Not some­thing I’ll do every day, but over on Quak­erQuaker I cross-referenced today’s One Year Bible read­ings with Esther Green­leaf Murer’s Quaker Bible Index. Here’s the link to my post about today: First Month 20: Joseph rises to power in Egypt; Jesus’ para­ble of wheat & tares and pearls. It’s a par­tic­u­larly rich read­ing today. Jesus talks about the wheat and the weeds aka the corn and the tares, an inter­est­ing para­ble about let­ting the faith­ful and the unfaith­ful grow together.

As if know­ing today is Inau­gu­ra­tion Day, Isaac Pen­ing­ton turned it into a polit­i­cal ref­er­ence: “But oh, how the laws and gov­ern­ments of this world are to be lamented over! And oh, what need there is of their ref­or­ma­tion, whose com­mon work it is to pluck up the ears of corn, and leave the tares standing!”

Mar­garet Fell sees the wheat and tares as an exam­ple of jeal­ousy and false min­istry: “Oh how hath this envi­ous man got­ten in among you. Surely he hath come in the night, when men was asleep: & hath sown tares among the wheat, which when the reapers come must be bound in bun­dles and cast into the fire, for I know that there was good seed sown among you at the first, which when it found good ground, would have brought forth good fruit; but since there are mixed seeds­men come among you & some hath preached Christ of envy & some of good will, … & so it was easy to stir up jeal­ousy in you, you hav­ing the ground of jeal­ousy in your­selves which is as strong as death.”

We get poetry from the sev­en­teen cen­tury Eliz­a­beth Bathurst (ahem) when she writes that “the Seed (or grace) of God, is small in its first appear­ance (even as the morn­ing –light), but as it is given heed to, and obeyed, it will increase in bright­ness, till it shine in the soul, like the sun in the fir­ma­ment at noon-day height.”

The para­ble of the tares became a call for tol­er­ance in George Fox’s under­stand­ing: “For Christ com­mands chris­t­ian men to “love one another [John 13:34, etc], and love their ene­mies [Mat 5:44];” and so not to per­se­cute them. And those ene­mies may be changed by repen­tance and con­ver­sion, from tares to wheat. But if men imprison them, and spoil and destroy them, they do not give them time to repent. So it is clear it is the angels’ work to burn the tares, and not men’s.”

A cen­tury later, Sarah Tuke Grubb read and wor­ried about reli­gious edu­ca­tion and Quaker drift: “But for want of keep­ing an eye open to this pre­serv­ing Power, a spirit of indif­fer­ence hath crept in, and, whilst many have slept, tares have been sown [Mat 13:25]; which as they spring up, have a ten­dency to choke the good seed; those ten­der impres­sions and reproofs of instruc­tion, which would have pre­pared our spir­its, and have bound them to the holy law and tes­ti­monies of truth.”

I hope all this helps us remem­ber that the Bible is our book too and an essen­tial resource for Friends. It’s easy to for­get this and kind of slip one way or another. One extreme is get­ting our Bible fix from main­stream Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian sources whose view­points might be in pretty direct oppo­si­tion from Quaker under­stand­ings of Jesus and the Gospel (see Jeanne B’s post on The New Calvin­ism or Tom Smith’s very rea­son­able con­cerns about the lit­er­al­ism at the One Year Bible Blog I read and rec­om­mend). On the other hand, it’s not uncom­mon in my neck of the Quaker woods to describe our reli­gion as “Quaker,” down­grade Chris­tian­ity by mak­ing it optional, unmen­tion­able or non-contextual and turn­ing to the Bible only for the oblig­a­tory epis­tle ref­er­ence.

This was first made clear to me a few years ago by the mar­gins in the mod­ern edi­tion of Samuel Bow­nas’ “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions Nec­es­sary to a Gospel Min­istry,” which were pep­pered with the Bib­li­cal ref­er­ences Bow­nas was casu­ally cit­ing through­out. On my sec­ond read­ing (yes it’s that good!) I started look­ing up the ref­er­ences and real­ized that: 1) Bow­nas wasn’t just mak­ing this stuff up or quot­ing willy-nilly; and 2) read­ing them helped me under­stand Bow­nas and by exten­sion the whole con­cept of Quaker min­istry. You’re not read­ing my blog enough if you’re not get­ting the idea that this is one of the kind of prac­tices that Robin, Wess and I are going to be talk­ing about at the Con­ver­gent work­shop next month. If you can fig­ure out the trans­port then get your­self to Cali pronto and join us.

