Wess Daniels posts about Quaker the­ol­ogy on his blog. I responded there but got to think­ing of Swarth­more pro­fes­sor Jerry Frost’s 2000 Gath­er­ing talk about FGC Quak­erism. Aca­d­e­mic, theologically-minded Friends helped forge lib­eral Quak­erism but their influ­enced wained after that first gen­er­a­tion. Here’s a snippet:

“[T]he first gen­er­a­tions of Eng­lish and Amer­ica Quaker lib­er­als like Jones and Cad­bury were all birthright and they wrote books as well as pam­phlets. Before uni­fi­ca­tion, PYM Ortho­dox and the other Ortho­dox meet­ings pro­duced philoso­phers, the­olo­gians, and Bible schol­ars, but now the com­bined yearly meet­ings in FGC pro­duce weighty Friends, social activists, and earnest seek­ers.“
…
“The lib­er­als who cre­ated the FGC had a thirst for knowl­edge, for link­ing the best in reli­gion with the best in sci­ence, for draw­ing upon both to make eth­i­cal judg­ments. Today by becom­ing anti-intellectual in reli­gion when we are well-educated we have jet­ti­soned the impulse that cre­ated FGC, reunited yearly meet­ings, rede­fined our role in wider soci­ety, and cre­ated the mod­ern peace tes­ti­mony. The kinds of energy we now devote to med­i­ta­tion tech­niques and inner spir­i­tu­al­ity needs to be spent on phi­los­o­phy, sci­ence, and Chris­t­ian religion.”

This talk was hugely influ­en­tial to my wife Julie and myself. We had just met two days before and while I had devel­oped an instant crush, Frost’s talk was the first time we sat next to one another. I real­ized that this might become some­thing seri­ous when we both laughed out loud at Jerry’s wry asides and the­ol­ogy jokes. We ended up walk­ing around the cam­pus late into the early hours talk­ing talk­ing talk­ing.
But the talk wasn’t just the reli­gion geek equiv­a­lent of a pick-up bar. We both responded to Frost’s call for a new gen­er­a­tion of seri­ous Quaker thinkers. Julie enrolled in a Reli­gion PhD pro­gram, study­ing Quaker the­ol­ogy under Frost him­self for a semes­ter. I dove into his­to­ri­ans like Thomas Hamm and mod­ern thinkers like Lloyd Lee Wil­son as a way to under­stand and artic­u­late the implicit the­ol­ogy of “FGC Friends” and took inde­pen­dent ini­tia­tives to fill the gaps in FGC ser­vices, tak­ing lead­er­ship in young adult pro­gram and co-leading work­shops and inter­est groups.
Things didn’t turn out as we expected. I hes­i­tate speak­ing for Julie but I think it’s fair enough to say that she came to the con­clu­sion that Friends ideals and prac­tices were unbridgable and she left Friends. I’ve doc­u­mented my own set­backs and right now I’m pretty detached from for­mal Quaker bod­ies.
Maybe enough time hasn’t gone by yet. I’ve heard that the per­son sit­ting on Julie’s other side for that talk is now study­ing the­ol­ogy up in New Eng­land; another Friend who I sus­pect was nearby just started at Earl­ham School of Reli­gion. I’ve called this “the Lost Quaker Generation”:http://www.quakerranter.org/the_lost_quaker_generation.php but at least some of its mem­bers have just been lying low. It’s hard to know whether any of these historically-informed Friends will ever help shape FGC pop­u­lar cul­ture in the way that Quaker acad­e­mia influ­enced lib­eral Friends did before the 1970s.
Reread­ing Frost’s speech this after­noon it’s clear to see it as an impor­tant inspi­ra­tion for “QuakerQuaker”:www.quakerquaker.org. Parts of it act well as a good lib­eral Quaker vision for what the blo­gos­phere has since taken to call­ing con­ver­gent Friends. I hope more peo­ple will stum­ble on Frost’s speech and be inspired, though I hope they will be care­ful not to tie this vision too closely with any exist­ing insti­tu­tion and to remem­ber the true source of that “daily bread”:http://www.blueletterbible.org/cgi-bin/popup.pl?book=Mat&chapter=6&verse=11&version=kjv#11. Here’s a few more inspi­ra­tional lines from Jerry:
bq. We should remem­ber that the­ol­ogy can pro­vide a foun­da­tion for unity. We ought to be smart enough to real­ize that any for­mu­la­tion of what we believe or link­ing faith to mod­ern thought is a sec­ondary activ­ity; to para­phrase Robert Bar­clay, words are descrip­tion of the foun­tain and not the stream of liv­ing water. Those who cre­ated the FGC and reunited meet­ings knew the pos­si­bil­i­ties and dan­gers of the­ol­ogy, but they had a con­fi­dence that truth increased possibilities.