Isaac Smith was going to write something about creeds:
I had been kicking around writing something on the uses and abuses of creeds in the Quaker tradition, but then I discovered that Ben Wood had written a fairly definitive version of that essay already. So read that instead.
Ben’s 2016 piece on Quakers and creeds is definitely worth a read. I checked my records and I must have missed it at the time, so I’ll share it now. He goes deep into the kinds of creeds that Penn and Barclay gave in their writings but also what the earlier Christian creed-makers were coming from. He also comes to today. Here’s a taste:
we cannot be creed-makers before we are story-preservers and story-tellers. We cannot hope to resolve differences unless and until we dig down into our own Quaker story; unless we come to terms with its power and implications. At least part of our sense of spiritual malaise is a reticence to engage with the depth of the Quaker tale. Partly that reticence is about a lack of teaching ministry among Friends. We haven’t given each other the tools to become skillful readers of our own narrative. We have assumed that people can just ‘pick this stuff up’ through a mysterious process of osmosis. This has led to a fragmentation of understanding about the meaning and implications of Quaker grammar.
In my world, talk of creeds has sprung up recently following the QuakerSpeak video of Arthur Larrabee’s nine core principles of unprogrammed Friends. His principles seem fairly descriptive of mainstream Liberal Friends to me, but predictably enough the video’s comments have people worried about any formulation: “Espousing core beliefs — no matter how well intentioned — risks introducing a creed.” One of my pet theories is that the mid-century truce over theology talk that helped Quaker branches reunite (at least on the U.S. East Coast) has stopped working.
OK. After a few decades, I guess I and many others in my meeting have become just simple Quakers (finally). For us (if I may be allowed to speak for others without their permission), there are really just two “creeds”, if you will, that are essential for Quakers; practices which go back to the very founding of the very earliest gatherings of Quakers before they were even called Quakers:
- ‘Expectant waiting’ worship so that we might find God within us and us within God; and
- Seeking the way forward as a spiritual community by arriving at a communal sense guided by the Spirit during ‘expectant waiting’ worship together.
Everything else that comes forth from Friends should be a result of those two purely spiritual practices. I dare say that if more Friends considered those two as the only essentials to being a Quaker, we would have had less Quaker schisms, more ‘lives that speak’, and a more vibrant religious society as the Spirit consumed us.
I have had many Friends over the years tell me that they believe “committees” or “Quaker tradition” or both are essential to being a Quaker. With that type of “creed”, no wonder we can not get many newcomers to stick around.
Perhaps we are not seeing the elephant in the room because we have and enjoy too much business and drama going on — without first routinely (read, “at least weekly”) seeking the Spirit in our lives through those two spiritual practices that centuries ago were considered essentials to being a Quaker.