Re: Re there is no such thing as Quakerism

Friends, I was taking a break from slogging through 17th-century
Quaker tracts (the labored reasoning and antique language in those
things can be pretty fatiguing), & decided to peek in on this
newsgroup, to see how it had evolved since I ceased participating in
late February.

Alas, little surprised me. This newsgroup is like a river -- a
lot of stuff flows through it, but it always looks pretty much the
same. Still, Timothy Travis's question, on May 3, about what there
is, if anything, that all "Quakers" have in common, caught my eye and
seized my imagination. It seemed a useful question.

So I thought I'd drop in just long enough to offer my two cents'
worth.

To begin with the obvious, it is standard for dictionary
definitions to tie the meaning of the word "Quaker" to membership in a
constituent body of the Society of Friends. In other words, all
Quakers (as the word is formally defined nowadays) are members of
Quaker congregations. Conversely, those who are not members of such
bodies are not Quakers -- although they may well still be, in the eyes
of Christ, *Friends* -- a much nobler calling. (I personally feel
sure that there must be many, many Friends who are not Quakers.)

But I understand Timothy to be asking for some commonality beyond
the matter of outward membership. Indeed, the question of whether
such a further commonality exists is every bit as interesting to me as
it is to him.

Matthew Stoner's list of commonalities -- "Quakers do not believe
in outward sacraments" -- etc. -- strikes me as sound in the main.
There are *individual* members of Friends meetings and Friends
churches who disagree with various points in his list, but I know of
no *congregations* -- either meetings or churches -- that, *as a
whole*, reject any of the points on his list.

Timothy seems to suggest that some Friends churches do believe in
outward sacraments, but this is not actually true. The Friends
churches in question believe in outward *ordinances*, but do not
regard these ordinances as *sacraments*. The difference between the
two is that a "sacrament" is "a rite in which it is believed God's
saving grace is uniquely active" (here I am quoting Van A. Harvey, *A
Handbook of Theological Terms*, a standard reference text). Indeed,
in the Roman Catholic view, the sacraments are *such* a unique channel
of God's saving grace that their observance is *important to one's
salvation*. An ordinance, by way of contrast, is *not* a special
channel of grace; it's simply a rite that Christ's followers practice
because they believe he "ordained" (i.e., established) it. So far as
I know, *all* Friends churches affirm that practices like water
baptism and bread-and-wine communion are not sacraments, but, *at
most*, only ordinances.

Timothy also suggests that "in the evangelical branch of the
[Quaker] family you will find those who believe that the Bible is the
ultimate authority that reveals God to us." I do not believe this is
true of any evangelical Friends *churches*. So far as I know, all
evangelical Friends *churches* continue to affirm the traditional
Friends understanding, which is that the Bible is the written *words*
of God, but not the Word of God, and that it is the Word of God, i.e.
the living Christ, who is the ultimate authority who reveals God to
us.

Yes, there are individual members of Quaker bodies who think
differently. As Matthew observed, there are also individual Roman
Catholics who disagree with various points in their Church's official
Catechism. However, it has always been generally understood that it
is the position of the *congregation* that defines what it means to be
a member of a particular religious body -- *not* the views of
dissenting individuals. There are individual Jesuits who do not even
believe in God; but that does not mean that their position must be
taken into account in deciding what the commonalities of Roman
Catholicism are. And it is similar for Friends. The commonalities of
Quakerism, like the commonalities of Roman Catholicism, are
*normative* ones, and as such, they are things that not every Friend
*actually* lives up to; they are rather things that every Friend is
*challenged* to live up to by the religious body that she or he has
joined.

A final point. Matthew writes that he thinks we should "look to
the early Friends for [their] definition [of "Quaker"]." I must
agree. And interestingly enough, for early Friends, the definition of
the word "Quaker" was tightly, indeed indissolubly tied to their
understanding of "convincement". It was the sense of convincement by
the Holy Spirit -- i.e., the sense, encountered in one's conscience,
that the issue of wrongdoing, i.e. sin, was of absolute importance,
and that one needs to become perfected from wrongdoing/sin in order to
escape damnation, *and that one has not yet attained to such
perfection* -- that caused early Friends to tremble, or "quake",
uncontrollably. And so, when they were mocked as "quakers" by their
unbelieving peers, it was this sense of convincement, and the manifest
evidence that this convincement and trembling is of critical
importance, which they found not only in their own living experience
*but also throughout the Holy Scriptures* -- that they pointed to in
their replies.

So, by the standard of early Friends, one is a Quaker if-and-
only-if one has truly experienced the heart-rending, body-shaking,
attitude-transforming experience of convincement. And perhaps that is
something worth thinking carefully about.

Well, now it's time to get back to my research. My love to all.

All the best,
Marshall Massey <mmassey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
.

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