The Beyond Within. A Commentary on Through a Glass Darkly, David Boulton’s response to my A Man that Looks on Glass

Table of contents :
contents
opening remarks
viii
my personal journey
1
‘errors and misrepresentation’
9
‘dark’ forebodings
19
inclusivity
28
total inclusivity
39
tolerance and inclusivity
44
the passage of time
49
‘hitched to a lie’
53
transcendence
55
language
73
language and renewal
82
closing remarks
85

Citation preview

The Beyond Within



The Beyond Within A Commentary on Through a Glass Darkly, David Boulton’s response to my A Man that Looks on Glass

Derek Guiton

Published in 2017 by FeedARead Publishing Copyright © Derek Guiton The author(s) assert the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author(s) of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library C.I.P. A C.I.P. catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Design and layout by David Botwinik Cover illustration: LSF F 234 Centring Down, 2000 by John Perkin (1927–2012), Copyright © Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain

‘You can only see things clearly with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.’ — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Life’s splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view . . . If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. — Franz Kaf ka

contents opening remarks viii my personal journey 1 ‘errors and misrepresentation’ 9 ‘dark’ forebodings 19 inclusivity 28 total inclusivity 39 tolerance and inclusivity 44 the passage of time 49 ‘hitched to a lie’ 53 transcendence 55 language 73 language and renewal 82 closing remarks 85

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opening remarks

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hen i first read David Boulton’s Open Letter, Through a Glass Darkly, his response to my book, A Man that Looks on Glass, I felt it enough to leave Friends to make up their own minds about its contents. But then, after reading Ian Kirk-Smith’s review of David’s book in The Friend, it became clear that a reply of some kind was necessary.1 I was partly concerned by the continuing misunderstanding of the nature and focus of my book, and I also felt there were wider and more significant issues than those raised in Ian’s review that urgently needed to be addressed. My concern centred largely around three important themes, each with a strong bearing on discussions among Friends in relation to our current Book of Discipline and its impending (or probable) revision. They are: 1. Inclusivity 2. Transcendence 3. Religious Language

In this short work I hope to explore these themes in a way that will be helpful to Friends generally, and also to examine their implications for the Society’s immediate and long-term future. As the book is intended as a commentary on David’s Through a Glass Darkly, I will follow the thread of his argument as presented, while also making occasional reference to the writings of other Friends in the non-theist network who advocate a future for the Society based on the form of atheism known as ‘radical religious humanism’. Such an open exchange should be seen as a sign of health: our understanding of the issues around the current state of our Religious Society can only benefit from the ‘to and fro’ of critical analysis and evaluation. Some will say that disputing each other’s theologies is divisive, but divisiveness is not the issue when the future of the 1 See The Friend 174, 51 (16th Dec., 2016), p. 13.

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opening remarks Society itself is what is at stake. The issue then is how to discern what has gone wrong and what can be done to fix it. Criticism, whilst incisive, should not, of course, be hurtful. At the same time, writers who make it their business to challenge the foundations of another’s faith must expect their own positions to be challenged in turn. It is no use objecting (once they have been made public) that the more forthright passages in which they present their arguments have been unfairly ‘selected’ for comment.2 Unfair bias would ignore other passages which give an alternative or opposite view. I don’t believe I have ignored these other passages, here or in A Man that Looks on Glass, but where I have found them to contradict one another I have raised questions.

nothing personal intended In Through a Glass Darkly, David assumes that the ‘man’ in A Man that Looks on Glass specifically refers to him.3 Not at all, it is employed generically just as it is in George Herbert’s original poem. Nor, despite my describing it at one point as a “rejoinder to Boulton”, is the book concerned with David’s personal viewpoint or personal faith position, any more than it is with the personal views or faith of others whose ideas I explore at length—Don Cupitt, Charles Taylor, Janet Scott etc. However, where I disagree with a perspective which is more than personal to the writer, especially one which I feel undermines and destabilises the Society at its core—as I believe is the case with humanism—I cannot but express my opposition, while emphasising that this implies neither intolerance nor disrespect. My concern throughout in A Man that Looks on Glass was to provide a critique of some aspects of the present state and direction of the Society, and to dismantle, so far as I was able, certain philosophical barriers to faith. The non-realist and anti-transcendentalist ideas underpinning so-called ‘religious’ humanism and some—not all—Quaker non-theism are by no means the sole cause of the 2 The Friend 174, 51 (16th Dec., 2016), p. 13. 3 David’s booklet, hereafter Open Letter; my book, hereafter Looks on Glass.

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The Beyond Within problems we are now facing, but most would recognise that they have had a considerable disruptive impact. It is a difficult balance to maintain, but where I have focused my attention on David’s ideas specifically, it is as a propagator of these ideas within the Society, not as an individual Friend or seeker.

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my personal journey

I

n the foreword to his Open Letter, David describes my book as “a passionate defence of a transcendent, mystical theology grounded in an unassailable faith in a supernatural power”. This is reasonably accurate although it requires some unpacking. The appeal here is surely to the prevailing assumptions of postmodernism, for as the literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, points out, “Postmodernism is allergic to the idea of certainty, and makes a great deal of theoretical fuss over this rather modest, everyday notion”. So in postmodernist terms an unassailable faith is definitely not a good thing. Nor for that matter is a passionate defence. Eagleton continues: “Some postmodern thought suspects that all certainty is authoritarian. It is nervous of people who sound passionately committed to what they say”.4 But then, whose faith is more appropriately described in these terms? Is it the faith of the religious believer or that of the atheist? Most humanists I know express absolute certainty that God is no more than a human concept. What are our grounds for saying we are ‘certain’ and what kind of certitude do we mean? David is right to link the kind of confidence he describes as ‘unassailable’ to faith. What makes Quaker faith ‘unassailable’ is that it is ultimately based on experience—if not our own, then that of others whom we respect and trust, as well as that of the generations who have gone before.5 This is what I meant 4 Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 136. 5 As Dean Inge rather pithily expresses it in his essay on theism: “If a dozen honest [people] tell me that they have climbed the Matterhorn, I am satisfied that the summit of that mountain is accessible, though I shall never get there myself. We are not all equally gifted as contemplatives, any more than as musicians. But want of attention is the chief obstacle. The still small voice does not shout at us. If we spend a perfunctory five minutes a day in thinking about God and the spiritual world, what can we expect? The testimony of the mystics cannot establish Christianity, but it is a strong and I think sufficient argument for Theism, since all the contemplatives are agreed that what they have experienced was not a figment of their own imagination, but spiritual communion with a living Being.” See Philosophy 23, 84 ( Jan., 1948), pp. 47–8.

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The Beyond Within when I said in Looks on Glass that we have “nothing to fear from theological and philosophical debate if we are firmly rooted in our God-centred and deeply inspiring mystical tradition”. Here it will help to quote the early twentieth century Russian philosopher, S.L. Frank: Faith in its primary essence is not blind confidence but immediate certainty, direct and immediate insight into the truth of that which is revealed. Thus it is true that faith is based upon revelation, but ‘revelation’ should not be taken to mean something which we think to be revelation, or which for subjective psychological reasons we are prepared to recognise as such—whether it be the words of the founder of our religion, or the Bible, or the teaching of the Church; revelation must be understood in the strict, literal sense of the term as the expression of God Himself, His manifestation to our heart, His voice speaking to us, His will which we freely accept from within. We follow it because we know that it is His will—a will that attracts and holds us by the compelling power of holiness and is freely and spontaneously recognised by us as possessing absolute value. In the last resort faith is the encounter of the human heart with God, God’s manifestation to it. True, it is but rarely and only to the few of His elect that God reveals Himself with perfect clearness, manifesting Himself in the fullness of the all-conquering, all-pervading power of His glory. To the rest His voice comes as it were from afar, scarcely discernible, perhaps, amidst the clamour of the world—or only as the whisper of a friend heard in the inmost depths of our consciousness in rare moments of solitude, concentration and peace. But whether we apprehend the reality of God vividly or faintly, clearly or dimly, from near or from afar, that reality is in the last resort its own guarantee. However complex may be the network of links which connects our minds with God, the current which runs along it and sets our minds aglow with the light which we call faith can only come from the primary source of all light, from God Himself.6

6 Frank, God With Us (tr. N. Duddington. London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), pp. 20–1.

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my personal journey This is a different kind of certainty. Its ‘unassailability’ not to be confused with the ‘self-certainty’ described by Heidegger as ‘unsurpassable’ which is absorbed from the culture by the individual and is the source of egocentric ‘distress’. My own experience is closer to the second of Frank’s categories in degree of intensity, but just once it was of the kind that shakes one to the foundations—a love of the ‘other’ far in excess of anything one could generate from within oneself and which is experienced as both of and beyond the subject. This kind of experience is both extraordinary and actually quite common. Today we prefer not to think of God as having a favoured ‘elect’—even while we acknowledge the primacy of figures such as Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, the Dalai Lama or a Zen master like Kodo Sawaki. But that is not Frank’s point. He wants to say that certainty in religion is based not on ideas about the transcendent, but on direct experience, what the French existentialist philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, calls “the transcendent within experience”.7 For some, that will seem a contradiction in terms. Cupitt speaks of a radical immanence “always completely within the flux of experience”, but unlike Marcel his purpose is not to open a pathway to the experience of God but to insist that if something is experienced it is then necessarily purely subjective—there are no ‘facts’ in the world ‘out there’: all we have are concepts in our minds. What this amounts to is a denial of the truly ‘other’. It leaves unanswered such questions as ‘What do personal relationships involve?’ or ‘What do we mean by the unknown?’ It removes the element of mystery. We are trapped within a kind of logical circularity. The non-realist comes back with: “But the ‘other’ can only be subjectively experienced”. However, to say this is surely to admit the reality and therefore, to use Rowan Williams’ term, the ‘extrasubjective’ presence of the other? If we take the analogy of touch, the experience of touch may be subjective but when we shake hands after Meeting for Worship the 7 See Looks on Glass, pp. 232–3; also Rowntree-Clifford, P., Interpreting Human Experience: A Philosophical Prologue to Theology (London: Collins, 1971), p. 19.

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The Beyond Within experience is mutual. It is not the same The respected as clasping together our own hands in French philosopher, prayer for we have no difficulty distinJean Wahl, guishing our own touch from that of described the sense another. In the same way, Friends will of the presence sometimes describe their inward experience as being ‘touched’ by the Spirit. of God as an Asked to describe the experience further experience of they are likely to say it is beyond words, “infinite love which, ‘ineffable’ (‘ineffability’ being one of the no doubt, embraces hallmarks of the religious experience us, but which we according to William James). But it is feel to be other than the touch that is ineffable, that melts the ourselves because soul and perhaps can only be compared in our fundamental to the experience of sexual love in which individuality and each separate self transcends the limita[wilfulness] we are tions of his or her own being to become opposed to it.” one in ecstatic union with the other, but perhaps with this difference: in the case of the religious or mystical experience it is the touch of the infinite that breaks through the finite boundaries of the self. As Rowan Williams says, on the subject of Cupitt’s (and therefore David’s) radical religious humanism, “A religious discourse which denied . . . the extra-subjectivity of God would hardly be intelligible”.8 Equally, a scientific discourse which denied the extrasubjectivity of the world we live in—and emerged from—would be unintelligible. Non-realism, to be consistent, has to apply to the world as much as to things of the Spirit and is as unintelligible in relation to the world as it is in relation to God.9 Without ‘the other’, 8 See Higton, M (ed.), Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM Press: 2007), p. 244. 9 Cupitt is having it both ways when he admits (The Old Creed and the New, p. 105): “If we are to find happiness in creative work, we need to interact with a material ‘Other’, and it seems we also need a framework of limits and conventions within which to work— which is why I have suggested that the not-self and the self, my Other and I, need to have approximately the same degree of reality and power, so there can be a certain mutuality

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my personal journey where is empathy? Without empathy, where is love? Without love, where are ethics? Ethics are born in the presence of the other, as the philosopher-novelist, Umberto Eco—himself an agnostic—insisted in conversation with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini.10 Frank, paradoxically, gets his point across in the language that he knows, the language of the theologian-philosopher—and who but a few intellect-resistant (but spiritual) Friends would argue that this is wrong or misplaced? I found my own experience neatly encapsulated in the words of the respected French philosopher, Jean Wahl, who described the sense of the presence of God as an experience of “infinite love which, no doubt, embraces us, but which we feel to be other than ourselves because in our fundamental individuality and [wilfulness] we are opposed to it.”11 However, it is not my ‘certitude’ or otherwise that is of interest here. My book was not concerned with my own religious experience, assailable or otherwise, but with dismantling the barriers that an increasingly assertive and influential strand in the Society’s life had placed in the way of belief or trust in God. I felt that the dangers facing the Society were more subtle than in the past. We believed that we were rising to the challenge and moving forward between them.” This is critical realism rather than non-realism. It implicitly recognises the force of the critical realist argument and is wholly inconsistent with the non-realist attack on the reality of God. In accepting a material ‘Other’ (and curiously capitalising it) but refusing a Divine ‘Other’, Cupitt reveals a prejudiced atheism unrelated to the non-realist theories expounded in his books. For a more extended (and infinitely more rewarding) discussion of these issues, see Williams, ibid., pp. 228–54. 10 Eco, U. and Martini, C., Belief or Nonbelief: A Confrontation (tr. M. Proctor. NY.: Arcade Publishing, 1997), pp. 89–102. Eco argues for an ethics without the sanction of the transcendent but acknowledges that the solid values ‘which underlie his own life and work’ may well be the product of his Catholic upbringing. Not a mystic in the religious sense, he describes his attitude to religious belief as ‘incredulous’, but at no point does he base this position on a theory which logically denies the existence of the other. On the contrary, the presence of the other is for Eco the ultimate and immediate source of meaning and value. 11 Wahl, ‘The Roots of Existentialism: An Introduction’ in Sartre, J-P., Essays in Existentialism (NY.: Citadel Press, 1993), pp. 6–7: my italics. The consciousness of sin in this sense is more one of unworthiness before God and is, in part, the experience early Friends described as ‘convincement’.

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The Beyond Within under guidance, but in reality we were simply accommodating to ideas emerging from the Zeitgeist—ideas which would replace the cross with the rainbow, embrace the secular, and leave us, like Cupitt, staring into the void.12 After “unassailable faith”, David ascribes to me a belief in a “supernatural power”. That too is problematic because he and I have very different understandings of the term ‘supernatural’. For David, an atheist, it’s on a par with a superstitious belief in spooks, poltergeists and “things that go bump in the night”. Supernatural in this sense seems to refer to spirit as a different kind of substance, perhaps an extremely attenuated form of matter, but at any rate as a ‘thing’. If spirit were a thing, it would have extension, that is, it would occupy space and time. It would be contained by the very dimension of which it is itself the Source. But spirit in the sense in which most modern theologians use it is not a thing; it is altogether ‘other’, a ‘mystery’ that can be experienced but not grasped, known but not captured in language. For today’s theists the ‘supernatural’ refers to the transcendent, the ‘something more’, the ineffable Mystery that can only love and reveal itself as Love with no beginning and no end. Theism is usually defined as belief in a ‘personal God’, but what theists mean by ‘person’ in this context, and what they mean by the term ‘God’, has been changing in recent decades—and for the most part not towards non-theism, but towards a deeper understanding of theism. As David rightly avers, I prefer the term ‘supra-natural’, not only to distinguish between our different meanings but also in going further by placing God ‘beyond being’, as an ‘Otherness’ known not in thought but (as Frank says) in pure experience. Or, as I suggest in Looks on Glass, as Divine self-revelation in which the usual subjectobject relation is reversed with God being the ineffable subject that reaches towards us. If I had to label myself, it would be as a Quaker-ChristianUniversalist (and perhaps also a rationalist mystic, a Darwinian 12 See, for example, his The World to Come (London: SCM Press, 1982), p. 112.

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my personal journey creationist, a pro-life pro-choicer, and a CAAT—Campaign Against the Arms Trade—activist). Does the ‘Quaker-Christian’ component mean that I believe Jesus was unique, in the sense of being divine? My view of Jesus is that he was not God in the literal sense (whatever that would mean) but a man who through his personality and actions revealed to us the creative power, love and beauty of God. I also believe that Jesus was filled to overflowing with the spirit of God in a way unparalleled in human history, although I suspect some early Friends like Fox and Nayler at certain moments in their lives came near to it. It is in this sense that I understand the divine initiative implicit in Incarnation. One could say that Jesus was wholly transparent to the Light of the Christ, so much so that one could say (with George Fox) that he was the Light and exemplified this by his actions. So although I cannot worship Jesus as God, I revere him as the pattern of what life is when lived in complete obedience to the divine will. Being a young man in the sixties and seventies, I naturally took a keen interest in eastern religions. I was particularly attracted to the ideas of Vedanta which I still find a useful model for thinking about God, existence and the individual human life; but in the end I found that these ideas supplemented and extended my understanding of Christianity rather than replaced it. In one of the notebooks I kept during this period I discovered the following passage by Rabindranath Tagore: The true universal finds its manifestation in the individuality which is true. Beauty is universal, and a rose reveals it because, as a rose, it is individually beautiful. By making a decoction of a rose, jasmine, and lotus, you do not get a realization of some larger beauty which is interfloral. The true universality is not breaking down the walls of one’s house, but the offering of hospitality to one’s guests and neighbours.13

So I would call myself a universalist in the sense described here by a great Indian poet, dramatist, theologian and philosopher—interested 13 See Tagore in The UNESCO Courier 14 (1961), p. 27.

