far as my own experience goes. I ministered, for example, at the Quaker Peace Testimony 350th Anniversary Conference in 2010, and had a positive response from Friends there; as also during the Yearly Meeting in London on Zoom, without any adverse comments. All this I take to be a good sign that tolerance and even a celebration of diversity is alive and well among us. I feel confident that the pages of the Friend will continue to reflect this diversity in all its forms, including Quaker Christianity, and I look forward to reading more in this vein. I humbly invite Christian and theist Friends to be more visible.

But what kind of a God should we return to? John Sharp (once the archbishop of York) wrote: ‘Let us take care to represent God to ourselves, the most kind, and loving, and benign being that is conceivable. Let us be persuaded heartily that [God] loves us, and takes care of us; that [God] pities our infirmities, and hath a sense of our wants, and is as ready to relieve us, and to give us whatever we stand in need of, as we can be to ask… Certainly, we have all the reason in the world to believe this: The notions we have of [God’s] nature do lay the grounds of such belief; the revelations… in [scripture] do confirm it.’

I cannot believe that such a loving, caring God will, in all-wise providence, abandon Quakers in Britain to be led away entirely from Christianity. I pray that the tide will soon be seen to turn, and it is my belief that if we unite in such prayers they will not go unheard. All revivals have begun with earnest supplication to a God who answers prayer.

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Comments

I agree with Clive’s comments.

By Richard Pashley on 29th September 2022 - 11:37

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How refreshing and welcome your article is ! I’m entirely in agreement . We should be confident and uninhibited in our faith.  ” Just as we respect the diversity of others ,so we may expect the same in return ” - Of course , how true , and how central that is .
In friendship.

By Neil M on 5th October 2022 - 8:43

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All this talk of God as if we still believed in the 20th century version, does us no good. Friends are in a better position than most to guide us all away from all this. Fox knew plainly that Christ had risen and was within each of us - and yet we are still reciting the old texts.
The stories and Biblical images are powerful but reinforce an outdated magic. Let those who are helped by all that hang on until they are ready to move on.

By john0708 on 5th January 2023 - 17:17

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Theological understanding of God has developed considerably in the last fifty odd years. The American theologian Charles Hartshorne wrote a wonderful book, which was a summary of a lifetime’s work, entitled ‘Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes.’
Still, the New Testament has some wonderful observations that still seem to ring true. Gallatians 5: 23-4, for instance. ‘The Life in the Spirit’: if I can think, contemplate, act - and thus in some way become - love, joy, patience, peace, goodness, gentleness, kindness, compassion, trustfulness and self control, then that would surely be a heavenly experience. It’s certainly a Quaker one, since we are guided by the Spirit. So why wait??
As Richard Rohr has said ‘God is stranger than we think, and stranger than we can think!’ After all, three-in-one is the atomic building block of all things. It doesn’t need to be male-dominated or even gendered at all of course. Isn’t God about Universal Love, Ultimate Goodness and Unending Life?
Rendered like this, I have no problem with a Christian understanding of God, reminiscent as it is of the intimate experience of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Of course their appreciation of Christianity was far, far removed from the appropriated means for domination and control that it became when The Roman Empire ‘adopted’ it (and that the mainline understanding has been stuck with ever since…). So can ours be also.

By markrdibben@gmail.com on 11th May 2023 - 12:48

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I have also read the book. Its both interesting and worrying. Some people seem to think a non-theist viewpoint as more “advanced” and those who believe in God as somehow backwards. This came across clearly in john0708’s comments - which I have to say are both arrogant and rude. I would argue that has Quakers we have eschewed theology and our own history at our peril and are now poorly equipped to reply to every new trend.

We meet for corporate worship: “Worship is the response of the human spirit to the presence of the divine and eternal, to the God who first seeks us.” (QFP 2.01).

Without a spiritual basis founded on well thought out principals that are both understood and agreed on as a corporate body we become a group of individuals who meet for coffee once a week and sit around in silence with nothing to unite us.

We have the answers, they are in QFP, our history, the Bible (yes, those old texts) and those foundations should be used to aid our discernment as we seek the guidance of the spirit. Abandoning them is both foolish and reckless.

By kevinphilp on 12th June 2023 - 13:03

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