I had an inter­est­ing oppor­tu­nity last Thurs­day. I skipped work to be talk with two Quak­erism classes at Philadelphia’s “William Penn Char­ter School”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penn_Charter_School (thanks for the invite Michael and Thomas!). I was asked to talk about Quaker blogs, of all things. Sim­ple, right? Well, on the pre­vi­ous Tues­day I hap­pened upon this pas­sage from Brian Drayton’s new book “On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Ministry”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/1–888305-38-x:
bq. I think that your work will have the great­est good effect if you wait to find whether and where the springs of love and divine life con­nect with this open­ing before you appear in the work. This is even true when you have had an invi­ta­tion to come and speak on a topic to a work­shop or some other forum. It is wise to be sus­pi­cious of what is very easy, draws on your prac­ticed strengths and accom­plish­ments, and can be treated as an every­day trans­ac­tion. (p. 149).
Good advice. Of course the role of min­istry is even more com­pli­cated in that I wasn’t address­ing a Quaker audi­ence: like the major­ity of Friends schools, few Penn Char­ter stu­dents actu­ally are Quaker. I’m a “pub­lic school kid”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheltenham_High_School, but it from the out­side it seems like Friends schools stress the ethos of Quak­erism (“here’s Penn Charter’s statement”:http://www.penncharter.com/content/aboutpc/quakerism.asp). Again Dray­ton helped me think beyond nor­mal ideas of pros­el­tyz­ing and out­reach when he talked about “pub­lic meet­ings”: “We are also called, I feel to invite oth­ers to share Christ directly, not pri­mar­ily in order to intro­duce them to Quak­erism and bring them into our meet­ings, but to encour­age them to turn to the light and fol­low it” (p. 147). What I shared with the stu­dents was some of the ways my inter­ac­tion with the Spirit and my faith com­mu­nity shapes my life. When we keep it real, this is a pro­foundly uni­ver­sal­ist and wel­com­ing mes­sage.
I talked about the per­sonal aspect of blog­ging: in my opin­ion we’re at our best when we weave our the­ol­ogy with with per­sonal sto­ries and tes­ti­monies of spe­cific spir­i­tual expe­ri­ences. The stu­dents reminded me that this is also real world les­son: their great­est excite­ment and ques­tion­ing came when we started talk­ing about my father (I used to tell the story of my com­pletely messed-up child­hood fam­ily life a lot but have been out of the habit lately as it’s receded into the past). The stu­dents really wanted to under­stand not just my story but how it’s shaped my Quak­erism and influ­enced my com­ing to Friends. They asked some hard ques­tions and I was stuck hav­ing to give them hard answers (in that they were non-sentimental). When we share of our­selves, we present a wit­ness that can reach out to oth­ers.
Later on, one of the teach­ers pro­jected my blogroll on a screen and asked me about the peo­ple on it. I started telling sto­ries, relat­ing cool blog posts that had stuck out in my mind. Wow: this is a pretty amaz­ing group, with diver­sity of ages and Quak­erism. Review­ing the list really reminded me of the amaz­ing com­mu­nity that’s come together over the last few years.
One inter­est­ing lit­tle snip­pet for the Quaker cul­tural his­to­ri­ans out there: Penn Char­ter was the Gur­neyite school back in the day. When I got Michael’s email I was ini­tially sur­prised they even had classes on Quak­erism as it’s often thought of as one of the least Quaker of the Philadelphia-area Quaker schools. But think­ing on it, it made per­fect sense: the Gur­neyites loved edu­ca­tion; they brought Sun­day School (sorry, _First Day_ School) into Quak­erism, along with Bible study and higher edu­ca­tion. Of course the school that bears their legacy would teach Quak­erism. Inter­est­ingly enough, the his­tor­i­cal Ortho­dox school down the road aways recently approached Penn Char­ter ask­ing about their Quaker classes; in true Wilbu­rite fash­ion, they’ve never both­ered try­ing to teach Quak­erism. The offi­cial Philadel­phia Quaker story is that branches were all fixed up nice and tidy back in 1955 but scratch the sur­face just about any­where and you’ll find Nine­teenth Cen­tury atti­tudes still shap­ing our insti­tu­tional cul­ture. It’s pretty fas­ci­nat­ing really.

h3. A work­shop led by Zachary Moon and Mar­tin Kel­ley at the 2005 FGC Gath­er­ing of Friends.

