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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 5, 2012 at 11:55pm

What God has shown me, through a fairly long life under His teaching:

The sort of Eternal Warranty you describe is not, so far, the sort of guarantee that comes with divinely-inspired thoughts, customs, laws or traditional practices. Or the Jews would still be sacrificing in the original Temple. (Or actually, rather, still sacrificing wherever some worthy Israelite was moved to set up an altar.)

[In the case of Jesus' precepts, his essential meaning remains valid even when specific statements have ceased to serve their original purposes... But those, embodying divine wisdom, present hard chewing for the typical human mental digestive processes.]

"What early Friends taught, and believed," was that God, in the form of Christ, was available to them and guiding them to properly understand the Bible, as well as how they should embody that understanding in their practices.

Some of them may have thought their descendents could, and should, remain in that same understanding and continue the same practices... but the central fact they did know: was that God was available and guiding them at that time,

and would continue to do so.

Even a casual acquaintance with the history of Friends will show you: We didn't always get it right. But God remained available, remains available.

Lacking any useful "human" means of settling this difference... Does it still seem the same to you, if you pray for wisdom as James recommends? (I, myself, have never found a good reason to stop!)

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Permalink Reply by Isabel Penraeth on 1st mo. 6, 2012 at 9:26am

Forest--

I must confess that much of what thee types is fairly incomprehensible to me: I am often unsure what thy precise point is. I point this out not as a failing of thine, for others seem to have no similar difficulties, but as way of saying, what I am about to say may have nothing to do with what thee was trying to address . . . which would be accidental and not intentional.

Has thee considered, Forest, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral as being perhaps necessarily different from one person to another, that the weight of Scripture or Tradition versus Reason or Experience will be adjusted by a person's proclivities but also perhaps by God . . . that some people may be Given by God a different  avenue to pass through, their own path to the Narrow Way, that will get *that* person Guided through to Him . . . and that different people have been given different spiritual gifts and that not everyone Feels His Guidance in the same Measure. It seems to me thee would have no spiritual "crutches" at all, even those "crutches" for those who feel Called to the Way of Traditional Friends . . . thee would seemingly deny them the "crutches" the earliest Friends found Useful . . . I think God is being more Compassionate than that. I see these Traditions and the Scriptures are for some Friends a form of Heavenly Compassion and a Gift from God that while capable of misuse have real Usefulness, a way of being Faithful to the best of their ability while learning more about being Faithful, when there are gaps in Faithfulness, when there are holes in Understanding and Discernment.

Above, Joseph said,  "I believe one can be in danger of throwing the 'baby out with the bath water' when one disregards the historical and traditional heritage of the Early Friends in favour of new and modern interpretations which negate the very existence of what founding Quakers actually taught and believed." (emphasis mine)

It is my experience that some liberal Friends feel a need to deny that anyone can be experiencing the same spiritual reality of the founding Quakers, and that I believe I am experiencing the same Everlasting Gospel that early Friends describe, their descriptions of their spiritual experiences echoing my own so completely, I am somewhat of a problem--as are Tradition and Scripture.

When I walk through the meetinghouse door of a liberal meetinghouse, and it is discovered I am Quaker not Mennonite or Amish, there are always liberal Friends who are made angry by my appearance, without ever speaking a word to me about what I might or might not believe about this or that. My experience has been that these Friends are the ones most ignorant of Traditional Quakerism, the fullness of its practices and beliefs, and that they are really rejecting in me an ugly form of Christianity experienced by them elsewhere. And how many ugly forms of Christianity have there been? Many. I am the greedy televangelist; I am the racist Southerner; I am the superior and privileged WASP; I am the misogynist anti-intellectual. I am the selfish Manifester of Destiny. I am the condemner of Unbaptized Infants. I am the sadistic Inquisitor. I am a swirl of evil and cliche that activates them and troubles them and makes them want to act out and make sure I know they reject me and all I stand for . . .

And while I don't defend mindless heeding of Tradition, I do think that it is actually more defensible than rejecting it without ever understanding it at all . . .

