Quaker Universalists
Their Ministry Among Friends and in the World1
by Daniel Seeger
The Renaissance writer Giovanni Pica della Mirandola, in his
Oratory on the Dignity of the Human Person, offers us an interesting
variation on the Genesis myth. His formulation is one which illuminates some of
the dilemmas faced by people interested in universalist spirituality, and so is
a useful place to begin this reflection. Pica suggests that as the Creator
completed the fashioning of the cosmos he (sic) longed for someone to reflect
on the beauty, intricacy and majesty of so great a work, and to share with him
the joy of its accomplishment.
The Creator realized that such a creature, if it was to
appreciate with him the scope of the universe, could not be a member of one of
the already created families of beings already subsumed totally in the cosmic
dynamic. He thus began to consider the fashioning of human beings, creatures of
undetermined nature, creatures which he eventually placed in the middle of the
universe, saying to them:
“Neither an established place, nor any special function have we given
to you, and for this reason, that you may have and possess, according to your
desires and judgment, whatever place, whatever form, and whatever functions
you shall desire .… We have set you at the center of the world, so that from
there you may more easily survey whatever is in it. We have made you neither
heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, freely and honorably
your own molder and maker, you may fashion yourself in whatever form you shall
prefer .… To you it is granted to be whatever you will.”
Thus, in terms of this parable, the meaning of human life,
and the way human beings should live, is an open question.
One of the chief functions of the great religious traditions
of humankind has been to draw people together around answers to this open
question. Yet one of the intractable problems that we have faced through the
ages is the strife engendered by competing visions of the purpose of human
life. One of the great, and hopefully lasting, contributions of the liberal
Enlightenment is that it established a consensus that putting an end to
religious warfare and intolerance is morally good and is rationally preferable
to protracted attempts at imposing our spiritual visions on others by force.
But a byproduct of this accomplishment is that people have been left to a large
extent at sea.
It is perhaps the most salient characteristic of our society
that we have in view no system of ends widely believed to be worth striving for
together. We are left with a futile quest for purely private personal
fulfillment which often ends in emptiness. Public discourse in such a context
has been called “civil war carried on by other means.” Whether it be issues of
war and peace, of nuclear weapons, of the various dimensions of social justice,
of matters like abortion, sexual morality, or family policy, most of our public
utterances are used to express disagreements, the most striking feature of
which is their shrill and interminable character. What is significant about so
much of contemporary culture is the absence of a shared sense among people of a
point or purpose, of a final meaning to human life which can provide a context
for understanding, and an opening to a mutually agreeable solution, to whatever
maladies of spirit, of ethics, or of politics may confront us.
No amount of rational philosophy, nor of political debate,
will ever convince us which faith is the true one, which conception of what it
means to be a human being is valid. Our vision of our human destiny is one to
which we can only be drawn by love, by enthusiasm. The great communities of
faith, with their various scriptures and traditions, hold up for us our good
possibilities, showing us their nobility and attractiveness, drawing us to
them.
All the great sages of East and West, the great prophets,
the great religious leaders, have understood that it is in relationship with
others in communities of faith operating through history that human beings are
enabled to make the godlike choices that establish their divine nature, that
help them realize the magnificent potential within. It is the blindness to this
process of spiritual realization and its possibilities, the vagueness and
uncertainty about it, which gives our own time the characteristics of a dark
age, with all its disorders.
In the face of this human predicament, we who are interested in the spirituality
of universalism face the key question of whether the thrust of our universalism
is to be constructivist, affirmative, and healing, or whether it will contribute
further to the relativism, confusion, and disintegration in humankind’s spiritual
landscape.
Religions and ideologies (one could very well include Marxism in this discussion)
have in common that they offer answers to Pica della Mirandola’s great question.
They tell us what we are meant to be as human beings, they offer explanations
for the meaning of human existence, and they outline ways for us to live which
are expressive of such meanings. They do this not only for individuals, but
they aspire to orient whole cultures, and often succeed in doing so. They
are comprehensive ways of life and thought.
It is probably fair to go so far as to say that not only
Marxism, but all religions and ideologies are revolutionary, in that they are
seeking to nurture a new kind of human being through their explanation of
meaning and their prescribed pattern of living, and to generate a society
better than any thus far seen on earth. It is probably also fair to say that
however brutal various religions and ideologies may have proven to be in actual
practice, they are, in general, compassionate in intent, in that they
seek to foster a right ordering of human life which would maximize happiness.
