Some years ago I gave a paper to the Aberdeenshire Theological Club, of which I was and still am a member, entitled ‘Do Quakers have a theology?’ to which I answered ‘yes and no’.
Yes, we have a large corpus of Quaker thoughts and reflections from the past to the present in documents like Quaker faith and practice, but no, we do not have any formulated creed or dogma (the nearest to which Quakers get is Robert Barclay’s Apology*).
Quakers generally accept the point made by Rex Ambler in his booklet the ‘The End of Words’, where he quotes Isaac Penington, that words (formal or informal) only point to, but cannot capture, what they are about.
At that meeting, I offered the thought that there were at least four varieties of Quakers:
- First those who would regard themselves as trinitarian Christians (historically rather more Quakers were probably of this persuasion, but nowadays in the UK very few) who believe in the resurrection and so on.
- Second, those who would definitely identify themselves as Christians because they see Jesus Christ as the supreme example of a spiritual / moral leader to follow or live up to, and accept a form of theism which includes the idea that, apart from there being that of God within each person, there is also a transcendent God as the source of being.
- Third, there are those Quakers who regard themselves as Universalists rather than specifically Christian, because they believe that there is a spiritual source to existence but it is equally accessible to people of all different faiths.
- And then there is a fourth group of Quakers whose position is similar to, though they may not describe it in these terms, the Sea of Faith movement – a movement once led by Don Cupitt that took the view that though there is no transcendent God, religious faith and practice (prayer, worship) proceeds on the basis as if there is. A parallel would be our capacity for aesthetic appreciation. Whether or not beauty is objective, we are enriched by the perception of beauty; likewise whether or not there is a transcendent God, we are enriched by a life which has a spiritual dimension of there being something beyond the mundane material world. (At the meeting I thought I would be like Daniel in the lion’s den, but in fact a Church of Scotland minister, with the agreement of many, said that in his church there was the same variety of positions, but of course they couldn’t admit it because they had a creed!)
The wonderful thing about Quakers is that we can accept one another in this great variety of theological positions (and no doubt many other ways of expressing it). I like to use the metaphor from ecology: Quakerism is a miniature ecosystem in which variety of belief is seen as a strength rather than a weakness.
Nigel Dower, Aberdeen Local Meeting
* Robert Barclay was a Scottish Quaker Leader, born 1648 at Gordonstoun, Moray, Scotland, died 1690 at Ury, Aberdeenshire.