Isabel

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 6, 2012 at 1:48pm

My experience has certainly been that God sends the spiritual & mental nourishment I need, but I normally don't receive it until previous lessons have prepared me to see the meaning.

So I don't deny that what early Friends got was the best truth they could receive, nor that it continues to nourish people, including me, to this day. But it isn't yesterday's stale bread that I'll be eating today. (It may be the same recipe, & certainly has to come from the same Cook.)

If God leads you to find truth in traditions from various previous times, that is not what I'm arguing against.

If you want to appeal to the earliest Friends, however, they did not rely on tradition, but on the Author of traditions.

And there is a difference. Old wine good, new wine good too! (& I don't think thee prone to interpret my 'playful' mode as 'insulting', but some are, hence disclaimer. Poets talk funny ways sometimes; how it be. This may be theology, but that doesn't mean it should come out in formal technical terms as if we were discussing engineering; God is creative and what He wants said, as plainly as possible, just might have to come out with curlicues. )

I believe (and can quote a pretty early Friend to that effect) that as the movement grew, it fell into the same error that Jesus condemned among the Pharisees: a tendency to clean the outside of the cup-- not really meaning to leave the inside dirty, but putting such emphasis on the outside that

the inside, of themselves and others, had begun to escape their attention!

Among the many things God uses the Bible to communicate... is the fact that it's a human invention.

That isn't the most important message it can convey, but (as Love & Truth can not exist as separate things) I consider your efforts to deny it mistaken.

The fact that you and I are fallible-- does not invalidate the fact that God can use us both to tell each other what we need to hear.

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 6, 2012 at 2:34pm

Isabel, This site software is putting my replies to individuals at the end of the discussion, not where I intend it to go. So 'to Joseph' may be appearing after your comment... and I'm having to address you by name (a practice I try to avoid!) just to say that this is about what I read from you.

[Talking "about me", "to me", "about what I said" are different-- and the point of saying so, is that people are more likely to be offended when that difference gets blurred.]

I grew up raised by atheists who sent me to a Methodist church because they thought it would be good for me. So I owe John Wesley a wonderful interpretation I heard as a child in his church, but I don't consider his "quadrilateral" the best way of conceiving the human multilemma:

"How can I recognize God's voice in the midst of all this?"

("All this" necessarily being filtered through "all me", which can certainly add another layer of confusion.)

I'd say that God has addressed me through all of those elements... and that none of them are the Voice of God (which we also call 'intuition,' though what people mean when they say "my intuition" may often be something far less reliable!)

And how do we know that God is addressing us in this "still small voice" but not in whatever internal thought seems sure at every moment?-- is not in that whirlwind, while this whirlwind however does have my name on it.... really does come from the solid source of all truth?

And the best answer to that question is: It is only by God's power that we can know God's voice. We can only trust that it is God's voice, that we're receiving God's inspiration-- because God is the appropriate object of our trust. [More later. Good place to pause.]

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Permalink Reply by Barbara Smith on 1st mo. 6, 2012 at 5:38pm

My belief is that while naturally God can communicate directly to each of us, I agree with Isabel that our capacity to notice the communication, or to receive it or benefit from it varies from person to person, from time to time in our lives and depending on what else is going on in our lives maybe. I also know for a fact that God communicates to me through other people, through their writings, through rituals, and most of all through the Bible. When I am stressed, or stuck, or whatever, then I often will be comforted by one of the above, especially if I am feeling that God is not present (which happens to me periodically). I also need Jesus and to know him, through the Light and through the Bible.

So I could never say that all I need is the "direct" communication with the Inner Light, though that (Jesus) is the basis of all the communication obviously.

Also, I wanted to point out that though the early Quakers were steeped in the Bible and interpreted all of their experiences through their reading of the Bible. so it is never true to say that they saw the Inner Light as their sole guide - they saw Jesus as their guide as he communicated to them through the Light. Don't know if anyone said this here, but I've heard Quakers say this many a time.