Throughout history different religions have succeeded to
different degrees in their realization of these goals. As John Hick writes,
religions have often …
“…provided an effective framework of meaning for millions of adherents,
carrying them through the different stages of fife, affording consolation
in sickness, need, and calamity, and enabling them to celebrate communally
their times of health, well-being, and creativity. Within the ordered psychic
space created by a living faith, as expressed by the institutions and customs
of a society, millions of men and women in generation after generation have
coped with life’s pains and challenges and rejoiced in its blessings; and
some have gone beyond ego-domination into a transforming relation with the
Eternal. Many have responded –again, in their varying degrees – to the moral
claim of love/compassion mediated by the great traditions and widely formulated
as the Golden Rule: “Let not any man do unto another any act that he wishes
not done to himself by others, knowing it to be painful to himself.” (The
Hindu Mahabharata, Shanti parva, cclx.21); “Do not do to others what
you would not want them to do to you.” (Confucius, Analects, Book XlI,
no. 2); “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.” (The Buddhist Udanavarga,
verse 18); “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”
(Jesus, Luke 6:31); “No man is a true believer unless he desires for
his brother that which he desires for himself.” (The Muslim Hadtih,
Muslim, imam, 71-2).2
Carl Gustav Jung has made a well-known comment on the value
of religious faith: “Among all my patients in the second half of life … there has not been one whose problem
in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is
safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the
living religions of every age had given to their followers, and none of them
has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”3
I recently saw a television program entitled “Thy Kingdom
Come … Thy Will Be Done.” It was
made by British producers, but surveyed the burgeoning evangelical movement in
the United States. It was developed from a liberal point of view and so did not
gloss over much that is sinister, and in fact which is blatantly counter to the
teachings of Jesus, in the growth of this religious Right. Yet I could not help
concluding from the many interviews the producers conducted with evangelical
church members that people, probably very many people, were finding in the movement
a way and a guide for life which was bringing them meaning and joy.
Now, one of the things that politically active evangelicals
understand very well is that for human beings to change significantly, social
structures must change. Except for a few very exceptional sages, people do not
and cannot alter their lives profoundly all by themselves. The world cannot be
saved simply by trying to save individual persons. The social structures within
which individuals live must also be saved. People who grow up in different
societies and different historical periods are formed in different ways. They
become quite different persons than they would have if they had grown up
elsewhere.
Thus, all
significant religious teachers have started communities of believers intended
to be the beginnings of a new culture, including, for example, the Buddha,
Jesus, Mohammed, George Fox, and Francis of Assisi. This insight is what fuels
the American Friends Service Committee’s preoccupation with “social change,”
and the Marxist determination to build a new society. It is what fuels as well
the evangelicals’ disquieting thrust into the political arena.
Most universalists
shrink from “evangelizing” anyone, from aggressively promoting any particular
religious perspective. Is there a universalist way of life which can fill
diverse human needs? Do we have more thinking to do about this, lest the arena
simply be captured by others whose inadequate way of addressing questions of
meaning and of ways of being nevertheless become seductive because there is
nothing else in view for seekers to find?
In this nuclear age
human beings are living out their lives confronting every day the very worst
that evil can do. How, in all our diversity, can human beings live together in
an atmosphere of peace, of active sympathy, instead of regularly falling prey
to the kinds of struggles which now may erupt in a holocaust, in a nuclear
omnicide, a killing off of everything?
William Cantwell
Smith, professor of the comparative history of religion at Harvard, has
written: “My own view is that the task of constructing even that minimum degree
of world fellowship that will be necessary for humankind to survive at all is
far too great to be accomplished on any other than a religious basis. From no
other source than his faith, I believe, can a person muster the energy,
devotion, vision, resolution, and capacity to survive disappointment, that will
be necessary – that are
necessary – for this challenge.”4
We must bring together all the wisdom, devotion and insight
that humanity has accumulated in its long history, not as elements of rivalry,
but in honest seeking for that new way of life which will encourage survival.
Surely universalist spirituality, with its readiness to acknowledge truth from
whatever religious camp it might be spoken, and with its vision of a charitable
rapport among religious traditions, has a vital contribution to make in
bringing a new world to birth. But to make such a contribution, to do what is
required of us in today’s world, will certainly involve an activist and
involved approach, will require conceiving of ourselves and our Fellowship as
something more than a place where people gather for shelter as refugees from
various forms of Christian malpractice.
