01-20-2007 13:45

Clarifications

Michael, 
 
Your letter clearly and strongly expressed your deep convictions. It is not my intention for my comments to be construed as an attack. I appreciate your statements about opposites and shades of truth. I am not so sure, though, about the common criticism I hear about unprogrammed tradition wanting to avoid challenge or conflict, or what you call the “niceness testimony”. Sometimes that is the case, but I don't think that it is any more so than with Christians who use more traditional “god language”. I have found that some Quakers who tend to frequent use of such language become non-responsive when I speak in the manner that I am doing in this dialog. I think the distance between the two extremes is sometimes more about expectations about the type of language required in testimony than about depth of spirituality.  
 
For example, I could say that I know of what George Fox says when he said, “There is someone, even Christ Jesus who can speak to your condition”. But I don't call it Christ Jesus. Would Wallace accept that as true, or would he say I don't know of it? I am curious. 
 
I can also speak of a yearning for truth and to will one thing, to use a phrase from Kierkegaard. Is that what you mean by God's will? I don't think of God as something external that has a mind and will and experiences things like anger and disappointment. But I may from time to time speak of God in a somewhat metaphorical sense that could suggest that.  
 
I used the phrase “world view of two thousand years ago” in the earlier post, not to denigrate Wallace and not just in reference to atonement theology. Atonement theology was just an example. We receive education in science and math, and learn about cause and effect, scientific method, thermodynamics, etc, and then we hear the religious language and we try to make sense of it all. But I read an article recently about Quakers doing more outreach, and it talks about “..being unafraid to communicate it [faith] in the simple language of our traditions.” It is not a matter of fear. It is a matter of using language with integrity. I have to speak from my own understanding.  
 
I believe the dichotomies we find in current Christianity such as secular and religious, spiritual and material, natural and supernatural, sacred and mundane, are sometimes useful in talking about things, but they are just ways of thinking and understanding. They are characteristics of our ways of understanding rather than characteristics of the things we are trying to understand. 
 
In the best case, the dichotomies are about our perceptions and the limitations of our perceptions more than about objective reality. In my view of the world, there is just one reality. We use the religious language to indicate such things as feelings of reverence or experiences that we want to communicate and words fail us. But the “simple language of our tradition” is a tool that sometimes obfuscates and in our world the context often requires a different set of tools. 
 
In the less than best cases, the “sacred language” is used not to point to any realities so much as part of an attempt to reach more religious depth by a sort of ritual use of language. We have some idea of who we would have to be to have this depth, and this image involves some a kind of ritual use of language. The language is part of the role of how we think we need to talk and act to find the depth.  
 
It might help to illustrate. Concepts and language fail to communicate not just religious realities but even everyday experiences. How would you communicate the color blue to someone who had never seen it, the taste of a tangerine to someone who has not tasted it, the shattering of a glass to someone who had not heard it. We can't. A child learns such things directly and learns what words we use to refer to them. The words do not communicate the experiences. 
 
The word “God” is no nearer to truth than any other word. Like the taste of the tangerine, words do not communicate experience, they just point to it, especially if the word brings up images that are out of sync with a person's world view. The question is, “Are we pointing to truth or fantasy?” The same words can point to either, or more likely to a mixture. 
 
But, as you say most eloquently, Quakerism is not about theology. It is a discipline and a path that we believe will lead us to a truth that is beyond comprehension. It is entirely ok for people to use whatever language makes sense to them, but when Quaker writers speak of this path in terms that seem to require a certain set of words and concepts, which I find Wallace doing, that Quaker is not convincing. It seems he is excluding.

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