'...we are clearly questioning the religious language we use in a way that is in keeping with our long history of seeking to live and speak truthfully.' Photo: sswweett59 / flickr CC.
'...we are clearly questioning the religious language we use in a way that is in keeping with our long history of seeking to live and speak truthfully.' Photo: sswweett59 / flickr CC.
Just before Yearly Meeting this year, a headline appeared in a national newspaper: ‘The Quakers are right. We don’t need God’, with the strapline: ‘The group is considering dropping God from its meetings guidance as it makes some feel uncomfortable…’
Simon Jenkins’ article in the Guardian was, of course, a rather sensationalist simplification of the complex process in which we were engaged, but he was right that we are clearly questioning the religious language we use in a way that is in keeping with our long history of seeking to live and speak truthfully.
I was one of the group that met at Woodbrooke in the autumn of 2016 to look at what was then characterised as the ‘theism/nontheism’ debate and which was a matter of concern to many Meetings. Our deliberations formed the basis of the book God, Words and Us, which offers other, more helpful ways of looking at our spiritual diversity. Having worked with a number of Meetings on this issue since then, I want to outline why I feel excited by, and hopeful about, our present explorations.
For a start, this dialogue offers us the challenge to articulate the basis of our faith for this present era. As British Quakers we tend to be wary of theology, citing as precedent George Fox’s dismissal of speculation about God as mere ‘notions’. But dismissing all theology as notional can be a cover for laziness or signal an avoidance of potential conflict around our differences. When Timothy Peat Ashworth and I travelled in the ministry on the ‘Rooted in Christianity, Open to New Light’ project (exploring these twin aspects of our current spiritual diversity), addressing our differences openly and honestly induced for some an initial response of fear: Friends spoke of ‘opening a can of worms’ or of a sense of ‘walking on egg-shells’. But what if we approached our present situation as an opportunity to explore and evolve? The transitionary time in which we find ourselves challenges us to think anew about the spiritual basis of our witness in the world and how we articulate it for these times.
Spirituality
According to data from the National Centre for Social Research’s British social attitudes survey, more than half the people interviewed now say they have no religion, compared with forty-one per cent in 2002 – and seventy per cent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four said they have no religion, compared to fifty-six per cent in 2002. If we are to attract people today it will be by emphasising that Quaker spirituality is characterised not by belief but by experience.
I do understand that some Friends feel irritated or upset that we are having this discussion at all. I myself used to wonder what place self-styled atheists or humanists had in a religious society. Speaking of God has been core to our identity since the founding of the Quaker movement, and when asked what we are doing in our Meetings for Worship and Business, the traditional answer has been: ‘We’re seeking to discern the will of God.’ Quaker tradition is steeped in biblical, God language. So, what has changed? And why might growing numbers of us not want to speak of God today?
The answers are many and varied. For myself I am ambivalent about using the word not because I want to reject the sense of divine presence in the world but because of the assumptions that are too easily made when that word is used. In her book The Case for God, Karen Armstrong argues that whenever the word ‘God’ is used today the conversation invariably centres on whether God exists. This, she points out, means that ‘the symbol of God is no longer working. Instead of pointing beyond itself to an ineffable reality, the humanly conceived construct that we call “God” has become the end of the story’. That’s precisely why some of us might choose – as a sincere religious witness – not to use the word at this time. We wish to avoid the danger of idolatry: the belief that by using that all-too-familiar word the ineffable can be tied down, the mystery at the heart of life made manageable.
Then there’s the issue of theological ‘baggage’, all the historical accretions of what others have insisted the word God had to mean. I came to realise that I do reject (like many Friends today) what Marcus Borg called ‘the God of supernatural or parental theism’: the God many of us were taught to imagine as male, all-powerful, the patriarchal judge of the world.
I was greatly helped to understand the context in which this debate has arisen by another insight from Karen Armstrong (in her essay The Future of God):
I am not dismayed by the widespread atheism of our time. After the genocidal catastrophes we witnessed during the twentieth century, many of the old ideas about God have come to seem facile and incoherent. Atheism can represent a rejection of inadequate notions of the divine and a refusal to find a facile solution to the difficulty and darkness that falls upon the human spirit when contemplating Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bosnia and Rwanda.
Historically, Karen Armstrong points out, the word ‘atheism’ was used to describe ‘the rejection of a particular conception of the divine, not… a blanket rejection of the Sacred in toto.’
She makes the case that the word ‘atheism’ ‘has been used:
…during periods of transition, when people were making a new leap forward in religious understanding. Thus at an early stage of their history, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all called ‘atheists’ by their pagan contemporaries… because their conception of the divine was so radically different from current notions as to seem blasphemous… It may be that the atheism we see [today] will also herald the advent of a new form of religious understanding…
- From Time and Tide: Sea of Faith beyond the Millennium.
Commitments
This, then, is the context in which I feel positive about our present discussions – and feel proud to be part of a faith community that is committed to honesty, truth and the engagement of all its number. After all, exploring a different conception of the ‘Ground of Being’, suggesting new religious images, is something that Quakers have been doing for over 350 years. Early Friends used surprisingly and fresh imagery to suggest a new way of relating to divine presence in the world; they spoke of the Inward Light, the Seed, the Guide – all images used to subvert conventional thinking and avoid the danger of idolatry that Karen Armstrong identifies.
My own experience includes Twelve Step ‘recovery’ fellowships (spiritual programmes modelled on the original fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous but now used by people to address all kinds of addictions and compulsions). Here the second step speaks of ‘coming to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us…’ It is left to each individual to discover and name that power in whatever way is meaningful for them. Yet the fellowships retain unity as spiritual communities because of the common experience of surrendering our egoic wilfulness to that power – however we define or imagine it.
I believe as Quakers we can learn from this example. It’s not that ‘anything goes’, or ‘you can believe what you like’, the important thing is that we do not have to agree on a common definition of that power but can find unity as we let this power guide our lives. Once, when sharing the ‘Experiment with Light’ with a group of (non-Quaker) women, Diana Lampen was asked: ‘What is this Light which Quakers speak of?’ Diana was inspired to reply: ‘It is a power and guiding presence some of us call God.’
I like to end events with this quotation from Dag Hammarskjöld:
God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day our lives cease to be illuminated by that steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason’
- From Markings.
Alex was the 1999 Swathmore Lecturer. He offers one-day events on ‘Speaking of God – or not’ and ‘Spirituality: our common ground’ through the Woodbrooke-on-the-Road programme.
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