“To stand within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge, but makes it possible.”
Hans Georg Gadamer
Today I spent a few hours working on my Mid-Program defense for my PhD program, I will be presenting it to my committee on May 14th. This entails laying out the key questions and motivations behind my research. It also includes what I’ve studied so far, where I am headed and how I will finish up (God help me!). It’s a good exercise but it’s rather grueling and kind of works against the way I am wired. When I was editing today I came across the word “denominations” which I had written awhile back and I instantly replaced it with the phrase “faith traditions.” Shocked by my initial response, I realized that I still have an allergy to the word.
I grew up Catholic, went to mass regularly, was baptized Catholic (as far as I know) and was confirmed as an adolescent. I did my time, literally, in parochial schools up through 8th grade and was devastated when my parents decided to stop going to mass and start taking us to some small store-front Charismatic church. I was by then pretty committed to my Catholic faith. Then I was indoctrinated in the non-denominational framework, where all denominations are evil! Boo!! And will steal your soul, because everyone in them is mindless and not really passionate about their faith, they just go because that’s where their parents went, or whatever.
I stopped believing this anti-denominational doctrine once I realized the importance of being a part of something bigger than one local congregation, and the amount of support, accountability, and richness of history involved with, well, denominations. But still, I don’t like the word. I prefer instead to talk about (faith) traditions for a couple reasons.
For one, the word denomination just has a bad rap for a lot of Americans. It sounds overly paternalistic, top-down and dated. Whereas tradition, at least to me, rings of something more alive, something that is potentially more organic and flat. Anyone can participate in a tradition. For instance, think of all those interested in aspects of the monastic tradition, who adopt this or that practice, but are not themselves wholly monastic.
A friend made a great point to me on twitter saying that denominations help to name something that would otherwise remain unnamed and unnamed things are ultimately untenable as movements. I think he was right to suggest the importance of naming something, this is a process we see happening again and again in the Bible. But still, the problem lies not in the fact of naming something, but rather that often everything can be lost but the name. Consequently, the denominational name simply becomes a placeholder for something that has become largely obsolete. Rather, tradition in the way I understand it stresses the (dis)continuity between our stories, the practices we engage in as Christians, our beliefs, and points to what texts, biblical and otherwise, are important in the formation of our communities.
Finally, denomination still signals, at least to me, a preference to structure and hierarchical authority. Here “denomination” is the opposite of “movement” or “organic.” A denomination was once a movement that has become top-heavy, bogged down by its irreplaceable and non-translatable history and text. Instead, a tradition is more like a way of perceiving our contemporary world and relating to our shared history, a way of interaction with and communication about God. It can remain fluid and translatable even when people within that tradition get caught up in denominational-isms.
This is what I like so much about the Quaker Everett Cattell who worked within the denominational structures of the Friends church, he was both a college president and a superintendent, but suggested that the heart of the tradition was not found in those structures but in the community’s organic relationship to God’s mission and fellowship with one another in the Spirit, both of which he felt would actually undercut our structures and challenge them to be re-thought according to our contemporary needs. My reading of Cattell is that he believed the only way to truly be a Quaker was to betray the structures in favor of obedience to God’s call to be for the world, and in doing so, we might in fact be truly Friends.
Following Cattell, I have very little interest in Quakerism, in as much as it is an ism. These things that are the “way we’ve always done them” can actually becomes obstacles to our believing in the power of God’s Spirit. The denominational nitty gritty, when it is left to its own devices and not rooted within the life of the tradition, only sustains structures often reinforcing the church’s role as a placeholder for our belief rather than a bottom-up community of people following God’s mission in the world. I want to be a part of a community that not only tells but also lives into the stories of those we call Quaker.
A few weeks back I was invited to talk with some college-age Friends during a weekend retreat. It was my first visit to Plainfield, Indiana and I had a nice time meeting these students and their adult leaders from Western Yearly Meeting. I was invited to sit on a panel with three other people to answer “What is a Quaker?” And later in the day, I led a workshop on “How Quakers Might Worship.” My take on the first question was to look at what Quakerism might become in our hands rather than offer a historical or objective set of practices that determine whether we are Quakers or not. Here are some of the thoughts I shared:
This question, what is a Quaker, is an open-ended question and needs to be treated that way. There is no longer any “right” answer to this question, at least not in the sense that one can offer some clearly argued historical or theological point and persuade all his or her hearers of that truth. But there are some who offer better answers then others. Some versions of what it means to be a Quaker today are far more compelling and make better sense of what we know than other versions. What makes something compelling is not simply its logic, but how well it works on the ground. We are most convinced of the truth of something when we see it worked out in real life. This is no less true of the Christian faith.
Because we ask the question, “What is a Quaker?” we are alerted to the fact that the Quaker tradition is in crisis. Things aren’t what they used to be, times have changed and things we were certain about are no longer easily assumed within our culture. It’s not unlike the kind of crisis a lover has who finds out that his beloved is no longer in love with him and has found another. Quakerism awaits to be remade/reborn in our hands, this will happen through the work and guidance of the Holy Spirit and Inward Light of Christ.
Quakers are a part of the Christian Church. A Quaker is (usually) a Christian with a particular family resemblance. There is no such thing as just a Christian anymore, maybe that was true in St. Paul’s time, but now the Christian world is far to fragmented to miss the importance of particular traditions and theological schools that guide our theologies, practices and assumptions about the world. They are like other Christian traditions, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anabaptist etc. but like the Anabaptists they have tended to challenge the dominate political and cultural ideologies of their time in light of the Gospels and authority of Jesus Christ. Families are messy, there are always “black sheep,” there are always those whom we don’t get along with, or don’t see eye to eye with, yet we are still family and share a common history.