This is for Young Friends who want to break into the power of Quak­erism: it’s the stuff you didn’t get in First Day School. Con­nect­ing with his­tor­i­cal Quak­ers whose pow­er­ful min­istry came in their teens and twen­ties, we’ll look at how Friends wove God, covenants and gospel order together to build a move­ment that rocked the world. We’ll mine Quaker his­tory to reclaim the power of our tra­di­tion, to explore the liv­ing tes­ti­monies and our wit­ness in the world. (P/T)

Con­tinue…

The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony is one of the pop­u­larly well-known out­ward expres­sions of Quaker faith. But have we for­got­ten its source?

In a meet­ing for wor­ship I attended a few years ago a woman rose and spoke about her work for peace. She told us of let­ters writ­ten and meet­ings attended; she cer­tainly kept busy. She con­fessed that it is tir­ing work and she cer­tainly sounded tired and put-upon. But she said she’d keep at it and she quoted early Friends’ man­date to us: that we must work to take away the occa­sion of war.

Read con­tem­po­rary Friends lit­er­a­ture and you’ll see this imper­a­tive all over the place. From one brochure: “We are called as Friends to lead lives that ‘take away the occa­sion of all wars.’ ” Yet this state­ment, like many con­tem­po­rary state­ments on Quaker tes­ti­monies, is taken out of con­text. The actor has been switched and the mes­sage has been lost. For the peace tes­ti­mony doesn’t instruct us to take away occasions.

The Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony: Liv­ing in the Power

The clas­sic state­ment of the Quaker peace tes­ti­mony is the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion. Eng­land was embroiled in war and insur­rec­tion. A failed polit­i­cal coup was blamed on Quak­ers and it looked like Friends were going to be per­se­cuted once more by the civil author­i­ties. But Friends weren’t inter­ested in the polit­i­cal process swirling around them. They weren’t tak­ing sides in the coups. “I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occa­sion of all wars,” George Fox had told civil author­i­ties ten years before and the sign­ers of the dec­la­ra­tion elab­o­rated why they could not fight: “we do earnestly desire and wait, that by the Word of God’s power and its effec­tual oper­a­tion in the hearts of men, the king­doms of this world may become the king­doms of the Lord.”

For all of the over-intellectualism within Quak­erism today, it’s a sur­prise that these state­ments are so rarely parsed down. Look at Fox’s state­ment: many mod­ern activists could agree we should take away occas­sion for war, cer­tainly, but it’s a sub­or­di­nate clause. It is not refer­ring to the “we,” but instead mod­i­fies “power.” Our instruc­tions are to live in that power. It is that power that does the work of tak­ing away war’s occasion.

I’m not quib­bling but get­ting to the very heart of the clas­sic under­stand­ing of peace. It is a “tes­ti­mony,” in that we are “tes­ti­fy­ing” to a larger truth. We are acknowl­edg­ing some­thing: that there is a Power (let’s start cap­i­tal­iz­ing it) that takes away the need for war. It is that Power that has made peace pos­si­ble and that Power that has already acted and con­tin­ues to act in our world. The job has actu­ally been done. The occa­sion for war has been ended. Our rela­tion­ship to this Power is sim­ply to live in it. Around the time of the Dec­la­ra­tion, George Fox wrote a let­ter to Lord Pro­tec­tor Oliver Cromwell :

The next morn­ing I was moved of the Lord to write a paper to the Pro­tec­tor, Oliver Cromwell; wherein I did, in the pres­ence of the Lord God, declare that I denied the wear­ing or draw­ing of a car­nal sword, or any other out­ward weapon, against him or any man; and that I was sent of God to stand a wit­ness against all vio­lence, and against the works of dark­ness; and to turn peo­ple from dark­ness to light; and to bring them from the causes of war and fight­ing, to the peace­able gospel.