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The Beyond Within in and willing to learn from other faiths, desiring to ‘welcome the stranger’, but refusing to bend so far backwards in trying to accommodate a wholly different tradition that I reject and injure my own. I also see myself as a universalist by virtue of being a Quaker. Quakerism is a universalist religion. Robert Barclay, for instance, devotes a whole chapter of his Apology (the longest in the book) to the theme of ‘universal redemption’, repudiating the Puritan doctrine which restricted salvation to the few and excluded those who, because of a mere accident of birth or geography, “do not know the name of Christ”. However much Barclay tries to wriggle out of it in his efforts to bring Quakerism nearer to orthodoxy, this seems to conflict with the strict orthodox view (now more or less confined to the evangelical wing of the Christian Church and not uniformly held even there) which insists on faith in the historical Jesus as the sole means of access to God. The first Quakers, including Fox, appear rather to have played down the historical Jesus in order to concentrate attention on the universal Christ. To say that this Christ is as a ‘Seed’ within all people, wherever they happen to be born, and whether or not they know it, is surely no more a form of cultural imperialism than to say there is ‘that of God’ or, if you like, Brahman, in every one. Is it not the basis of our belief in the absolute sanctity of human life and consequently of our Testimonies to Peace and Equality? The issues around the status of the historical Jesus in early Quakerism are complex, but what is clear is that they present reasonable grounds for universalists to engage with what might be described as a Quaker-Christian-Universalist theology. The reward could be a more organic Quaker universalism which no longer feels the need to distance itself from the Quaker-Christian tradition. For just as a developing poem or piece of music finds its fullest expression in the discipline of form, may we hope and pray that Friends will find a freshening of spiritual insight within a restored sense of unity in the essentials.

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‘errors and misrepresentation’

M

uch has been made of a few small errors I made in Looks on Glass; these come down to one simple oversight. I had misremembered David’s role, having him down as a founder and onetime secretary of the Sea of Faith Network rather than as editor of the Network’s journal. However, David suggests a darker motive, that this mistake arose from a desire to inflate his importance in order to justify the attention he felt I had unfairly focused on him. In the same way, he says, I overstated his role in setting up the Nontheist Friends Network (NFN), thus ignoring the contribution of the other 50-plus co-founders who might well feel ‘short-changed’. These errors might seem trivial, he says, until one realises they are the basis on which I build my thesis that he is the source of what I see as the Society’s ‘current woes’. In fact, I have never argued that David is the source of the Society’s difficulties. The first two chapters of Looks on Glass trace a much wider and longstanding process of theological drift and loss of identity. But David is surely doing himself an injustice in claiming that he is merely part of a movement and “no leader”. That is not how others see him. The Progressive Christianity Network, for instance, introduced David to their conference as “the founder of the NFN who has had a long association with the Sea of Faith Network”, and on his retirement from the Clerkship of the NFN he was thanked for his work in establishing the Network as a Listed Informal Group with ecumenical and international links. No mention of disgruntled co-founders, and the ‘long association’ is not assumed to be that of an ordinary grassroots member but of someone who has wielded considerable weight in the Sea of Faith Network and is still one of its better known public voices. But apart from having these affiliations, David is the only nontheist that most of us know by name, who has books in every Quaker library, was a member of Meeting for Suffering’s ‘Theological Think 9

The Beyond Within Tank’, and speaks on so many Friendly platforms. Is it really such an error to think of him as a ‘leader’?14

‘misunderstanding and misrepresentation’ Whether I have misunderstood David’s presentation of his ‘position’ is a matter of opinion. I can only suggest that people read my book for themselves. However, I hope Friends will believe me when I say that I have not deliberately misrepresented David’s or any other person’s point of view. That is undoubtedly a much more serious charge than mere misunderstanding, and for this reason one would expect it to be supported, if not by evidence,at least by convincing argument. In a review of the Open Letter in The Friend, Ian Kirk Smith has written: Derek Guiton has been highly selective in taking what he wants from David Boulton’s writing and, indeed, in the comments he makes on other sources he believes are part of a change and decay in the Society.15

This is stated without qualification and without any supporting reference to texts (the word ‘decay’ is Ian’s own). Instead, we are assured that David himself provides all the necessary examples, “often illuminating the broader ‘context’ of a quotation used against him”. With only this to go on, we are left to find the incriminating examples for ourselves. This I shall now attempt to do. David begins his critique by acknowledging that the text of A Man that Looks on Glass is properly and adequately referenced. 14 David is not himself immune to factual error. Having admitted that the growth of non-theism among Friends was bound to create tensions, he assures us that “Friends in Britain have held together for more than three and a half centuries without allowing theological disagreements to develop into schism” (Open Letter, p. 6). There is, of course, the Beaconite Controversy of 1836; it was a sizeable schism with a considerable number of Friends, including some of the most prominent, leaving the Society to join the Plymouth Brethren. 15 See The Friend (16th Dec., 2016), p. 13.

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‘errors and misrepresentation’ “I can’t complain”, he says, “ [for] you give chapter and verse.” But he continues: I’m not even going to quibble that you take quotations out of context, nor make too much of the fact that you sometimes truncate a text to maximise the impact of your argument (Open Letter, p. 17).

None of this is fair. If I “give chapter and verse” it is hard to know what David sees as the difficulty; the reader can easily check the context for accuracy and objectivity. Do I ‘truncate’ passages for the reason he states? All writers have to take a decision on where to end a quote. David gives just one example from which he extrapolates an entire modus operandi. On page 190 of Looks on Glass, I had written: Boulton informs us that every year since 1995, Cupitt had been calling for a “new this-worldly and democratic religious humanism (a ‘religious’ humanism that later in the book is described as ‘wholly secular’).

It is the remark in parenthesis to which David takes exception. He responds: You fail to complete the sentence. In the passage you are quoting I write . . . ‘Radical religious humanism is wholly secular in the root meaning of the word: it is of this world and for this age, the only world we can know and the only age of which we can have any direct experience’ (Open Letter, pp. 23–4).

David forgot that I had already quoted the sentence in full some eighteen pages earlier (p. 172) so that the reference to ‘wholly secular’ was in the form of a reference back to a passage already introduced to the reader. But even if it were necessary to quote the passage in full at this juncture (which I would dispute), to say that “religious humanism is wholly secular in the root meaning of the word” etc., only adds to the point I am making. Moreover, isn’t it true that any attitude which treats our values as humanly derived values only, “of this world and for this age” only, is what most of us mean by a ‘secular’ attitude? Elsewhere, David states unequivocally that 11

The Beyond Within Radical religious humanism is a secular humanism, a rational humanism, an ethical humanism which feels free to draw on, to feast on, the best of our long, complex, diverse heritage of religious expression (Real Like the Daisies, p. 65).

Let us not dwell on the implications of ‘feast on’, ‘draw on’ or even ‘feels free’: humanism has always satisfied its hunger at the table of religion. I would only point out that John Donne, William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and other religious poets would never have agreed to ‘rationalise’ their religion in the way suggested here. Nor do I believe that the great poetry they produced could spring from humanism, ‘religious’ or otherwise. But to return to the question at issue, ‘truncating’ a passage to maximise the impact of my argument would certainly indicate a form of selective bias, but is that what I have done here? And how has David, in Ian Kirk-Smith’s words, “illuminated the broader context”? In fact, it is I who have supplied the broader context, both here and in Looks on Glass. And the note of accusation seems even more inexplicable when one recognises that by omitting the ‘rest of the sentence’ (a sentence which, as I said, I had already quoted in full) I am not altering David’s meaning in the slightest, nor am I leaving his thought incomplete. Quite apart from its being unethical, what would I have to gain from using such unnecessary tactics? But this isn’t the only example of my supposed ‘misrepresentation’. David wants it to be understood that it was not my challenge to his humanist project that prompted him to write his Open Letter but his perception that I question and misrepresent his motives: My motive, you tell your readers, was to move my own ‘brand of religious humanism’ from the margins of the Society to its centre ground and create in the NFN ‘a campaigning organisation operating within Britain Yearly Meeting with . . . a vigorously pursued counter-agenda’ (Open Letter, p. 11).

How is this a misrepresentation? Although I don’t use the word ‘motive’ (it doesn’t appear anywhere in the book), I do conclude that it is David’s intention to move his ‘religious humanism’ from 12

‘errors and misrepresentation’ the margins to the centre ground—because, quite simply, that is what he says: If religious humanism is still largely confined to the fringes . . . it has nevertheless found a voice which . . . cannot now be silenced. How then do we amplify that voice? How do we build a new secular spirituality . . . Where better to start than among Friends?16

He then gives a long list of reasons why the Religious Society of Friends is ripe for such an initiative. This strikes me as a very straightforward and public declaration of his intentions. Why should I not take it seriously and ‘select’ it for comment? Again, am I misrepresenting David’s motives when I ask, If the aim is to amplify the voice of the ‘new secular spirituality’ in Britain Yearly Meeting so that it is no longer confined to the fringes, should this be interpreted as a plea to share the centre ground with theism rather than replace theism altogether? (Looks on Glass, p. 191).

This is a perfectly legitimate question, especially as David himself invites us to make a similar distinction between those who “simply ask for nothing more than acceptance of non-theism . . . and those who hope to see a non-theistic understanding of human spirituality gradually replace traditional theism”17—leaving us to guess which of these he favours. So if it was not David’s intention to move his particular brand of religious humanism from the margins to the centre ground, what was his intention? “The real motive”, he says, was quite different. Our primary aim from the start was to create a framework of support for nontheist Friends who told us they felt isolated or excluded in their meetings, and to work for a genuinely inclusive Religious Society of Friends (Open Letter, p. 11).

Was it? The primary aim? I can accept that it may have been one of the aims, but to say it was the primary aim is surely an example 16 See Godless for God’s Sake, p. 15; my emphasis. And for my so-called ‘misrepresentation’ see Looks on Glass, pp. 190–1. 17 Looks on Glass, p. 191.

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The Beyond Within of the hyperbole to which David admits he is sometimes prone. If it was the primary aim it must have been for the benefit of a very small group of Friends because, as I point out in Looks on Glass, Friends who hold to these positions are hardly to be thought of as shrinking violets and you cannot help wondering what is going on when you hear plaintive references to ‘my non-theism’ or talk of ‘coming out’ as a non-theist. Non-theism is not a condition or way-of-being comparable to race, disability, gender or sexual orientation, so why should it warrant so much trepidation? It is an idea, a theological or philosophical concept, and while ideas or concepts can be creative or destructive, they do not usually, at least in Britain, confer victim status on those who voluntarily espouse them. So taking all this into account, what is the ‘supportive framework’ for? Is it really necessary . . . or does it serve a different need altogether? (p. 182).

I go on to suggest that the much more important aim had less to do with providing support to a ‘vulnerable group’, and much more to do with furthering the agenda of the Sea of Faith Network within the Society. The role of the NFN, I suggest, was to act as an arm of the Sea of Faith Network, amplifying the voice of non-theism in the Society and widening its influence with a view to realising Cupitt’s and Boulton’s dream of establishing “an avowedly religious humanist organisation in Britain” (ibid.)

No doubt David would regard this, too, as a form of misrepresentation. But in Chapter 10 of Looks on Glass, I back up all of these claims with argument and quotation (“chapter and verse”). Among other things, I show how the founding documents of the NFN are riven by contradiction as the writers, in their eagerness, vacillate between representing the NFN as a broad-based liberal alliance and an exclusively humanist initiative. The overall thrust, however, is overwhelmingly towards the humanist perspective and, as one would expect, there is considerable overlap in membership between the two ‘Networks’. Their mission statements are almost identical and Quaker non-theists are 14

‘errors and misrepresentation’ described in Sea of Faith literature as ‘fellow travellers’, with not a hint of their supposed vulnerability. Despite all this, and notwithstanding his pledge to amplify the voice of radical religious humanism within our Religious Society (“Where better to start?”), David bridles at the suggestion that it amounts to a kind of theological ‘Trojan horse’. The concept of the Trojan horse, which I took from the Anglican theologian, Alister McGrath, seems to have hit a nerve since he refers to it as my “repeatedly invoked Trojan horse” (Open Letter, p. 21). In fact, I ‘invoke’ it only once in the entire book as against four references in the Open Letter—a type of ‘error’ which is arguably more serious than that attributed to me earlier. The single reference in my book comes at the beginning of Chapter 10: Inevitably, I will be making frequent references to the writings of David Boulton and the aims and objectives of the two organisations he helped to found, namely the Sea of Faith Network [see correction, above p. 8] and the Nontheist Friends Network . . . I will explore the links between these organisations and the proposition that the NFN is to all intents and purposes an arm of the Sea of Faith Network, sharing essentially the same humanist agenda and secular vision as the parent organisation. In this sense, it will be part of my case that non-theism in its organised form is a kind of Trojan horse, a means of establishing an alien belief system within the host organisation with the aim of eventually achieving dominance (p. 164).

Note, ‘in its organised form’. I am not referring here to the wide variety of individual opinion that might go under the description ‘non-theist’—the modern Quaker mix—but to an organisation within an organisation with the kind of separate agenda that would not be accepted by any other organisation dedicated to a specific and quite different purpose—whether the Labour Party or the local golf club. I remember when David gave a talk to Friends at Hebden Bridge Meeting (2006), he described non-theism as a ‘movement’. This seems to go well beyond the usual notion of a support group. For example, he was proud of the fact that it had its own networks, 15

The Beyond Within its own publications and conferences and an international following. He also commented on how his humanist colleagues in the mainstream churches couldn’t believe his good fortune when he told them he belonged to a religious tradition that re-wrote its scripture every thirty or so years. How many of these mainstream colleagues—retired Anglican ministers and the like—will shortly be making their way to our door? How will they be received? As one enthusiastically incautious Friend put it, how can we afford to turn them away? On the contrary, in his view, “we should clasp them to our bosom with cries of joy”. When I think of David’s words on this occasion and place them alongside his ardent desire to ‘build a new secular spirituality’, starting (of course) in the Religious Society of Friends, the Trojan horse analogy doesn’t seem so wide of the mark.

don’t say: ‘secular friendly’; do say: ‘religious humanist’ Another way in which David believes I misrepresent him is in giving readers the impression that he is advocating an anti-religious secularism and seeking to move Britain Yearly Meeting in that general direction. Hence the wording of his advert in The Friend: Through a Glass Darkly defends Quaker nontheism against recent charges that it aims to turn the Religious Society of Friends into a secular friendly society (my emphasis).18

We find the same denial in the Open Letter itself: Let me put it as plainly as I can. It is not the aim of the Nontheist Friends Network, or of any nontheist Friend I know, to turn Britain Yearly Meeting into a secular friendly society (p. 39; my emphasis). 18 See David’s book advertisement in The Friend (e.g. 7th Oct., 2016, p. 18); my emphasis. In fact, the phrase ‘secular friendly society’ doesn’t appear anywhere in my book, although there is a reference in the Introduction to Alastair Heron’s prophetic booklet, Quaker Identity: Religious Society or Friendly Society?

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‘errors and misrepresentation’ Well, maybe not into a ‘secular friendly society’, if we stick with that precise wording, but a ‘radical religious humanist’ one? This may seem like nit-picking, but David goes to considerable lengths in his Open Letter to dissociate what he calls ‘anti-religious secularism’ from what he believes is the more acceptable ‘religious humanism’ which retains all the trappings of traditional religion without the ‘supernatural’ content. However, the point I make in my ‘Religious book is that ‘religious humanism’, if it humanism’, if it ever became the dominant trend, would ever became the indeed lead to Britain Yearly Meeting dominant trend, becoming a secular friendly Society, would lead to BYM especially if Yearly Meeting adopts an becoming a secular open door policy, welcoming not only friendly Society, so-called radical religious humanists, but humanists of all stripes. The difference especially if YM between an ‘anti-religious secularism’ adopts an open and ‘radical religious humanism’, from door policy. a theological standpoint, is minimal. I think most people would say there is no essential difference. It seems disingenuous to argue that radical religious humanism is a form of religion and therefore not secular when elsewhere David describes it as a ‘secular humanism’, a ‘rational humanism’ and, indeed, as ‘wholly secular’. But in any case, what would be the religious aspects of Quakerism that would survive the adoption of so-called radical religious humanism? As a religious society we have no art, no music, no fine architecture, no “complex system of imaginative symbols”—all of which feature so prominently in David’s description of what radical religious humanism is. I explore these questions in more detail in Looks on Glass (pp. 206–12) under the heading “What has ‘religious humanism’ to offer?” A final word; this relates to David’s complaint that I accuse him of ‘manipulating’ Friends who are leaning towards non-theism. I have trawled through my book and the only contexts in which I find myself using the word ‘manipulate’ or its derivatives have 17

The Beyond Within nothing to do with David himself but with general points about management techniques and, in one instance (Looks on Glass, p. 256), our vulnerability as a Religious Society to pressures stemming from a wholly immanentist understanding of God. However, I do quote David as saying that the Sea of Faith Network, while having objectives which most people would see as humanist, keeps its mission statement intentionally “ambiguous and flexible to attract those who understand religious systems as man-made but see them as aspects of a transcendent divinity or cosmic benevolence”—a strategy which I describe as a form of ‘dissembling’.19 But then, I suggest that this is a practice to which the Society of Friends itself has been reduced in its heroic but unsuccessful efforts to attract new members (see Chapter 1 of Looks on Glass).