Correctly to assess the role and function of religions in
human life it is necessary to acknowledge that religious institutions and
religious cultures have been plagued with what I have termed “malpractice”.
- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all approved of
slavery until barely a hundred and fifty years ago and all, except for
minorities within them, routinely violate the human rights of women even today.
- Hinduism has supported a caste system and other outrageous practices, such
as allowing or encouraging widows to cremate themselves on their husband’s
funeral pyre.
- Christianity is guilty of the burning of witches, of
the torturing to death of people regarded as heretics, and of the persecution
of Jews.
- Islam has promoted Holy Wars, and often still enforces
the cruelest of punishments on members of its society it regards as having
transgressed its laws. In fact, many aspects of Islamic law stand in stark
contradiction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United
Nations (1948).
- The poor of Latin America have for generations been
consoled by the symbol of a heaven and the rewards awaiting far them after they
have passed through this vale of tears, all the while their religious feelings
have been manipulated to allow landowners to take great advantage of them.
- There are many other ways in which the world’s religions have contributed
devastatingly to the divisions of humankind.5
In considering this panorama, one is tempted to inquire if
it can be demonstrated that any particular religious tradition has succeeded in
producing more saints in proportion to its population, or a higher quality of
saintliness, than any of the other great streams of religious life. Can we
demonstrate that any of the great religions has promoted the welfare of
humanity better than others?
Again, John Hick reaches what is for me a most sensible conclusion: “It seems
impossible to make the global judgment that any one religious tradition has
contributed more good or less evil, or a more favorable balance of good over
evil, than the others. As vast, complex totalities, the world traditions seem
to be more or less on a par with each other. None can be singled out as manifestly
superior.”6
The complexity of this panorama of the role of religion in
human life can engender various problems for those who are interested in
universalist spirituality, a spirituality which can be regarded, at least in
part, as growing out of a desire to conserve what is good in faith traditions
and dispense with what is bad.
One mistake is to regard faith issues in a rather cold and
detached fashion, as if religion is a kind of superstition better dispensed
with or kept around only in very diluted forms. This is an attempt to
intellectualize religious experience or to subsume it under a system of
rationalist philosophy. But such a bloodless approach to religious faith is
certainly a far cry from the concrete examples of prophesy and sanctity we have
actually seen in the religious experience of humankind. It is certainly a far
cry from the mood and the attitude of George Fox and the valiant sixty, who
were quite passionate about their religious insights. It certainly bears little
kinship to the flavor of the testimony of many of the great Christian mystics
about whom Rufus Jones wrote and whom he regarded as persons who prefigured Quakerism.
An argument can be made, although it cannot be done within
the scope of the present consideration, that rational philosophy cannot answer
the profound question raised by Giovanni Pica della Mirandola’s creation
allegory, nor can it answer questions of meaning or of ways of life. These can
only be provided to those who participate in the life of a community of faith,
a group whose thought and action are informed by some distinctive profession of
settled conviction, and who pass from generation to generation the wisdom of
the community.
There is a second inclination which is apt to overtake those interested in
a universalist spirituality. In the face of the bewildering panorama of humankind’s
religious experience, and in the face of what has been noted earlier as the
impossible task of rendering judgment overall regarding which religious cultures
or religious traditions most helped or most hindered humankind, it is tempting
to sink into a sort of indiscriminate relativism, an unwillingness to judge
some things bad or good, or better or worse, than other things.
This disinclination to make judgments probably stems from an unwillingness
to appear “dogmatic,” or culturally chauvinistic, or to mimic the triumphalist
and extravagant claims traditional to Christianity regarding other religious
faiths.
Yet we have to exercise discernment. While there is a real need to be broad-minded
and to free ourselves from fanaticism, we certainly cannot tolerate religious
cannibals, religious sacrifices of human victims, religious wars of aggression,
religious murders, and religious castes simply as part of the “infinite variety”
of human faith. We are apt to be more sharply aware of the failures and the
evils of Christianity than we are of the other world faiths because we have
been exposed to them more relentlessly. But there are some aspects of all
the great religious traditions for which resistance is imperative. While we
want to be cautious and not rush to judgments merely on the basis of our own
inherited religious or cultural biases, we must, after humble and careful
searching, be prepared to resist with vigor the shadow side, or destructive
side, of a particular religious tradition.