The peace tes­ti­mony is actu­ally a state­ment of faith. Not sur­pris­ing really, or it shouldn’t be. Early Friends were all about shout­ing out the truth. “Christ has come to teach the peo­ple him­self” was a early tagline. It’s no won­der that they stretched it out to say that Christ has taken away occa­sion for war. Hal­lelu­jiah!, I can hear them shout. Let the cel­e­bra­tion begin. I always hear John Lennon echo­ing these cel­e­brants when he sings “War is over” and fol­lows with “if we want it.”

Obvi­ously war isn’t over. Peo­ple must still want it. And they do. War is rooted in lusts, James 4:1–3 tells us. Mod­ern Amer­i­can greed for mate­r­ial things with ever more rapac­ity and blind­ness. We drive our S.U.V.s and then fight for oil sup­plies in the Per­sian Gulf. We worry that we won’t be pop­u­lar or loved if we don’t use teeth-whitening strips or don’t obsess over the lat­est T.V. fad. We aren’t liv­ing in the Power and the Deceiver con­vinces us that war is peace.

But the Power is there. We can live in that Power and it will take away more than occa­sions for war, for it will take away the lusts and inse­cu­ri­ties that lead to war.

Speak­ing Faith to Power

When you’ve acknowl­edge the Power, what does faith become? It becomes a tes­ti­mony to the world. I can tes­tify to you per­son­ally that there is a Power and that this Power will com­fort you, teach you, guide you. Early Friends were pros­e­lytis­ing when they wrote their state­ment. After writ­ing his let­ter to Cromwell, Fox went to visit the man him­self. Cromwell was undoubt­edly the most pow­er­ful man in Eng­land and any­thing but a paci­fist. He had raised and led armies against the king and it was he who ordered the behead­ing of King Charles I. And what did Fox talk about? Truth. And Jesus.

George Fox stood as a wit­ness just as he promised, and tried to turn Cromwell from dark­ness to light, to bring him from the cause of war to the peace­able gospel. By Fox’s account, it almost worked:

As I was turn­ing, he caught me by the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, “Come again to my house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we should be nearer one to the other”; adding that he wished me no more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged his own soul; and admon­ished him to hear­ken to God’s voice, that he might stand in his coun­sel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would keep him from hard­ness of heart; but if he did not hear God’s voice, his heart would be hard­ened. He said it was true.

This then is the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony. I don’t think it can be divorced from its spir­i­tual basis. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, many lead­ing Friends tried to dilute the Quaker mes­sage to make it more under­stand­able and palat­able for non-Friends. A line of George Fox was taken out of con­text and used so much that most Friends have adopted “that of God in every­one” as a uni­fied creed, for­get­ting that it’s a mod­ern phrase whose ambi­gu­ity Fox wouldn’t have appre­ci­ated. When we talk about peace, we often do so in very sec­u­lar­ized lan­guage. We’re still try­ing to pros­e­ly­tize, but our mes­sage is a ratio­nal­ist one that war can be solved by tech­no­cratic means and a more demo­c­ra­tic appor­tion­ment of resources. Most con­tem­po­rary state­ments have all the umph of a floor speech at the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion, with only throw-away ref­er­ences to “com­mu­ni­ties of faith,” and bland state­ments of “that of God” hint­ing that there might be some­thing more to our message.

The free­dom of liv­ing the Power

We actu­ally share much of the peace tes­ti­mony with a num­ber of Chris­tians. There are many Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians who read­ily agree that there’s a Power but con­clude that their job is just to wait for its return. They define the power strictly as Jesus Christ and the return as the Sec­ond Com­ing. They fore­see a worldly Armaged­don when peace will fail and thou­sands will die.

That’s not our way. Friends pulled Chris­tian­ity out of the first cen­tury and refused to wait for any last cen­tury to declare that Jesus is here now, “to teach his peo­ple him­self.” We keep con­stant vigil and rejoice to find the returned Christ already here, deep in our hearts, at work in the world. Our way of work­ing for peace is to praise the Power, wait for its guid­ance and then fol­low it’s com­mands through what­ever hard­ship await us. When we’re doing it right, we become instru­ments of God in the ser­vice of the Spirit. Christ does use us to take away the occa­sions for war!