19 See The Trouble with God, p. 209 and Looks on Glass, pp. 167–8.

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‘dark’ forebodings

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n the late 1930s a group of non-theist Friends in California branched off to form a separate humanist Society of Friends. In 1991 they became an affiliate of the American Humanist Association and in 2003 they removed the ‘of Friends’ from their name. Although nothing ever happens in quite the same way, liberal Christianity has always been in danger from an encroaching humanism. A more recent example, also from across the Atlantic, is that of Gretta Vosper who has been enthusiastically welcomed to Woodbrooke as a guest of the NFN. Not a Friend herself, but a minister in the United Church of Canada, Vosper first ‘came out’ as a non-theist and later declared herself a ‘theological non-realist’. Before long she had made some pretty far-reaching changes to her church services as well as the church environment. She dropped any mention of God, the bible was nowhere to be seen, and the large cross above the altar was hidden behind “a cascade of rainbow streamers”. Finally, in 2013, she broke cover as a confirmed atheist, justifying this as an act of solidarity with Bangladeshi bloggers who were facing persecution for their atheist views. What was the impact of this ‘modernising’ programme on church attendance? According to Ashifa Kassam who interviewed Vosper on behalf of the Guardian newpaper, trouble was already in the air in 2008 when Vosper removed the Lord’s Prayer from the service.20 As a result, Kassam reported, attendance plunged from 120 people to 40, leaving her church in turmoil and its financial affairs in ruins. “The Lord’s Prayer was the last thing in the service that still held them to previous generations of church”, Vosper told her, “so it became the lightning rod for all that loss”. In the same year Vosper published her book, With or Without God, written, we are told, with the aim of “irritating the church into the 21st century” and praised for “driving the Christian West to places it has never

20 See The Guardian at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/24/atheist -pastor-canada-gretta-vosper-united-church-canada

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The Beyond Within gone before”.21 One might have expected such grandiose ambition to have led to a marked improvement in the church’s prospects, as newcomers, attracted by her ideas and perhaps her notoriety, beat a pathway to her door; but alas, it was not to be. Kassam describes the congregation as 100 strong at the time of her interview in April 2016, an improvement on 40, but still well below the original mark. In fact, the real situation may be a lot worse. It’s difficult to know how much reliance to place on Kassam’s figures since the United Church of Canada’s tabular statements reveal a somewhat different picture. Average weekly attendance is shown as declining from 150 in 2006 to 110 in 2008, followed by a steep drop to 84 in 2009 and to 71 at the end of 2015.22 It could be argued that this would have happened in any case (I don’t have comparable figures for other United Church congregations) but what the figures do not show is the substantial reversal in ecclesial fortunes that some, including our own radical religious humanists, would have predicted. Not content with instituting change in her own local church, Vosper has now placed herself at the heart of Toronto’s ‘Oasis Network’, thought to be the first of its kind in Canada. Offering “a less lonely way of losing your faith”, Oasis, we are told, will retain many of the features of a traditional church, but instead of services there will be guest speakers who will lead discussions on topics relevant to the community. The goal, she says, is to “create a freethinking, compassionate community that offers many of the same benefits regular church-goers have experienced”. Vosper’s book is an eloquent exposition of the arguments for radical religious humanism and for rejecting God or Jesus or indeed any sense of the reality of the Divine Presence as understood in orthodox and liberal Christianity. Her iconoclastic approach to all of these subjects is what she feels is needed to rescue the Christian church from its tradition and “ensure its vibrancy well into the 21 John Shelby Spong in Gretta Vosper, With or Without God: Why the way we live is more important than what we believe (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2008), p. xv. 22 Figures obtained from the Office of Ministry and Employment, The United Church of Canada, 3250 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada M8X 2Y4.

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‘dark’ forebodings twenty-first century”. However, it is on the question of personal religious experience and her views on the reality of the Divine Presence that I wish to comment here. Vosper is quite clear that she places little or no reliance on individual religious experience: “I know no proof of God beyond personal experience, and I cannot acknowledge that proof as substantial”.23 She then argues that personal religious experience can be explained (or explained away) by pre-existing ideas or experiences.24 She therefore shares David’s position that “the sense of presence is real but the presence itself is not real”, although I am not sure she would agree with him that to think otherwise is ‘dangerous’. Finally, in order to discredit any notion of the reality of a Divine Presence and perhaps to give scientific support to her claims, she launches into an account of an experiment carried out by Michael Persinger, an American Professor of Psychology, who, she says, “recreated experiences of a ‘sensed presence’ by using electromagnetic fields”: By stimulating one or the other of the temporal lobes with artificial magnetic fields, a subject can be made to have either a fear-based or bliss-based experience of a being that is close by them. Researchers working with Persinger and exploring the spiritual nature of his findings have suggested that prayer, a process of separating thoughts from feelings and so also the functioning of both sides of our brains, stimulates the brain in a similar way and makes it possible for individuals to create a sense of the presence many would then call ‘God’. Those who become highly practised at the separation of brain function brought about through prayer might even have a constant sense of God’s presence with them in their lives.25

Friends who have actually experienced the real presence of God in their lives will probably read this with interest without allowing it in any way to disturb their convictions. As S. L. Frank has said, this kind of experience is its own guarantee. The experiment, popularly known as ‘the God Helmet’, was whooped up by the 23 Vosper, With or Without God, pp. 16–17. 24 ibid., p. 228. 25 ibid., pp. 228–9.

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The Beyond Within popular science media but curiously Vosper’s writing excited little interest among Persinger’s is well-peppered fellow scientists. Why? The most likely with prestigious reason is that a more readily available in-words like explanation was psychological suggesinclusivity, tion, especially as most of Persinger’s subjects were recruited from his own diversity, psychology department and would have community, known that he had been working in this vibrancy, etc. area for more than a decade. But far Nothing wrong more important is the fact that a group with these in of Swedish researchers tried to repeat themselves, of the experiment under more rigorous course, but as experimental conditions and failed to with the word reproduce the results. In science there ‘democratic’ during is no credibility without replication. If the Cold War, Vosper had herself researched the issue one has to be very she would have immediately encouncareful about their tered the work of fellow Canadians, precise application. Mario Beauregard and Denise O’Leary. In their 2007 publication, The Spiritual Brain, the authors present clear scientific reasons for distrusting Persinger’s work, a stance supported by the generality of scientific opinion within the field.26 The other point made by Vosper about prayer involving the separation of both sides of the brain and giving rise to the sense of presence is also dependent on Persinger’s work and fails by the same standard. Interestingly, Beauregard and O’Leary make the point that the sense of presence “cannot be described easily in words or images. The ability to describe exactly and in detail what one has seen or 26 The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (NY.: HarperOne, 2007). Space does not allow me delineate the ‘clear reasons’ to which I refer. Suffice it to say, Beauregard is an award winning neuroscientist specialising in the neuroscience of consciousness. He was selected by the World Media Net to be among the ‘One Hundred Pioneers of the 21st Century’.

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‘dark’ forebodings experienced, as the God-helmet wearers mostly seemed able to do, usually points to an experience that is not mystical.”27 Vosper’s writing is well-peppered with prestigious in-words like inclusivity, diversity community, vibrancy, etc. Nothing wrong with these in themselves, of course, but as with the word ‘democratic’ during the Cold War, one has to be very careful about their precise application. How inclusive and diverse, for example, is the following statement from a recent Oasis article? The group is open to anyone who shares the five core principles of Oasis: (1) people are more important than beliefs, (2) reality is known through reason rather than religious insight, (3) human hands solve human problems, (4) meaning comes from making a difference, and (5) be accepting and be accepted.

Laudable as they individually sound, none of these propositions can be considered in simple isolation; they are all embedded in wider, unacknowledged, frames of reference. For example, (2) has entire but contestable philosophical systems backing it up—materialism, logical positivism, non-realism etc. Moreover, (5) feels like a strange mixture of tolerance and threat. Collectively, they are far from providing a model of how humanists and theists can share the same church-space, especially when the humanists have their own internal organisation and display more energy and proselytising zeal than the rest of our members put together. In his Open Letter, David ridicules me for suggesting that Britain Yearly Meeting might be vulnerable to an ideology of this kind, yet it seems I am not the first Friend to harbour such misgivings. David himself informs us that they surfaced at Meeting for Sufferings some two to three years ago, again in connection with the proposed revision of the Book of Discipline: Nontheist Friends, it was suggested, would seize the opportunity to drive God out of the book and (as Derek Guiton puts it) “turn 27 Beauregard’s and O’Leary’s point is similar to that of R.C. Zaehner who (in the 1920s) compared drug-induced mystical experience to the authentic experience of the great mystics. See Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Enquiry into some varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford: OUP, 1921).

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The Beyond Within Britain Yearly Meeting into a humanist or secularist organisation” (Open Letter, p. 6).

To avoid misunderstanding, I should stress that I have never been a member of Meeting for Sufferings and so was not present on this occasion which predates the publication of my book. It also seems right to point out that in my own case I was referring to humanist, not ‘non-theist’ Friends. Contrary to David’s oft-repeated claim, I do not believe that non-theist Friends in general want to turn Britain Yearly Meeting into a humanist or secular organisation. However, I believe there are humanists within non-theism who would look on such a prospect with eager enthusiasm, although they would probably think of it as a ‘religious’ humanism.

the outward shell Of course, there’s nothing surprising about that in itself: humanists, broadly speaking, are idealists, activists, even—like David himself— visionaries. They want the best for humanity and they see belief in God as an obstacle rather than a source of strength. Quaker or ‘religious’ humanists are no different; they share the same secular outlook which admits of no horizon beyond the human; they too want to dispense with God, and even the ‘mystical’, but to preserve the outward shell of religiosity. However, it is anybody’s guess how long such a shell on its own would last. David’s perspective in this regard is far from reassuring: Some religious humanists will want to express their humanism within an existing religious tradition, others will want to separate themselves from traditional religious institutions. Some will want to devise non-theistic liturgies, some will be happy with liturgies in traditional God-language taken with lashings of metaphor and poetic licence, some won’t want any liturgies or rituals at all, thank you very much.28 28 Real Like the Daisies, pp. 63–4.

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‘dark’ forebodings In other words, no-one really knows what to expect and virtually everything is up for grabs. Incidentally, this does assume that the ultimate aim is to ‘turn Britain Yearly Meeting’ into a humanist or secularist organisation’, albeit a ‘radical religious humanist’ one. Quaker humanists are very clear and very determined about that. In an article which typically combines reassurance with the promise (or threat?) of a ‘challenge’ to our ‘Quaker way’, Michael Wright (of the NFN), says: The Quaker way will inevitably be changed by our membership; it cannot be a static tradition. It embraces us, upholds us, and we seek to contribute to the Society by bringing whatever gifts and service we have. We also bring our perspectives, some of which value deeply what we find here in the Religious Society of Friends, but some of them also are going to challenge and change the Society.29

Is a ‘static tradition’ the only alternative to humanist non-theism? Significantly, we are not told what it is about the Quaker way that the NFN ‘values deeply’ and what on the other hand they would like to ‘challenge and change’. We only know that they are working to develop a five year plan: “Part of our conversations together about the way forward among Friends will be about what we cherish, and what we seek to change, as part of our work to draft a new five year strategy”.30 Non-theists are a theologically diverse group representing a wide range of different opinions rather than a homogeneous bloc speaking with one voice. But David and the NFN leadership often speak of them—and for them—as if they were indeed a clearly defined rather than an amorphous group. This gives more weight to the nucleus of dedicated humanists who are small in number but—helped along by the new fashion for ‘inclusivity’—growing in influence. 29 Wright, Being Quaker Now: a different way of being open for transformation, p. 8. This article may be found at: www.nontheist-quakers.org.uk/documents/Being_Quaker_ now.pdf 30 ibid.

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The Beyond Within Paul Parker, our current Recording As for not wishing Clerk, has written about the need to to persuade other bring the whole spectrum of theologiFriends, what does cal and a-theological diversity under the NFN mean, one umbrella. But it is clear that Quaker when it says . . . humanists want to bring all who describe themselves as non-theists under that it hasn’t been the separate umbrella of a humanistforward enough led NFN, the impetus for this coming “in articulating a from opposition to theism. These are positive view and not compatible visions. The NFN, or practice of being its leadership, has its sights on much Quaker without more than Paul’s concept of the unity reference to God”? of opposites, well-intentioned though the latter is. To illustrate this further, I highlight the following extract from the editorial in the NFN News of February/March 2014. We have here an entirely different perspective from Paul’s, one taking its inspiration more from the work of Gretta Vosper: Over the past year we have made big strides in getting nontheist understandings of the Quaker way on to the national agenda, in The Friend, in Area and Local Meetings, and in groups like QCCIR. . . . Later in the autumn the Network will partner the Progressive Christianity Network (PCN) in organising a major tour by the radical and inspirational ‘post-theist’ president of the Canadian branch of PCN, Gretta Vosper, with meetings in major cities including Newcastle, Manchester and Oxford. Things are changing! Be part of the change!

How can they write this and then say: “We are not a campaigning organisation and we do not set out to persuade other Friends: we simply seek to be clear about our own experiences and the current explanations we give to other people for how we account for them”?31 As for not wishing to persuade other Friends, what do 31 See NFN Newsletter (Feb., 2017), p. 1.

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‘dark’ forebodings they mean, when they say in the very same article that they haven’t been forward enough “in articulating a positive view and practice of being Quaker without reference to God”?32 Where does this fit under Paul’s umbrella? Given the tendency of non-theism to gravitate towards humanism in the longer term, it seems highly unlikely that our Society will be able to withstand the blandishments of such a well-honed, athletic pressure group as the NFN which is constantly assessing where it has got to and asking the question ‘What next?’ That is why (unfortunately) Paul’s solution to the problem, which requires both sides to observe a high level of restraint, is unworkable. In fact, it almost certainly prepares the way for an even worse crisis further down the line.

32 Real Like the Daisies and Godless for God’s Sake are patently campaigning documents. See, for example, Godless, p. 17: “There is so much to do! So much in our divided, warring world, our atavistic religion, our polluted politics, our unexamined ways of thinking that we need to subvert! Where shall we find the society of rebels, agitators and outsiders, the partisan recruits to the underground army of subversion whose loyalty is pledged to the republic of heaven on earth? Who will choose to be Godless—for God’s sake?”

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inclusivity

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anguage about ‘polarities’ and ‘binary opposites’ has been in fashion for some time—but not always in the way one would expect. Some polarities seem to be perfectly acceptable, and indeed welcome. Thus we have ‘inclusivity’ (good), ‘exclusivity’ (bad), ‘diversity’ (good), ‘doctrinal uniformity’ (bad), etc., as if there were nothing in between. Commonsense should tell us that some diversity and inclusivity are good, and some not so good, and similarly with the other categories, but this black and white view of things runs through the whole of the Open Letter and is to be found in much Quaker writing generally. Following the success of our campaign for equal marriage, ‘inclusivity’, like ‘diversity’ before it, has become something of a shibboleth. Humanists present themselves as champions of this new doctrine. But just because it was used successfully in that important campaign does not mean that it should then be applied across the board as an abstract principle. Yet that is what is happening. In April 2016, the NFN inserted a new clause into the organisation’s constitution (why we should have an organisation with its own separate constitution within Britain Yearly Meeting is another matter) which states pointedly: “We want to ensure that our Religious Society of Friends is an inclusive rather than an exclusive Society”. As we shall see, it is not just the Book of Discipline that stands to become more ‘inclusive’ in this broad ideological sense, but also every other aspect of our corporate life. Even a detail like the wording of the little leaflet we have in the foyer of the Meeting House, “Your First Time in a Quaker Meeting’, will not be overlooked. Thus we are told that at the April 2016 Conference of the NFN “the view was expressed that the current version of Your first time in a Quaker Meeting is so worded that people who tend not to use ‘God’ language would find it off-putting”.33 Quaker Life is currently 33 NFN Newsletter (May, 2016), p. 2.

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inclusivity revising the whole set of Quaker outreach leaflets, presumably to make them more ‘inclusive’ of the ‘new realities’. And it seems that this is going ahead whether or not we decide to produce a new version of the Book of Discipline.34 If indeed the primary motive for the How is it founding of the NFN was not by stages exclusivist to to turn Britain Yearly Meeting into an suggest a minimal ‘avowedly’ humanist organisation, but requirement for to provide support for vulnerable nonmembership which theists, then the way to alleviate their amounts to no more isolation and exclusion, David tells us, than an attitude is to work indefatigably for “a genuinely of openness to the inclusive Religious Society of Friends”. possibility of the There is no evidence that our Quaker real presence of non-theists fit into any of these ‘vulnerGod? Would we able’ categories. But accepting, as we want applicants to must, that this is how David and the NFN leadership perceive them, it has to offer less than this? be said that the assumption that they do provides a useful rationale for directing all the efforts of the NFN towards the goal of ‘strengthening’ and ‘enhancing’ our existing inclusivity. And this in turn will move the Society closer to becoming an ‘avowedly humanist’ organisation, an outcome which will be eminently appealing to the NFN leadership, even if achieving it is not claimed as the primary motivation. Whether or not such an outcome is intended, consider what a prize it would be—a humanist organisation with a ready-made infrastructure, perhaps based at Friends House in London, with meeting places all over the country, and—being a ‘religious’ humanism— without even the need to register a change of purpose with the 34 I note that the Annual Report of Quaker Service [2015–16] replaces ‘that of God’ with ‘a divine spark’, a term which meant something real to Plotinus and Dionysius but is evasive and almost meaningless today. In fact, the word ‘God’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the text of the Report, although there is a reference to ‘the Lord’ in a headline quotation from North American Friend Job Scott (1751–93).

