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Allen’s Neck Friends Meeting |
June 2005
Quaker View of God Some fifty years ago Rufus Jones said, "There is, it must be said in all frankness, no distinctly Quaker concept of God." Although this may overstate the case, the fact is that Quakers are not given to speculation about God. Nevertheless, they do begin with certain basic assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality, or what Paul Tillich called "the ground of our Being." Early Friends clearly took God for granted based on what they believed to be their direct inward experience of God. The phrase that appears more often than any other in the journal of George Fox is "the power of the Lord (or God) is over all," and by this he meant a sense of the personal presence of God as enabler on every occasion and in every situation in life. It didn’t seem to occur to him or other Friends to speculate about the nature and attributes of God. It was enough that God was present with them.In systematic theology it is customary to consider the classic arguments for the existence of God: the cosmological argument from first cause; the teleological argument from design; and the ontological argument from a perfect idea of God, which presupposes existence. But Friends have long maintained that such logical claims can never convince anyone of the existence of God, let alone prove God’s existence. Rather, Friends have insisted that to know and claim that reality God must be experienced spiritually within. Thus, Friends have never begun their search for God in the realm of logic, nor in the external world of nature, nor in the far reaches of space and time. For them God is infused Spirit rather than abstract external being.
Early Friends were , however, sufficiently rooted in the Puritan (Calvinist) tradition so as to have a clear sense of the transcendence of God - that is, the greatness and goodness and majesty of God. Although they knew the inward and immediate presence of God, they understood that God was much more than what they experienced personally. God transcended creation by standing apart from and beyond their immediate awareness of the Divine.
Friends believed that God as spirit was fully disclosed in Scripture, especially in the book of Psalms and in the New Testament writings of Paul and John. A favorite passage in the latter is John 4:24 indicates, that Friends were able to have direct and immediate experience of God by way of what they called "the Christ within." This divine-human encounter is called mystical experience by many Friends. Insofar as there is a gulf between God and ourselves, this immediate experience of God bridges the gap and brings us into the presence of God so that our experience becomes firsthand rather than a secondhand report about God.
Wilmer A. Cooper
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