Are Quakers Christians?
There are a lot of ways to ask that question. Does being a Quaker mean that you are Christian? Does being a Quaker mean that you are a Christian? What is the difference between being Christian and being a Christian?
A long time ago – 2000+ years ago – there was a man named “Jesus” called, “Christ”. Christ was a word that meant “Leader” “Teacher”, which he clearly was. Those who listened to him and followed him were called “Christians.” They didn’t have to do or be anything else. In fact, being called a Christian was a great way to be laughed at for being a fool. Jesus himself was called a crazy man. Not a particularly exclusive company. A number of Hebrew men had gone off from their heritage of the Hebrew religion into various different directions and were called mad men.
But Jesus was saying things that people wanted to hear. He was saying that they could be free of the slavery of Rome and that they would be forgiven and loved by a God that they had learned until then was a vengeful God, a strict and angry God.
There was a book written by a person [Schonefield, a Jewish rabbi) who claimed to have investigated as much as was known about the years that Jesus lived. One of the theories that came out of that writing was that Jesus had deliberately manipulated his life to match the prophecies in the bible that his people knew. Maybe he did! But any one who would deliberately manipulate his own life to end in such a horrible way was certainly insane! But I hardly think that to listen to such words and to yearn for them to be true was insane.
Jesus’ words were of a way to think, a way to live, a way of relating to one’s fellow man that was different. Jesus wasn’t about starting a new religion, but to change the direction of the one he knew and saw as flawed. That way of thinking, of acting, of living came to be called, “Christian” and as more people learned about it and believed in it, wrote about it, LIVED it as well as they could, it became another religion. There were a lot of sacrifices in the name of that religion but to be free to choose ones own thoughts and beliefs is so strong a desire, a need of mankind that sacrifices were made and continue to be made; some in the name of religion, some in the name of freedom its self. (Wars have been and are being fought in the name of religion though I see a true motive as greed and power. The funny thing is, wars fought in whatever name don’t achieve anything but hate and destruction.)
That name, Christian, has become the name of a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of relating to our fellow man. You don’t have to be a Christian to be Christian in your life. I see so many ideas, intentions and directives in other religions that are “Christian.”
A strongly held part of Quaker thought is the peace testimony. I see this as a vital part of Christian thought. Concern for others, avoidance of violence, simplicity of living, these are all Christian attitudes and are attitudes that I see being taught in many other regions that do not call themselves “Christian”. I guess that means that Quakers are Christian, whether or not they are Christians. As participants in Quaker Meeting for Worship, we don’t ask, “What religion do you belong to?” There is no requirement to be a formal member of any Christian organization, not even of ours! Every one is welcome to participate in our silent Meeting and learn about a Christian life whether they want to be called Christian or not.

Since no one reads my blogs anyway, I'll post this even if I would be uncomfortable to share it with people I know!