Just my two cents.

Blessings, Barb

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 6, 2012 at 11:55pm

Barbara Smith said:

[Let's see if including the header puts this reply where I intend it...]

I think everyone here has said that God addresses people by many diverse means. So I don't understand what this "All we need is direct input" idea is doing in the conversation.

-------------------------

What I've been saying, in that connection: That direct input is what tells us which modes of God-to-human communications to trust in any particular moment, and how to interpret them.

An example of this would be Fox's idea (not new, by the way) that to understand the Bible, you needed to ~'be in the same spirit as the apostles (etc) who wrote it'.

We have many many people (quite a few of them on the net) who try to interpret the Bible as if it were a technical manual. They're too busy figuring out "what He must have meant" to ask, and see, "What did You mean?-- How should I see this?"

So what makes scriptures helpful is not the literal words there, but those words plus God's immediate leading as to how to read them. Without that 'direct input' in the process, it becomes sterile. Even if we're trying to practice "the way Early Friends read this." It could be a perfectly good way, but that isn't what we need to practice! Because their "way" was to ask God-- and how did they know themselves answered?

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Permalink Reply by Barbara Smith on 1st mo. 7, 2012 at 8:52am

Forrest - I totally agree with this:

"That direct input is what tells us which modes of God-to-human communications to trust in any particular moment, and how to interpret them."

and the rest of what you've said. I was not responding to what had been said here, exactly (sorry). I was more responding to my experience of the opposite of what you are saying, which I found common among my liberal meeting, which is to see the Bible, for example, as a historical document, of little meaning today except to show us how the folks back then understood God.

I fully understand about the emptiness of traditions when kept for their own sake - or even worse because humans have added on myths of their own about "why" those traditions arose, which is a common human behavior. And I find this tendency among Quakers to divide themselves into the the tradition/non-tradition or the Bible/no - Bible or the pastor/no pastor groups disturbing. In fact one of the reasons our family does not currently attend a meeting, and instead have been members of a nondenominational small fellowship for the past 17 years is that in this fellowship the emphasis is on the journey of each one of us, a recognition that each of us is on our own path, and that together we will support each on on those paths. We are not part of a greater denomination, so we do not spend time and energy worrying about how the denomination is doing, whether we are conforming or not to the historical background of the group etc. Of course there are wonderful things about learning from those who went along similar paths before us, but Christ is the center, not George Fox, and I feel this is not always so clear among Quakers.

I hope I stated that clearly. It is always so hard to put multi-dimensional concepts into the linear format of words on a page.

Blessings to all,
Barb

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Permalink Reply by Isabel Penraeth on 1st mo. 7, 2012 at 2:30pm

But I really do find people writing here, as if without scripture & traditions we would have nothing to guide us-- whereas the very source of those traditions is God, and the fact that God is in fact always available to guide us. Without that, those traditions, admirable as they may be, would have no solid ground to support them.

Forest-- Honestly. Who? Because I don't see anyone writing like that, and I don't personally know any Conservative or Traditional Friends who would argue that without scripture and traditions we would have nothing to guide us. Not remotely. What I read on this site are people writing about an *aspect* of their faith, and having few outlets for those callings towards traditional practices, place their seeking about them here to share and fellowship with others who have had those experiences. 

Evangelical Friends have clearly chosen Scripture over the Guidance of the Inward Christ (the ones I know don't deny that Guidance--and in fact place it as quite important), but they have clearly set aside most of Quaker tradition. But thee cannot mean them, as there are almost no Evangelicals here.

What thee describes I have only seen among the Amish, traditional Mennonites, Old Order River Brethren . . . not among Quakers. And I am pretty sure I have had more experience and communication with Traditional and Conservative Friends than thee has . . .

Isabel

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 8, 2012 at 11:22am

Isabel Penraeth:

I'm not being paid to edit this site, nor keep notes, nor serve as a prosecutor of it.

But I am a former editor, and do notice nuances and implications-- and disconnects between what people mean and what they actually say.

