Some while ago a Friend lent me a copy of David Boulton's book 'The Trouble With God.' I read it and reacted with anger. I wasn't angry that someone should put forward an argument like the argument in the book. I read this sort of thing all the time with an even temper. It's more that an argument such as this should be presented from within the Quaker movement as a Quaker viewpoint, when it seems to be to be a parody and undermining of everything that drew me to Quakers and keeps me among them.
Now people who are that personally angry about something are generally in above-average danger of making errors of judgement about it, so when I ended up writing a fairly long piece stating the grounds of my objection to 'The Trouble with God,' I assumed it might be flawed for this reason, so I filed it and forgot about it, thinking it possible I might be mistaken. Looking at this piece again after a while, I find it's not as bad as I feared, so I've decided to take the calculated risk of putting it out, warts and all. I'd appreciate Friends' comments. I'd like to stress that I've no beef with any individual Friend, least of all David Boulton (I've never met him and know very little about him). If I'm going after anything, it's the book. But the book, in my judgment, is an absolute turkey.
There is an inner integrity in us all which rejects all programmes of As If. ... This inner integrity demands the real.
Thomas Kelly, Reality of the Spiritual World, 1944
There's no cosy way of saying this. David Boulton, the "humanist and Quaker" author of The Trouble with God: Building the Republic of Heaven, has written an anti-Quaker book. The Trouble with God is not a work of Quaker universalism; it's not Quaker humanism; it's not Quaker atheism or Quaker non-theism or Quaker agnosticism. It's not Quaker anything. It's anti-Quaker. It's against any and all sorts of Quaker testimony or subdivisional -ism.
At first glance, this assertion itself seems unQuakerly in its intolerance. But it isn't, for two reasons. Firstly, it isn't intolerant. David's entitled to put his view forward, and maybe he's right. It's just that if he's right, Quakers of every stripe are all equally wrong. Secondly, and more fundamentally, it's Quakerly to propose clarity. An anti-Quaker understanding of truth is, by definition, not in unity with a Quaker understanding of it. For the moment, then, I'm postponing any full assessment of the truth of David's thinking, simply as such. All I'm now seeking is clarity about what he says, and how this stands in relation to the essentials of Quaker faith and practice, no matter who's right or wrong.
Quakers don't, and shouldn't, think in terms of creeds. David doesn't suggest a specific creed, but his thought is deeply credal, in the sense that it acknowledges no reality beyond what the conscious, rational human mind can grasp, and what human words can achieve. It comes from the same spiritual place that creeds come from. This is not the point of origin for any genuinely Quaker witness.
David terms his thinking radical religious humanism. Unlike conventionally religious credal thinking, it's based on the secular theory that the human consciousness is quite unable to experience absolute truth or reality in any significant sense. All we can experience is, in a sense, our own talking or thinking. So goes the theory. Applying this theory to God or the Spirit, David concludes that we can't, and don't ever, have any direct experience of it. He infers that human words such as God and Spirit can't refer to anything real; they're fictions, and this is the basis on which hardcore atheists demand that we stop using the terms altogether. But David takes a different line. He believes that, if we accept that God is simply an idea, we are free to have what he calls a "make-believe" relationship with an idea as if it were a reality, and that this is worth doing because such make-believe is life-enriching and ethically fortifying, even if it's ultimately only a form of imaginative play.
In my judgment all this is demonstrably untrue, from the basic theory onwards, but that's not currently my point. My point is, firstly, that spiritual life in David's understanding depends entirely on human thought and language, in a way which would make it a credal process. Creeds about a make-believe God are still creeds. So here, tentatively and under correction, I shall compare religious humanism with the current state of my own discernment of what Quakers are.
Quakers have always maintained that there is a truth beyond language which we can experience. Their point has usually been that we don't experience it very often, or very easily, or very fully. We can't understand it, or talk directly about it, because our conscious capacities for thought and language won't allow us to. When we do really begin to experience this reality, we experience it ecstatically, both in the general sense that it is a heady experience, and in the literal sense that it makes us 'stand outside' our normal selves. It strikes us with such overwhelming power and presence that we are compelled to call it a spiritual reality. It can change us utterly. It can disrupt our conscious mind and will, and our habits of behaviour and communication, often traumatically. For some, like me, it can only be understood as actual godhead, or God, a presence rooted in a reality which is more real than the one we move through every day. For other Friends, the same spiritual truth is the reality we always experience, viewed through cleansed and enlarged human perceptions, more or less as William Blake taught. Without papering over the cracks between these formal understandings, they aren't really germane to the point currently at issue, because all such views share a basic sense that the truth we call spiritual, whatever else it may be, is, at any rate, real. It is not solely the creation of human thought and language. Quaker understandings are less about cultivating linguistic fiction than they are about clearing it out of the way in order to get at the reality beyond.