A third misconception would be that it is possible to
contribute toward the projection of a global spirituality adequate to
humankind’s future on the basis of a superficial dabbling – or Way-hopping –
among religious traditions. One cannot plumb the depths of humankind’s
spiritual needs at this juncture of history nor develop the capacity to address
these needs profoundly on the basis of oblique or glancing encounters with the
substance of many different spiritual traditions. It is only by having
connected with the deepest elements of one spiritual tradition that one will be
sensitized enough to respond to the deepest elements in another. I think it is
no accident that those who have done most to bring about a rapprochement among
two or more spiritual traditions have been deeply immersed in their own
tradition. I am thinking particularly of people like Thomas Merton, a Trappist
monk, who accomplished much in building bridges of communication and feeling
between Christianity and the Taoist, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths. His ability to
resonate to the truths in these faiths, and to look sympathetically at the
dissonances between each of them and Christianity itself, was enhanced, not
impeded, by his many years of Christian monastic discipline and study. A
post-exclusivist or post-dogmatic religious identity cannot rule out belonging
to one’s own religion. We need religious roots. “A kind of ‘religious space
trip’ by which we try to cruise mystically above all religious traditions
without belonging to any one of them does not permit serious religious
commitment and living. To be religious and to be serious about it one must,
generally, belong to a religion.”7
Still another misconception is the idea that a future global
spirituality will be some sort of wholly novel theological concept. But a
glance at humankind’s religious past gives very little reason to suppose this
would be the case. Although humankind certainly needs to adopt a new global
spirituality, it is hardly likely that this will be unrelated to the
spiritualities which already exist. Just consider the past. Christianity
expropriated vast amounts of Jewish spirituality and Hellenistic philosophy in
its essential self-definition. The prophet Mohammed built the Islamic faith on
Jewish and Christian religious roots. He acknowledges both Moses and Jesus
Christ, and the Koran even concedes to Jesus the miracle of a virgin birth!
Buddhism, although in some senses a reaction against the Vedic spiritualities
which Prince Gautama encountered in his searchings, nevertheless incorporated
many modes of thought and practice from Hinduism.
While we universalists are sometimes derided by others for
our syncretism, the fact is that all the great spiritual traditions of the past
have been syncretic and have tended to absorb unto themselves anything useful
that was in view. The only difference in the current situation is that the
modern technologies of communication and transportation have made many more
traditions grist for a spiritual seeker’s mill than ever before was the case.
One can expect that as a global spirituality begins to emerge it will contain
elements from many of the existing world faiths and will tend to be fashioned
by people who have deep experience with and knowledge of their own and other
spiritual traditions and practices. We cannot expect truly to grasp the meaning
and significance of any faith tradition by standing outside of it and looking
in.
Ellen Zubrick Charry, Associate Program Director of the
National Conference of Christians and Jews, asks an interesting set of
questions about possible points of contact among the world’s religious faiths:
“…(I)s the Marxist notion of suffering totally
unrecognizable to the Buddhist? Or is it possible that in identifying suffering
and oppression, respectively, as a central problem, each has excluded an aspect
of suffering upon which the other has fastened? How far is the existentialist
naming of the problem of meaninglessness from the Hindu expression of the
problem as entanglement in finitude? Is there any common ground between the
Hindu naming of the solution as liberation from redeath and the existentialist
naming of the solution as living an authentic existence? Is the Christian
diagnosis of sin unrecognizable to the Muslim who speaks of forgetfulness of
the divine nature … or to the Marxist who sees human greed as destroying the
lives of those in grinding poverty? Is the Jew able to hear the Islamic claim
about the universality of God despite Judaism’s claim to an exclusive covenant
between God and the Jewish people? Are feminists and black theologians
unsympathetic to the Buddhist notion that all suffer because all crave? Can the
Marxist readily ignore the existentialist claim that economic arrangements,
important though they be, do not begin to diminish Sisyphus’s misery? Is the
Christian concern over alienation from God unrelated to the Buddhist concern to
extinguish craving for things of this world (e.g., fame, honor, and power), or
to the Muslim’s distress that one is tempted to ignore the will of God?”8
We obviously cannot now know what the future holds. It could
be that some new form of religion or of faith will be revealed containing
useful elements from major existing faiths. But certainly another possibility
is simply that the existing world religions might retain their current spheres
of influence, but would come gradually, through dialogue and searching, to
evolve so as to incorporate good elements one from the other, and release from
their practices and attitudes whatever a new global consciousness shows to be
seriously retrograde.