When I point these out, people get defensive and hostile, go into "defending my position mode"-- and if I'm not extremely careful, so do I. Which is not good for me, or for what I intend. If it's making people feel the way I feel when everyone decides to thump on me (and they wouldn't feel like doing that if I hadn't been too good at winning arguments, insufficiently good at addressing people) then I don't want to do it.

Certainly not in "Look what you said awhile ago" mode.

I'm going to return to considering what you said earlier, that is, what I think you meant, a little later, because I think it deserves some sympathetic attention, and when I say "I don't have time to do this adequately right now," that is what I'm talking about.

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Permalink Reply by Karen Mercer on 1st mo. 15, 2012 at 5:04pm

Having an excellent idea of what this is about, I will answer.

There has never been a time in my life when I was not surrounded by dogma and traditions. I accepted them uncritically, for I was exposed to little alternate viewpoint, and the little to which I was exposed was so routinely criticized and ridiculed by people of all ages, shapes and sizes that I fearfully dismissed it. So there is no "before tradition" for me.

However, I'm not talking about Christianity or any religious tradition, I'm talking about the accepted viewpoints of post 1970s Modernity. Few people think upon how uncritically they accept the popular culture around them and the full extent to which it is a dogma that shapes not only their conclusions, but the very questions they are permitted to ask.

Fortunately, Frank Herberts "Dune" series crossed my path in my mid 20s and I found it most mind-opening on socio-political matters. I suspect the main effect of this was that I very shortly asked myself a question that would completely upend my life as I new it. I asked, "What if everything I've ever been taught is wrong?"

That mere question opened doors in my mind that could not be shut. From that point I became, like Temple Grandin, the Anthropologist from Mars. I began to study everything I could get my hands on and to dissect all my experiences and to reject all so-called Common Knowledge. I was not religious in any sense anyone would understand and most of what I've studied is not religious. Neurology, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, History, and currently, Economics.

I had had no direct spiritual experiences and turned to studying religion as an outgrowth of cultural studies and personal experience. I was confronted, in the form of a group of other mothers at my son's school, with Islam. I was quite put out to find myself completely ignorant of this growing population around me who were so clearly different and about whom so much was whispered. I set out merely to remedy my ignorance on the one hand but I was also perplexed by a reaction I could not understand....I envied them.

I envied their right to cover their bodies which I had unknowingly spent a lifetime feeling deprived of. You see, I was raised far MORE liberally than most of my friends....my household was filled with pornography which I was permitted and encouraged to look at for as long as I can recall. I was an early reader so I also imbibed the anti-authoritarian ethos that pervades the editorials of Penthouse and Playboy....anti-religion, anti-tradition, anti-Victorian/Puritan (the two were conflated) anti-censorship etc etc. My upbringing was Libertarian in the extreme, yet here I was nurturing a wistful feeling that these women were far more valued and well-treated by their culture than I was. Yet all around me I was being warned about "the Patriarchy" and the sexism of "Victorianism".

So I studied, and studied. And I learned that the "Common Knowledge" I heard all around me about Islam was common, but hardly qualified as knowledge. More accurately, it was ignorant, fearful people repeating slogans, jargon and secondhand opinion. To be blunt, it was cant. It made me wonder again how just how much of the Common Knowledge around me was sheer rubbish repeated enough to acquire the patina of respectability.....after, everybody knows...

Then, I entered an abusive relationship which I only survived by the Grace of God descending upon me and giving me a personal experience. Since I knew little of religion or mysticism beyond teenage dabbling in Wicca, I was unprepared for it and unable to integrate it for many years. But I studied such experiences and was quite surprised by the common themes repeating through so many people's experiences. There was, in fact, a mystical tradition for me to rely on, in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, which better explained my experience that Wicca could. I studied and found also the Prophetic Tradition, Scholastic Tradition... all sorts of wonderful things there to help me understand. Generations of collected knowledge, sifted and refined by the minds of many.