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The Beyond Within Charity Commission! The very thing needed to accommodate the “new this-worldly and democratic religious humanism” that David tells us Cupitt has been calling for every year since 1995!

a minimal requirement for membership? Now, inclusive is what David says I am not. He writes: “If Friends are indeed ‘in crisis’ . . . it is because our Society’s inclusivity is being challenged by those who want some of us out, not those who are working to keep all of us in” (Open Letter, p. 16). But how is it exclusivist to suggest a minimal requirement for membership which amounts to no more than an attitude of openness to the possibility of the real presence of God? Would we want applicants to offer less than this? An attitude is not a belief, still less a creed, and after all I am only suggesting an attitude of openness, an attitude entirely in accord with our Quaker beliefs and practices. It would be difficult to think of a less demanding criterion unless we do away with the whole notion of admission criteria or ‘boundary maintenance’ altogether—which some are advocating, apparently without giving any thought to the almost inevitable consequences. However, I could argue that I have managed to suggest an even less restrictive criterion in that in most contexts I have replaced ‘the real presence of God’ with the phrase ‘openness to the possibility of the transcendent’, or ‘openness to the possibility of the something more’, or to use Charles Taylor’s forensic phrase, commitment to the ‘open reading of immanence’. All of these terms are explained where necessary, and discussed, in Chapter 10 of Looks on Glass. Who would be excluded by this restriction? Not all non-theists, most of whom are genuine seekers, but certainly those who are adamantly opposed to that very special attitude to the world we call ‘mystical’ which is at the heart of the Quaker experience and a necessary element in our worship; and it could be said that in opposing that essential attitude they are in effect excluding themselves. I strongly suspect that most people in this group would describe themselves as humanists. We would not be doing them any great 30

inclusivity favours by inviting them to become members of a religious society dedicated at its core to the worship of God, nor ourselves by giving those who don’t share, or even respect, that ‘special attitude’ an irrevocable influence over our corporate affairs. In short, to accept such people into membership does justice neither to them, nor to individual Meetings, nor to our Society in general, although they would not be excluded from our love and care and would continue to be welcomed into our Meetings as Attenders. In his Open Letter (pp. 37–9), David gives three reasons why he believes my suggestion of such a minimal criterion “is likely to be rejected if it is formally proposed.” First, he says, “Friends are unlikely to accept the distinction you make between a belief test and an attitude test”. In defining transcendence as the “Real Presence”, I am ignoring the reality that “belief and attitude cannot be sensibly separated”. But that is a false logic. It is quite possible to have an attitude of openness to the possibility that certain states of affairs may be true without currently or perhaps ever being able to believe that they are. David himself has said that he is open to the possibility that he may be wrong, and surely he would agree there is a difference between that and believing he is wrong? I think Friends would be unlikely to see this as a valid reason to turn my proposal down. David’s second argument is that my proposal is fundamentally flawed because it is self-contradictory and incoherent: You are proposing what you yourself call ‘a credal requirement for membership’, albeit one ‘as minimal as the “something more” which you add ‘need not be seen as credal in any sense at all’. You are asking the Society to adopt a ‘credal lrequirement’ which need not be seen as credal. This does not seem to me a coherent position (Open Letter, p. 37).

It is not ‘coherent’ because of the way David has re-formulated it. This is one of the difficulties I have with so much of the Open Letter—it makes responding to it a bit like unpicking an interminable series of unusual knots. A sensitive reader of literary texts would 31

The Beyond Within see that in this context I am developing a point. Here is the relevant passage from Looks on Glass: the subject under discussion is ‘boundary maintenance’:

As Alister McGrath has pointed out, “Every movement based on core ideas or values has to determine its centre on the one hand and its boundaries on the other. What is the focus of the movement? And what are the limits of diversity within the movement?”

The Society of Friends is not the only faith organisation which may have to take this kind of action. As Alister McGrath has pointed out, “Every movement based on core ideas or values has to determine its centre on the one hand and its boundaries on the other. What is the focus of the movement? And what are the limits of diversity within the movement?” Friends have not so far been able to answer these questions adequately, inhibited to some extent by their reputation for liberal tolerance. However, a credal requirement for membership as minimal as the ‘something more’ or the ‘open reading of immanence’ would in no way detract from our liberal credentials and would be accepted by most thoughtful persons as rational and justified. It draws the line precisely where Charles Taylor, David and Margaret Heathfield, and David Boulton himself in his own way, have all located it. Indeed, such a requirement need not be seen as credal in any sense at all. All we would be looking for is an attitude of openness to the possibility of the Real Presence rather than an already established belief in it (Looks on Glass, pp. 173–4).

But David continues: “Your credal-but-non-credal attitude/possibility test will make no difference unless you apply it to Friends already in membership, which I do not see you yet proposing” (Open Letter, pp. 38–9). Certainly to apply such a criterion retrospectively would be inadvisable and would cause too much hurt, and David is right: I will not be making any such proposal. At the same time I believe we have to do something if we want to check the drift towards a secular or ‘religious humanist’ Society of Friends. While we would resist applying any new criteria retrospectively, 32

inclusivity there seems little point in persisting in what many of us see as a fatal mistake. The two approaches are perfectly capable of being combined. If this leads to a small number of people resigning their membership (and at this stage it would be small), this might be an acceptable price to pay for the continuance of the Society as above all else a vehicle for spiritual discovery and social action in the service of God. However, any resignations would be regrettable and we should do all we can to encourage such Friends to stay and play a full part in the search for peace and social justice which is the strand we all have in common. David’s next reason for believing Friends would reject my proposal is that, by extending the open door to those who admit the possibility of a transcendent Presence, I “rob the test of any practical efficacy”. David illustrates his point with an imagined conversation between two Area Meeting visitors armed with my criterion and a rather bemused humanist applicant. Too long to quote in full, the exchange ends with the visitors (now desperate) asking: “But would you accept the possibility of a transcendent God—or Spirit, or the Divine, or the Mystery. . . ?” and the applicant replying, “Well, of course I accept the possibility that I may be mistaken. Don’t we all?” (Open Letter, pp. 37–8). However, there is a difference between genuinely feeling that one may be mistaken and saying that one could possibly be so as a matter of logic. Visitors are expected to exercise their judgement and their intuition, and “sincerity of purpose” is one of the main qualities to be discerned in an applicant (QF&P, §11.17). So again, if Friends do reject my proposal, I sincerely hope it will not be for the reason suggested here. David’s final argument is more to the point. He says my proposal “doesn’t begin to address the critical problem . . . of the Society’s ‘direction of travel’ as indicated by the British Quaker Surveys” (Open Letter, p. 38).What the surveys show is that when asked how they self-identify as Quakers, a growing number of Friends ‘come out’ (David’s expression) as non-theists and humanists. What this 33

The Beyond Within amounts to is that my ideas about boundary maintenance, however minimalist, are already too late. But is he right? Certainly, the trend seems to be in the NFN’s favour—unfortunately and sadly encouraged by some in the Quaker leadership—but the figures are by no means as favourable to David’s cause as he supposes. Once we have discounted the ‘undecided’ and the various ‘in-between’ theologies, the proportion of Friends identifying as fully declared atheists was still only 14.5% in 2013. Of course, this leaves no room for complacency; their impact is out of all proportion to their numbers.35 But I believe there is still time for Friends to find a solution to our problems. It is also my belief that most of our non-theist Friends, when they have really looked at the issues, would support a minimalist criterion of the kind I am proposing. And there is a further factor. Within my own circle of friends there are at least six who have left the Society and returned to their original churches because as Christians and/or theists they felt unhappy with the closed (and sometimes downright rude) attitudes they encountered in so many Quaker settings. If others up and down the country are being driven out of the Society for the same reasons, then a modest adjustment to our admission criteria might help to reverse ‘the direction of travel’ and actually boost our numbers. Of one thing I am sure, the way to revive the fortunes of the Society is not to allow ourselves to be swept along by the NFN in its push to ‘strengthen’ and ‘enhance’ our existing inclusivity as this will lead only to the “critical problem” getting worse. As US Friend Patricia Loring has said, “the consequence of having no standard [for membership] is that the Meeting conforms to the vision of those it has admitted”.36 I cannot believe that the NFN leadership is unaware of the implications of Patricia Loring’s comment and therefore unaware that an 35 According to the NFN Newsletter (April, 2017), p. 5, membership of the NFN was 56 (down from 84 the previous year). Most of these Friends/Attenders will be non-theists of various kinds and a relatively small number will be atheist (humanist). 36 Loring, quoted in Best, S and Masters, S., “What Can We Say Today?: Questions for the Revision of the Book of Discipline”, The Friends Quarterly (August, 2014), p. 39.

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inclusivity all-inclusive ‘peaceful co-existence’ is the quickest route to the religious humanist society they are putting such efforts into achieving. Perhaps the definitive statement of what the humanist wing of the Society now means by ‘inclusivity’ is the following: The shared aim of the Nontheist Friends Network is to help strengthen the Society as an open, inclusive body where different theological identities, theist and nontheist, are subservient to an overarching Quaker identity expressed in our practices, our values, our testimonies, and our written record of Quaker faith and practice, as reviewed and revised under collective discernment every generation (Open Letter, p. 39).

This obviously needs some unpacking. Let’s start with the words ‘strengthen’, ‘open’ and ‘inclusive’. How does it envisage strengthening us as an open and inclusive society? Does it mean strengthen by increasing the representation of existing minorities, so they would have a greater say? Or does it mean strengthen by admitting other, as yet unnamed, groupings into membership? And if that is indeed what it means, what groupings has the writer in mind? Would he exclude ‘secular humanists’ with no interest in the ‘religious’ aspects of ‘religious humanism’, or would they too be admitted? Will everyone be admitted? The answer to this last question—and it came as a shock even to me—is ‘Yes’: I suggest that in the evangelical spirit of “whosoever will may come”, we would do well to extend the hand of Friendship to all who will take it: all who show they want to join us in Quaker meeting, Quaker decision-making, Quaker action. How can we learn to love our enemies if we can’t even share our Society with those who want to join us as Friends? (Open Letter, p. 40).

Quaker meeting, Quaker decision-making and Quaker action? How will these be understood and interpreted in an increasingly secular setting—in the context of a ‘new secular spirituality’? We could do with a little more detail. Are we speaking about Quaker meeting as worship—yielding ourselves and all our outward concerns to God’s guidance, so that we find ‘the evil weakening in us 35

The Beyond Within and the good raised up’? (QF&P, §1.09); do we mean by ‘Quaker decision-making’ a practice based on the recognition that God’s will can be discerned through the discipline of silent waiting? (QF&P, §3.02); by ‘Quaker action’, do we mean action arising from Quaker ‘concern’: “a gift from God, a leading of his spirit which may not be denied”? (QF&P, §13.07). If those who wish to join us as Friends are not open even to the possibility that these claims are valid, then is it wrong to advise them against applying for membership, in effect excluding them, while of course inviting them to join with us in silent worship as welcomed Attenders? In the eighteenth century, during the period known as quietism, Friends withdrew from the world; now they are inviting the world in. Is there no middle way? If we follow this advice, and there are those in the Society who are willing to take the risk (not all of them humanists), we are well on the way to losing our identity altogether—and in the process acquiring a very different one! An ‘over-arching Quaker identity’ (an idea very similar to Paul Parker’s ‘single umbrella’) has to have some identifiers. David would make our shared practices and testimonies the identifiers, but how long would that arrangement last, especially under the impact of a programme of continuously ‘strengthening and enhancing inclusivity’? Why, without any faith in Divine guidance, should our business practices be sacrosanct? Already, some Friends are saying, ‘Why not take a vote, it’s much quicker’ and ‘Why an hour of silence? Waste of time. Let’s have a conversation’. And our Testimonies are likely to fare no better, for how can there be a Testimony to Truth if all truth is relative, or indeed a Testimony to Peace if the only touchstone is its value in dealing with situations in ‘this world and this age’? The Peace Testimony is not a tool for conflict resolution, any more than discernment is synonymous with consensual decisionmaking. As I say in Looks on Glass: without that absolute standard or Inward Guide, what is there to prevent a slide towards the pragmatic, the rational weighing of all the factors involved in a particular international situation? Yet the Peace Testimony is clear and, in the best sense of the word,

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inclusivity dogmatic: “The spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it” (p. 202).

How can the Testimonies be expected to provide an over-arching identity when, as John Punshon pointed out, they spring from a unity of faith, a greater whole, which transcends the presuppositions of rationalism and humanism? Or as Lorna Marsden says: Our testimonies arise from our way of worship. Our way of worship evokes from deep within us at once an affirmation and a celebration, an affirmation of the reality of that Light which illumines the spiritual longing of humanity, and a celebration of the continual resurrection within us of the springs of hope and love; a sense that each of us is, if we will, a channel for a power that is both within us and beyond us (QF&P, §20.16).

Finally, whilst ‘the shared aim of the Nontheist Friends Network’ places theism and non-theism on an equal footing, both being ‘subservient’ to an overarching system of values, which for David is ‘wholly human’, in reality it is only theism that will be ‘subservient’ since non-theism cannot be said to be ‘subservient’ to the values that it stands for.37 A level playing field in matters of belief inevitably leads to a levelling down. We look for words that are inclusive of both points of view and end up with words that only fully capture the experience of one of them. It came as no surprise, therefore, when I read that David wanted to persuade me “that an inclusive Religious Society of Friends is healthier, more generous and more liberal than one that spends its precious time debating who’s in and who’s out”—for an open door policy such as he is advocating will eventually realise his aim of amplifying the voice that “cannot now be silenced”. But again, note: my proposed criterion points to a barrier so slight, a membrane so thin and porous, that—I repeat—it is no more than an attitude, a genuine openness, towards the possibility of certain beliefs rather 37 I am assuming that the word ‘subservient’ as used here has both the sense of ‘subsumed’ and ‘subordinate’.

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The Beyond Within than the beliefs themselves. I don’t think this makes me in any sense an exclusivist. On the contrary, I believe it marks me out as an extreme inclusivist who draws the line only at the point where we begin to ‘disappear into the secular’.38

38 See Looks on Glass, Chapter 11.

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total inclusivity

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avid’s total inclusivity (“whosoFriends who ever will may come”) is perfectly advocate total compatible with tolerating theists and inclusivity as mystically minded non-theists since, the solution to if current trends continue, the open door policy will eventually lead to such our problems Friends being outnumbered and marwould do well to ginalised, or quietly leaving the Society consider whether because it no longer meets their spirithey are putting tual needs. There is nothing for the NFN their ideological to do but push for an ever-increasing preferences and (‘enhanced’) diversity and inclusivity sectional interests to guarantee that result, and the task is before all else, made all the easier because of the power ignoring the of expressions like ‘open and inclusive’ likelihood that over the minds of modern Friends in total inclusivity general. However, Friends who advowould spell the end cate total inclusivity as the solution to of the Society as our problems would do well to consider we know it. whether they are putting their ideological preferences and sectional interests before all else, ignoring the likelihood that total inclusivity would spell the end of the Society as we know it. There is a point at which change can pass out of the control of those who blindly embrace it. Earlier I went through the various reasons David gave for considering that Friends would not accept my suggestion of imposing a minimum requirement on applications for membership. There was, however, one very powerful reason David did not consider, and that is its incompatibility with a new theology of inclusivity which has been gaining ground in Quaker-Christian academic circles as an expression of self-effacing love. 39

The Beyond Within Ben Wood, in a thought-provoking article, “Declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues”, suggests that there is “a demanding principle of inclusivity which makes difference the medium through which God’s loving grace is expressed,39 a sentiment which is taken up by Harvey Gillman in a reference to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: One of his most profound insights is that we find God in the ‘face of the other’—precisely because each face is different. I would add that we can transcend difference to find unity, but the individual is manifested through difference. To ignore this is to dishonour the uniqueness of the divine in each person.40

Canadian Friend Jeff Dudiak takes this a step further. For him, as for Levinas, love is a matter of responding to the otherness (the alterity) of the other with our whole being—our whole undivided, unimpeded attention. We do violence to the uniqueness of the other (her face) by projecting onto her our own cherished meanings and presuppositions; and included in these are our own pre-understandings and even experience of God which can become part of what it is we are projecting: “’God’ [in this sense] functions as an impediment to my ‘face-to-face’ relationship to the other”.41 It is possible to take these ideas as no more than a theological or philosophical expression of the ‘rainbow’ ideology which emerged in the struggle for the ordination of women and same-sex marriage, but that would be to deprive them of true theological depth and universality. Now that both these ‘political’ objectives have been achieved, the theological task is surely to explore and develop them in a way that leaves ideological presuppositions behind and removes the element of risk which they pose for religious faith? As they stand, they could be seen as playing unintentionally into the hands of those who are actively campaigning to secularise our Society and 39 Wood, ‘Declaring the Wonders of God in our own Tongues’: Framing a Theological Response to Quaker Non-Theism’, QCCIR Paper (Oct., 2013), p. 2. 40 Gillman, The Friend 174, 32 (5th August, 2016), p. 3. 41 Dudiak, ‘Levinas and the Invisibility God’, Quaker Religious Thought, 113 (2009), passim and esp. p. 8.

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total inclusivity who want us to set God aside altogether. By treating any admission criteria, even the most minimal, as a form of violence towards the other, resistance, even objection, becomes impossible. We are clearly at a turning point. If we take this route, we must be ready to embrace the outcome that Ben Wood, Harvey Gillman and Jeff Dudiak do not consider, namely, that instead of radical inclusiveness leading to reconciliation and unity through a positive acceptance of difference, it will lead instead to internal splits and the eventual liquidation of the Society as a means of giving active expression to the will of God. This, I contend, places a heavy moral responsibility on those who are advocating the radical or total acceptance of difference, regardless of the impact it would have on the spiritual ethos of the Society and more particularly the debate around a possible revision of the Book of Discipline. Ben Wood points to the Pentecostal experience of the early Christians and the similar awakening amongst early Friends. Neither imposed boundaries or doctrinal conditions on church membership. But in both cases the religious and cultural background was so radically different from our own as to make the comparison seem less than convincing. What Jeff Dudiak, and perhaps Ben Wood and Harvey Gillman, seem to be proposing is a perfect, self-sacrificial love of the other; a love that imposes no boundaries and accepts unconditionally whatever is thrown at it. Only God can love in this way and though we should try to be imitators of God (Eph. 5:1–2) we need to recognise the dangers—that in “wanting to give without measure we can bring ruin to ourselves and those close to us”. And this is not a fault in the creation, but necessary to our condition as creatures.42 It was Simone Weil who once said, [God] loves not as I love, but just as an emerald is green. [God] is ‘I love thee’. And I myself, if I were in a state of perfection, I should love just as an emerald is green.43 42 See Volf, M., Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), pp. 61–3. 43 Davy, M-M., The Mysticism of Simone Weil (London: Rockliff, 1951), p. 46.