It follows from all this that the first characteristic of a
Quaker Universalist spirituality will be an enthusiastic and positive
affirmation of the significant role of religious traditions in defining the
meaning of human existence and in giving significant formation to individual
human life and to the social order. Moreover, we must see that now that we live
in a single interconnected and interdependent world, it is humankind’s
religious traditions which offer us the best hope for shaping a viable future.
There are themes common to many of the world’s major
religious faiths:
- the idea that a human being is placed on this earth by
a power greater than him/herself and for purposes not strictly one’s own;
- the idea’ that this larger creative principle is at
once mysterious and yet also intimately knowable, that it resides somehow in
all people;
- the idea that right living involves an abandonment of
egotistical willfulness and an obedience to larger purposes;
- the idea that to do this brings great joy, in spite of
all expectations to the contrary;
- the practices of love, faith, and hope;
- nonviolence:
- the practice of inner silence, of chanting, and of other devotional exercises to still the
self-willed impulses of the mind and heart so that Truth can be heard.
Is there any hope for the human future unless more and more
people become imbued with these values which are common to many or all of the
great faith traditions?
In October of 1970, 221 representatives of all the world’s
major faiths gathered at Kyoto, Japan under the sponsorship of the World Conference
on Religion and Peace. They found in common that they possessed:
- a conviction of the fundamental unity of the human family, of the equality and
dignity of all human beings;
- a feeling for the inviolability of the individual and
his conscience; a feeling for the value for the human community;
- a recognition that might does not make right, that
human power is not sufficient unto itself and is not absolute;
- the belief that love, compassion, selflessness and the
power of the spirit and of inner sincerity ultimately have greater strength
than hate, enmity and self-interest;
- a feeling of obligation to stand on the side of the
poor against the rich and the oppressor;
- deep hope that ultimately good will be victorious.
Admittedly those who gathered for this conference may not
have been typical of the main streams of their various spiritual communities,
but rather came from their more venturesome and charitable wings. Nevertheless,
a declaration such as this shows the true direction in which all the world’s faiths
should move. It is our job as Quaker Universalists to cultivate and nourish
these trends, which we can only do by understanding deeply the spiritual
resources offered by different ways of devotion, and by being active
participants in interfaith dialogues, not by being remote or standoffish.
Finally,
those of us interested in a Quaker Universalist spirituality should avoid
falling into the assumption that a kind of formless and blanket hostility to
Christianity is a service. Rather, it is our job to celebrate and raise up all
the beautiful things that Christianity and its saints have brought to the human
enterprise, and to help project these good things into the future. We Quaker
Universalists must occasionally be prepared to play the role of Christian
evangelists, as I on some occasions have felt it right to do. For as we
encounter people of many backgrounds in the new global spiritual community, we
will occasionally meet people hungering to know about Christianity and about
how the activity of God in human affairs finds manifestation in this particular
faith experience. I am overstating the case, just to make a point, in using the
term “evangelism”, for certainly any such interpretations of Christianity I
have offered have never had the goal of asserting the superiority of Christian
spirituality over other faiths. But I have often found myself engaged in
efforts to help people understand what is true and beautiful in the Christian
message.
It behooves us also to recognize that institutional
Christianity is presently facing one of the gravest crises of its existence – a
crisis comparable in import to that faced at the very first council held at
Jerusalem and described by the Apostle Paul in the Letter to the Galatians and
in the Book of Acts; a crisis greater even than those posed by the Protestant
Reformation and by the scientific age. For regrettably, a great deal of
Christian theology, and the faith of a great many people, has been hung on the
untenable proposition that Christianity is superior to all the other world’s
faiths, and that all of humanity is destined to become Christianized. Now,
however, after extensive efforts by Christian missionaries, efforts which have
often had great achievements to their credit, it seems that, given world
demographic trends, by the year 2000 A.D. only about 16% of the world’s
population will be Christian. Most Christian converts have come from
polytheistic or animistic religions, or from religions that had already lost
their personal hold on the hearts of their people. Often such conversions as
these have not been purely matters of the heart, in that they took place in the
context of the military, political and economic pressures of colonialism and
cultural imperialism. In any case, when confronted by living religions,
especially if they were undergirded by some kind of. intellectual system,
Christian missionaries have had practically no success at conversions. Islam,
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism have been relatively untouched by Christianity
except, in the case of the latter, when evangelism was accompanied by terror.
