Light and Silence

I've been reading a lot about the history of Christianity lately, and also following various threads in Quaker blogs and message boards about a number of tensions people see in Quakerism. The tensions in Quakerism echo those through Christian history: some folks are most interested in Tradition, some are most interested in Scripture, and others are most interested in Spirit. Most everyone values all three of those on some level, but the prioritization is often very different.

(Yes, this three-part division is abstract, though I still find it helpful.)

Looking back over the grand divisions of Christianity, and oversimplifying drastically, the Catholic and Orthodox approaches have explicitly valued Apostolic Tradition, though built on Scripture and with room for Spirit. In the Protestant Reformation the reformers catapulted Scripture to the top, then divided amongst themselves over how much Tradition to retain and what Scripture actually meant. Spirit is still present, though often the Word (per John 1 and elsewhere) seems to be treated as the Word of Scripture, and Spirit often primarily validates Scripture.

I see Quakerism as having followed the third path, emphasizing Spirit. Early Friends were steeped in Scripture, but more willing than the Anglicans or even the Puritans to jettison existing church Traditions. They did, of course, develop their own new Traditions quite quickly after throwing off the old.

None of these religious groups completely excludes Tradition, Scripture, or Spirit; it's more about which gets priority when. Quakerism, while it is likely best defined by the priority it gives the Spirit, still contains Tradition and Scripture.

Within Quakerism - surfacing in the Quaker messageboard and blogs I follow, more than in the Meeting I attend - people seem to be fighting over the proper relation of these three components. To over-generalize once again:

• Some people see the Spirit, the Light, as the key feature of Quakerism, and the notion that the Light is Christ or is connected to Scripture is just unfortunate Tradition.

• Some people see the Light as dimmed terribly when removed from the Scriptures, and some of those people add Tradition and doctrine from more other Protestant perspectives as well. (Some people also want to subtract existing Quaker Tradition.)

• Some people value Quaker Tradition and practice, but have less interest in the possibilities the Light opens, while others see Tradition as a barrier to fruitful connection with the Spirit. (The latter seem better represented on blogs, and I doubt anyone is completely uninterested in the Light anyway.)

Personally, I see all three of these pieces working together, with the Spirit mediating Scripture and Tradition. I enjoy reading the early Quakers' works and watching them figure out how these three pieces fit together, and how to live by that. Their direct dealing with all of these tensions created a group that has survived three and a half centuries so far, despite the tremendous potential for splits and schisms that always seems to be created by humans' difficulties in discerning the Spirit.

Maybe it's just the nature of blogging and messageboards, but it feels like a lot of people despair about the current state of Quakerism, since it doesn't meet their expectations of what it should be. My own perspective is that it should - and can - be a lot of different things.

Balancing these three pieces in their myriad facets is never an easy thing, and as Quakerism in key ways abolished the laity, we all - as ministers - have to work through them, hopefully with guidance from the Light.