Here’s the text of a paper I presented at the Society for the Study of Theology Postgraduate Conference, 4-6 September 2023, at the University of Edinburgh.
In this paper, which is based on my Masters thesis, I begin with the understanding of hope found in narrative theology, a way of doing theology associated with Stanley Hauerwas among others. I use this to show how Quakers in Britain today struggle to articulate a common hope. I then suggest how Quaker worship can be seen as a source of transcendent hope through offering a taste of the Eternal sabbath, with some help from Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann.
Within narrative theology, hope is connected to the end of our story, whether individual, collective, or universal. We use narrative to make sense of our lives,[1] and these narratives give our lives direction towards an end. This end gives meaning to the whole.[2] With God as the author of our end, there is an open unfinishedness to the Christian narrative. We can be confident that the end of God’s story will be consistent with God’s character, but the end is not one we can predict.[3] Christ has yet to say the last word.[4] The Christian story holds openness in tension with closure.[5] God authors an expected, unexpected end. Because God’s story is not yet finished, we are free to creatively participate in the anticipations of God’s Kingdom in the present.[6] It is the expected, unexpected nature of the end of God’s story that gives us the freedom and confidence to act, and therefore allows us to hope.
I find it difficult to say whether my own faith community shares this kind of narrative-based hope. I’m a member of Quakers in Britain, also called the Religious Society of Friends, a relatively small religious group known for being a historic peace church, and for their practice of silent worship and rejection of outward sacraments. Quakers rarely make formal theological statements, and when they do, they are limited to particular subjects. Quakers in Britain have written very little on hope, and their current ‘Book of Discipline’, an authoritative anthology of Quaker experience and procedures called ‘Quaker Faith and Practice,’ does not include “hope” in its index. In recent years, Quakers in Britain used the phrase ‘In turbulent times, be a Quaker,’[7] stating that, in the context of the climate crisis, ‘our faith in common humanity gives hope,’[8] but with no elaboration on the meaning of ‘common humanity.’
I interpret this reticence to articulate a communal hope as related to the community’s lack of a shared narrative. Since the Quaker movement began in mid-17th century England, Quakers have been immersed in the story of the Bible. This is still true for the majority of Quakers globally, most of which practice an evangelical Christian faith. Quakers in Britain have followed a different path. Towards the end of the 19th-century, British Quakerism began to adopt a liberal theology, resulting today in an almost total detachment from the Biblical narrative, and a theological climate I would describe as post-Christian liberal pluralism. ‘Quaker Faith and Practice’ exhorts Quakers to ‘remember the importance of the Bible, the writings of Friends and all writings which reveal the ways of God,’[9] placing scripture alongside other writings seen to mediate spiritual authority. Knowledge of the Bible is not seen as necessary for the individual Quaker, and scripture has little, if any, corporate function.
As well as this loss of a shared narrative, Quaker sociologist Ben Pink Dandelion has identified some theological positions held within contemporary British Quakerism that make it difficult to articulate a shared hope. Dandelion suggests that Quakers hold an informal doctrine of perpetual seeking and ‘the certainty of never finding.’[10] This rational certainty of the impossibility of theological certainty has been named by Dandelion as a doctrine of the ‘absolute perhaps,’[11] and more recently as a form of ‘ortho-credence,’[12] where the way of believing is more important than the beliefs held.
Dandelion also describes Quakers as inhabiting an ‘Eternal Now’ where ‘[an] ahistorical atemporal mysticism and the means to “God” [have become] more important than the end.’[13] This is reflected in a paragraph from ‘Quaker Faith and Practice’:
For us it is not so important when the perfect world will be achieved or what it will be like. What matters is living our lives in the power of love and not worrying too much about the results… We must literally not take too much thought for the morrow but throw ourselves whole-heartedly into the present.[14]
These informal doctrines of the ‘absolute perhaps’ and the ‘Eternal Now,’ focused as they are on the present moment, rely on an abandonment of historical specificity. They involve a rejection of any one particular, unifying narrative. I’m reminded of Stanley Hauerwas’ insight that the story of liberalism is that it has no story.[15] I see this lack of a shared story as inhibiting Quakers from having a shared theological language. If all truth is provisional, then little, including what Quakers hope for, can be said with confidence. In what Dandelion has termed a ‘culture of silence’, Quakers in a theologically diverse community avoid potentially divisive discussion by simply not talking about their beliefs.[16] Quaker theologian Rachel Muers writes that shared silence can be used to give the impression of unity through suspending doctrinal division, and that without a shared understanding of what silence is for, ‘communal silence does indeed risk being nothing more than mutual tolerance on the basis of non-engagement, a mark of the lack of any common place to stand.’[17] This is an end of shared story, for no more stories (or stories with endings at least) can be confidently told. The silence of Quaker worship has become an empty space to be filled with a multitude of individual stories, or a silence that covers our differences, whilst telling no one story of its own.