Our business method, with its disregard of personal preference, its striving after unity, and its abhorrence of the vote, is the practical expression of this essential Quaker recognition of the reality of the real. It is, apparently, the one feature of Quaker practice which is more or less globally invariant. I believe (subject to correction) that all Quaker meetings, whatever their faith tradition, whether programmed or unprogrammed, maintain the observance of the business method. The method's historical origins lie in a literal belief in the direct inspiration of God, discerned specifically in distinction from individual or collective human opinion or rational calculation. In Britain, the method is not always now practised in this conscious understanding. Its workings may or may not be seen (as I see them) as potentially transcendent in the supernatural sense, but they are always, in fact or aspiration, ecstatic in the literal sense, inasmuch as, through the method, we continue to seek, and act on, an understanding of truth, as distinct from preference. In practice, Quakers may fail to follow the method into its fullness. But, to date, we have not redefined the basic aspiration. Nor should we.
This aspiration is not compatible with religious humanism. Its whole point is to seek after the reality we have no choice about. The practical difference therefore arises over the issue of choice, and its relation to truth. In the final analysis, as David argues through his favoured symbol of the 'republic of heaven,' the religious humanist goal will always be to realise and express human choice. This is what compels David's humanism to reconfigure the sacred as a form of make-believe. The risk is that, if we once admit that the sacred is real, in a way our own thoughts and words aren't, then something beyond us suddenly seems to threaten to impede, or at least authoritatively guide, our choices. The thing about Quakers is that this guidance - including, if necessary, a disregard for our own preferences - is exactly what we look for. We define ourselves as Quakers by our intention to live in the truth - that is, face up to reality. We don't look for freedom. We seek to take responsibility.
Modern British Quakers are purposefully and extraordinarily vague in their verbal descriptions of Spirit to which they feel responsible. It is possible to be seduced by this into the assumption that we are, or should be, equally vague in our experienced understanding of it. This is not my view. Quaker words and ideas about the Spirit are vague. But Quaker experience and understanding of the Spirit is precise and specific. And to me at least, we appear far from vague about what the Spirit is not. It is not us. Whatever it is that we do or don't worship in meetings for worship, it is clear that we are not worshipping our own selves. The Spirit is not us, though it may be discerned within us. It's something greater than us, something in some sense apart from what we currently or habitually are. And, above all, as the mere existence of the truth testimony ought to remind us, it is not construed as a game of make-believe. Right or wrong, the Quaker method of life is the opposite of religious humanism. Quakers teach that, because reality is accessible, we had best stop playing around with creeds. Religious humanism teaches that, because reality is inaccessible, we may as well play around with creeds to our hearts' content. This view, if acted on, would turn Quaker unity into its opposite: an anthology of make-believe creeds whose only unifying feature would be that none of them would really be Quaker, arguably because they'd all be lies, but chiefly because they'd all be creeds. Saying this sets no constraints on our paradoxical unity-in-diversity. It re-affirms the essential ground of its being. Religious humanism and the Quaker way are like chalk and cheese. There are infinite varieties of cheese. But chalk isn't one of them.
The ingrained Quaker refusal to impose outward uniformity of creed or doctrine has fostered the vast, liberal, and spiritually healthy unity-in-diversity of which British Quakers are rightly protective. This unity now consists (partly) in incorporating, within our common witness, expressions of belief and understanding which are logically and rationally opposite to one another. As a result, the aggregate of liberal British Quaker witness now centres on a vast, formally inexpressible paradox, which radiates an apparently boundless plurality of belief and expression of thought and life. At its shallowest, this plurality bogs us down and renders us impotent. At its highest and deepest, it arises from a harmonious unity of witness to authentically revitalised human lives. Radical religious humanism (besides appearing far too comfy to be really radical - but that's another discussion) is not a new tactic or style of play in this great liberal Quaker game of contact with reality. It is an attempt to stop the game by dispensing with the reality. If only for clarity's sake, we should stop calling it Quaker.