But the wait­ing is nec­es­sary, the guid­ance is key. It gives us the strength to over­come over­work and burn-out and it gives us the direc­tion for our work. The slick­est, most expen­sive peace cam­paigns and the most dra­matic self-inflating actions often achieve much less than the sim­ple, hum­ble, behind-the-scenes, year-in, year-out ser­vice. I sus­pect that the ways we’re most used by the Spirit are ways we barely perceive.

Quaker min­istry is not a pas­sive wait­ing. We pray, we test, we work hard and we use all the gifts our Cre­ator has given us (intel­li­gence, tech­nolo­gies, etc.). There are prob­lems in the world, huge ones that need address­ing and we will address them. But we do so out of a joy. And through our work, we ask oth­ers to join us in our joy, to lift up the cross with us, join­ing Jesus metaphor­i­cally in wit­ness­ing to the world.

The modern-day Pres­i­dent order­ing a war suf­fers from the same lack of faith that George Fox’s Cromwell did. They are igno­rant or impa­tient of Christ’s mes­sage and so take peace-making into their own hands. But how much do faith­less politi­cians dif­fer from many con­tem­po­rary peace activists? When I block­ade a fed­eral build­ing or stand in front of a tank, am I try­ing to stop war myself? When I say it’s my job to “end the occa­sion for war,” am I tak­ing on the work of God? I feel sad for the woman who rose in Meet­ing for Wor­ship and told us how hard her peace work is. Each of us alone is inca­pable of bring­ing on world peace, and we turn in our own tracks with a quiet dis­pair. I’ve seen so many Quaker peace activists do really poor jobs with such a over­whelmed sense of sad­ness that they don’t get much sup­port. Detached from the Spirit, we look to gain our self-worth from oth­ers and we start doing things sim­ply to impress our worldly peers. If we’re lucky we get money but not love, respect but not a new voice lifted up in the choir of praise for the Cre­ator. We’ve given up hope in God’s promise and despair is our ever-present companion.

Our tes­ti­mony to the world

It doesn’t need to be this way. And I think for many Friends it hasn’t been. When you work for the Power, you don’t get attached to your work’s out­come in the same way. We’re just foot­sol­diers for the Lord. Often we’ll do things and have no idea how they’ve affected oth­ers. It’s not our job to know, for it’s not our job to be sucess­ful as defined by the world. Maybe all the work I’ve ever done for peace is for some exchange of ideas that I won’t rec­og­nize at the time. We need to strive to be gra­cious and grounded even in the midst of all the undra­matic moments (as well as those most dra­matic moments). We will be known to the world by how we wit­ness our trust in God and by how faith­fully we live our lives in obe­di­ence to the Spirit’s instructions.

Related Read­ing

Again, the link to the 1660 Dec­la­ra­tion is the first stop for those want­ing to under­stand Friends’ under­stand­ing on peacemaking.

Quaker His­to­rian Jerry Frost talked about the peace tes­ti­mony as part of his his­tory of twen­ti­eth cen­tury Quak­erism (“Non-violence seemed almost a panacea for lib­eral Friends seek­ing polit­i­cally and socially rel­e­vant peace work”). Bill Samuel has writ­ten a his­tory of the peace tes­ti­mony with a good list of links. Lloyd Lee Wil­son wrote about being a “Chris­t­ian Paci­fist” in the April 2003 edi­tion of Quaker Life.

If wars are indeed rooted in lust, then non­vi­o­lent activism should be involved in exam­i­nat­ing those lusts. In The Roots of Non­vi­o­lence (writ­ten for Non​vi​o​lence​.org), I talk a lit­tle about how activists might relate to the deeper causes of the war to tran­scend the “anti-war” move­ment. One way I’ve been explor­ing anti-consumerism in with my re-examination of the Quaker tra­di­tion of plain dress.

