A Man That Looks on Glass. Standing up for God in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)

282 Pages·2015·1.663 MB·English

by  Derek Guiton

A Man That Looks on Glass

Derek Guiton
Published in 2015 by FeedARead Publishing
Copyright © Derek Guiton

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Cover design by David Botwinik
Cover illustration: The Message by J. Walter West (1922),
courtesy of Library of Society of Friends, London
A Man That Looks on Glass

Standing up for God in the Religious Society of
Friends (Quakers)

Derek Guiton

A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.

George Herbert (1633)
Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Gerard Guiton for his many insights and
suggestions in the drafting of this book, his constant moral support
and his ability to put me in touch with relevant academic sources.
Grateful thanks also to Rachel and David Britton for their
friendship, encouragement and stimulating conversation, and to
Rachel particularly for allowing me to publish the full text of her
talk to Colchester Friends, ‘God as Energy or God as Person’, as
an Appendix. Thanks also to my readers, Margaret and David
Heathfield, Edward Hoare, James Hogg, Roger Iredale and Noël
Staples for their perceptive criticisms, textual corrections and
points of information. And, of course, a special thank you to my
wife, Brenda, for her patience, companionship and good spirits
throughout. Needless to say, any errors are my responsibility
alone.
Contents
Page

Introduction i

1 Believing nothing in particular 1
2 Prophecy and change 16
3 Accommodation and discernment 33
4 The Quaker need of theology 41
5 The behavioural creed 59
6 Belief and Quaker non-credalism 67
7 Gently move – the search for a common 92
language
8 Non-realism or Real Presence? 102
9 Relativism – the denial of Truth 144
10 Non-theism — walking the faultline 163
11 Non-theism – disappearing into the secular 1 8 6
12 Theism – the sovereignty of Love 213

Endpiece 255

Appendix A
Bryan Magee, Knowing, thinking and 261
perceiving without Language

Appendix B 263
Rachel Britton, God as Energy and God as
Person

Introduction
WHICHEVER WAY ONE looks at it, the Religious Society of
Friends is in crisis. The main features of this crisis are growing
secularisation, the emergence of incompatible belief systems and a
readiness, in very many cases, to embrace ideology as a substitute
for faith. Although all of these features have come up for
discussion at various times in The Friend and other Quaker
journals there has been no attempt since Alastair Heron’s brave
little book, Our Quaker Identity (1999), to address them as the
single existential crisis that they represent. Quaker writing on this
subject has tended towards a ‘wise reticence’— doubtless from
fear of provoking conflict. The effect has been to leave the field
open to one side in this debate and allow the impression to
develop that those who hold to the traditional Quaker faith have
no answer to the arguments of secular rationalism.1
Consider, for example, the 2013 and 2014 Swarthmore
Lectures. Both are excellent in their exposition of Quaker spiritual
values. But in each case the authors discourage any engagement
with current realities by appealing to Friends to abandon the
‘empire of the mind’ and plant a ‘garden of the heart’. ‘Heart-
knowledge’, it is suggested, encourages spiritual transformation,
‘head-knowledge’ leads to rational argument which will only
worsen the crisis by driving us further towards the secular.
This book is written in the conviction that we need both
kinds of knowledge. The Inward Light and the light of reason are
complementary, not opposite. We have nothing to fear from