Have you ever wondered what God is? Is God some all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful existence? Something so mysterious, so vast, so different that we can never comprehend its existence? Or is God a fantasy, a myth, a superstition created entirely in man’s imagination to be the answer to all the mysteries that exist in the world in which we live?
The planet on which we live is but a tiny micro-speck in space. It is only one of eight or nine planets that orbit our sun. And although it is not the smallest, it is far from being the largest. Our sun is the center of our universe but only a tiny speck in the galaxy we call The Milky Way. More than that, beyond it is space, with millions more suns and universes and galaxies, plus “black holes”, whatever they are. SPACE----it seems limitless, without limits, no end. Is there an end? If there is an end, then there must be a beginning.
Stars (suns) are known to have burned up, used up their fuel, expanded into nova, and then what? Is that the end? What about the debris left, what is that? What was the beginning? There are asteroids that may be the debris of exploded stars or smashed planets or-----what?
And how did it all start? God created the world in six days? Did He create it? Did He create us? Is He the creator of it all? If this incomprehensible “thing” we call our world, including suns and universes and galaxies and space WAS created, that means there was a beginning. There was a time when there was nothing. What was all this created from? Pure energy? What did that come from?
If it is true that all this that we know and also all that we don’t know about was created, that there was a beginning, then there is also an end! What is that? Does that mean there will be nothing, again?
Life is supposed to have “evolved”! Life, living things, we are told, probably began as just the right combination of chemicals and heat and life was born. It experienced its surroundings and responded to them and changed and evolved. Did “life” begin then? What about those elements, those chemicals, those minerals, are not they the very beginning? And if that was the beginning of life, then what was before that? And what is going to be the end?
But if “life” is something more, human life, or even all animal life, or what about plant life? If even just human life is something more, when does it begin? Two living cells come together and begin to grow in the way that they are programmed to grow and become a tiny person. Is that person the beginning? When that physical being dies, is that the end? If there is a beginning, then there must be an end. If there is no end, no beginning, as in a circle, if life is a cycle of change, then physical death is NOT an end but only a stage through which we progress.
Many of the Eastern religions function on the idea of a cycle. The religion we are familiar with, the Judeo/Christian religious system, functions on the idea of life being a straight line, having a beginning and an end. What is God in all this? Did God create that cycle to begin with? Was God the beginning? Did God create the laws---of gravity, of physics and chemistry, of life and reproduction and the continuation of the species, of evolution? What about the laws that govern all those galaxies and space, that keep everything spinning where they are without crashing into each other, and even the laws that sometimes bring one body out there in space in contact with another?
Every time I ask myself, “What is God? Why do I believe there is a God?” I guess my answer is, because I have to. There are so many mysteries in our daily lives and beyond. Man seems to have an immense curiosity about the why and wherefore of those mysteries. I have to believe there are answers. I see that there is truly an order in how things work and I have to believe that something, someone, if you will, is responsible for that order. I’m willing to call that something, God.
Then there is the question of “worship.” Why do we pray to a god, why do we petition a god for help, for supply of daily needs, for protection? Why do we say prayers of thanksgiving? We pray, “Thank you, Lord, for this day, for this meal, for this life!” What do we expect? I don’t know! I don’t know! But I say those prayers too. I need to feel that I will find help, my needs and protection if I ask for it. I need to express gratitude for this gift of life and all that is a part of it. So I say those prayers and I call on God---an existence that may only be a myth, and I think about God in quiet times and I believe.

This was written as dated but seems entirely appropriate to today.

October 9, 2001

In an article by David Leonard in the September (2001) Friends Journal, he makes the statement that “For Quakers, becoming a child of God is a lifelong project. Perhaps one can be ‘saved’ from guilt or can commit oneself to a new path in a single prayer meeting. When one reads the accounts of these epiphanies among early Friends, however, one is struck by the long periods of seeking and threshing that preceded them. And being a ‘child of God’ requires an ongoing series of breakthroughs that come from continuous living in the Light of Christ. Friends therefore have not been ones for altar calls but instead for gradually altered lives.”
William Penn observed of the early Friends:

They were changed men…. Whose….ministry was conversion to God, …. Not schemes of doctrines and verbal creed or new forms of worship, but a leaving off in religion [of] the superfluous and reducing the ceremonious and formal part, and pressing earnestly the substantial, the necessary and profitable part…’

In the same article David Leonard states, “Quakerism arose out of the ferment that overtook England in the first generation after the Bible became widely available in English. In the period around the English Civil War most literate English men and women read the Bible avidly and studied it intently. They frequently were shocked to discover that the Christianity portrayed in the New Testament was quite different from the one presented by the established churches, both Anglican and Catholic. Quakerism was an attempt to recapture ‘primitive Christianity’ as reflected in the Gospels and the Book of Acts.
However, Friends did not and do not believe that the discovery of Truth, whether about Christianity or anything else, is primarily a matter of scholarship.”
We are called the Religious Society of Friends because Jesus said that “You are my friends if you do whatsoever I command you.” His command, from the Sermon on the Mount was, “You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” As a Quaker, I am not unaware of my many personal failings and the ways in which my aspirations exceed my performance; it’s just that I see no benefit in wallowing in my shortcomings and instead want to get on with doing better. This is a true statement of how I see the rest of the world as well. We must get on with doing better. We dare not be unaware of mistakes made, failed aspirations, but we cannot simply wallow in the failings.

[In that vein, I would like to point to something I saw on TV Friday, October 5th. There were videos of demonstrations against the bombing that the U.S. is doing. Hordes of people (probably exaggerated by the camera angle) carrying signs saying, “War is not the answer” and “Stop killing innocents” and “No bombing.” All of this pointed very un-ambiguously to undesirable violence BUT not one word anywhere, even when some of the demonstrators were interviewed, not one offered any way to “get on with doing it better.” One woman acknowledged that the terrorism was terrible and not to be tolerated. She said the terrorists should be punished, but innocents (children) should not be the target. She never offered any suggestion as to how the terrorists could be so carefully isolated that they could be stopped without touching innocent bystanders]

Mistakes WILL continue to be made. We must not cease to act because we are afraid of failures. But we have to see where the mistakes, the failings are and get on with doing better.
Ours is one of the few countries in existence in which the mistakes, the failures are allowed to be displayed, to be pointed to, to be talked about. We tend to become blinded by the glare of the light on the mistakes and are slow to put them behind us and get on with doing better.

