February 9, 2015
Do Quakers Believe In God? Do we need God??
Recent conferences have used these questions as their titles. I suggest another question, “Could God be cleansed out of BYM?”
Let us not be individualistic as we usually are. Let’s not consider what I believe, or you believe, or what he or she believes. Let us consider instead what the Religious Society of Friends (BYM) “believes” – what it stands for and what is its purpose.
BYM is just one of many organisations, each of which has a declared Purpose. BYM has agreed with the government, represented in this case by the Charity Commission, that its Purpose is religious. In case of any doubt as to what the word ‘religious’ means in this context, BYM has pointed to its book of Christian Discipline, also known as “Quaker Faith and Practice”.
In QF&P the first section mentions God. The first Advice mentions God. In the book, God is mentioned over 700 times! We cannot escape from the conclusion that BYM is an organisation whose Purpose is centred on God.
When charities apply to be registered they accept the condition that they are not permitted significantly to amend their agreed Purpose. Therefore BYM cannot ever be anything other than a God-centred organisation.
Moreover, BYM is a denomination of the Christian church and an active member of the Christian ecumenical movement in Britain.
To those Friends who find these facts challenging and who would prefer them not to be true or who hope that BYM might change into an organisation which is not God-centred, I would say this. “You are on the wrong bus. You cannot persuade the driver to change the route, because he/she is not permitted by law to do so”. I suggest you have two options. Decide to stay on the bus, trusting that the ride will be satisfactory. Or get off, and get onto one going to your desired destination.
You could accept Advice 1’s call to trust that good things come from God. Five words, beautifully simple: “Good things come from God”. Advice 1 does not demand you believe, it simply exhorts Friends to make the decision to trust this hypothesis. There are plenty of other perfectly reasonable hypotheses, including that there is no God, but BYM is the organisation of those who have decided to accept that simple Advice. They have decided to put their trust in the assertion that good things, especially love and truth, are the leadings of God.
Alternatively I suggest those who cannot accept the concept of divine guidance set up a new society, perhaps called the Spiritual Society of Friends, Reformed Quakers (BRYM). BYM and BRYM could co-operate in many matters, such as jointly sponsoring QPSW. BYM might give a proportion of its assets to BRYM equal to the proportion of BYM’s former members who transferred their membership to BRYM.
Then non-theists would no longer be troubled by religious language, and God-centred Friends would no longer be inhibited from using religious or Christian language. In business meetings those who try to lay their personal opinions on one side in order to seek the will of God will not be out-argued by those who simply express their own views.
Footnotes
1. In my opinion, BYM should apologise to the many who have joined the Society in the past few decades, not realising what they joined. It has been very wrong to attract and retain members with atheistic convictions by glossing over the fact that BYM is a God-centred religious organisation, a Christian denomination and one of the core members of the Christian ecumenical movement in Britain. BYM needs a mechanism, a teaching ministry, which continually clarifies the essential features of Quakerism, such as its understanding of ‘God’, and the concept of divine guidance. Every other faith group has officers (priests, rabbis, immams, ministers) who regularly and frequently remind adherents of their group’s basic beliefs. Quakers have trusted that newcomers come with Christian knowledge, and have assumed that God will ‘teach and transform’. But as the first sentence of QF&P says, God does not impose upon us. God has to be allowed. (Reminder: “As Friends we commit ourselves to a way of worship which allows God to teach and transform us… all out testimonies come from this leading”. QF&P 1.01)
2. God cannot be defined. God is known only by God’s effects. Quakers have never thought of God as a dreadful sin-obsessed, male autocrat, given to anger and jealousy. To reject God on the basis that some people are believed to think of God in that way, is ‘a poor silly notion’.
3. Religious organisations splitting is pretty normal. American Quakers have split into almost countless sub-groups. Almost all Christian denominations except arguably the Romasn Catholics are the result of splits.
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