Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Photo: Borya/flickr CC
Working out belief
George Rhys Williams argues that we must work out our beliefs in our lives
At the heart of our Quaker approach is the idea that we must all be seekers after truth, that each one of us has that of God within us, and must find our own way to the inner light. It is important for us as Quakers to be able to recognise that everybody is able to open up to God’s light within them.
For Quakers the ‘Inner Teacher’ was Jesus Christ. We seek wisdom from the Bible and from many other sources. God can be known directly. God is beyond all names and transcends the descriptions offered by man-made doctrine and religion. It is up to the individual to come to an understanding of the Divine. God is not defined by ancient scriptures or a person’s faith or belief system. I choose to experience God directly, not ‘believe’ in some barbaric concept of God that many blindly have faith in.
Words must not become barriers between us, for none of us can ever adequately understand or express the truth about God. Yet words are our tools and we must not be afraid to express the truth we know in the best words we can.
The Quaker objection to credal statements is not to beliefs as such, but to the use of an officially sanctioned selection of them, to impose a uniformity in things where the gospel proclaims freedom. ‘Credo’ is the Latin for ‘I believe’. The meaning of the word is debased if you confine it to an act of the will giving intellectual assent to articles of faith. It is much better translated as ‘I commit myself to…’ in the sense that one is prepared to take the full consequences of the beliefs one has adopted. One adopts not so much a set of propositions as the discipline of working out, in one’s life and experience, the consequences of the truth one has espoused. The value of the beliefs lies solely in their outworking. This, I take to be the heart of the original Quaker message.
‘We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of government, nor are we for this party nor against the other… but we are for justice and mercy and truth and peace and true freedom, that these may be exalted in our nation, and that goodness, righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace, and unity with God and with one another, may abound.’
Edward Burrough, 1659
Quaker faith & practice 23.11