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The Beyond Within As we now know, she aimed for absoWe have an lute perfection and physically destroyed opportunity now herself. But the perfection towards to pull back from which we strive as Quakers, is not the the brink. By the flawlessness that Weil sought. Hers is the time of the next perfection of the Greeks, represented revision, if present by Plato’s ‘ladder of perfection’ or the trends continue, Platonic Forms. But ‘perfection’ in the biblical Greek (teleioo) means ‘spiritual it may be too late. maturity’. So perhaps this perfection, We may no longer with just the teeniest dose of pragmahave what we now tism, is what we should be aiming for?44 fleetingly enjoy— Weil’s Greek perfectionism puts us in the luxury of choice. danger of losing touch with reality which would make us ineffective, wilfully unable to help the other, and therefore, in the Hebrew sense, spiritually immature. Like her, although in a corporate sense, we could even end up destroying ourselves. Teleioo seems more in keeping with our ordinary human nature. Human love comes in different kinds, has conflicting objects and sometimes involves difficult choices; otherwise why should we have need of discernment and Divine guidance? I have family members who are humanists and atheists and I love them dearly, but I also love our Society and its tradition. Nor do I want to see our Christian roots permanently wither and die; they are what made our Society in the first place, and they continue to mould it both at the individual and the corporate level. So although I love my family and would gladly welcome them to Meeting as Attenders, I would not want them to become members until they had at least shown some awareness of what Evelyn Underhill described as ‘the instinct for transcendence’. Inclusivity, or hospitality to difference, in the sense affirmed here by three of our principal theologians shouldn’t mean having 44 I am grateful to my brother, Gerard Guiton, for pointing out this distinction.

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total inclusivity no boundaries or admission criteria at all, thus leaving us open to the kind of role reversal one would expect in a Pinter play where the guest ends up making the rules for the host. It means quite the opposite—giving without surrendering the capacity to give; as Tagore put it, without “breaking down the walls of one’s house”. It is sometimes more loving to observe boundaries than remove them altogether. We have an opportunity now to pull back from the brink. By the time of the next revision, if present trends continue, it may be too late. We may no longer have what we now fleetingly enjoy—the luxury of choice.

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tolerance and inclusivity

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enerosity of spirit, which David is now urging on all of us, is an attractive trait in any individual and a fundamental one in a religious society dedicated to the ideal of service. But how generous, inclusive and tolerant is radical religious humanism? Since it is my generosity and inclusivity that are being questioned in David’s Open Letter, I should like to draw the reader’s attention to the following passage from Looks on Glass: Among the traditions Boulton would “reasonably expect those who avow a humanist perspective to sweep away” are belief in a creator, the soul, the supernatural world, theism, deism and ‘theological modernism’.45 Moreover, he warns us that “superstition and the kinds of mysticism that are better described as mystification need to be kept under constant criticism. They are too dangerous to be ignored in the name of tolerance”.46 Among the kinds of mysticism that might be “better described as mystification” he would no doubt include the sense of the presence of God in our Meetings for Worship, including our business meetings, for he says that while the sense is real, the presence is not real, and to think otherwise is the sheerest superstition, on a level with the holding of a séance.47 The tenor of these remarks suggests a certain coldness towards the beliefs of all those Friends who are still theists, and should alert us to the far-reaching nature of the changes that “boldly embracing” radical religious humanism would bring (pp. 172–3).

The Religious Society of Friends is an organisation one of whose basic tenets is the possibility of unmediated access to the Divine. That basic tenet is here being condemned as “too dangerous to be ignored in the name of tolerance”. According to this view, the sense or experience of Divine Presence is on safe ground only if we agree that it is the sense or experience that is real, not the Presence. One 45 The Trouble with God, p. 186. 46 ibid., p. 204. My italics. 47 Real Like the Daisies, p. 51.

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tolerance and inclusivity might ask, how does his repudiation of the claim of many Friends to have known and experienced the reality of that Presence sit with David’s ‘tolerant’ and ‘inclusive’ welcome of all and sundry into the Society? And surely such a prohibition should exclude not just theists but also those non-theists who believe their experience of the numinous has some objective reference? These are just some of the contradictions one is constantly coming up against in humanist writing for Friends. Who does David accept as a genuine non-theist and how tolerant is he of the varieties of non-theism in the Society? In the Open Letter he explains that there are “many different ways of being nontheist within the Religious Society of Friends” and he lists a number of them (Open Letter, p. 21). However, it turns out that most of the categories he selects are really very similar. So we have atheists “for whom any concept of God is unproductive”, humanists “who understand God as a wholly human construct”, non-realists in the early-Cupitt tradition”, “postmodernists and post-postmodernists”, agnostics and (not quite a concession) those who “sense ‘something other’ or ‘beyond’ that you might call transcendent” (my italics). This is a diversity that is less and less a diversity the more one looks at it. There are, of course, other non-theist positions, such as the different versions of pantheism, but these go unmentioned presumably because they make some claim to the reality of the Divine. Those that are selected are described as consisting of free spirits, enjoying a variety of faith positions and committing to none: None of these groups live, move and have their being in sealed boxes. The categories are fluid, and many of us find ourselves straddling more than one, or moving imperceptibly from one to another—and back again. We too are seekers, and that’s our diversity (Open Letter, p. 21).

But what at first sounds fluid and tolerant appears less so when one realises that the moving around is between categories that are virtually interchangeable. Furthermore, if “none of these groups live, move and have their being in sealed boxes”, what did David 45

The Beyond Within mean when in Real Like the Daisies he gave them a real drubbing down for not staying put? [Radical religious humanism] is not a half-way house between religion and humanism, a refuge for those who simply can’t make up their minds. Radical religious humanism must be more than a safe house for those who want to have their theistic cake and eat it. It may provide for some a useful staging-post in a personal journey from one kind of commitment to another, but if that is all it is, it’s no big deal.48

Two different occasions, two different perspectives. The one ostensibly liberal, the other considerably less so, neither particularly tolerant nor inclusive. We see in both cases that the people who are being sidelined are those who, although not believing in the personhood of God, are nonetheless convinced that their experience of the numinous has a transcendent quality. This, for a humanist, is anathema. So rather than tolerate their ‘in-between’ status, David dismisses them as “simply unable to make up their minds” or wanting “to have their theistic cake and eat it”. I comment on this in Looks on Glass as follows: Boulton wants to keep people in one fixed place, but if we are on a spiritual journey we may need to go through that place to understand what it is about, and then we may need to make a decision whether to let go of the false images of God that are kept there. For some people it is only possible to grasp what the holy is when they are able to contrast it with their experience of the farthest reaches of the secular. For such people, religious humanism could very well be a staging post, a necessary step on a long journey towards the mystery that is God (p. 163).

David speaks of radical religious humanism as dissolving “the old differences between the sacred and the secular, the human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural” (Open Letter, p. 25). In this connection he looks for alliances with those in the Society who argue (rightly from a religious perspective—though the question is 48 Real Like the Daisies, p. 63.

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tolerance and inclusivity not without its difficulties) that “the whole of life is sacramental”. But the two points of view are not the same, or they become the same only if we abolish the transcendent, for if there is no horizon beyond human flourishing, then it is only the Sacred and the Divine that are ‘dissolved’. Levelling down is always at the expense of the higher, the more allusive, the more spiritually profound. So we should not expect radical religious humanism to be tolerant or explorative in considering this important question either. Here in the words of Don Cupitt we have the same argument but in a tone perhaps closer to the sentiments being expressed: Today all the traditional supernaturalist ideas about the religious life are dead, and must be got rid of. Above all, we should be tireless in hunting down and driving out all forms of the repulsive distinction between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ things and concerns.49

Is it surprising, then, that to David’s question, “Can I persuade you that an inclusive Religious Society of Friends is healthier, more generous and more liberal than one that spends its precious time debating who’s in and who’s out?”, my answer is a noncommittal ‘maybe’. I say ‘maybe’ because so much depends on the ideologies we are admitting. David, as we have seen, defines his idea of inclusivity as extending “the hand of Friendship to all who will take it”—in the “evangelical spirit of ‘whosoever will may come’”. Thus, he would open the Society not just to ‘radical religious humanists’ but to any humanists—including, presumably, his fellow members of the British Humanist Association and the Sea of Faith. David may insist that it is not the intention of non-theists (or even humanists?) to turn Britain Yearly Meeting into a secular friendly society but the open door is guaranteed to accomplish just that. What David has done, and not David alone, as he would wish me to point out, is introduce a set of destabilising ideas into the 49 Cupitt, The Old Creed and the New (London: SCM Press, 2006), p. 51. It may be objected that what is being ‘hunted down’ is merely an abstract theological or philosophical concept, not a person. Nevertheless, the violence of Cupitt’s language seems excessive when one considers that included among those who hold to this ‘repulsive’ distinction are his own colleagues, academic and clerical.

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The Beyond Within Society—destabilising because they retain the appearance of religion while contradicting its essence. And because we have accepted them without challenge, and given them parity with our traditional beliefs, the revision process itself is in danger of being undermined. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that since an overextended diversity has made true corporate discernment almost an impossibility, the only choice now open to us is between a negotiated settlement and complete paralysis.

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the passage of time

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n his open letter, David suggests that the more intolerant, or as he puts it, the more ‘OTT’, statements by him which I quote in my book can now be disregarded since they were written over a long period of some thirty years and his views have softened with the passage of time. “Could it be”, he asks, that, as he shared his perspectives with other Friends, theist, nontheist and those rejecting both labels, his emphases were moderated by the corporate experience? Could it even be that Friend David sometimes actually changed his mind. . . ? (Open Letter, p. 17).

Could it be? Well, it would be helpful if David could tell us. So far as I am aware, none of the statements I have quoted has ever been retracted, nor have any specifics been offered as to what led to this change of heart. There does appear to have been change in some areas, but whether it extends to the more ‘OTT’ passages is a moot question. His Godless for God’s Sake with its uncompromising attacks on theism was published in 2006, but we still see it being promoted by the NFN as ‘Our Book’. On the other hand, on the question of inclusivity and, by extension, tolerance we do see quite a dramatic change of direction. The new vision is of a Society of Friends “where committed Christians, Universalists, Jews, Buddhists, theists, post-theists, nontheists and religious humanists joyfully accept their theological and ideological differences, sharing their truths, listening to and respecting each other, and finding heresy only in any form of dogmatic assertion.”50 In Looks on Glass, I comment on this passage as follows: Tolerance of committed Christians and theists has now succeeded intolerance of all that an “an avowed humanist would sweep away”. There is only the uncertainty of what is meant by the prohibition 50 Boulton, Quaker Voices ( July, 2014), p. 6.

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The Beyond Within on “any form of dogmatic assertion”—another undefined expression. Clarifying what one means by these kind of terms is essential to any intelligent wider discussion of the issues (pp. 193–4).

Here the sting in the tail is in the casual phrase “finding heresy only in any form of dogmatic assertion”. What, for David, would constitute a ‘dogmatic assertion’? In the Open Letter (p. 31), David discusses the kind of “dogmatic theism” he was referring to when he described theism as a lie. Generalising from the experience of those well-known mystics, Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush, he had defined the God of theism as “an Ultimate Authority, transcendent, super-human and absolute, who knows what is best for us, and whom we obey or disobey at our peril” (Godless for God’s Sake, pp. 10–11). Surely, when writing this, David was aware that the God he was describing in these terms was emphatically not the God of love whom theistic Friends (and most mainstream Christians) worship. In the Open Letter he appears to exonerate himself by pointing out that he was writing at a time when bin Laden and Bush were each claiming Divine support for their cause. Is this a retraction? He doesn’t say so and the book has now been reprinted without alteration. In the Introduction to Godless (a book of essays by different hands), David sets out his position with great clarity. Having depicted the God of theism in these uncompromising terms, he warns, “the good and godly in our religious societies and our Religious Society” will try to get out of it by claiming that this God is not the God they worship but a God who has been appropriated by those who want to misuse religion for their own purposes. He rejects this defence, and with it any alternative definition of theism, because he believes there are no overarching values to distinguish the true from the false, the good from the bad. I address this argument and the philosophy underlying it in Chapter 9 of my book, “Relativism: the denial of Truth”. Here I just want to point out that there is nothing in anything he has written in recent years (including in the Open Letter) to suggest he has changed his mind on this fundamental question. But notice how the word ‘transcendent’ has 50

the passage of time been slipped in: “an Ultimate Authority, transcendent, super-human and absolute”. It is ‘transcendence’ that, for David, makes the theism he is describing ‘dogmatic’. Transcendence is common to all forms of theism, not just the Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush variety. It is also a feature of the kinds of theism practised by the great Christian mystics, for example, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, and, in our own time, such people as Thomas Merton and Simone Weil—not to mention the great sages of other faiths. These are about as far removed from David’s idea of a toxic, life-denying theism as it is possible to be. Ursula King rather beautifully sums up the theism that expresses the revelation of God’s love in the following terms: A mystic is a person who is deeply aware of the powerful presence of the divine Spirit: someone who seeks, above all, the knowledge and love of God, and who experiences to an extraordinary degree the profoundly personal encounter with the energy of divine life. Mystics often perceive the presence of God throughout the world of nature and in all that is alive, leading to a transfiguration of the ordinary all around them. However, the touch of God is most strongly felt deep within their own hearts.51

Nowhere in David’s writing for Friends is this kind of mystical theism given so much as a glance. It is far easier to condemn the toxic kind directly and other kinds by association. It follows that any form of theism that acknowledges God’s transcendence, in David’s view, should be treated as ‘dogmatic’, ‘heretical’, possibly ‘dangerous’, and therefore, one would expect, not to be tolerated. Despite his joyful acceptance of “theological and ideological difference”, the moderating influence of more grounded Friends and the passage of time, little of substance has changed, and when one reads this section of his Open Letter carefully, one finds that at no point does David actually retract that ‘earlier’ understanding and condemnation of theism. 51 King, Christian Mystics: The Spiritual Heart of the Christian Tradition (London: Batsford, 1998), p. 6.

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The Beyond Within So why is it now being tolerated? No explanation is given for it and we can only guess at the reasons. There seem to be four possibilities: 1. a complete change of heart, 2. the launch of the NFN and the push for acceptance in what might have been seen by its organisers as a theologically unsympathetic environment, 3. the start of preparations for the next revision of Quaker Faith & Practice, 4. the enormous emphasis on ‘inclusivity’ as a principle to be applied across the board, particularly in the wake of our successful campaign for same-sex marriage. (1) seems unlikely since, as we shall see, David continues to regard theism as founded on a lie. (2) and (3) are certainly possible and (4) is bound to be a factor since it provides the perfect ideological background for inviting all and sundry into the Society, thereby progressively diluting the theist presence while at the same time ‘welcoming’ it as one, not particularly noteworthy, element in the general mix. ‘Inclusivity’, as an abstract or ideological principle, is the rod we have made for our own backs and it would be surprising if the NFN leadership didn’t take full advantage of it.

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‘hitched to a lie’

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hen david does contrast that The belief that God ‘earlier’ perspective with his is not dependent on more recent, ‘moderated’ views in the the human mind Open Letter, we find that the contrast and would exist is not with a more acceptable model of even in the event theism but with a model which denies of a major asteroid the transcendent altogether—”natural (as opposed to supernatural) religion”. collision followed His views here are supported by a by the immediate lengthy quotation from a poem by Stevie extinction of all life Smith (not one of her best) which, he on Earth . . . is a says, is “as good a summary as I know view David defines of the religious humanist and Quaker as a lie since, as a nontheist project”—living “without philosophical nonthe dishonesty of pretending our fairy realist, he argues stories are literally true, clinging for that there is nothing comfort to beliefs we do not believe in, beyond language. or allowing good to be hitched to a lie” (Open Letter, p. 31). David began this section by saying that I start my Chapter 8 with “the bald statement that ‘David Boulton defines theism as a lie’” and suggests that I have exaggerated his position. If that is true, I am at a loss to understand what he means by his comment on Stevie Smith. And while my “bald statement”, which incidentally is based on a direct quote, is supported by thirty-two pages of reasoned discussion, all we get from David is the indignant protest that to say theism is a lie “is some distance from ‘defining’ or ‘declaring’ that theism . . . makes you a liar, let alone accusing theist Friends of living a lie” (Open Letter, p. 30). This last is a classic aunt sally. Just to be clear, nowhere in Looks on Glass do I declare that David believes theism makes one a liar or 53

The Beyond Within that he accuses theist Friends of living a lie. Neither the word ‘liar’ nor the phrase ‘living a lie’ occurs anywhere in my book. But I do say that David’s philosophy requires us to think of theism itself as a ‘lie’ because that is what he says: Why, in poet Stevie Smith’s piercing accusation, “allow good to be hitched to a lie”? The ‘lie’ is not God, but the simplistic, literalist notion of God: the notion that ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘it’ exists independently of our human consciousness encoded in human language.52

David is right in one sense, this is the theist position, the belief that God is not dependent on the human mind and would exist even in the event of a major asteroid collision followed by the immediate extinction of all life on Earth. It is a view that David defines as a lie since, as a philosophical non-realist, he argues that there is nothing beyond language: language “goes all the way down”, and God and everything else is merely (David says “gloriously”) a human construct. But non-realism has been rejected by the majority of English speaking philosophers and scientists and I have questioned its relevance for Friends in my Chapter 8. So David’s claim that theism is a lie rests entirely on this now somewhat discredited philosophy and not on Stevie Smith’s poem which he merely calls on for additional support. But if it is ‘misrepresentation and error’ to say that I accuse him of declaring that theists are liars or living a lie, what does David himself mean when, in the Open Letter, he summarises the content of Stevie Smith’s poem as (to repeat) “living without the dishonesty of pretending our fairy stories are literally true, clinging for comfort to beliefs we do not believe in, or allowing good to be hitched to a lie” (my emphases), and then says the poem is a good summary of the religious humanist and Quaker non-theist positions? Whatever the influences of the past thirty years, this clearly expresses what he believes and thinks others should believe now.