1 Here I should like to stress that I am referring mainly to Britain Yearly
Meeting which follows the unprogrammed (silent) tradition of Quaker
worship. Other Yearly Meetings, particularly in the southern hemisphere,
follow a tradition of programmed meetings with services organised by a
pastor. Since these Yearly Meetings tend to be more committedly Christ-
centred, problems around secularisation are not usually an issue.
i
theological and philosophical debate if we are firmly rooted in our
own God-centred and deeply inspiring mystical tradition. But we
have a lot to fear from refusing to engage with those for whom
reason is the only guide. There is nothing to be gained and much
to lose by burying our heads in the sand. As the great Anglican
theologian Austin Farrer said, “what no-one defends is soon
abandoned”.
Leading Friends have warned against this gradual and now
burgeoning crisis almost from its beginnings in the 1950s but their
warnings for the most part have gone unheeded. It is probably this
that led Alastair Heron to address the problem head-on and in a
form “as free as possible from ambiguity and equivocation”. What
did he see as the problem? Essentially our inertia in the face of a
threat that would put an end once and for all to something we hold
to be the most significant and central focus of our lives, that
precious experiment in practical mysticism that began in earnest
on Firbank Fell in the summer of 1652. Heron’s call to Friends
was to overcome this inertia and put into action a programme of
Society-wide spiritual renewal, and (crucially) not to let up until
the drift from Religious Society to friendly society had been
decisively reversed. For, as he pointed out, “if nothing effective is
initiated soon, in thirty years’ time the membership of the Society
will need to be described by terms such as ethical, humanist,
secular. By then only a minority will affirm personal experience of
the living power of the Spirit of God in their daily lives”.
We are now half-way through Heron’s thirty-year term and
it looks as if that disquieting prognosis is turning out to be grimly
accurate. According to the British Quaker Survey 2013, the
number of Friends and attenders professing belief in God has been
decreasing (down from 74% in 1990 to 72% in 2003 and 57% in
2013 — considerably lower than in the population as a whole)
while the number identifying as fully declared atheists has been
increasing (up from 3.4% in 1990 to 7% in 2003 and 14.5% in
ii
2013). There is also a large undecided contingent which has
remained constant at around 25% over the same twenty-three year
period. Overall, the trend appears to be moving towards a rejection
of belief in God but not necessarily towards non-theism as a
theologically fixed position since not all of those in the undecided
group would accept the ‘non-theist’ label.2 However, there is no
doubt that Heron’s fears have been amply vindicated. What we are
looking at is a Religious Society in flux.
In his Swarthmore lecture, Open for Transformation, Ben
Pink Dandelion draws attention to our anxiety about falling
numbers.3 That is a different concern and in his view perhaps a
false one. “In dwelling on the end of Quakerism”, he says, “where
is our faith?” He urges us not to worry — fear and anxiety are
themselves symptoms of the secular. Faced with falling numbers
“we can adapt our structures as we need to, and as we have done
in the past”. All very true — but who are ‘we’? The end of
Quakerism may be about more than falling numbers; it may also
(despite appeals to an all-embracing but undefined ‘Quakerness’)
be about our increasingly divergent and doubtfully compatible
identities. How is it possible to adapt our structures to halt, and
hopefully reverse, the decline in our numbers without further
widening the theological basis for membership? And what is the
advantage in that if the net result is yet further to dilute our core
beliefs and Quaker identity and make it all the easier for others to
step in with a wholly different set of beliefs and values?
I am not aware of any research into the reasons why people
resign from the Society or the rate at which they are leaving; nor

2 According to the survey, the undecided contingent has remained constant at
around 25% over the same 23 year period. This seems odd in view of the
changes in the other figures but suggests other factors may be involved. The
British Quaker Survey 2013 is available online.
3 Membership of Britain Yearly meeting has been declining by an average
of 167 people per annum over the past ten years. See Simon Best and
Stuart Masters, The Friends Quarterly (August 2014), p.39.
iii
of any comparison between the numbers and beliefs of those who
have left and those newly admitted to membership. As numbers
continue to fall, it seems we are losing more members and
attenders than we are gaining. But again, what about the changing
composition of the Society? It is possible that what we are seeing
here is a process of positive feedback (what environmentalists call
‘catastrophic bifurcation’) where the more secular we become the
more secular we become. As Friends and attenders of Christian
and/or theist conviction die off or quietly withdraw from the
Society, the proportion of those who do not share their convictions
grows larger and this in turn attracts yet more people of similar
outlook for whom our traditions can have no more than a passing
historical interest.
What all this means is that for many Friends today George
Fox’s claim to have known God’s presence ‘experimentally’ was a
mistake and the Society was founded on nothing more than a
delusion. This is a view which categorically denies any possibility
of encounter with the Real Presence of God whether as individuals
or corporately in our meetings for worship. Further, it undermines
‘gospel order’, the decision-making process without voting by
which our business affairs are conducted, and makes it less likely
that any future ‘adaptations’ will be considered and introduced
under guidance. Some Friends continue to speak of the Society as
‘the great survivor’, but it is doubtful that any religious institution,
however worthy, could survive such total abnegation of its basic
and founding principles. If we go down this route we will most
certainly, and probably very soon, be speaking about ‘the end of
Quakerism’.
Today one is likely to be accused of intolerance and
dogmatism for insisting on any principles at all as being central to
our faith. “Variety”, we are assured, “is the spice of Quaker life.”
At the risk of appearing intolerant and dogmatic I would question
this. Some variety is undoubtedly good for Quaker life, but variety
iv