When faced with the question of what the Quaker hope is, Quakers in Britain may be able to answer as individuals, but it is a tremendous challenge to articulate a shared, communal hope. I suggest there are resources within the Quaker tradition that may be of use here. George Fox, one of the most significant leaders of the early Quaker movement, understood the importance of a shared story and the shared language it provides. Although Fox claimed that an individual could be saved without knowledge of the Bible or the historical Jesus, he also claimed that scripture provides the necessary language for the gathered Quaker community to understand its spiritual experience and its role in history.[18] Fox saw the Bible as providing a narrative key to the Quaker experience of worship. For Fox, the Quaker silence told a story.
We can see this in Fox’s interpretation of the seven wax seals of chapter 6 of the Book of Revelation. The first five seals contain various judgments, until with the opening of the sixth seal comes a great shaking (Rev 6.12-17). The name ‘Quakers’ partly comes from the physical charismatic quaking experienced by the early Friends, and they associated this with the earthquake of the sixth seal, interpreting it as a liberating shaking off of the old, fleshly humanity whilst being born into the second, spiritual humanity.[19] The breaking of the seventh seal is followed by silence in heaven, which early Quakers saw as the state of spiritual understanding and peace that follows the quaking of judgment.[20] The silence of Quaker worship was seen to reflect the silence of heaven.[21] Quakers interpreted their ecstatic shakings and silences through narrative, and in turn communicated that narrative through their worship.
Following Fox’s lead, I will now offer a narrative-understanding of Quaker worship that makes it an explicit source of hope. The Book of Revelation with its apocalyptic fury, although a favourite text of George Fox, is generally viewed with suspicion by Quakers in Britain today, so instead I will move from the silence of the seventh seal to the stillness of the seventh day, and explore how the narrative of the sabbath might contribute to a Quaker theology of hope.
When I first began exploring a Quaker understanding of the sabbath, it seemed to me undeveloped beyond the belief that no one day was more special than any other.[22] I was excited to find in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann an understanding of the sabbath that could re-narrativize Quaker worship as a site of hope. Moltmann is not a Quaker, but I have found his theology to be very Quaker-sympathetic. Moltmann writes that ‘the whole work of creation was performed for the sake of the sabbath.’[23] The sabbath is when God rests in and enjoys creation, and the creation rests in and enjoys God. The sabbath is therefore equivalent to the unmediated presence of God.[24] Every experience of the sabbath stillness is the experience of God’s self, but this is not the same as the ahistorical mysticism of the ‘Eternal Now’. Experience of the sabbath rest is not just concerned with the present. It is connected to the past and future of God’s story, offering a taste of God’s rest on the sabbath of creation, and a foretaste of God’s rest at the eschaton.[25] The Quaker experience of God’s unmediated presence, and the Quaker understanding that worship cannot be restricted to one day of the week, correlates with Jesus’ making, in Moltmann’s words, ‘the whole of life a sabbath feast.’[26] The silence of Quaker worship could therefore be understood as narrating and pointing towards the stillness of the messianic, eternal sabbath[27] when ‘the homeof God is among mortals’ (Rev. 21.3) and God and creation are at rest in one another.
This is as far as my research had taken me by the completion of my Masters dissertation, but in preparing this conference paper and returning to this material, I was excited to discover that the Quaker theology of the sabbath was not as undeveloped as I had initially thought. Quakers in the mid 17th-century also understood their worship as offering a taste of the eternal sabbath. Early Quaker Isaac Penington, author of some of the most well-loved passages in ‘Quaker Faith and Practice,’ also seems to be the Quaker who has written the most on the sabbath. Penington distinguishes between a temporal sabbath which is a rest from physical labour, and a spiritual sabbath which is a rest from sin and the rebellious human will.[28] This echoes the distinction Quakers made between the spiritual ‘substance’ and the material ‘shadow’, seen in the Quaker rejection of bread and wine communion and water baptism in favour of spiritualised understandings of these sacraments.