52 Godless, p. 11.

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transcendence

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avid begins his section on transcendence with a full-page homily on the meaning of the word in all its applications, not just its use in theology. However, it is in relation to theology that I employ the term in Looks on Glass, and it is in this sense that I will be using it here. David makes the point that it is not only theists or religious mystics who can lay claim to the experience of transcendence: I am no stranger to the experience of transcendence in its less metaphysical meaning. Indeed, most if not all of us will have had peak experiences where we sense the ineffable, perhaps as a real presence, a cosmic benevolence, a moment when time stands still, or an encounter with the miracle of boundless love (Open Letter, pp. 33–4).

Such experiences, he continues, may be triggered by a beautiful piece of music, a perfect line of poetry, a sound, a smell, a silence. But he hastens to add that “we don’t necessarily suppose that our subjective sense of the ineffable is hitched to an objective reality, a Real Presence independent of the physical material universe of which we are a part” (Open Letter, p. 34). Like David, I would put the stress on the word ‘necessarily’, for there are some experiences of the ‘ineffable’ which virtually overwhelm the subject with a sense of Real Presence felt to be both immanent and transcendent and therefore in some degree objective; and even the gentlest intimation in our Meetings for Worship may carry with it that same sense of conviction. Harvey Gillman describes how, as a young man, such an experience ended a decade long dalliance with atheism: I was convinced (convicted, turned upside down, shaken) by something more profound. This led me to want to ‘worship’ (the only word I could use), to say ‘yes’ to something which I would now

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The Beyond Within describe as Presence, the beyond within, Spirit (with a capital S), the divine, even God.53

It is one of the hallmarks of the religious experience that people feel there’s something special about it. To the atheist, such an experience must be a projection or a delusion; but to those who have had experiences of this kind, it seems that nothing could be more real.

When we look more closely at what David is saying, we are immediately faced with a medley of questions. Is he attempting to claim these peak experiences for himself and his fellow humanists while at the same time denying that they have any meaning beyond a kind of spiritual hedonism? The emphasis on ‘sense’ recalls his contention in Real Like the Daisies that “the sense of the presence of God is real enough: but it is the sense, the experience, which is real, not the presence”, adding that to believe otherwise is ‘dangerous’.54 Phrases like ‘when time stands still’ and ‘the miracle of boundless love’ appear to be deliberately clichéd and thrown in not to elevate but to disparage. The tone is reductionist, the subtext “so don’t assume there is anything special about your experience”. But it is one of the hallmarks of the religious experience that people do feel there is something special about it. To the atheist, such an experience must be a projection or a delusion; but to those, like Harvey Gillman, who have had experiences of this kind, it seems that nothing could be more real. In that moment, according to S. L. Frank, we no longer need faith, we know with certainty that God is with us—for the experience is its own guarantee.55 In similar vein, Thomas Merton, describing God as the “infinitely abundant Source”, says that religious experience realised through contemplation, is “above all, awareness of the reality of 53 Gillman, Words (London: Friend Publications, 2016), p. 7. My italics. 54 Real Like the Daisies, p. 51. 55 Frank, God With Us, pp. 21–2.

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transcendence that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond faith”.56 Moreover, the certainty of which Merton and Frank both speak is not confined to the few whose experience has taken the form of a dramatic, lifechanging event but also extends to the many who have heard the barest whisperings of transcendence in the innermost depths of their being, yet have recognised them as the word that heals. To return now to the more ‘everyday’ experiences of the transcendent—the experience of being ‘taken out of ourselves’ by an especially inspired piece of music, a painting of genius, a dramatic performance or a hauntingly beautiful line of poetry. David doesn’t take us beyond his acknowledgement that such intense experiences occur. He doesn’t ask, ‘What do they themselves signify? What is their source? Do they participate in or are they analogous to something deeper?’ These are the kind of questions contemplated by writers such as the literary critic, George Steiner, Rowan Williams and the philosopher, Sarah Allen. They all agree, in Steiner’s words, that “there is language, there is art, because there is ‘the other’”. Art is response, an apprehension of something that goes beyond ourselves, something that seeks to be communicated through us. As Steiner says, “It is out of the fact of confrontation, of affront in the literal sense of the term, that we communicate in words, that we externalise shapes and colours, that we emit organised sounds in the forms of music”.57 Rowan Williams likewise maintains that the poet’s dissatisfaction with our ‘ordinary’ language stems from the pressure of a non-linguistic apprehension of reality, analogous to mystical experience, and registered as a ‘jolt’ from that which lies outside us;58 or as he puts it in an essay on John Donne, we celebrate the great poets not just for the words on the page and for 56 Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY.: New Directions Books, 1962), p. 1. 57 Steiner, Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), pp. 137–8; Allen, The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence: Levinas and Plato on Loving Beyond Being (Pittsburgh, PA.: Duquesne University Press, 2009) and esp. her ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–11; Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), passim. And see Looks on Glass, pp. 139–40. 58 Williams, ibid., p. 7.

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The Beyond Within their musical and conceptual patterning but for their apprehension of a reality the language “allows to show through”.59 And Sarah Allen, writing on the philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, speaks of “the light that is born as soon as subjectivity [associated with non-transcendence and a suffocating immanence] is opened up to otherness”.60 Levinas, says Allen, attempts to reintroduce into philosophy a sense of ‘vertical transcendence’, an understanding of the Divine in experience and one therefore that sits well with the Quaker doctrine of the Inward (not merely ‘Inner’) Light. She describes Levinas’ transcendence as one that is touched by the Infinite or God, one that comes from above and outside the self, but also one that inhabits and commands the self at its very core. This transcendence is not one that can be intended or represented by human thought; rather it pierces the circle of human consciousness by breaking in upon thought from the outside—from an outside that is other and cannot be assimilated into the identity of consciousness.61

Although couched in rather abstract language, this, I believe, is a very accurate description of what is happening in many kinds of religious experience and tallies with the numerous accounts reported by William James in his famous Varieties of Religious Experience. James was aware that in mystical experience God was to be found within us, but maintained that that did not make God and the human subject one.62 Allen’s description also corresponds to the traditional Christian view, which holds that immanence and transcendence are not mutually exclusive. Both are necessary if God is to be in any sense knowable. This is probably what the mainstream of British Quakerism believes even today. It coincides with the early Quaker insistence that in stressing the presence of God within they 59 Moses, J. (ed.), One Equall Light: An Anthology of the Writings of John Donne (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), p. xi. 60 Allen, ibid., p. 55. 61 Allen, pp. 3–4. 62 ibid.

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transcendence were not denying an objectively existing God.63 But even more interesting is the inversion of the subject-object relationship in the Levinasian model where ‘the Other’ is the active subject, which ‘pierces’ the circle of human consciousness, and we the receptive object of that which cannot ultimately be assimilated into our finite human awareness. David’s answer to these sophisticated thinkers is that it’s ‘all in the mind’, an illusion, on a par with belief in “ghoulies and ghosties” (Open Letter, pp. 35–6). However, having apparently ditched his and Don Cupitt’s philosophy of non-realism (he offers no defence against my Chapter 8—‘Non-Realism or Real Presence’) he is left with little or no foundation on which to base that conclusion which must now be regarded as no more than an unsupported assertion.

transcendence and supernaturalism Transcendence, in David’s view, “has been narrowed down to a euphemism for supernaturalism”. But I would have thought they were entirely different. Supernaturalism of the kind David is justly deriding is based on the assumption of a naive dualism involving, as Rowan Williams puts it in a slightly different context, “parallel kinds of substance as the only ontological alternative to physicalism”.64 Theology has moved on considerably from this kind of crude dualism. But for David, ‘moving on’ has not been progress; rather he sees it as a gradual wasting away, death by a thousand cuts: “it seems that God now stands pretty well alone as the sole inhabitant of an enchanted realm, and he too has been etiolated, depersonalised 63 See, for instance, Freiday, D. (ed.), Barclay’s Apology (Newberg, OR.: Barclay Press, 1967), p. 438; Benjamin Nicholson, A Blast from the Lord (London: Calvert, 1653), p. 5 and Samuel Fisher, The Testimony of Truth (London: n.p., 1679), p. 770. The Quakers’ Inward Light finds its source in Luke 17: 21 where ‘within’ (entos) is indeed the more accurate translation. See Fitzmyer, J., The Gospel According to Luke, X–XXIV (Garden City, NY.: Doubleday, 1985). Vol. 2, p. 1161; he says that while Luke normally used en mes¯o for ‘among’ (e.g. Lk. 2: 46, 8: 7, 10: 3), the use of entos in 17: 21 is a rare occurrence, appearing only once elsewhere in the Gospels in Mt. 23: 26. 64 Williams, The Edge of Words, p. 38 (at footnote).

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The Beyond Within as ‘the Spirit’, ‘the Divine’, ‘the Other’” (Open Letter, p. 36). One senses his frustration that God should have survived even in this attenuated form! But of course there is nothing attenuated about the Spirit, the Divine or the Other, nor necessarily are such figures of speech wholly depersonalised. Personhood is perhaps the highest and noblest of human attributes. It is what we most value in our children, our partners and our friends, and it is difficult to see how it could be lacking in the Divinity and Presence experienced as unconditioned Love. And if the word ‘personal’ sounds too provincial for such a Presence it is only because we have forgotten that our limited human personhood draws its character and strength from the Source, and not the other way round. As we all know, theology evolves. It is in the nature of theology to keep pace with developments in all the other fields of human knowledge and endeavour. It is the role of theology to seek coherence with new discoveries—new light. The thousand cuts image is the wrong one, and it doesn’t all have to end in death. Because something has been purified, pared down to its essentials, does not mean that the essentials also have to go. Just to take the term ‘the Other’, we have seen how this is central to the thinking of a wide range of leading philosophers and theologians, not all of them Platonists as David, equating transcendence with ‘a Platonic belief in the Real Presence’, avers. And this centrality and the terms in which it is propounded are explained precisely by the desire to avoid dualistic and anthropomorphic assumptions about God’s essential nature—God’s inscrutability. It may be argued that we cannot relate to a God who is ‘inscrutable’. Are we not looking at the same problem brought against the idea of transcendence itself—that it is beyond the limits of all possible human experience? Again, David never engages with any of the philosophical and theological perspectives presented in Looks on Glass (which is why I am having to re-present some of them in brief here). Instead he prefers to assert his point of view without offering any supporting argument. We have seen in Sarah Allen how in the mystical experience it is not we who cross the boundary to the 60

transcendence ‘inscrutable’, but the ‘inscrutable beyond’ whom we invite to come to us. We hear it, beautifully expressed, in the Taizé song, Veni, Sancte Spiritus. Allen observes that it is the Presence of ‘the Other’ that “inhabits and commands the self at its very core” and not our limited human understanding that grasps at the essence, the alterity, of ‘the Other’. To put it another way, it is the difference between God-as-thought, which results in a concept, including the concept of no-God, and God-as-experienced, which is God as gift/Love. Now let us look at how this ‘problem’ of the inscrutability of God was understood in past Christian tradition (for it is not exactly new!). In my book (pp. 230–1), I refer to two levels of understanding of the transcendent and immanent God, taken not from a modern but an early medieval source: Whether we call the experience of transcendent Love ‘God’ or something else hardly matters. It is as much within the tradition of Christianity to think of God as the ‘incomprehensible mystery’ beyond naming as it is to refer to God as ‘God’. The fifth century theologian, Dionysius the Areopagite urges us in The Divine Names not to speak of the Ineffable and Unknown “with the persuasive words of human wisdom” and so to “refrain from speaking or forming any conception whatever of the super-essential and hidden God”.65 Despite this, or in order to explain it further, he makes a distinction between God’s undifferentiated nature which is beyond the reach of the human mind, being approached only through the practice of ‘mystical unknowing’, and God’s differentiated nature by which is made manifest the Divine ‘emanations’ or attributes of Love, Goodness, Truth, Wisdom, Power, etc. In that sense, God is more than Love, the ‘more’ belonging to the undifferentiated nature which cannot be known in a conceptual sense since it transcends all knowledge, but can be experienced in union with God—as Dionysius says “after the manner of the angels, since it is through the stilling of all the activities of the mind that the 65 See Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names (tr. The Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom. Fintry Brook: The Shrine of Wisdom, 1957), p. 9. The term ‘super-essential’ is defined by the translators as “beyond the reach of that which is particular”. Yet, they add, “through mystical agnosia or unknowing, the particular can be transcended”.

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The Beyond Within union of the Godlike minds with the super-eminently Divine Light takes place”.66 Here we have the two essential components of mystical religion, the understanding of God as both Mystery and Divine Love. Not God as Love without remainder, but God as the Mystery of the source of Love—a concept which will be familiar to Friends through the writings of the early Quakers, in particular Isaac Penington for whom (as we have seen) the things of the spirit could not be known but “in union with them [and] in the receiving of them”.67 Doubtless too this was what Eckhart meant when he spoke of “the God beyond God” and made his famous pronouncement that “man’s last and highest parting occurs when, for God’s sake, he takes leave of God”. He was referring of course to what Dionysius called ‘the mystical agnosia’, and the long line of mystics who came after him, ‘the via negativa’, the selfemptying of the soul—and not, as Boulton suggests, an embryonic non-theism. For whatever we might understand by the ‘nothing’ (no-thing) that Eckhart applied to his experience of the Godhead it came to him by way of a consistent and dynamic theism.68

Among the most illuminating accounts I have of transcendence in the ‘vertical’ sense is one I found in Evelyn Underhill’s The Golden Sequence. She describes the sacred, the numinous, as something most real and fundamental to our human world, permeating all deep human experience, though always lying just beyond the range of conceptual thought. Our experience of this ‘something’ may be slight and fleeting, or profound and transforming. But it is always the experience of a living reality; an unseen energy other than ourselves, and having in its own right a range of being and significance unconditioned by the narrow human world. 66 The Divine Names, p. 13. 67 Penington, A Question to the Professors of Christianity (London: n.p., 1667), p. 6. 68 See Lanzetta, B., ’Three Categories of Nothingness in Eckhart’, The Journal of Religion 72, 2 (1992), pp. 248–68. David interprets Eckhart as saying that the price of truth is self-denial in matters material, intellectual and spiritual (Godless, p. 6). Eckhart, however, was referring to Truth as the goal of religious contemplation not philosophical truth. A Dominican friar, the substratum of his theology was theist and trinitarian.

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transcendence This reality is not, like sunlight, susceptible of analysis. Its character is never truly clear to the logical levels of the mind. It is, as the Victorines declared, ‘beyond reason’ though not ‘against reason’. It is known, therefore, more richly by intuition than it can ever be by intellect; and for these reasons . . . most richly and steadily by those who accept, in some way or degree, the special disciplines of the religious life.69

Would David regard this too as ‘dangerous’ and thus not to be “ignored in the name of tolerance”? For him, it is simply commonsense to say that we cannot get beyond the physical material universe. As he sees it, the transcendent is not a meaningful idea in any sense at all, since if it is defined as lying outside the limits of human experience and thought, we are bound to say that no-one can experience or think it. But that is to fall back on a tautology. If we define something in advance as completely beyond our experience and powers of thought, then logically it cannot be either experienced or thought. But the transcendent doesn’t have to be thought or defined in that way. In Looks on Glass I give examples from literature of the power of language to evoke that which lies beyond language, showing how the ineffable can be both real and present to the imagination without defining it in words, and how for Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Rowan Williams et al, it is the ‘Other’ that comes to us, not we who are left straining after what cannot be thought or defined—striking “with our spirit’s knife/ Invulnerable nothings”.70 Here I would refer the reader back to the passage from Sarah Allen: “This transcendence is not one that can be intended or represented by human thought; rather it pierces the circle of human consciousness by breaking in upon thought from the outside—from an outside that is other and cannot be assimilated into the identity of consciousness.” 69 Underhill, The Golden Sequence: A Fourfold Study of the Spiritual Life (London: Methuen, 1932), p. 2. The Victorines were a medieval group of philosophers and mystics based at the University of Paris. 70 From Shelley’s “Adonais”.

