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Permalink Reply by Bill Samuel on 5th mo. 17, 2011 at 3:05pm

I appreciate your comment, as a Christian who left BYM.  But I think Neuhaus has a bit of a problem in the opposite direction.

 

Liberal Friends are right to be wary of doctrinal formulas (Neuhaus would not agree). The Gospels show Jesus as having the most trouble with those who were the most careful to be doctrinally correct. And you look in Luke where Jesus was asked what needed to be done to inherit eternal life, and Jesus responded with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. No one in his audience would have been unaware that he was placing someone they all would have considered a heretic in the heroic role in the parable. At other times, he would answer questions with a series of parables which looked at the matter from several different angles. A very different approach from a neat doctrinal formulation.

 

So there is some truth to Liberal Friends' disdain of orthodoxy. You can't really put God into a neat, humanly designed box, although one needs to observe that many of the orthodox formulations are not so much wrong as not being a full picture. But you do need to have a spiritual center - some sense of the Truth which is a genuinely corporately held norm. Without that, you run into the spiritual dead ends which many meetings have indeed experienced, and you wind up throwing the baby out with the bath water. So you get to the ridiculous point of pleading for some toleration of those who hold to the original core understanding of the centrality of the Living Christ. And I think you often wind up with a basis for unity which is not only not explicit, but something that if stated baldly Friends would recoil at. Liberal meetings sometimes seem to have become clubs for a certain WASP, middle-class, well educated, liberal demographic. And that is an abomination, IMHO.

 

The church where I am now has found a way to have a center without falling into the doctrinal trap. And we are clear about being a centered set rather than a bounded set (which is what traditional orthodoxy leads to). We have a vision which undergirds everything we do.

 

The unprogrammed, nonhierarchical character of many Friends meetings provides great vulnerability to drifting away from the core of the faith. Earlier generations of Friends had ways they used to keep more or less on track. Not by any means perfect ways, but when used in the right Spirit (unfortunately that was not always the case) did help to keep Friends united in a vital spirituality. These ways have largely been abandoned by large parts of the Society (partly due to abusive use of them), but they have not been effectively replaced. And things have drifted so far in much of Quakerism that one wonders whether it can be truly revitalized, although there have been serious efforts in recent decades which have borne some fruit.

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