The spiritual sabbath Penington describes is given initially as a taste. This taste initiates a pilgrimage out of a spiritual Egypt, through an arduous symbolic six days of inward labour towards the seventh day of rest. The taste of the spiritual sabbath is given at intervals to spur the individual on, and the period of spiritual rest can gradually increase. Although for many the rhythm of entering and leaving this spiritual sabbath will continue indefinitely, for some it may be possible to enter the eternal sabbath in this life.[29] I will quote Penington at length here:
That man who is born of the Spirit is to wait for the movings, breathings, and kindlings of the Spirit in him: and when the Sun ariseth, he is to go forth to his labor in the light thereof, and in the night and withdrawing of the Sun, to retire; and when his seventh day of rest comes, he is to receive it from, and enjoy it in, the Spirit; and afterwards to be willing to begin his week again, even till his whole race and the full course of his pilgrimage be finished. Yet if it were possible for man, after he is come to Christ, to abide perfectly with him, to cease from lust, to keep within the faith, to draw naturally in the yoke, to bow in the spirit continually to the Father of spirits, there would be a continual sabbath kept in the passage, even before the great, full, and perfect sabbath in the end.[30]
If the idea of tasting the eternal sabbath is already present within Quakerism from its earliest days, we may ask why we need to bring in Moltmann at all. I think Moltmann still offers an important contribution, especially as Penington’s theology of the sabbath, in common with other Quaker and wider Christian theology of the time, is highly supersessionist (as well as androcentric). In making a distinction between the spiritual and temporal sabbath, Penington calls the former ‘the gospel-sabbath’ and the latter ‘the Jews’ sabbath.’ Quakers who experience the spiritual ‘gospel-sabbath’ are named ‘true Jews.’[31] There has been very little attention paid to supersessionism in Quaker thought, and so Moltmann’s sensitivity to Christian-Jewish relations, his attention to Jewish theological and philosophical voices and the ‘messianic perspective’ of his theology,[32] make him a useful dialogue partner in recovering and repairing early Quaker thought in this respect. My reading of Moltmann suggests he would say the Eternal Sabbath is a messianic sabbath, and so can never be divided, as Penington does, into a ‘gospel sabbath’ and a ‘Jews’ sabbath.’ Moltmann writes that God’s Shekinah, God’s presence with God’s people in exile, is intimately related to the sabbath, stating that ‘Sabbath and Shekinah are related to each other as promise and fulfilment, beginning and completion.’[33] This needs much more careful unpacking than I can do here. In my current PhD research, I am exploring the relationship of Whiteness to modern Quaker theology, and if, as Willie James Jennings suggests, supersessionism is the womb in which Whiteness matures,[34] then there is much Whiteness to grapple with in early Quaker theology too.
With the caveat that there is still further work to do, the silence of Quaker worship has something to offer those seeking a source of collective transcendent hope. The Quaker tradition contains a narrative understanding of the stillness of Quaker worship as both offering a taste of, and pointing towards, the eternal sabbath of God’s promised future. The taste of the eternal sabbath within Quaker worship offers a hope in God as author of our story, exciting our hunger and thirst for righteousness, for actively participating in God’s expected, unexpected ending.
[Featured image photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash]
[1] Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Visions, Stories, and Character (1973, 2001)’, in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 166.
[2] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue, New ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26.
[3] Paul S. Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 168.
[4] Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church, and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24.
[5] Fiddes, The Promised End, 281.
[6] Fiddes, 170–73.
[7] Jon Martin, ‘Quakerism: A Faith for Turbulent Times’, Quakers in Britain, 2017, https://www.quaker.org.uk/blog/in-turbulent-times-be-a-quaker.
[8] ‘A Quaker Response to the Crisis of Climate Change’ (Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain, June 2009), https://quaker-prod.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/store/de7f01e99d824a1cc6f18a17ec112414a1abfd51a16726095ef63ee96c37.
[9] Britain Yearly Meeting, Quaker Faith & Practice: The Book of Christian Discipline of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain., 5th ed., 2013, para. 1.02.5.
[10] Pink Dandelion, An Introduction to Quakerism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 152.
[11] Dandelion, 152.
[12] Pink Dandelion, The Cultivation of Conformity: Towards a General Theory of Internal Secularisation (London: Routledge, 2019), 129.
[13] ‘Ben’ Pink Dandelion, ‘From God’s Time to Historical Time: Secular Amillennialism’, in Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming, by ‘Ben’ Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn, and Timothy Peat (Birmingham: Curlew Productions and Woodbrooke College, 1998), 185.
[14] Britain Yearly Meeting, Quaker Faith & Practice, para. 24.60.
[15] Michael G. Cartwright, ‘Afterword: Stanley Hauerwas’s Essays in Theological Ethics: A Reader’s Guide’, in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 636.
[16] Dandelion, An Introduction to Quakerism, 145.
[17] Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 153.
[18] Douglas Gwyn, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (Richmond, Ind: Friends United Pr, 1986), 122–23.
[19] Gwyn, 187.
[20] Gwyn, 188.
[21] David L. Johns, ‘Worship and Sacraments’, in The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, ed. Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 261.
[22] Britain Yearly Meeting, Quaker Faith & Practice para 27.39.
[23] Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1985), 277.
[24] Moltmann, 280.
[25] Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1996), 266.
[26] Moltmann, 276.
[27] Moltmann, The Coming of God, 276.
[28] A view he shares with James Nayler, another Quaker leader of the time, see James Nayler, ‘To All the World’s Professors,’ The Works of James Nayler, vol. 2 (Glenside PA: Quaker Heritage Press, 2004), 70.
[29] Isaac Penington, ‘To All Such as Observe the Seventh Day of the Week’, accessed 24 August 2023, http://www.qhpress.org/texts/penington/seventh.html.
[30] Isaac Penington, ‘The New Covenant Distinguished from the Old’, 1660, http://www.qhpress.org/texts/penington/covenant.html.
[31] Isaac Penington, ‘Of the Church in Its First and Pure State’, 1668, http://www.qhpress.org/texts/penington/recovery.html.
[32] E.g. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1990).
[33] Moltmann, The Coming of God, 266.
[34] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010), 36.
Jolly Quaker 