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denial of the transcendent In Looks on Glass I discuss the transcendent in relation to the experience of Divine Love in a variety of different contexts. The denial of the transcendent leads to the denial of foundational Truth and so has far-reaching implications for ethics. I explore some of these questions in Chapter 9 of the book, one of the chapters David ignores in his Open Letter—surprisingly, as it is the basis on which he justifies so much else he has to say. Here is a passage from my discussion of relativism and Truth: The relativist may still reply that Divine Love is an illusion since all our concepts are human concepts, and that this includes our understanding of whatever is assumed to impinge on our human awareness from ‘outside’. However, as I have argued in Chapter 8, this would mean privileging a non-realist over a critical realist view of reality (a choice which the overwhelming majority of scientists and philosophers have rejected) and ignores the way in which, as John Milbank puts it, “our mode of knowing is continuously reshaped by what there is to be known”.71 In other words, there is a way in which reality ‘comes at us’, forcing us to change or adapt our theories (if we’re scientists), to extend the scope and reach of language itself (if we’re poets) and opening us to the transforming power of Divine Love (if we are mystics or contemplatives). Boulton regards any suggestion that we may have access to absolute truth in any form as “displaying the overweening arrogance of men playing God”,72 paradoxically appealing to a theistic instinct, 71 See Shortt, R., God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005), p. 110. 72 Boulton, The Trouble with God, p. 217. We have of course been here before. David Hume makes the same charge, specifically focusing on the Quakers, and with the same assumption that religious experience is to be understood in terms of human pride rather than response to the free gift of Love: The Quakers are the most egregious . . . as enthusiasm arises from a presumptuous pride and confidence, it thinks itself sufficiently qualified to approach the Divinity, without any human mediator. Its rapturous devotions are so fervent, that it even imagines itself actually to approach him by way of contemplation and inward converse. . . . The fanatic consecrates himself, and bestows on his own

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transcendence the wish to avoid blasphemy. But is it overweening arrogance or playing God to seek the absolute truth that may have access to us?—to feel in our heart of hearts that it is God who is taking the initiative in making us aware of that in experience which we know to be more than subjective, an awareness for which we can take no credit upon ourselves?73

Friends have long been receptive to the kind of ideas in which philosophies like relativism, which deny transcendence, can take root and flourish. A small but telling example might be the following statement: “The religious life is an adventure, with no stoppingplaces. Nowhere can one say ‘This I know’; never more than ‘That’s what I now believe’”. It is true that the religious life is an adventure and there are indeed no permanent stopping places. It is also true that at any one time we can only say what we believe. But by counterposing the two forms of knowledge just mentioned, rejecting the former in favour of the latter, the writer is making a statement about truth being relative to the individual. ‘This I know’ is saying that there is a truth beyond us which we can know in experience. ‘That’s what I now believe’ is saying that truth is subjective, with the implication that it changes from day to day and from individual to individual. I have taken the example from Damaris Parker-Rhodes’ 1977 Swarthmore Lecture, Truth: A Path And Not a Possession. But these words (which are in sharp contrast to George Fox’s “This I know experimentally”) are not to be found in the body of her text, but on the inside cover of the published lecture, raising a suspicion that they may not be Parker-Rhodes’ own words. The lecture is not about all of us having our own ever-changing truths for which we can claim no greater authority than our individual human thoughtprocesses. It is about her journey towards a Quaker Christianity, her person a sacred character, much superior to what forms and ceremonious institutions can confer on any other. See Hume, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm (1741) in Wollheim, R. (ed.), Hume on Religion (London: Fontana, 1963), pp. 248–9. 73 Looks on Glass, pp. 161–2.

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The Beyond Within Quaker faith in continuing revelation and the spiritual adventure of being open to new light under the inspiration and guidance of the Spirit. The nearest she comes in the lecture to the ideas that are expressed in the summary is when she says, “Quakers see truth in terms of the Christ Within, the Seed, and the Inward Light. This is a concept which points to truth as being in movement and not static”.74 But that is the opposite of subjectivism. Truth is a path and not a possession because to treat it as a possession is to limit the freedom of the Christ (what she also calls ‘the Cosmic Christ’), confining it to the little space of our own egos. The summary, on the other hand, expresses the kind of relativistic thinking that was part of the changing ethos of the Society in the late 1970s/early 80s as it made room for the new universalism, and is asserting itself again as we prepare to compromise with death-of-God humanism. The really noble aim of atheistic humanism, the humanism of Feuerbach, Nietzsche and of Auguste Comte (the original founder of ‘radical religious humanism’), was to complete the death of God in order to restore to humanity its own essence and faith in itself. But the experience of two world wars and the horror of the Nazi death camps (and in our own time the cruelty perpetrated in Cambodia, Rwanda and by all sides in the Balkans and the Middle East) has put paid to any sense of humanity being a glorious end in itself. As the atheist, Michel Foucault, said, “Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end”,75 and Jean-Paul Sartre, “I cannot count upon men whom I do not know, I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon man’s interest in the good of society, seeing that man is free and that there is no human nature which I can take as foundational.”76 There are now strong indications that the future of so-called religious humanism will be one which deprives it of any claim to restore 74 Parker-Rhodes, Truth: A Path and Not a Possession (London: FHSC, 1977), p. 12. 75 Foucault quoted in Hillebert, J., ‘The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity’, New Blackfriars 95, 1060 (2014), p. 675. 76 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen, 2007 [1946]), p. 46.

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transcendence to humanity its own essence and faith in In repudiating itself. On the contrary, the trend now is transcendence to reject outright “the very possibility and opting for a of an irreducible or given human nature purely immanentist . . . or of something in man that is essenunderstanding of tially or fundamentally human and that 77 forms the core of human existence”. the nature of God, In repudiating transcendence and we have opened opting for a purely immanentist underthe way not just to standing of the nature of God, we have anti-theism but to opened the way not just to anti-thea terrifying antiism but to a terrifying anti-humanism humanism which which leaves us with no final ground leaves us with no on which to take a stand for peace final ground on and non-violence but throws us naked which to take a and defenceless against the strength stand for peace and of a pitiless world order. Alexander non-violence. Solzhenitsyn and Henri de Lubac have both argued that without God the sense of the sacredness of human life is vulnerable to powerful vested interests and oppressive ideologies which are corrupting of ordinary human feeling. It is a mistake, then, to say that theism is “our problem rather than our salvation”. It is our Quaker understanding and recognition of ‘that of God’, the imprint of the Divine in each and every one of us and in the environment and non-human world, that saves us from ourselves.78 In giving so much space in his Open Letter to transcendence, David has homed in on what for him was the key sticking point. However, if I am certain of anything it is that the Society must at some point face the question of God’s transcendence, and where it stands on that question—or disappear from the pages of history. 77 Geroulanos, S. quoted in Hillebert, ibid., pp. 674–5. Emphases are Geroulanos’. 78 See A. Riches, “Christology and Anti-Humanism”, Modern Theology ( July 2013), p. 312.

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The Beyond Within

‘words’—transcendence and personhood It seems that words are the arena in which the battle for Quaker Faith & Practice and hence the future of the Society will be fought out. I use the language of conflict because—to speak plainly—there is, without any doubt, a behind-the-scenes struggle going on for the soul of the Society in which language is currently playing the principal part. This is not a battle of words, but a battle for words, many of them listed in Harvey Gillman’s recent book of that name. Let me say at the very outset that what follows is not an unfriendly criticism of Harvey Gillman; but I am questioning, in the mildest possible manner, the position of The Friend magazine, whose editor, Ian Kirk-Smith, summarises the point of Harvey’s book as showing how words “can be closed and exclusive or . . . open and inclusive”. We are back with the culture of diversity and inclusion which has already done so much damage and is now set to test us to the very limit. Is it really that simple? Is it now a core Quaker belief that diversity—all diversity—and inclusivity—all inclusivity— are goods in their own right? How far can the Society’s diversity be extended before it breaks? How inclusive can we become before the words we rely on lose their distinctive religious meanings—before we begin to say, ‘None of that matters’? As it happens, Harvey Gillman’s Words turned out to be a very good read. I found myself ticking my agreement against sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. When he speaks of “something which I would now describe as Presence, the beyond within, Spirit (with a capital S), the divine, even God” I am in no doubt that we share the same understanding. When he says it is not the name but the relationship that is paramount, I naturally concur, although for reasons which I will explain later I would not ditch the name either. When he reminds us that for Martin Buber the only real name for the Divine is Thou!, I again find myself in complete agreement (see Looks on Glass, p. 225), but would have liked him to explore the theological implications of that statement a little further. And when he says “Prayer is the voice of life itself speaking 68

transcendence through our particular being” and “Prayer is a disposition of the Spirit/spirit, and intention of the soul”, he reveals the true attitude of the mystic, for such prayer doesn’t require words, although it may start with words. My only criticism, and it is a very general one, is that his love of paradox can sometimes leave us wondering where he himself stands amidst the multifaceted meanings he explores. We have the labyrinth but without Ariadne’s thread to wind us back to our origins. His reflections on the individual words, although ingenious and thoughtful, leave us with little solid ground on which to construct meaning in any larger sense. It sometimes feels as if his ‘words’ are like wet, mossy stones causing us to slip and slide, so that we immediately lose our balance and all sense of direction. Is this because, rather than helping us find our way to some foundational meaning on which we can be more or less agreed, his words are so ‘open’ and ‘inclusive’ that no one meaning can be inferred? And doesn’t this both reflect and reinforce the ethos of the modern Quaker Meeting? In his meditation on Christianity, Harvey asks the question, “Who owns the copyright of the word?” In John 1:1 we are told that “the Word was with God and the Word was God.” But if we say no-one owns the copyright, the word can be interpreted any way one likes—all words are up for grabs. Tradition—a centuries long meditation—counts for nothing, or very little, and ‘openness’ and ‘inclusivity’ place all readings on an equal footing. Are Friends so smitten by the doctrines of a dying postmodernism that they see no danger in that? One of Harvey’s most baffling paradoxes is that around the conflict between the personal and impersonal in God—and yet I think this is the one with which I have most sympathy. Having said that “it is not the naming but the relationship that is paramount” and commended Martin Buber for addressing the Divine as ‘Thou’, he explains: I am a person, hence I express relationship in personal terms, but I do not assume that the divine is personal—nor yet impersonal.

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The Beyond Within Thus I am neither theist nor nontheist (or am I both at the same time?). As I stress relationship over definition, I am not an -ist, for I will not define myself either.79

But he has already defined himself, very adequately for the purposes of this discussion—as a person! And what kind of relationship can a person have with an impersonal Thou who neither sees nor cares for you? What would such a Thou mean? There is a section on this in Looks on Glass (pp. 217–19) as well as an Appendix, “God as Energy and God as Person” (by Rachel Britton, pp. 263–6), but I would like to make a few additional comments here. It is often said that we cannot define God, but when we say that God is Love, isn’t that a kind of definition? And yet this ‘definition’ goes beyond the concept that God is Love to the experience. Similarly, when we say we believe in God, it is the experience that enables belief: In regard [for instance] to the use of the word ‘Faith’. . . the Society of Friends has never been content to use the word with a purely intellectual connotation. The Faith which is essential to Christianity it conceives to be a much deeper thing—the response of a [person]’s whole being to the love and grace of God when this is inwardly revealed. . . . It is not only a belief in truth (cognitive), but a surrender to truth (volitional).80

So belief is not merely conceptual—it is not a case of believing in belief, or having faith in faith, as Nietzsche put it, but of being enabled through experience to believe. “I believe because I see.” In Looks on Glass I develop the idea of the personal in God in relation to a discussion around the ‘Quaker method’, or as it is sometimes called ‘Gospel Order’: But in order to uphold the Quaker method, is it necessary to believe or place one’s faith in a personal God? What about “aligning ourselves” with a “force for good” in the universe—something quite 79 Gillman, ibid., p. 7. 80 From Christian Life, Faith & Thought in the Society of Friends (London: The Friends’ Bookshop, 1922), p. 12.

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transcendence different from the God of theism? Well, for a start we would have to re-write (or eliminate) so many of those wonderful passages on discernment in Quaker Faith & Practice which would mean altering the very spirit they breathe. But let us look at what a supposed “force for good” implies. If we mean something more than the other forces in the universe—such as gravity and dark matter—and the word ‘good’ seems to suggest that we do—then there are a number of consequences. ‘Good’ is a moral, not a scientific term. It implies that there is moral purpose in the universe. However, we can’t have a moral purpose on its own. To make sense it needs a moral agent. Good also implies love, and we can’t have love without a lover and a beloved. And these—the moral and the loving—require some form of conscious way of being. The lover must know that It loves and what It loves, otherwise love is impossible. A “force for good” cannot therefore be impersonal—like a stone, or the force of gravity. In some way it must include the personal. Without the element of the personal, however difficult it is to conceive of that in relation to God, we are reduced to bringing our own wills into alignment with an impersonal force which logically and by definition can be neither moral nor loving.81

However, it would be a crude form of theism that thought of God as a person, with the smallness or finitude that implies, or of ourselves as having a relationship with God as we would with another human individual, such as a lover or spouse. It rings truer to experience to remove the indefinite article and think of God as in 81 Looks on Glass, p. 203. Some idea of what this can mean is suggested by Keith Ward in the chapter on ‘the personal ground of being’ in his God: a Guide for the Perplexed (London: One World, 2003). Among others, he refers to the philosopher Schopenhauer who “saw the whole universe as the tragic appearance of a blind striving of the will, a striving which leads inevitably to conflict, unhappiness and suffering”, and to Nietzsche who “looked forward to the advent of the superman, who would completely reject Christian values such as mercy and submissiveness, and incarnate in himself the pure will to power, in a life serene and pitiless, strong and free.” In Nietzsche, as in Schopenhauer, God is understood as “the universal Will which is beyond good and evil, and for which ceaseless striving without a moral goal is the only reality.” Ward warns: “This is what happens when the vision of transcendent Goodness is lost, and one sees only the struggle and suffering and the will to power of the universe itself as the final reality”.

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The Beyond Within some way including the personal, and of our relationship with God more as a state in which we ‘find ourselves’(in both senses of that phrase)—or as Harvey says of prayer, “a disposition of the Spirit/ spirit, and intention of the soul”. And again, when like early Friends we talk of God ‘without’, we don’t mean that we externalise God, or summon ‘Him’ up, as David seems to think, as a ghostly figure in a Meeting for Worship which he describes as a kind of séance, but that God ‘comes’ to us, i.e. is Present to us, from ‘beyond’ what we understand as ‘being’. This is where much modern theology is ‘at’ (and where Friends have been all along) and it’s just plain silly to go on having the same arguments about entities or ontologies which theology has long since passed by. But having made the point, it must be said that this too grossly oversimplifies the direction of current theological explorations which are much more interesting than many Friends seem willing to admit.

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language

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t is in his response to my Chapter 7, “Gently Move—the search for a common language”, that David attempts to shift the discussion onto a much more personal plane where I am accused directly and indirectly of intolerance and narrowness. Do you really hold that searching, free-thinking and speaking our truth with integrity are inimical to modern Quakerism and “the school of Christ”? I think that many Friends will find such a narrow, inward-looking perspective disconcerting and disappointing (Open Letter, pp. 49–50).

As he rightly says, the chapter is a critical analysis of an article in The Friend jointly authored by himself and John Lampen.82 But before I go any further, I should like to recall some of my opening remarks in order to emphasise that criticism or analysis does not imply animosity or disrespect. I wish to make it absolutely clear, in the light of David’s reproach, that I feel no animosity towards anyone, not David himself, and least of all John who has done far more than most of us to bring reconciliation and healing where it is most needed. David is right to quote Herbert’s line, “anger is not love, nor wisdom either”. However, my book was not written in anger, but as a long-considered religious concern about trends which I felt were seriously damaging to our Society and yet were not being given the attention they urgently needed. Sometimes a ‘passionate intensity’ can be mistaken for anger. The suggestion that I am opposed to freedom of thought and speaking truth is both untrue and, I must say, unjust. What I hope came across in the book is that I would have preferred a different emphasis. I was making a very different kind of point, one which receives its meaning from the religious rather than the secular sphere where David positions it. “Our hesitancy”, I wrote, 82 ‘Gently Move’, The Friend (16th Jan., 2009), pp. 14–15.

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The Beyond Within “is around phrases such as ‘free-thinking’, ‘their own conviction’, ‘speaking our truth’”: However suited to life in a secular democracy, they are not the sentiments one would expect of the ‘humble learner in the school of Christ’; there is a note of self-projection in this way of speaking that seems curiously at odds with a professed religion of the Spirit. . . . Friends giving ministry are accustomed to asking themselves, ‘Does it come inwardly from God?’ Even where the word ‘God’ is not used, they are asked to pray that their ministry may arise from deep experience, and to trust that words will be given (Advices and Queries, 13). It is not their own truth they are seeking but the Highest Truth. Without this assurance . . . they should remain silent. When one thinks about it, it’s a strange thought that one should go to Meeting to accept or cherish the free-thinking capacity of anyone. But this is clearly another, and logical, consequence of a heavily secularised notion of diversity (Looks on Glass, pp. 100–1).

One might be forgiven for asking why David chose these particular words and phrases in the first place to describe the “spirit of modern Quakerism”? ‘Free-thinking’ is a rationalist term and surely he was aware that The Freethinker is the name of a humanist journal with a strongly anti-religious and atheistic stance, dedicated to “waging relentless war against Christian superstition”?83 After quoting several long tracts from his and John’s article, David comments: “I find it difficult to imagine how any unprejudiced and open-minded Friend could take this to be anything other than a gentle plea to all Friends to observe Friendly courtesy and gentleness in matters of Quaker controversy, avoiding hurtful 83 The full mission statement, published in the first edition (1881), reads: “The Freethinker is an anti-Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against superstition in general, and against Christian superstition in particular. It will do its best to employ the resources of Science, Scholarship, Philosophy and Ethics against the claims of the Bible as a Divine Revelation; and it will not scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or sarcasm that may be borrowed from the armoury of Common Sense.”