For rea­sons I can’t under­stand, peo­ple some­times read “Liv­ing in the Power: the Quaker Peace Tes­ti­mony Reclaimed” and think I’m “advo­cat­ing a retreat from directly engag­ing the prob­lems of the world” (as one Friend put it). I ask those who think I’m posit­ing some sort of either/or dual­ity betwen faith vs. works, or min­istry vs. activism, to please reread the essay. I have been a peace activist for over fif­teen years and run non​vi​o​lence​.org [update: ran, I laid it down in 2008), a promi­nent web­site on non­vi­o­lence. I think some of the mis­un­der­stand­ings are generational.

One of the more rev­o­lu­tion­ary trans­for­ma­tions of Amer­i­can Quak­erism in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury has been our under­stand­ing of the tes­ti­monies. In online dis­cus­sions I find that many Friends think the “SPICE” tes­ti­monies date back from time immemo­r­ial. Not only are they rel­a­tively new, they’re a dif­fer­ent sort of crea­ture from their predecessors.

In the last fifty years it’s become dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate Quaker tes­ti­monies from ques­tions of mem­ber­ship. Both were dra­mat­i­cally rein­vented by a newly-minted class of lib­eral Friends in the early part of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury and the cod­i­fied by Howard Brinton’s land­mark Friends for 300 Years, pub­lished in the early 1950s.

Com­fort and the Test of Membership

Brin­ton comes right out and says that the test for mem­ber­ship shouldn’t involve issues of faith or of prac­tice but should be based on whether one feels com­fort­able with the other mem­bers of the Meet­ing. This con­cep­tion of mem­ber­ship has grad­u­ally become dom­i­nant among lib­eral Friends in the half cen­tury since this book was pub­lished. The trou­ble with it is twofold. The first is that “com­fort” is not nec­es­sar­ily what God has in mind for us. If the frequently-jailed first gen­er­a­tion of Friends had used Brinton’s model there would be no Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends to talk about (we’d be lost in the his­tor­i­cal foot­notes with the Mug­gle­to­ni­ans, Grindle­to­ni­ans and the like). One of the clas­sic tests for dis­cern­ment is whether an pro­posed action is con­trary to self-will. Com­fort is not our Society’s calling.

The sec­ond prob­lem is that com­fort­a­bil­ity comes from fit­ting in with a cer­tain kind of style, class, color and atti­tude. It’s fine to want com­fort in our Meet­ings but when we make it the pri­mary test for mem­ber­ship, it becomes a cloak for eth­nic and cul­tural big­otries that keep us from reach­ing out. If you have advanced edu­ca­tion, mild man­ners and lib­eral pol­i­tics, you’ll fit it at most East Coast Quaker meet­ings. If you’re too loud or too eth­nic or speak with a work­ing class accent you’ll likely feel out of place. Samuel Cald­well gave a great talk about the dif­fer­ence between Quaker cul­ture and Quaker faith and I’ve pro­posed a tongue-in-cheek tes­ti­mony against com­mu­nity as way of open­ing up discussion.

The Feel Good Testimonies

Friends for 300 Years also rein­vented the Tes­ti­monies. They had been spe­cific and often pro­scrip­tive: against gam­bling, against par­tic­i­pa­tion in war. But the new tes­ti­monies became vague feel-good char­ac­ter traits–the now-famous SPICE tes­ti­monies of sim­plic­ity, peace, integrity, com­mu­nity and equal­ity. Who isn’t in favor of all those val­ues? A pres­i­dent tak­ing us to war will tell us it’s the right thing to do (integrity) to con­truct last­ing peace (peace) so we can bring free­dom to an oppressed coun­try (equal­ity) and cre­ate a stronger sense of national pride (com­mu­nity) here at home.

We mod­ern Friends (lib­eral ones at least) were really trans­formed by the redefin­tions of mem­ber­ship and the tes­ti­monies that took place mid-century. I find it sad that a lot of Friends think our cur­rent tes­ti­monies are the ancient ones. I think an aware­ness of how Friends han­dled these issues in the 300 years before Brin­ton would help us nav­i­gate a way out of the “eth­i­cal soci­ety” we have become by default.

