Letters - 18 September 2026
'In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.'
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God and goodness
In his Thought for the week (24 July), John Ashcroft prompts me to revisit the Quaker reference to ‘that of God in everyone’. I was particularly interested to learn about the way this adage was first given to us by George Fox, and then later interpreted subtly differently by Rufus Jones. John reminds us that ‘Fox called Friends to answer whatever of God might be present in anyone, but Jones changed this to a belief that there is that of God in everyone.’
Neither Fox, as quoted here, nor Jones, explains what they mean by the term ‘God’ in this context. I’ve always reacted against a tendency among Friends to equate ‘that of God’ to that of ‘goodness’. The questions which arise for me are: one, what counts as good?; two, who is the judge?; and three, what is deemed not good and therefore not ‘of God’?
I prefer Jo Farrow’s more comfortable interpretation of ‘that of God in everyone’, quoting Fox’s experiences of meeting the ‘darker’ aspects of his personality, to mean ‘that of wholeness’ in all of us (see ‘Spirituality and self awareness’ from the Friends Quarterly of July 1984). This idea bears in mind Maurice Nicoll’s point, in his book The Mark, that the original Greek meaning of the word the Bible translates as ‘sin’ (hamartanein) literally means ‘missing the mark’, of which we are all capable. We all reflect aspects of the God force subject to the influences which determine if this God energy is to impact in a constructive or destructive way.
Sue Holden
Reparations
David G Bower (Letters, 28 August) argues that an apology can only genuinely come from ‘the person who committed the wrong to the person who was wronged’. This seems to understand responsibility solely in individual terms, overlooking the responsibility of institutions, communities and states.
As a Canadian, I think of the indigenous children who died in Canada’s residential school system, many buried in unmarked graves. Those schools were not simply the actions of individuals who behaved badly. They were part of a system created and sustained by governments and churches. Most of those directly responsible are now dead. Does that mean that the institutions which survive them have no responsibility to acknowledge or repair what was done?
We need not inherit our ancestors’ personal guilt. But we do inherit institutions, societies and structures, along with both the benefits and harms they have produced. If institutions can inherit assets, authority and privilege across generations, surely they can also inherit responsibilities.
History cannot be changed. But its consequences do not necessarily remain in the past.
Nicholas Little
