Jeanne Warren of Oxford meeting has given us permission to post here her response to a recently re-posted article in Prospect magazine on disagreeing about God – keep or dilute God? in revising our current Quaker Faith and Practice (draft to be published as ‘Our Quaker Way’ in November).
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/71397/disagreement-among-friends-why-quakers-are-questioning-god
Jeanne writes:
I fear repeating myself on this subject, which has been an important one to me since I was a teenager, some 75 years ago.
Something is missing in our world today. We do not look for love and joy, we look for power and money. Everyone suffers from the resulting destruction. In my upbringing, religion was the counter to this. I realise this is not everyone’s experience, so not everyone shares my compulsion to find a credible formulation of what it is that that religion consisted of. But in case anyone out there does share the urgency of my search, I can only repeat that I finally found something that satisfied me. It cannot be expressed in a simple phrase, but I will just lift a couple of sentences from a short article I wrote for our Oxford (England) Quaker Meeting newsletter this month:
“God is not a separate ‘spiritual’ person. God is the infinite personal reality that we are individual examples of. . . . I gradually came to understand that by giving up the concept of a God who might not exist, I had room for the concept of God as being the personal reality in which we ‘live and move and have our being’.”
I call myself Christian in the sense that the Gospels tell us of Jesus’s teachings that all are to be loved and to be considered equal. I do not think he is God, I think he knew God and wanted to share what he knew. Thankfully, the Methodist church I grew up in in America was not very theological, emphasizing instead that we should put these principles into practice in our daily lives. The key, looking back, was that the church taught us to look out for the well-being of everyone, not just ourselves. Talk of ‘God’ was a way of universalizing our concern for others.
I think that the idea of God as ‘a person’ is now a huge roadblock, making it very difficult for increasing numbers of people to approach religion at all. Religion as a base separate from politics was formerly able to empower those who believed in the importance of unselfish values. That power is waning. A CEO quoted in the book “Limitarianism” by Ingrid Robeyns said, “In the past you would feel ashamed if you earned a hundred or a thousand times more than the lowest-paid person in your company. Now, that shame is gone.”
The danger of dropping the word ‘God’ is that it will get replaced by something less suitable. If we replace God with nature we risk depersonalization. If we replace God with humanity we risk egocentricity. We need to understand and value ourselves, not as individuals, not as part of a collective, but as beings who relate to others in a community of potentially infinite size and love. This is the creation into which we were born, we did not make it. Our job is to understand it enough to live well in it, whatever that turns out to mean. Religion is about that.
To try to live well while throwing away any concept of Guidance is to make our job even harder. Quakers have done a decent job of preserving a usable bridge to the energy and insights of the early Friends, but it is a job which continues to evolve. It requires, always, that we be humble, realizing that we are but one stage in the story of humanity.
Jeanne Warren
(originally on the nontheist google group discussion (hosted in America but with one of our UK members as one of the moderators) which you can find here: https://nontheistquakers.org/email-discussion/
