< one > Chekhov: “Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.” Sometime around the late 1980s, I started having two recurring nightmares: One, I’m maybe at home, or out somewhere, when the sky darkens and a dull roar starts up. It’s a tornado, bearing down on right … Continue reading Karmic Collision IV: Like a (Kidney) Stone
Post Office work is more than drudgery. It’s honest, productive work, an integral part of what keeps our society going. I kept reminding myself of that. But I often wondered: do many children in the United States daydream about growing up and getting a job as a mail handler? I doubt it. Maybe a few … Continue reading Karmic Collision III: Living My Double Life
A bulletin from southern California: The biggest Quaker church in the world wants to shut down one of the smallest. The small church sued in late 2018 to stop the shutdown. But a hearing in Orange County Superior Court on January 31 could lock their doors & make the
. . . I grew up in a large, mildly liberal pastoral Friends meeting in Indianapolis. Amiable but tepid, it gave me little to rebel against, but not much to inspire or motivate me either. I did not attend any church or meeting during my college years. But I had a spiritual sense that gravitated … Continue reading “Passing The Torch”, Author Doug Gwyn: “I received a distinct calling . . .”
Lucretia Mott completely rejected this whole [traditional Easter] scenario, decrying the “harm done” by it.
Yet she seemed devoted to Jesus. She quoted his words incessantly, affirmed his “messianic status,” and thought she was preaching his “gospel” message during her sixty controversial years as a Quaker preacher.
But if Jesus’ “gospel” was not about depravity and vicarious blood atonement, what did Lucretia say it was?
Scholar Priscilla Eppinger has put it in a nutshell: Salvation for humans would come through the faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. By this, Mott meant a faith like that of Jesus. She quoted from Paul’s letter to the Galatians (2:20):
“Faith of Jesus Christ is faith in the truth, faith in God and in man. The life that I now live in the flesh, said the Apostle, I live by the faith of the son of God. . . . Well [Mott added] what is this other than a faith similar to that which Jesus held, the faith of the son of God.” (Greene 124)
The faith of Christ, not faith in Christ. Neither Eppinger nor Lucretia originated this alternate motto. And what was this “faith”?