Category Archives: Quaker Theology

Lucretia Mott’s Quaker Easter Message, Still Good the Day After

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”?

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A Quaker Bible Scholar & the Resurrection

Wit and erudition also came together in his New Testament courses. Cadbury was greatly admired by many students for his careful exposition of various approaches to analysis of New Testament texts, particularly the Gospels, and his care to avoid inserting his own views, so students were free to develop their own.

Or rather, this was admired by many. Yet some, among the more theologically orthodox, expected him not only to teach the Gospels, but also to “bear witness” to his belief in them, especially the key passages involving Jesus.

Thus the story is told that toward the end of a semester, one such student raised his hand, and then confronted Cadbury. As I recall, he said, “Professor, you have talked a lot about the crucifixion and the resurrection in the Gospel texts, but we have no idea what you believe about this. So, let’s have it: Yes or No, do you believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus?”

Cadbury pondered the query with a sober mien, removed and polished his spectacles, carefully replaced them,  and said:

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Now Online: “Quaker Theology” #33 — 20th Anniversary Issue

Theology as self- and group-defense was part of our 1999 response to the opening query about “Why theology”? It was current then; it was imminent when I visited that school; and it is immediate now.
But I also insisted there were positive reasons to write, read and talk about theology, which we defined as

“the ongoing work of self-examination and definition which any living faith community faces. This ever-unfinished work is at the center of Quaker Theology’s efforts; indeed, it provides us with our working definition of theology, which is: disciplined reflection and continuing conversation about individual and communal religious experience. It seems to us that such disciplined reflection is part of our religious duty. After all, in Matthew 22:37, Jesus includes in the first Great Commandment the imperative to love the Lord “with all your mind”; we think Friends today could do better at following this call.”

These positive reasons for theology are also still relevant, if seemingly sidelined by the rush of current events. It’s often been a struggle to make room for it, but we’ve worked at it.

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Sierra Cascades YM: “Our New Thing” versus the “Same Old Thing”?

Promising to reform this traditional system, even while coping with being purged by it, is not a new response. When the group that became  “Hicksites” were pushed out of Philadelphia Yearly meeting in 1827, their initial leadership insisted that they would preserve the recorded ministerial elite system — only they would run it better, less oppressively, than had the rival Orthodox junta. 

And maybe they did, for a short while. But before long, internal agitation surfaced among Hicksites about rising issues like women’s rights, and abolitionism, with the specter of civil war on the horizon. And it was shortly clear that the Hicksite recorded establishment did not like such reforming notions one whit more than did their Orthodox rivals. Soon enough there began among Hicksite meetings what I have called the Great Purge: hundreds of Friends deemed to be, in Kershner’s words, “divisive voices” or “only troublemakers,” who were silenced, marginalized or disowned.

But this time many victims stayed and, pardon the expression, fought back.

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Ashley Wilcox to Liberal Quakers: “I’m coming to uproot, to pull down, and destroy”

But Jeremiah was not the invader. Instead, like the other major Hebrew prophets, he was a kind of mail carrier, delivering God’s message to a generally resistant people:

“Behold, I [God] have put my words in thy mouth  [Jeremiah]. . . Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee (1: 10, 17) . . . .”  

Speak those words, Jeremiah; God (and Babylon) will take care of the rest.

However, Wilcox in her Guilford sermon, did not pick up Jeremiah’s messenger role, but rather that of invading Babylon. She repeated the operative phrase (1:10), but with herself as subject: “I [God] have this day set thee [Wilcox] over the nations and over the kingdoms [mainly unprogrammed liberal Quakers] to uproot, to pull down, and to destroy” what she [and God] have determined to be wrong about them. 

And, she explained, the terrible sin she is being dispatched to uproot and destroy is their practice, now a century old, of not recording ministers. Once that demolition is done, the recording system is what will be replanted in its place.

Wilcox insisted that the end of recording, and resistance to reviving it, has done much harm to liberal Quakerism, and to many in its ranks who are seeking recorded status, especially women. 

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