What do you do when you have NOTHING? No job, no home, no transportation, no connection to the rest of the world? What? When your job history is three years old and you’ve had to sell everything you had, house, car, possessions. All you have is the shirt on your back and a head filled with technology that is, albeit, three years old. What? What? Who? Where do you go, what do you do, how do you survive?

Some history of religion:

I took a course a few years ago called, “History of Religion.” It was interesting, enlightening and fascinating. (How God has changed!) Did you ever see any of the art work, the paintings of what most of the world thought of as “The After Life” or what the gods that they worshipped looked like and did centuries ago? They are fantastic depictions of the violence that “god” would do to those who may not have followed the rules. They show “god” devouring sinners, tearing miscreants to pieces, locking into cages underground of any who stepped off of the straight and narrow. Now and then there is a picture of “god” separating the “good ones” from the “bad ones” and maybe one in 100 is allowed to go to the “good” side and wear a flowing white gown and drift away while the “bad” ones pile up in swamps and garbage pits, or get eaten alive by that very “god.”

The course covered the history of all of the world’s major religions and even a few of the minor ones but the greatest part of the course was about the history of the Judeo/Christian religious culture. The God that the Jews worshiped was seen as a strict, even rigid Father. There were volumes of “rules” that had been developed over the centuries and in fact, they had a group of theologians whose sole purpose was to interpret the “book” of rules and make new ones. These men discussed and argued and whatever conclusion they came to was LAW! It was what God had dictated. A Jew could come to them with a question about how to handle some situation and they would hash it out and deliver an pronouncement. AND THAT WAS THE LAW. It never ended, this tinkering with how people were to live and all the time it was considered “God’s Law.”

The Christian religion is based on what are believed to be the words, the teaching of Jesus. The Christ Jesus. Christ is a word meaning “Leader/teacher.” Jesus preached love, peace, caring. This was a gentle, kindly, caring, forgiving, loving “Father”, unlike the strict, unbending Father to which the Jews were accustomed. Considering that the theologians of the Jews were constantly re-interpreting their own rules of living under their God, this was just another changing of the rules and a very happy change! But it didn’t come from those austere authorities so the religious community rejected it, even though many individuals and members of other religions embraced it. Why wouldn’t they? Here was someone saying, “God loves you. God will care for you, no matter who you are or what you do. All you have to do is to believe.” It seemed easy to worship such a God.

The religion of Islam was founded after Christianity. Islam claims to have originated with whom the Jews claim their religion originated: Abraham, the father of the tribes of Israel. Muslims claim to have originated with one of the tribes of Israel --- a different tribe than the one of which Jesus was a member. They worship one God --- the same God that the Jews worship and that Christians worship. THE SAME GOD! (How God has changed!) Mohammed claimed to have received messages from God that led him to found the religion of Islam. That’s right! God dictated how people were to live, what the rules were. Some are different from the “rules” that the God we worship has given us through Jesus. The same God? Very confusing --- but there is more.

Now, centuries after each of these religions began Christians and Muslims are on opposite sides it seems. Of course, as a Christian, I am sure that we are right. We are determined that love and peace are the way to live, even though we find ourselves using violence to create that kind of world. I don’t honestly know what a Muslim would say is his/her view of what the world should be but the extremist sect of Islam seems to be harking back to the dark ages when women were slaves or worse and nothing of love and peace or joy is permitted. Their God has changed! The strict, rigid “Policeman” rules. Not only does that God rule, but that God orders the elimination of all who do not accept the rules laid down by that God.

All this had brought to mind a question. How has the caring, loving, forgiving God that we still worship turned into the angry, jealous God of the Muslims?

Do you know what the word “jealous” means --- exactly? From the dictionary: 1 a Troubled by the fear, suspicion, or belief that one is being or might be displaced in someone’s affections: Further into the dictionary’s definitions: b. Of God; demanding absolute faithfulness and exclusive worship.
We understand “Exclusive.” “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” We can live with that. We see it as requiring the individual to worship one God. But it doesn’t say that other persons must die if they worship a different God (or worship in a different way.) But for God to “fear” being displaced doesn’t make sense to us. God is all powerful in our belief. God has no fear. There is no reason for God to “fear.” Why would our God tell another group of worshipers that we are a threat to Him? I don’t understand that way of thought. Do you?