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language language in personal communication and seeking inclusiveness in our public statements” (Open Letter, p. 48). Accusations of anger, darkness (!), narrowness, prejudice and hurtfulness aside, my answer to that is simple. Their article is much more than a ‘gentle plea’. I see it as exemplifying the very trends that gave rise to the concerns in my book, facilitating (despite John’s involvement) the movement towards accommodation and secularism which I cover in detail in my Chapter 3. If readers are in any doubt about this, I hope they will consider the following passage from the article itself, which incidentally David omitted to include in his long ‘reminder’ of what his and John’s article was actually about: Scientists use hypotheses in trying to make sense of what they observe; and these hypotheses can always be revised or discarded. Friends too form their own hypotheses, or adopt traditional ones, in trying to understand a host of things such as the roots of morality, the bonds we feel with one another, the stories that we find meaningful and the peak experiences that give us a sense of transcendence.84

Although line-by-line one could agree with this statement, the overall sense is that our religious beliefs are on the same footing as scientific hypotheses and can be discarded just as easily and with the same lack of compunction. I suspect John himself would not read the passage in this way, but I suggest it is how most others would read it. Moreover, it allows into the discussion a whole host of other theological perspectives, including relativism in relation to morality, the basis of fellowship, the realities behind our ‘stories’ and what we mean by “the sense of the transcendent”. John and David have diametrically opposed views on all of these issues, yet the passage and the article as a whole give a false impression of unity. If I am at all critical of John, it is because I believe he has conceded too much in what could be an important negotiation for the Revision Preparation Group. If the article were no more 84 ‘Gently Move’, p. 14.

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The Beyond Within than a ‘gentle plea for gentleness’, I would probably have read it with approval, absorbed it into other reading and forgotten about it, rather than have written a whole chapter in response. In Looks on Glass I cite a letter from Carole Hamby (The Friend, 9th August 2013) in which she expresses her concern that some Friends may be planning to ‘modernise’ the language of Quaker Faith & Practice to avoid giving offence to non-theists. This shows that I am not alone in voicing such suspicions (which David presents as an expression of my ‘dark’ side)—and I still believe they are justified. There is certainly an on-going conversation about this in Friendly circles, and I hope I may be forgiven for exploiting the ambiguity of the title to hint at the kind of, let us say, ‘quiet processes’ that might be needed to manage such a key change. After all, David himself says that the search for a common language will take “a great deal of skill and determination”. What skills did he mean? In his reply to Carole Hamby (16th August, 2013), David assures us that the NFN “is not in the business of trying to write the God word out of Quaker life”: Of course it would be absurd to bowdlerise George Fox and early Friends by deleting their theistic language: the anthology sections of Quaker Faith & Practice, written in the language of their time, are a precious part of our common Quaker heritage.

I wonder if Carole Hamby felt reassured by this? Whenever it is suggested that there may be moves afoot to change the language of Quaker Faith & Practice by replacing the word ‘God’ (I prefer this to the derogatory ‘God-word’) with more ‘inclusive’ terms, the denials start coming thick and fast (along with the accusations of ‘darkness’) but I notice that they always converge on the 17th century extracts, as if these were the sole or the main focus of concern. We find the same protestations, with the same diversionary aunt sallies, in the Open Letter: It will take a great deal of skill and determination to find ways of describing our aims, beliefs, experiences and practice in terms that we can all own, but we have to try. Moreover, seeking inclusive

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language ways of expressing ourselves in a manner that is true to our diversity does not mean that we bowdlerise the language of Nayler, Howgill, Barclay and others by anthologising them with the God-words removed! Their seventeenth-century language is our beautiful and blessed heritage—but it is no longer the home-language of all twenty-first century Friends (p. 51).

So far as I am aware no-one has ever suggested there might be a plan to bowdlerise the writings of early Friends! Nor am I aware that anyone has suggested making seventeenth century language our mother-tongue. It is what the plans might be for Quaker Faith & Practice as a whole—right up to the present day—that gives cause for concern. At this point, David turns on me in some exasperation to ask: “Do you not recognise the difference between including an alternative view and imposing it to the exclusion of others? To challenge transcendence theology is not to deny it a place in the book” (Open Letter, p. 55; David’s italics). But that again isn’t quite to the point. We’re talking about the fate of the word ‘God’, and I know for a positive fact that there are Friends who reject the word ‘God’ on the mistaken ground that it reflects only a seventeenth century theology, while at the same time ransacking the seventeenth century archives for alternative terms that are felt to carry less baggage but are certainly more esoteric. As for ‘transcendence theology’ (which, after all, simply refers to ‘belief in God’) being given a ‘place’ in Quaker Faith & Practice, it is part of my case that we need urgently to redress the imbalance between immanence and transcendence in favour of transcendence (though both are needed) or resign ourselves to the inevitable consequences (see Looks on Glass, pp. 255–60). Allowing ‘theistic language’, or yet more simply ‘God’, a place in the Book of Discipline will not be enough. It has to retain the leading place unless we want to change the purpose of the Society and take a qualitative step into an entirely different belief-system— Gretta Vosper style. This isn’t authoritarianism; it is commonsense. David continues his protest with the remark: “Our request is for 77

The Beyond Within more inclusivity: your response is what Mark Frankel [in a Quaker blog] describes as ‘a call for the revival of exclusivism’”. I have already answered the charge of exclusivism. But a humanist request for more inclusivity, to be expressed in the language we use in our church affairs? Well, yes: more begets more. Just to cast our eye back to the passage quoted, it is not only the anthology pieces as such but the language we use to describe our aims, beliefs, experience and practices that we are told we must try to make more inclusive, and as we saw earlier, even our outreach leaflets now stand to be rewritten. The number of Friends calling for these changes may still be small, but their influence rides on a tidal wave of fashionable inwords and affects every aspect of our corporate life. We can be sure that, for the time being at least, God-language won’t be redacted altogether, but there will be a persistent pressure, met by continued adjustment and accommodation, to deny God that central focus at the heart of Quaker worship. Our Testimony to equality, interpreted in a secular sense, i.e. no longer meaning ‘equality before God’, will ensure that absolutely everything will be divided down the middle. On the one side, the humanist denial of the transcendent reality of God and on the other the various kinds of affirmation of that reality. We may not like these binary oppositions, but unless we can find the courage to act now—which will mean revising our admission criteria—or unless something extraordinary happens—some movement of the Spirit, for instance, that again “gathers us all as in a net”—they will eventually be forced on us. Quaker Faith & Practice currently affords God that leading place which speaks of the primary orientation of the Society and in language that is contemporary, spiritual and profound. For this reason it is my hope that any major revision will be postponed as unnecessary and imprudent until such time as Friends are more in unity. This of course does not rule out the minor changes that will be needed to celebrate same-sex marriage and the diversity of sexual orientation and to incorporate the structural changes that have been introduced in response to pressures from the Charity Commission. 78

language But it does mean that we find the courage and faith to set aside the supposition, itself grounded in secular thinking, that “an unrevised Book of Discipline will be owned by fewer and fewer Quakers”, as if that were a trend that could not, with God’s help, be reversed.85 In the meantime, the search for a shared language will no doubt continue. This is a different search from the search for balance in the type of extracts to be included in the Book of Discipline. Presumably, a shared language would be one which we could all use, one which would accommodate the views and experiences of as many people as possible. As an aim, this seems reasonable enough, but is it realistic? Such a ‘language’ might go some way towards removing the terms ‘theist’ and ‘non-theist’ from our shared vocabulary, but won’t it mean replacing them with other terms which point to the same divisions? And, once the new terms become markers for the different Quaker groups won’t we be back to where we started or worse? Rather than a shared language encompassing different perspectives, we are more likely to continue with the language or languages we have, only now with communication inhibited by the implicit embargo on the ‘unshared’ items of vocabulary. And since the unshared items are likely to be those commonly used by theists, such an embargo would inevitably work to the disadvantage of the theist perspective. In addition to these difficulties, there are others which should not go unmentioned. In their ‘Gently Move’ article, David and John have told us “we need to take scrupulous care to seek forms of words that are as inclusive as we can make them”. As I suggest in my Chapter 7, also entitled ‘Gently Move’, this is likely to build a misleading ambiguity into our Quaker language and could, therefore, give a false (dishonest?) impression of unity to the general public. Moreover, there is a real danger that in our efforts to be inclusive across the whole range, including atheism, we will favour terms which stress the immanent only. There are Friends who are now 85 As reported in the NFN Newsletter (March, 2016), p. 4.

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The Beyond Within looking to the early Quaker tradition for more ‘inclusive’ alternatives to the word ‘God’. Expressions like ‘the Light’ or ‘the Seed’, have been suggested, but stripped of their troublesome associations with the transcendent, they will seem not only ambiguous but evasive. Such terms will have to be extracted from their traditional contexts and reinterpreted to suit a ‘modern’ agenda. But this leads to an interesting question: how much is our inclusiveness in fact excluding? A good part of the answer may lie in the words of Richenda Scott in her 1964 Swarthmore Lecture: The Inward Light or Seed is dormant, a mere potentiality, until it is awakened and kindled by the coming of God to man in his own experience. And the Light has no meaning for Fox and the early Friends till it is identified with the revelation of God in Christ. The Light is Christ, or the Holy Spirit, the power and grace of God.86

To use such terms with the stress entirely on immanence, even though they are Quaker in origin, would be an evasion and a very significant concession to atheism (under whatever name). Moreover, expressions such as ‘sinking down to the Seed’, beautiful though they are, don’t trip off the tongue lightly. If used, such expressions could lead to inhibited and awkward ministry and perhaps to some Friends not ministering at all. Finally, what would the search for a ‘common language’ mean for the theologically-based special interest groups in the Society? Could they survive without their own specialised terminology? Would it not require them to dissolve their special interest identities so that everyone was seen to participate in the general mix? David says he doesn’t want the ‘debilitating polarities’ of theist and nontheist. This, then, could be an excellent opportunity for the NFN to take the initiative and move the Society into a less polarised position. But will it? In rejecting a criterion of openness to the possibility of the transcendent, it would seem that humanist non-theists are also implicitly rejecting the possibility of a common language which would be open to theist experience. David’s choice in his 86 Scott, Tradition and Experience (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 71.

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language Open Letter (p. 34) of the phrase “hitched to an objective reality” is unarguably deliberate and tells us that his views on the status of personal and corporate religious experience remain unchanged; those who don’t necessarily suppose such experience is wholly subjective are again portrayed as falling for a lie. This does not augur well for an inclusive language that would be acceptable to all. As David says, the search for a common language will require great skill and determination—but also, if the difficulties I outline are anything to go by, it will take time.

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language and renewal

W

hen i was writing Looks on Glass, I hadn’t read Ursula Jane O’Shea’s 1993 Backhouse Lecture. It is a paper of quite extraordinary clarity, which breathes her love for the Society, from which she was later to resign, and places the whole process of what she describes as organisational and spiritual “breakdown” in its historical context. Breakdown, she says, occurs as the result of multiple heightened internal stresses and is usually final. The final stage in the life-cycle is termed ‘transition’: A faith community in transition will rightly ask itself the regular questions of any organisation in crisis: ‘What is wrong?’, ‘What can we do to fix it?’ Faith communities which look for and accept the guidance of God in their corporate life also need to ask other questions: ‘Have we been faithful to the guidance we have received?’, ‘Where is this crisis leading us?’ The most powerful factor affecting a religious organisation’s vitality will be the vigour with which its members, corporately and individually, feel united and inspired by relationship with the divine.87

Although individual leadings are the starting point, renewal, she emphasises, will only occur through the efforts of a large section of the community acting under guidance: “Transformation of a group can begin nowhere else but within each person, but it is the spiritual openness of a community to divine guidance [that will] ultimately determine the success or failure of their transition”. With renewal as the goal, Friends, individually and communally, must be prepared to make the necessary sacrifices and take whatever steps are needed to reconfigure the Society as an instrument for God’s action in the world. Renewal means stepping outside our comfort zone and entering the spiritual state our forbears called ‘convincement’, a redemptive process which invariably involved suffering. As Fox 87 O’Shea, Living the Way: Quaker spirituality and community (Backhouse Lecture. Brisbane: RSF, 1993/Quaker Books, 2003), p. 56.

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language and renewal understood and taught, we have to re-enact the gospel story in our personal and communal lives. Renewal of the Society waits for the choice of each Friend. Am I willing to risk the disturbing, transfiguring presence of the Spirit in my life? To obey it? To expect ‘the Cross’ and dark days as I discover and nurture who I am before God? . . . If significant numbers of us are not interested in, or willing to live by these experiences, the hoped-for renewal of our meetings cannot occur. But if our collective spiritual power gathers strength it will infect other Friends and newcomers. Ministry will become more grounded in the Spirit and individuals will be inspired by the Spirit to serve our meetings as nurturers, prophets and conservers.88

If we are to make progress, the search for a shared language could well be the catalyst for this. O’Shea was very aware of the connection between spiritual renewal and the need for a language in which we can “communicate our own parts of the pattern to one another”. However, she acknowledges that “exploration of an appropriate language to convey religious experience is beyond the scope of [her] lecture”. In this essay and in the book which it defends, I have stressed two characteristics which I believe any new religious language should possess. 1. it should avoid misleading ambiguity, and 2. give equal prominence to the transcendent and the immanent; at the very least it should correspond to Charles Taylor’s ‘open reading’ of immanence.89 Of course we know that a small group of prominent Friends has been engaged for some time in formulating this new spiritual esperanto, but if O’Shea is right, such a search could only be carried out successfully if it involved everyone in what would certainly be a massive theological enterprise—similar but on a larger scale to the current BYM-wide reading of ‘the red book’. Others will have 88 Living the Way, p. 59. 89 For an explanation of this term, see Looks on Glass, pp. 179–84.

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The Beyond Within different and probably better ideas, but I would like to throw in the following suggestions which I believe conform to Quaker practice: 1. For our purposes in BYM,a renewal process could be sensitively guided by our theologians and historians. 2. Inevitably, it would mean starting from our Christian roots and looking at how our present day Quaker language is rooted in the language of Scripture, especially the Christian Testament. Indeed, that would need to be the centrepiece of the whole project. 3. We would then look at how scriptural language was understood, adapted and enlarged by the first generation of Quakers. 4. In this light we would consider the nature and roots of our Testimonies and business practices. 5. At a later stage we could consider the language-related and other reasons why some Friends have opted for a particular understanding of Quaker universalism. 6. We could study theism and non-theism together and the different strands within them, thus breaking down the monoliths. Such a process could involve study packs, lectures, workshops, discussion groups, worship sharing groups and meetings for clearness. It would make appropriate and innovative use of social media and the Internet. It would take determination, vision, genuine (servant) leadership, and may involve some conflict. But, if successful, the rewards could be substantial: a better informed, more deeply committed and more spiritually grounded community of Friends, no longer believing ‘nothing in particular’, but having something uniquely Quaker to offer a generation searching for meaning and the good—a bubbling spring of living water that could change their world and ours.

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closing remarks

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n his foreword to Through a Glass Darkly, David asks himself why he is spending so much time and energy “arguing the toss about divine transcendence when the task of building the republic of heaven on earth was never more urgent”. But David has been arguing the toss about transcendence for decades; it is everywhere, in all of his books. It didn’t start with Through a Glass Darkly. Transcendence, as anyone making a close study of David’s and other humanist writings will recognise, has always been the sticking point, and understandably, indeed rightly so. As Charles Taylor points out: Defining religion in terms of the distinction immanent/transcendent is a move tailor-made for our culture. This may be seen as parochial, incestuous, navel-gazing, but I would argue that this is a wise move, since we are trying to understand changes in a culture for which this distinction has become foundational.90

David’s preference, naturally, is for immanence. A God that is wholly immanent is more easily disposed of in that this God is entirely dependent on human consciousness and disappears like a puff of smoke when that consciousness is no longer present. However, Quakers have never thought of God as wholly immanent. Robert Barclay, speaking for the Quaker movement of his day, protested vigorously against those who “maliciously inferred that we deny God, except that of him that is within us”. Isaac Penington speaks of the Christ “as God, ‘the infinite eternal Being’, which was most fully present in the man Jesus but ‘cannot be confined to be nowhere else but there’”.91 And in case these last should be dismissed as mere seventeenth century formulations, we have Rowan Williams, not a Quaker of course but one of the leading intellectuals of our age, saying explicitly, “A religious discourse which denied . . . the extrasubjective, reality of God would hardly be intelligible”.92 90 Looks on Glass, p. 163, passim. 91 Keiser in Keiser and Moore, p. 249. 92 See Williams, Wrestling with Angels (London: SCM Press, 2007), p. 244.

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The Beyond Within For Ursula Jane O’Shea the question is completely off the table. At the end of her Backhouse Lecture she declares emphatically: “In the Quaker Way the transcendent and immanent aspects of our lives are indivisible”. If the Society were to gravitate towards a theology based on the notion of immanence alone it would soon be facing its dissolution as a worshipping group dedicated to the service of God, although humanists would say facing a brighter future in the service of humanity. However, the question then, as Peter Berger rather sardonically puts it, is how “to demonstrate that the religious label, as modified in conformity with the [secular] spirit of the age, has anything special to offer”.93 If this is what we really want for our Religious Society, then a policy of total inclusivity is certainly the fastest route to achieving it. Blurring the distinctions of language is another but supplementary way, and accepting the NFN as a Quaker Recognised Body (Meeting for Sufferings, 1st April 2017) is undoubtedly transformative, but transformative in the sense of facilitating precisely that change. In fact, to most outside observers it would look like a fait accompli, a significant preparative step towards gaining acceptance for a revised Book of Discipline which would incorporate most of the NFN’s demands—the ‘possible’ revision becoming the ‘only possible’ revision. Quakerism is indeed changing, but not all of us want to be part of the change. We want to feel that any fundamental change is truly Spirit-led, and not prompted by leadings of the human spirit alone. Nor do we want to be pressured into silence because others wish to avoid conflict and division at any cost. “There are new challenges and changes sweeping British Quakerism and Australian Quakerism”, O’Shea says in conclusion. “They will be Life-giving if they reflect our fidelity to divine guidance and are lived flexibly yet tenaciously under that same guidance”. — Derek Guiton June 2017 93 See A Rumour of Angels (NY.: Anchor Books, 1970), p. 20.

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