The Source of our Testimonies

A quest for unity was behind the rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of the tes­ti­monies. The main accom­plish­ment of East Coast Quak­erism in the mid-twentieth cen­tury was the reunit­ing of many of the yearly meet­ings that had been torn apart by schisms start­ing in 1827. By end of that cen­tury Friends were divided across a half dozen major the­o­log­i­cal strains man­i­fested in a patch­work of insti­tu­tional divi­sions. One way out of this morass was to present the tes­ti­monies as our core uni­fy­ing prici­ples. But you can only do that if you divorce them from their source.

As Chris­tians (even as post-Christians), our core com­mand­ment is sim­ple: to love God with all our heart and to love our neigh­bor as ourselves:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great com­mand­ment. And the sec­ond is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neigh­bour as thy­self. On these two com­mand­ments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37–40 and Mark 12:30–31, Luke 10:27.

The Quaker tes­ti­monies also hang on these com­mand­ments: they are our col­lec­tive mem­ory. While they are in con­tant flux, they refer back to 350 years of expe­ri­ence. These are the truths we can tes­tify to as a peo­ple, ways of liv­ing that we have learned from our direct expe­ri­ence of the Holy Spirit. They are intri­cately tied up with our faith and with how we see our­selves fol­low­ing through on our charge, our covenant with God.

I’m sure that Howard Brin­ton didn’t intend to sep­a­rate the tes­ti­monies from faith, but he chose his new catagories in such a way that they would appeal to a mod­ern lib­eral audi­ence. By pop­u­lar­iz­ing them he made them so acces­si­ble that we think we know them already.

A Tale of Two Testimonies

Take the twin tes­ti­monies of plain­ness and sim­plic­ity. First the ancient tes­ti­mony of plain­ness. Here’s the descrip­tion from 1682:

Advised, that all Friends, both old and young, keep out of the world’s cor­rupt lan­guage, man­ners, vain and need­less things and fash­ions, in apparel, build­ings, and fur­ni­ture of houses, some of which are immod­est, inde­cent, and unbe­com­ing. And that they avoid immod­er­a­tion in the use of law­ful things, which though inno­cent in them­selves, may thereby become hurt­ful; also such kinds of stuffs, colours and dress, as are cal­cu­lated more to please a vain and wan­ton mind, than for real use­ful­ness; and let trades­men and oth­ers, mem­bers of our reli­gious soci­ety, be admon­ished, that they be not acces­sary to these evils; for we ought to take up our daily cross, mind­ing the grace of God which brings sal­va­tion, and teaches to deny all ungod­li­ness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, right­eously and godly, in this present world, that we may adorn the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in all things; so may we feel his bless­ing, and be instru­men­tal in his hand for the good of others.

Note that there’s noth­ing in there about the length of one’s hem. The key phrase for me is the warn­ing about doing things “cal­cu­lated to please a vain and wan­ton mind.” Friends were being told that pride makes it harder to love God and our neigh­bors; immod­er­a­tion makes it hard to hear God’s still small voice; self-sacrifice is nec­es­sary to be an instru­ment of God’s love. This tes­ti­mony is all about our rela­tion­ships with God and with each other.

Most mod­ern Friends have dis­pensed with “plain­ness” and recast the tes­ti­mony as “sim­plic­ity.” Ask most Friends about this tes­ti­mony and they’ll start telling you about their clut­tered desks and their annoy­ance with cell­phones. Ask for a reli­gious edu­ca­tion pro­gram on sim­plic­ity and you’ll almost cer­tainly be assigned a book from the mod­ern vol­un­tary sim­plic­ity move­ment, one of those self-help man­u­als that promise inner peace if you plant a gar­den or buy a fuel-efficient car, with “God” absent from the index. While it’s true that most Amer­i­cans (and Friends) would have more time for spir­i­tual refresh­ment if they unclut­tered their lives, the sec­u­lar notions of sim­plic­ity do not emanate out of a con­cern for “gospel order” or for a “right order­ing” of our lives with God. Vol­un­tary sim­plic­ity is great: I’ve pub­lished books on it and I live car-free, use cloth dia­pers, etc. But plain­ness is some­thing dif­fer­ent and it’s that dif­fer­ence that we need to explore again.

Pick just about any of the so-called “SPICE” tes­ti­monies (sim­plic­ity, peace, integrity, com­mu­nity and equal­ity) and you’ll find the mod­ern notions are sec­u­lar­l­ized over-simplications of the Quaker under­stand­ings. In our quest for unity, we’ve over-stated their importance.

