Testimony , livre ebook

Hymns Ancient & Modern - Rachel Muers

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

112 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

This book brings Quaker thought on theological ethics into constructive dialogue with Christian tradition while engaging with key contemporary ethical debates and with wider questions about the public role of church-communities in a post/secular context.

Informations

Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	09 mars 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780334054412
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0091€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

RACHEL MUERS
Testimony: Quakerism and Theological Ethics
© Rachel Muers 2015
Published in 2015 by SCM Press
Editorial office
3 rd Floor
Invicta House
108-114 Golden Lane,
London
EC1Y 0TG
SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)
13A Hellesdon Park Road
Norwich NR6 5DR, UK
www.scmpress.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.
The Author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978 0 334 04668 4
Typeset by Manila Typesetting Company
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd
To Gavin
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Oceans
Introduction: Knowing Experimentally: Approaches to Quaker Testimony and Theology
1 Walking in the Light: The Bible and Quaker Testimony
2 ‘We do utterly deny . . .’: Refusals, Silences and Negative Testimony
3 Speaking Truth to Power, and Other Holy Experiments
4 ‘Swear not at all’: Oaths, Nonviolence and Conscience
5 Religious Freedom and Solidarity: Quaker Martyrs and their Communities
6 Being Witnesses: Marriage, Sexuality and Tradition
7 Sustainability and Simplicity
Afterwords
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Reader; It is some time since I set about this Treatise, which makes me now think, that part thereof may seem to some to be unseasonable; for it swelled beyond my Intention, and took up more time in writing than I thought it would . . . when I set about it, I saw a Field before me, which cost me some spiritual Travel before I got thorow.
Elizabeth Bathurst, Preface to Truth’s Vindication , 1683
The thinking reflected in this book has been shaped over time in many overlapping communities, both in the academy and among Quakers. While I take responsibility for every part of it, and especially for its manifold defects – and am fairly sure that nobody is going to agree with, or like, all of it – I am very conscious that I also owe whatever is good in it to others. It would take far too long to list here all the individuals who have left their mark on it or have helped it to take form.
So, my heartfelt thanks to all friends, and colleagues in the University of Leeds, and previously in the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge; in Jesus Lane (Cambridge), Exeter and Carlton Hill (Leeds); in the Society for the Study of Theology, the Society for Scriptural Reasoning and various groups at the American Academy of Religion; at Woodbrooke and at Yearly Meeting. I hope you all know who you are. Among those with whom particularly long-standing conversations have shaped and supported this book – and whose influence it has not always been possible to identify and acknowledge, however hard I have tried – are Mike Higton, Julie Gittoes, Janet Scott, Rhiannon Grant and Ben Wood. I am also grateful to Jacqui Stewart and John Punshon for taking the time to share their expertise on Quaker testimony with me. Short papers that related closely to the book were presented at the Universities of Cambridge, Exeter, St Andrews and Aberdeen and at King’s College London; I acknowledge with gratitude the helpful discussions on those occasions.
Natalie Watson has been an unfailingly patient and encouraging editor, and I am enormously in her debt for her continuing enthusiasm for the project even in the face of long delays.
As always, my greatest debts are to my family, and especially the family I live with. The book is dedicated to my husband, Gavin Burnell – because, even more than usual, he made it all possible. And in so far as time spent with Matthew and Peter Burnell has disrupted or changed the writing process, I would not have wanted it any other way.
I also thank Rhiannon Grant for her invaluable work on the Index.
Prologue
Oceans
I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.
George Fox, Journal for 1647
There’s more than dark enough to drown us all,
pulls with strong currents though it’s overflown.
Mostly, I drift; but sometimes catch the tide
and swept up, thrown between the waves of light
we splutter kingdomwards, make landfall, stumble
bedraggled and squint-eyed, a few steps on.
Introduction
Knowing Experimentally: Approaches to Quaker Testimony and Theology
Beginning with Quaker ethics
This book is about how Quaker theological ethics works, and about what Quakers contribute to theological ethics. I attempt to show how Quaker ways of living and acting – an ethos , a pattern of life – relate to theology, to ways of thinking and reasoning about God and all things in relation to God. In doing so, I also make some more general suggestions about how Quaker theology can be done, and about how theological ethics can be done. The modest hope is that both people who are interested in Quakers and people who are interested in the relationship between theology and ethics will find something worth thinking about, arguing with or developing further.
Most people with a limited knowledge of religious groups know Quakers, if not as people who wear large hats and make porridge oats, then as people who observe various slightly puzzling or unusual rules – like not fighting – along with puzzling or unusual religious practices – like silent worship. People who try to understand Quakers by understanding what they collectively believe are, notoriously, likely to end up more confused than before – confronted by an enormous diversity of expressed belief, diverse not only across time and space but even within the relatively small communities of Quakers in Britain or the USA. It is much easier to find patterns, consistencies and norms in Quaker practice than in Quaker belief – even though the porridge oats bit, for the record and once again, is not true.
So it might seem that ethics is the obvious way to approach Quaker thought. However, people who try to understand Quakers by understanding what they do – how these puzzling or unusual rules, or patterns of practice, fit together and constitute a community’s identity – are equally likely to end up confused. Like Quaker theology, Quaker ethical reasoning is not often systematized. When we look more closely we find that in Quaker communities and in Quaker literature, the basis for a particular course of action is sometimes not explained; or it is explained in a way that does not obviously relate to other explanations; or it is explained in a way that does not obviously refer to God, or to conventional sources of theological authority or patterns of theological reasoning. This is true especially of contemporary ‘liberal’ Quakers in the West, but it is to some extent true elsewhere. As we shall see, from every era of Quakerism there are numerous examples of powerful and prophetic writing, articulating and advocating distinctive Quaker perspectives on the issues of the day; but there are fewer works that articulate any underlying coherence to these ethical positions. 1
In twenty-first-century Britain Quakers are accustomed to being known and for the most part respected – grudgingly, confusedly or otherwise – for their sustained tradition of ethical and political activism. Quaker involvement in the anti-slavery movement, in humanitarianism, in peace work, in post-conflict relief work, and so forth, is often cited. It might be reasonable to think that Quakers often have something distinctive or important to contribute on ethical questions. Quakers themselves either claim or imply this when they devote, proportionally, a large amount of their available collective time and energy – in local, national and international meetings – to producing major statements on contemporary ethical and political questions. Explicit claims such as ‘In the Religious Society of Friends we commit ourselves not to words but to a way’ ( Quaker Faith and Practice 1994, hereafter QF&P , p. 17) are common in official and semi-official accounts of Quakerism.
Given that context, it seems to make sense in twenty-first-century Britain to write about Quaker ethics, and expect an audience beyond Quakerism to learn something from it. It is less obvious, however, that that exercise will end up being theological . What if Quaker ethics has nothing theological about it – or nothing that adds to existing work in theological ethics? What, for example, if Quakers are simply being rather more consistent about enacting a set of ethical principles that could be adopted by anyone? Or, what if the historical sources of Quaker ethics lie in some theological moves that are not particularly original or unusual – and have in any case been forgotten by contemporary Quakers? In that case, Quakers might be interesting as the source of several case studies in ethical reasoning, but not as the source of new ideas in theological ethics.
My claim in this book is that Quaker approaches to theological ethics – to the relationship between patterns of acting in the world, and patterns of thinking about God and the world-in-relation-to-God – are, in fact, distinctive and interesting in their own right. I do, however, think that in order to appreciate Quaker approaches to theological ethics, we have to suspend several common assumptions about how ethic