I’ve written many times about the dumbing down of Quaker language into ever-more-ambiguous terms and like this latest blog post from Johan Maurer.
Whatever the causes, phrases such as “inner light” and “that of God” became even vaguer than they might have been individually. Increasingly, as some Friends meetings became gatherings of people who loved the atmosphere and found a refuge in the freedom of Quaker community, and as the surrounding culture became more hostile to claims of faith, the folkways of Quakerism became more important than the core teachings — at least in the London-Philadelphia axis and its offspring.
Let’s face it: that refuge became more important as certain quarters of Christianity became more obnoxious and authoritarian. It’s unfair to charge that hostility to Christianity simply became more fashionable. Too often, we Christians did it to ourselves, projecting a false certainty and a fearsome God instead of the actual Gospel.
He goes on to make the point that the Quaker avoidance of a kind of rigid certainty makes our faith inherently risky and it’s true, it’s always on the edge of either flying apart from centrifugal forces or collapsing in on itself in self-regard.
