Primitive Christianity Revived, Again
The heart of the Quaker revelation is that 'Christ is here to teach his people himself.'
It is not the idea that Christ is here to teach his people himself; it is Christ teaching us.
It is not the rejection of ideas about God; but it does entail recognizing and embracing God's ongoing process of teaching and cultivating each person; it entails resisting the substitution of ideas about God for facing God.
It isn't the worship of experience without ideas -- as if any experience could be free of ideas about its meaning. Neither is it reverence for anybody's 'experiences'. It does imply letting God teach us through experience. God will do so with or without our cooperation; but so far as we know that God is 'addressing us' via the events, thoughts, and other experiences of our lives, we can be more inclined to 'listen' for God's meanings, to ask for and expect clarification.
This is implicit in our scriptures and in our traditions; studying these can help us see it.
Studying these can't possibly substitute for seeing it, but does seem to help. The two ways people most often lose their ways are: 1) to neglect such study or 2) to study the ideas we find in scriptures & tradition, without recognizing how very radical they are, without digesting their full world-shattering actuality...
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