Thought for the Week: When non means yes!
David Boulton argues that our 'nons' can be expressed as positive affirmations
We Friends are often perceived as a negative lot. Asked what we believe, we tend to reply with a string of negatives. We are against credal formulations, against doctrinal dogmas as conditions of membership, against priestly hierarchy, against a professional ministry (at least here in Britain), against specific sacraments, against decorating our Meeting houses with icons, crosses and stained glass windows. We do not normally sing hymns, recite set prayers or read the Bible as the infallible word of God. We are among the most nonconformist of nonconformists.
Perhaps we need reminding that, oddly enough, our nons can all be expressed not as negatives but as positive affirmations. We are for a faith that does not depend on creeds and dogmas. We are for a radically egalitarian religious practice free of hierarchical control and clerical authority. We are for simplicity and inclusivity. Oddly, our nons can be ways of saying yes! We are for nonviolence, for being nonjudgmental, nonpartisan, non-profit-making. Maybe non is a nonessential part of our Quaker vocabulary.
I have been musing on this paradoxical positivity of the non-words since attending the inaugural conference of the Nontheist Friends Network at Woodbrooke on 9-11 March. Nearly a hundred of us were there and, as always when nontheist Friends get together, there was some fretting over the negative connotations of our adopted label. Must we define ourselves against something – and, in particular, against what Quakers have traditionally understood as the ground of their being: belief in God, the Spirit, our creator and our guide?
As it happened, all three keynote speakers at the conference commented on the negativity of the word, only to emphasise how non can be yes. For Philip Gross, poet, novelist and long-standing Friend, nontheism is ‘not less but more’. It pushes back boundaries, expands the circle, widens our inclusivity.
For Don Cupitt, theism and nontheism are both affirmatives. Theism affirms a particular understanding of God as Supreme Being, ultimate reality and final authority. Nontheism affirms an understanding of the Spirit as a human construct, our imagined projection of the ideal, the fictional protagonist in our cosmic story. Two different ways of understanding God-language, but both affirmative – and, for Friends, neither excluding the other.
For James Riemermann from Twin Cities Meeting, USA, the continuing dialogue between theist and nontheist understandings is the adventurous living modern Friends are called upon to embrace. Integrity requires that we ‘reveal our true selves’, not merely tolerating each other but celebrating our diversity. ‘If we all believed the same, what could we possibly say to one another?’
This unattractive little non-word ‘nontheism’, then, for all its apparent negativity, emerges as an affirmative and positive commitment to Quaker values and Quaker action. The conference minuted that theism and nontheism ‘need not be adversarial viewpoints but may be seen as different ways of seeking, finding and expressing meaning and purpose in our lives. We affirmed the importance of listening to each other with grace and due sensitivity’. The French may take some persuading, but for Friends non can indeed mean yes!
Comments
No wonder George Fox rejected ‘professors’! Intellectuals who can argue that black is white. That ‘non’ is a positive prefix! Where in the 1994 edition of Quaker Faith and Practice did we assert that God was a ‘Supreme Being, ultimate reality and final authority’? Its first mention of God is that we ‘allow God’, not ‘submit to God’. Advice 1 simply asks us to trust (not obey, or even believe) that good thoughts are ‘leadings’ (not commands) from God, who is then described as having a Light which show us (not punish us for) our darkness, and bring us (not orders us) to a new life. It’s a well used but invalid mode of argument to assume others have extreme characteristics, then argue their opposites. The success of Quakerism rests on ‘rightly following’ God’s Spirit. Not on rejecting it as a delusion. If we were to accept David Boulton’s Quaker Humanism” (which he promotes within and beyond BYM) we would be just another one of the hundreds of reformist organisations, or the scores of meditation groups. Non-theists have every right to their opinion. But if they reject the possibility of there being a God, why do they join, or remain in, a God-centred organisation? It’s not just silly, it’s downright offensive. Would a pacifist join, or willingly stay in, the army? Or a militarist the Quakers? Would an anarchist join the Conservative Party? Is it honest to commit oneself to an organisation, with the intention of opposing its core beliefs? BYM - the Religious Society - is our Faith Group - the place we come to nurture our faith - not to have it deliberately, destructively, cleverly destroyed. Rather than vandalise British Quakerism, why doesn’t David Boulton et al do as some Jews did - set up ‘Reformed’ version of their faith - the “Spiritual Society of Friends (Reformed Quakers)”? Then we could who were left within BYM could revert wholeheartedly to supporting each other in our testimonies to truth and simplicity. Stephen Petter”
By spetter on 12th April 2012 - 19:37
But, Stephen Petter, we already are a reformist organization so is there any good reason why reform should stop? ref: ‘Thought for the week’ in 12.04.2012 Friend
By PeterA on 13th April 2012 - 16:35
Stephen, David doesn’t say anything about QF&P. He writes about Don Cupitts presentation of different understandings of god in general seen by many theists, as a final authority or supreme being. You scoff and deride David as an intellectual playing with and distorting words and their meaning. Yet it is an accepted way of understanding change. That change in all aspects of life, natural and social, is brought about through the conflict of opposing forces. You CAN find a positive in a negative. Its dead dialectical! The Taoists in the 4th century BC, saw all changes in nature as manifestations of the dynamic relationship between the polar opposites of yin and yang, and believed that any pair of opposites are a relationship that links the two poles dynamically to the other. In science, Two negative charges repel. But a negative charge and a positive charge attract each other. If you put a positive charge and a negative charge near each other, they clash together.The trap of dualism - good vs evil, black vs white and so on, is that they invite a sense of security and control that is illusory and are in fact false descriptions of how nature really lives and transforms constantly, never settling or stopping. We humans tend to cling to certainty and fixity, kidding ourselves we really are in the driving seat. Actually, we are not. Life is in control. I am reminded of when I observe the movements of the sea so closely and watch for that when the tide turns; there is a slight hiatus for a second, no more, and then the water flows in the opposite direction. Life will carry on and transform with or without us. Best to enter the maelstrom rather than try to fight it off….....
By miriam on 14th April 2012 - 5:23
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