So a Quaker is a person who finds something deeply compelling about the stories that make us the Quaker family. Not only are they deeply compelling to them, but they find themselves within those stories. I remember reading Robert Barclay’s Apology for the first time. I kept thinking to myself, this is the kind of stuff I’ve always believed, or I have believed this my whole life without even knowing it! I found myself in a theological story written hundreds of years ago.
It is someone who care for the practices of the Quaker tradition but also recognizes that God’s Spirit is never limited to “they way we’ve always done it.” To be a Quaker is to be renewal worker for the Body of Christ.
A Quaker is a person who has a life-changing encounter with the living Christ and gives his or her life over to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
They live in the reality of God’s kingdom come. The kingdom is not something off in the distant horizon, it is here now.
A Quaker is a missionary, an evangelist, a radical, nonviolent, plain, a monastic and a creative kingdom dreamer.
Quakers are young and old, quiet and loud, faithful and doubters, politically involved and nonconformist, peaceful and transformative, they believe reconciliation with God’s Spirit is what the spiritual as well as the material world really needs.
It is you and me an what we make it in our generation. It is ready to be remade in light of what God is doing a new in our generation.
These were some of my reflections. There is obviously a lot that I didn’t touch on, but then again I tried to say most of this in 5 min. I really enjoyed having the chance to share some of my ideas and convictions with the group and I think it connected with at least some there. Being there helped me to remember how much I love working with those in the church, teaching, encouraging and guiding the body of Christ.
Cattell’s understanding of authority is derived from Christ, who is the head of the church. He argues that there is a tendency in the church to choose some one authority over another. Christ as head relativizes arguments over authority of Scripture, tradition, Spirit, etc. Rather we “must see the organic whole and each part functioning within the total organism, and each organ receiving its relative authority from that which is Christ” (Cattell, 8). This statement sounds close to post-foundationalism (a philosophical-theological movement newly espoused the later half of the twentieth-century). » Read the rest of this entry «
Yesterday, The Quaker Ranter, Martin Kelley, and I sat down over video (he’s in NJ) and had a conversation about some of the difficulties with insider Quaker lingo and the problems that presents for “outsiders.” We also discussed this in relation to using YouTube as a way to get the word out, and how we might go about doing something like this. The conversation is the first (trial) run of a series Martin will be conducting, something I personally look forward to. I enjoyed being the Guinea Pig.
Last week I did a lecture in class on John Caputo’s most recent book,What Would Jesus Deconstruct? I have mixed feelings about the book (more on this later) but I think in either case he makes some very helpful comments. The class I am currently a TA for is Mission in Contemporary Culture. In it we basically look at the world of cultural studies and how it (or if) it can be used in the church and in theology. Caputo’s book is a great example of deconstruction (I’ll hesitantly call a method used in culture studies) meeting the church.
Caputo takes as his starting point Charles Sheldon’s classic late nineteenth century text In His Steps (where we get the famed question WWJD?) and looks at the interruption of the homeless man entering the worship service and breaking down as an example of deconstruction. That is, during a worship service, is the is the unexpected and uninvited that transforms, the exact opposite of what was ‘programmed’ or planned for worship.
The man says,
I’m not an ordinary tramp, though I don’t know of any teaching of Jesus that makes one kind of a tramp less worth saving than another. Do you?…It seems to me there’s an awful lot of trouble in the world that somehow wouldn’t exist if all the people who sing such songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don’t understand. But what would Jesus do?
For all those of you who get a copy of The Friend, the only weekly Quaker publication in the world, you will see my review of the Ben Pink Dandelion’s 2005 book Liturgies of Quakerism in this week’s edition. It’s pretty neat to finally get something in The Friend and I hope there will be more opportunities in the future to write for them. The Friend is based out of London (The Friend’s House) and so draws a different crowd than some of our American publications which is another great thing about it.
This past spring I had the great opportunity to participate in leading a workshop on convergent friends in Providence with a dear friend, and some new friends we met there: David and Shawna. Afterwards Robin was contacted about writing an article for The Friends Journal on the workshop and she asked me to join in the process with her. This was my first co-authored article and I think it’s all the better for it. I learned a lot through the process of writing through working with Robin and am glad they put it online for you check out.
I’ve been reading and writing a ton while here at woodbrooke, which I suppose is good since that’s why I came here!? I just finished a fourth section to my final paper, it was on Martin Davie’s analysis of why and how Liberal Quakerism became the predominate form of belief in Britain. It took me a couple days to hammer it out, and it will take me as least as long to edit it, because it’s pretty long. I just quickly added up the word count on my various sections and I’ve got over 15,000 words so far, which isn’t too shabby. Actually, I think that’s as many words as I am required to have for my final paper for this tutorial, but I haven’t even written my conclusion yet, or added any of that fun juicy stuff where you get to argue your main points, etc.
This is a response to a comment I received yesterday about Quaker theology. The comment was good enough that I decided to write a post about it, because I know that many people have the same questions and challenges it brought up. Theology should be done in a way that is not only sensible (in terms of its sources and clarity) but also sensible in terms of its practicality. In other words, as one of my professors used to say, “if your theology doesn’t work, it’s bad theology.” This post tries to set forth why the pursuit of theology can and should be something we support. I’ve yet to really address an apology for why the Friends Church need Quaker theologians (something I am challenged on fairly constantly), and so this is my first attempt of many to come. The post is written as a response to the comment and not as a typical post » Read the rest of this entry «
Last week I did a lecture in class on John Caputo’s most recent book,