Moreover, as the globe shrinks, it is no longer possible to deny that countless
numbers of people have found salvation, to use a traditional term, through
faiths other than Christianity. It is no longer possible to deny the vitality
of other non-Christian religions, and their success in helping people to find
meaning and to live lives of heroism and holiness. Canon Max Warren, former
Secretary General of the Church Missionary Society in London, has observed that
“the impact of agnostic science will turn out to be child’s play compared to
the challenge to Christian theology of the faiths of other people.”10
There is much honest grappling with this situation going on
within the Christian Church, and part of our task as Quaker Universalists is to
support honest reassessments by Christian thinkers of the significance of all
this. Indeed, there have already been remarkable changes in Christian
attitudes. For example, it was scarcely a hundred and fifty years ago that Pope
Gregory XVI wrote: “We come now to a source which is, alas! all too productive
of the deplorable evils afflicting the Church today. We have in mind
indifferentism, that is, the fatal opinion everywhere spread abroad by the
deceit of wicked men, that the eternal salvation of the soul can be won by the
profession of any faith at all, provided that conduct conforms to the norms of
justice and probity … from this
poisonous spring of indifferentism floats the false and absurd, or rather the
mad, principle that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of
conscience.”
Going back a little further to the Ecumenical Council of
Florence in 1442, we find a proclamation that: “The Holy Church of Rome … believes firmly, confesses and
proclaims, that no one outside the Catholic Church, neither heathen nor Jew nor
unbeliever, nor one who is separated from the Church, will share in eternal
life, but will perish in the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his
angels, if this person fails to join the Catholic Church before death.”
Nevertheless, the Second Vatican Council declared unmistakably in its “Constitution
on the Church” that “those who, through no fault of their own, do not know
the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere
heart and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know
it through the dictates of their conscience – they too may achieve eternal
salvation.” In the Council’s Declaration on the Relationship of the Church
to Non-Christian Religions it affirms the universality of grace and salvation,
stating that even expressed atheists who follow their conscience are moved
by grace and can partake in eternal life. For the first time in the history
of official Church statements, the religions of the world are singled out
and praised for the way that they have answered the “profound mysteries of
the human condition.” The Council summarizes the beliefs and practices of
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and recognizes that they contain what is “true
and holy” and reflect “the Truth that enlightens every human being.” Further,
the Council “exhorts” Christians “prudently and lovingly, through dialogue
and collaboration with the followers of other religions, and in witness of
Christian faith and life, to acknowledge, preserve, and promote the spiritual
and moral goods found among these persons.”
I would not argue that this is a fully developed
Universalism, but it is a watershed of a kind, and represents a vast conversion
experience for the institutional Roman Catholic Church, or at least for those
of its members who attended the Council or who take its pronouncements
seriously, a conversion experience which, in ways it would be beyond the scope
of this consideration to document, both the liberal and evangelical wings of
Protestant Christianity are lagging behind.
The crux of the matter for Christians is, of course, the
concept of the uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth and his dual nature as a human
being and as one of the persons of the deity, an entity different in
fundamental nature from any other earthly being. This troublesome and awkward
concept is deeply imbedded in Christian faith and tradition, and represents a
very difficult obstacle for Christians in facing Truth as the unfolding drama
of the Creation is revealing it to us.
Some bold Christian theologians are doing a lot of work on
the subject of the Incarnation. The various ways they are reinterpreting it in
the light of our modern knowledge of the Truth and holiness in other faiths is
more than we can discuss today. But it certainly is true that as Quaker
Universalists we have a strong stake in the development of a new Christology,
and should be participating helpfully in this process of exploration. An overly
simple universalist Christology, such as one that claims that Jesus was simply
another “prophet like Jefferson,” is inadequate to the reality that exists, and
is scarcely helpful to Christians as they engage in one of the most fundamental
of spiritual reappraisals since the Council of Jerusalem.