Ear­lier I men­tioned that many of the ear­lier tes­ti­monies were proscriptive–they said cer­tain actions were not in accord with our prin­ci­ples. Take a big one: after many years of dif­fi­cult min­is­ter­ing and soul search­ing Friends were able to say that slav­ery was a sin and that Friends who held slaves were kept from a deep com­mu­nion with God; this is dif­fer­ent than say­ing we believe in equal­ity. Sim­i­larly, say­ing we’re against all out­ward war is dif­fer­ent than say­ing we’re in favor of peace. While I know some Friends are proud of cast­ing every­thing in pos­ti­tive terms, some­times we need to come out and say a par­tic­u­lar prac­tice is just plain wrong, that it inter­feres with and goes against our rela­tion­ship with God and with our neighbors.

I’ll leave it up to you to start chew­ing over what spe­cific actions we might take a stand against. But know this: if our min­is­ters and meet­ings found that a par­tic­u­lar prac­tice was against our tes­ti­monies, we could be sure that there would be some Friends engaged in it. We would have a long process of min­is­ter­ing with them and labor­ing with them. It would be hard. Feel­ings would be hurt. Peo­ple would go away angry.

After a half-century of lib­eral indi­vid­u­al­ism, it would be hard to once more affirm that there is some­thing to Quak­erism, that it does have norms and bound­aries. We would need all the love, char­ity and patience we could muster. This work would is not easy, espe­cially because it’s work with mem­bers of our com­mu­nity, peo­ple we love and honor. We would have to fol­low John Woolman’s exam­ple: our first audi­ence would not be Wash­ing­ton pol­icy mak­ers instead Friends in our own Society.

Tes­ti­monies as Affir­ma­tion of the Power

In a world beset by war, greed, poverty and hatred, we do need to be able to talk about our val­ues in sec­u­lar terms. An abil­ity to talk about paci­fism with our non-Quaker neigh­bors in a smart, informed way is essen­tial (thus my Non​vi​o​lence​.org min­istry, cur­rently receiv­ing two mil­lions vis­i­tors a year). When we affirm com­mu­nity and equal­ity we are wit­ness­ing to our faith. Friends should be proud of what we’ve con­tributed to the national and inter­na­tional dis­cus­sions on these topics.

But for all of their con­tem­po­rary cen­tral­ity to Quak­erism, the tes­ti­monies are only second-hand out­ward forms. They are not to be wor­shipped in and of them­selves. Mod­ern Friends come dan­ger­ously close to lift­ing up the peace tes­ti­mony as a false idol–the prin­ci­ple we wor­ship over every­thing else. When we get so good at argu­ing the prac­ti­cal­ity of paci­fism, we for­get that our tes­ti­mony is first and fore­most our procla­ma­tion that we live in the power that takes away occas­sion for war. When high school math teach­ers start argu­ing over arcane points of nuclear pol­icy, play­ing arm­chair diplo­mat with yearly meet­ing press releases to the State Depart­ment, we loose cred­i­bil­ity and become some­thing of a joke. But when we min­is­ter to the Power is the Good News we speak with an author­ity that can thun­der over petty gov­ern­ments with it’s com­mand to Quake before God.

When we remem­ber the spir­i­tual source of our faith, our under­stand­ings of the tes­ti­monies deepen immea­sur­ably. When we let our actions flow from uncom­pli­cated faith we gain a power and endurance that strength­ens our wit­ness. When we speak of our expe­ri­ence of the Holy Spirit, our words gain the author­ity as oth­ers rec­og­nize the echo of that “still small voice” speak­ing to their hearts. Our love and our wit­ness are sim­ple and uni­ver­sal, as is the good news we share: that to be fully human is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neigh­bors as we do ourselves.

Hal­leluiah: praise be to God!

Read­ing elsewhere:

• James Heal­ton has a great piece on the tes­ti­monies over on Quak​er​info​.com. The One Tes­ti­mony That Binds Them All Together talks about Christ’s role in the tes­ti­monies. (Be sure to check out Quakerinfo’s list of tes­ti­mony resources.