I by no means gave up my critical questioning....why give up the very tools that brought me here in the first place...and of course, I found a tradition of critical scholarship and arguments there before me.

As I am not a Traditionalist, but a Neo-Traditionalist I cannot speak to this purported argument with Traditionalists. I have never advocated an abdication of reason or personal experience of God, and as with Isabel, have not met anyone here who advocates blind acceptance of tradition over either of those things. What I do advocate, which gets up some people's noses, is that those same critical faculties be applied to the tenants and dogmas of Modernity. I advocate a radical freedom to criticize the Modern world and it's thinking just as we do the past, and to openly attempt to re-evaluate the past without the filters and blinkers of modernity in our way. I ask the annoying question, "What if our ancestors actually got some things right?" and I have frequently found the answer turns out to be a resounding YES, not just in my private opinion but in the opinions of learned people who are now churning front page articles in "Pschology Today" amongst other publications.

Amongst the "Common Knowlege" that can be debunked....Jesus as freedom loving iconoclast. Jesus was an ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jew in his lifetime. He didn't advocate chucking the Law, he advocated Super Law Plus....all the mitzvot, twice the kavannah (inner intention). His complaint about some of the Pharisees of his day and their followers was not that they followed the Law and the Tradition but that they didn't follow it enough, they were using the Law in the wrong way, to make a fuss over little details but glossing over larger matters. They were "straining out gnats, but swallowing camels" (a kosher reference most don't get, both insects and camels are not edible under kashrut law). But he never said anyone should stop paying attention to the small matters, he said we should pay attention to both. His teaching on the inner amongst the outer would not be found again in Judaism so boldly until the Hassidic movement of the 17th c (Hassid means "Friend" so that and their co-incidence in time with Quaker Friends should be of interest).

It is Paul, and only Paul, who attacks the Law with such a vengeance, at least in some of his writings.  The misfortune of this being nearly 2000 years of persecution of Jesus' coreligionists for failing to get on Paul's boat as it sailed away, leaving behind the Ebionites and other Law respecting Christians as well as the Jews. It remains a sad fact for too many Christians that his view of Grace came with such a high-price tag that they continue to speak about the Pharisees as if they actually knew any or know all there is to know of them, forgetting how close Jesus' teachings are to one of the major Houses of 1st C  Pharisee thought....or how much the 2 major Houses of the day disagreed (on virtually every point they opposed each other). When you speak of Pharisees, who then are you speaking of? Which time period? Which House? Which Rabbi?

"The Pharisees" and "the Jews" are two more examples of "Common Knowledge" that need a fresh look and can be added to the fresh looks and absence of cant we can use on every topic that has suffered under the Self-Hating Westerner/Modernity uber Alles worldview. Modernity is just as much a tradition as any other. People who are certain that modern thinking is somehow bias-free are like the fish in the water that doesn't know it's wet.

 

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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 16, 2012 at 11:01am

Karen Mercer said: [...]

There are four and twenty ways, of inflicting covert psychological violence against children, and every single one of them is wrong.

I don't even consider that the sexual forms of this are intrinsically worse than the others (though sexuality does add powerful emotional leverage); what they have in common is the tendency to undermine and attack a person's honest perceptions.

If someone truly comes to believe that "the Light in them is darkness," they've got a serious uphill battle, just to be able to let themselves know and say: "This way is up"!

----

Jesus was not faulting the Pharisees for lack of knowledge of Hebrew... or for being "Jewish". An enormous part of what looks like 'anti-Jewish' rhetoric in his sayings (both the accurate quotes and those suffering later embellishment) can probably be laid to an extremely heated argument, within the proto-Judaism of his time, between Jesus and the hierarchy of the Temple cult, in which some Pharisees ~"began to press him hard, and to provoke him on many issues,  lying in wait for him, to catch at something he might say."

We have at least one (probable!) story of a highly sympathetic and appreciative encounter between Jesus and a Pharisee. Jesus and Pharisees, after all, were arguing within strands of one complex web of scriptures and traditions, and many of them, in the tradition that eventually developed into modern Judaism, were quite close to some of his positions; some likely became followers.