Healing divisions in the Religious Society of Friends is an
important mission for a person with a Quaker Universalist sensibility. A
universalist is especially sensitive to cultivate a context in our Religious
Society where all can give an authentic expression to their faith. Intolerance
of Christianity, or of Christian vocabulary employed in expressions of faith,
is not a form of universalism. But neither is an intolerant Christian dogmatism
a form of Quakerism. We must help our Religious Society avoid both extremes.
Members of the Quaker Universalist Fellowship should be attending Evangelical
Yearly Meetings, Conservative Yearly Meetings, Yearly Meetings associated with
Friends United Meeting, Yearly Meetings associated with Friends General Conference,
and Independent Yearly Meetings, bringing back reports of whatever they found
there that is good and true, and serving as a community building link among the
various strands of Quakerism. We should incorporate within our ranks Friends of
many different theological perspectives in a truly “universal” way. Our
Fellowship should function in a way which nourishes the universalist leanings,
however tentatively they may appear, of as broad a variety of Friends as
possible.
Our Quaker Universalist Fellowship should seek to overcome
the present perception which some people have that it represents a “pole” in
the spectrum of acceptable Quaker beliefs – a pole which is the opposite of and
which is opposed to Evangelical Friends. We should not have an image as the
most “far-out” group of people who believe in as little as possible in the
spiritual realm. Rather we should be seen to take an activist interest in the
study of the diverse spiritualities and traditions of humankind, including
those spiritualities which manifest within Quakerism, so as to build bridges
and encourage sympathetic rapport, and so as to draw out those strands of
common experience which are useful for the future and upon which a global
spirituality can be built.
We should be one organ through which Friends are kept
attuned to and can help advance a growing universalist spirit in religious
communities outside of the Religious Society of Friends. It should be a vehicle
through which Friends can experience directly the resources of sanctity, including
different modes and traditions of worship, available through both Christian and
non-Christian religious communities outside of Quakerism.
A Quaker Universalist spirituality strives for
reconciliation among the different religious communities of the earth; it seeks
to heal any overt or covert power struggles among them. It does not expect
simply to eliminate religious institutions, nor necessarily to invent a new
religion, but sees that each of the great spiritual traditions of humankind can
be enriched if their members develop an active sympathy with, and a willingness
to learn from, others on a different spiritual path. It recognizes that to make
exclusive claims is not the best way to love our neighbors as ourselves. At the
same time it recognizes that all people must know something of Jesus of
Nazareth in order to grasp the full content of God’s presence in history. It
thinks optimistically about the possibilities of salvation in all the world’s
great spiritual traditions. Instead of cataloging the errors and the evil which
has sprung up in the guise of religiosity, it practices forgiveness and seeks a
new beginning. Its first concern is to cooperate with and to encourage anyone
who is already promoting the Realm of God on Earth. It anticipates the day when
all humankind’s great spiritual traditions will participate fullheartedly in a mutual building up of a civilization
of love. It recognizes that while spiritual life in its externals often
presents us with a bewildering diversity, the capacity to apprehend the One in
the many constitutes the special character of love. Let this capacity to
apprehend the One in the many, and the love it expresses, be our special gift
as Universalists to all other Friends, and to people of faith everywhere!
Notes
1. Message offered at the Fifth Anniversary celebration of
the Quaker Universalist Fellowship, held at Providence Meetinghouse in Media,
Pennsylvania on April 16, 1988.
2. John Hick, “The NonAbsoluteness of Christianity”. from The
Myth of Christian Uniqueness, John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, editors.
(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987) page 29.
3. Quoted in Regina Bechtle, “C. G. Jung and Religion,” in Psyche
and Spirit, John Jay Heaney, editor. (New York: Paulist Press, 1973) page
69.
4. Wilfred Cantwell
Smith, The Faith of Other Men (sic), (New York: Harper and Row,
1962) page 127.
5. Paraphrased from John Hick, ‘The NonAbsoluteness of
Christianity,” from The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, John Hick and Paul
Knitter, editors. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987) page 29.
6. Ibid., page ix.
7. Paul F. Knitter, No Other Name: A Critical Survey of
Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis
Books, 1985) page 13.
8. Ellen Zubrack Charry, “A Step Toward ‘Ecumenical Esperanto”‘,
from Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, Leonard Swidler, editor.
(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987) Pages 222, 223.
9. Homer A. Jack, editor; Religion for Peace. (New
Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1973), page ix.
10. Quoted by Paul F. Knitter, op.cit., page 20.