I loved The Covenant Crucified, and I totally see how the X-Covenant can be named as the Convergent-Covenant.

Our monthly meeting is living out quite a bit of the questions of what it means to be a faith community, where are our edges, what is our core. I’m hopeful that this line of thinking you’ve presented can present some feedback into that conversation.

And I wish you Godspeed for your presentation at FAHE!

Peace,
Chris M.

Thank you for this – I’m looking forward to hearing more.

I think I get the gist of what you’re saying, but that’s because I’ve read fairly widely in MacIntyre (and Yoder and Hauerwas – but not Gwyn – but your post makes me want to read “The Covenant Crucified”). And also because of my experience of Christian communities with roots in Catholicism, which is less compromised by Enlightenment modernity than either liberal or evangelical Protestantism, Quakers included.

This traditionalist way of thinking (telos-tradition-practice-character-virtues &c.) is very alien to most people raised in the modern, liberal, individualist world, which means most people in the USA and UK for a start. So if we are going to convey these ideas to others we need to find a way of presenting them that they can grasp. Which means finding examples of traditions and their practices that have survived into our modern world without looking too quaint (as many craft traditions probably do) for modern people to make sense of.

The obvious place for Quakers to start is with the Quaker tradition itself – with the practice of meeting as a community to discern the motions of the Spirit and then act on them, with the Testimonies understood as a witness to the truth thus discerned. But I can see that this will look like authoritarian groupthink to the many Friends and attenders who are ‘refugees’ from authoritarian churches or have simply drunk very deeply from the liberal-individualist spring. Or who have non-theist convictions that preclude any concept of a spiritual reality beyond the purely human.

How do you think Gwyn’s concept of the Covenant relates to John Punshon’s understanding of the Cross (in “Testimony & Tradition”) as being central to traditional Quaker thought and practice? He quotes a Yearly Meeting Epistle from 1700 that talks of “the offence of the cross” to describe the humiliation endured by those who struggle with themselves to follow divine leadings towards a life that runs counter to the demands of worldly society. There seems to me to be a parallel here with J H Yoder’s understanding (in “The Politics of Jesus”) of the way of the cross as the path of social nonconformity. Now there’s a challenge to post-Christian Quakerism!

Grace & Peace

Jeremiah

Friendship gets by on tacit rules, rules which don’t get legislated because behavior that would significantly violate them simply doesn’t happen. That doesn’t mean that friends don’t offend each other, but that their continuing devotion is more important than any particular conflict that arises.

The relation between people and God, as described in the Hebrew Scriptures, is considerably different. The national leaders liked to think they had an ongoing deal with God, as the neighboring tribes also had “covenants” with their gods; the nature of such deals was very much like what we would call “a contract.” One party agrees to do __ and to not do __, in exchange for the other party agreeing to similar (but not necessarily symettrical) conditions. God, evidently, agrees to this, but knows the people will violate his rules (They ARE people, after all!) and continues to love them anyway.

A friendship like this would not survive; this is more of a familial relationship! One doesn’t contract with one’s parents for one’s care–and even marriage, though certain agreements are entailed by it, is less a matter of MAKING an agreement than of ratifying a condition which has come to exist… So God is shown as being parental, while the leaders of his people keep trying to put things on a more businesslike footing: plagues of toad ONLY IF we misbehave in such & such a way; we want to know what’s okay and what isn’t, Boss… while they keep on violating the spirit of the relationship God wants to have with them.

Early Friends were drawn together by a sense that God was making something of them, “gathering a people” as Fox described it, or “forming a movement” as we might see it today. Contemporary Friends–at least those I’ve seen–don’t seem to have this kind of focus, but rather “This is a nice little church that teaches peace and doesn’t preach at us much.” If that’s what Gwyn is saying we’ve lost, yes, that seems to be long gone.

But most of what one can ‘talk about’ and study about a religious movement–is entirely beside the point. It puts one in a position very much like one of those Israelite kings, wanting to know should we ally with the Egyptians or the Babylonians (Who’s got the most chariots?) while that “impractical” issue: How well do we know God?–is the only one that matters in the long haul. We aren’t interested in Biblical history because of their organizational successes.