But he objected to certain tendencies, which he observed in many Pharisees of his day, and would undoubtedly find among Christians, "Liberals" and etc etc in later times...

One was to lose sight of the internal essentials behind too sharp a focus on the externals.

One was to  be so attached to learning traditions from other people... as to lose sight of God's present and ongoing work among people less observant of those traditions.

And what truly kept them, and even the prophet John, guarding the doors to the Kingdom but unable to enter (despite being among the best people of his day): the deceptive pleasures of indignation and self-righteousness, and the warped vision that comes of them.

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Permalink Reply by Karen Mercer on 1st mo. 17, 2012 at 2:34pm

What a strange belief system....abuse is wrong merely because it undermines honest perceptions? How about, it is wrong because it has been shown to make permanent changes in the structure and function of the developing brain.

And, regardless of what you consider on the matter, modern brain scanning has shown that for girls, the most profound and damaging alterations to the brain are to be found in sexual abuse....for boys, neglect causes the worst damage.

Prior to the Victorian Era, people were equally Christian, yet abuse and sexual abuse of children was unremarked upon and commonplace. It was the Victorians who instituted the modern tradition of trying to protect children from adult sexuality. A tradition we have dispensed with along with the rest.

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about by remarking on people thinking the Light in them is darkness.  I did not mention such a person, indeed, I am for more concerned with people who think the darkness in them is Light, including scanning myself for such. It is by far the more common affliction, so far as I can tell.

You have indeed, missed the essential point.....I am not aware of myself or any other person who is interested in tradition having said anything to the effect that tradition ought to trump a living experience of God or that the externals should be more important than the internals, yet you have begun your thread on that very premise. If you have met such a person, please provide us with this information. If there is something specific in what I or anyone else has said that lead you to that conclusion, please do point it out and I will be more than happy to point out your misunderstanding.

You have a great deal of criticism for those who "learn traditions from other people" yet you yourself are quoting the opinions of others who came before you. Where for instance, does your inside information on John come from? I am unaware of any Biblical verse which states that John was unable to enter the Kingdom, and that it was due to his taking pleasure in indignation and  self-righteousness. Perhaps I have managed to overlook that verse. If so, please point it out.

From the sounds of your descriptions, it seems that not one of the Prophets or the disciples Jesus chose have made it into the Kingdom, nor have any Christians. How very interesting....a religion designed to save all that seems incapable of saving anyone at all....beyond a small elite of people who have a very special relationship with God that gives them the inside track.

Well, well....so what are the rest of us to do?....those of us fully willing to admit that the Grace of God does not descend upon us 24/7 and that we have periods where God seems absent? And what of those poor, huddled masses of people who would love nothing more than a close personal relationship with God, yet despite all their efforts, find themselves not feeling God's presence yet? If those without God whispering in their ear about how best to go about their daily life are not to rely on the helpful information of those who have gone before us, and the traditions they instituted, and we can't trust the Gospels because of those pernicious disciples manifest failings in understanding Jesus and stubborn insistence in clinging to the self-righteous notion that there is such a thing as right and wrong, how shall we go about our day and make any decisions about how to live our lives?

What shall we have to rely on without Bible, tradition and our poor human moral intelligence if we are calling upon the Holy Spirit and currently getting a dial tone?....Eureka! I have it....we shall rely completely on the present Holy Spirit workings of the tiny elite among us who do claim to have God's personal line on speed dial, and shall put ourselves at their disposal unquestioningly....even if it does seem to offend our mistaken sense of good and evil.

How fortunate for us that we have one of these greats among us.

Forrest Curo said:

There are four and twenty ways, of inflicting covert psychological violence against children, and every single one of them is wrong.

I don't even consider that the sexual forms of this are intrinsically worse than the others (though sexuality does add powerful emotional leverage); what they have in common is the tendency to undermine and attack a person's honest perceptions.

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