Back on May 24, in a posting on the topic of travel in the ministry, I suggested that “…what is central to all Quaker travel in the ministry is our (somewhat unique) Quaker gospel: our neither-Catholic,-Orthodox,-Protestant,-Hindu,-Buddhist,-nor-Wiccan message of the way in which salvation is to be found.”
I wrote, “This is true even of a journey as unusual as mine…. [For] what I’ll be asking to listen in on, when I visit each Friends community along the way, is the very process by which we Friends work out our salvation: the process of direct discernment of God’s will.”
And I added, “I sense that this is no accident. I sense that God does not move a Friend to travel in the ministry unless the travel would involve, in some significant sense, a relation or dramatization of our basic Quaker gospel message that salvation is found through direct, divinely-given discernment.”
Even then, I knew that I was doing our Quaker gospel an injustice — describing it in one short sentence, focusing on one small part of it and failing to mention that there was more. But I intended to come back to that matter when time permitted.
Since that posting, I’ve posted reports on four visits with Friends communities, three of which involved formal called meetings. And all through that period, somewhere in the back of my mind, there was the feeling I’d expressed in that posting, that our Quaker gospel is in some sense central to what I am doing. That feeling led me to stress the necessity of really doing discernment — doing it rightly, in other words — as my visits progressed.
And it turned out that the process of asking for corporate discernment, and holding each meeting to the discernment process, was even more important than I’d foreseen. In Monmouth I erred by failing to place sufficient emphasis on the process, and the result was a meeting that was fascinating, but not really directed to the needs of Friends in general (it was more a venting of personal concerns), and rather lacking in spiritual power. That was not the fault of the Friends present there; it was my own, for spiritual power comes through the same portal as discernment — through looking to the still, small Voice rather than to our own opinions — and I’d failed to ask with sufficient force for discernment. By the time of the Urbana-Champaign meeting, I was laying heavy emphasis on the discernment process, and the outcome was markedly Spirit-filled and very helpful indeed.
Well, one thing leads to another, and now I’m feeling that the time has come to think — and write — a bit more about this matter of our Quaker gospel. For I think it’s going to matter again and again, and especially, perhaps, when I get to my destination.
Let me begin with a very basic question: How do we distinguish between the actual gospel of Quakerism — its Good News to the world — and other things, such as our testimonies (which are not so much the News itself but logical consequences that we’ve discovered in pondering that News), or such as our simple preferences and peculiar customs?
I would answer that our Good News is recognizable by the fact that it is received by its hearers as Good News. In other words, the ones who hear it are likely to respond both with some sort of “aha” reaction — some sense of “this really changes my understanding of the world, and in consequence, the way I want to live my life” — and with some sort of pleasure at the nature of the news.
If we think about this even just a little, we can see that the Good News of Quakerism is not just one idea or message, but rather a whole constellation of ideas and messages, and different ideas and messages in that constellation are going to speak with special force to different people.
Some people, for example, are going to be thrilled, and their world view changed, by the simple discovery that there is an actual people who reject the path of war and support each other in their peace testimony. So that will be a part of the Good News of Quakerism that reaches those particular people. But for other people, that part of the Good News may have no particular force or significance, and something else — “why, Friends really do try to worship in the manner of the first-generation Christians” — may be more significant.
In some times and places, the central gospel message of Quakerism has been quite different from other times and places.
I could add to this list of aberrations, but my point is made, and I don’t care to dwell on negativities. What is much more worth talking about is the original central Gospel message of Quakerism, which I think is a message of tremendous positive, transformative power, and which I think is well worth rediscovering. This was the message I was pointing to in my earlier posting, May 24, when I wrote of “our basic Quaker gospel message that salvation is found through direct, divinely-given discernment”. For while the idea that this is how salvation is to be found was not the exact central Gospel message of early Quakerism, it comes fairly close.
So what was the actual, original, central Gospel message of Quakerism? (Oh, I thought you’d never ask!) I think I know.
I have found statements of what I take to be that message, set out plainly and tersely in the writings of George Fox, James Nayler, William Dewsbury, Isaac Penington, Thomas Ellwood, William Penn, Robert Barclay, Elizabeth Stirredge, Benjamin Bangs, John Banks, John Richardson, Stephen Crisp, Joseph Pike, Jane Pearson, and others. Nearly always I find it expressed in a manner that conveys both a sense of its great importance and a sense that it is a discovery — exactly what I’d expect of a message of Good News.
Here’s an example — John Banks conveying the message in a letter written to his son from prison:
God in his love, according to his divine wisdom, hath given thee a measure or manifestation of his good spirit, grace, or light, which he hath placed in thy heart and conscience, a witness against every appearance of evil, which in some degree thou art come to the knowledge of; whereby thou knowest thou shouldest do that which is good, and eschew the evil. This light of the Lord Jesus Christ, teaches thee not to be wild nor wanton…; and if thou shouldest do or act contrary, this pure light will reprove and judge thee for it: and this is that, my child, thou must own and love; and then it will not only discover all sin, and every evil to thee, but as thou takest heed unto the checks, reproofs, and manifestations thereof, thou wilt thereby receive power over every thing, one after another, that the light so makes manifest unto thee … to have thy mind kept and exercised in the fear of God, and to serve him….
Notice how many ideas this passage joins together — the idea that there is a present-moment light or spirit available to us, to be found specifically in the heart and conscience; the idea that it is explicitly of Christ; the idea that it discovers the sins we have committed that we’ve blocked out of our consciousness, and having discovered them, brings them back into our minds and reproves us for them; the idea that when we find such a discoverer and reprover in our heart and conscience, what we have found is divine, is of God, is indeed proof that God is real; the idea that if we unite with it, it empowers us —
Without all these ideas, working together, this message is not yet a living, breathing entity. It is only when they all come together that the message becomes a complete engine, starting to move of its own power in our minds, working to transform us. It was the synthesis of these ideas that made the original Quaker movement the potent force in the world that it was.
— And this is the potent synthesis I am seeking to return to, in the called meetings for discernment that I am having with Friends communities in the course of my journey. I don’t know how far I can succeed, but it seems worth trying —
