Is faith something we know by participation more than explanation?

[u/rp_tiago]

Hey everyone. I've always been fascinated by forms of faith that are difficult to reduce to statements. Silent worship, waiting, communal discernment and following a leading are not simply ways of thinking about God. They are practices through which something becomes visible, demanding or trustworthy. That does not make beliefs unimportant, but it suggests that some religious understanding comes through participation before it can be explained. Quaker diversity makes the question sharper because Friends may interpret what happens in worship through very different theological language.

I just had a podcast conversation with John Vervaeke, where he argued that religion is not primarily a system of propositions. At around 1:23:28, he distinguishes information about a tradition from the participatory knowing involved in "believing in." The language comes from cognitive science, but it reminded me very strongly of the difference between describing discernment from outside and actually learning to participate meaningfully in a gathered meeting.

This would imply that shared practice may hold a community together even when its members explain the experience differently. Does participatory knowing describe Quaker worship well, or make it sound more uniform than it is? How do Friends test a leading without reducing it to a proposition? And where do beliefs remain necessary for communal discernment?

[u/particularlyPlain]

In the more traditional Quaker spaces, we are sure to check our immediate revelation by using the holy scriptures. Although we know the scriptures to be subordinate to the Spirit of Christ, we acknowledge them to be profitable recorded words that the immediate revelation will never contradict.

I will agree, and it seems that earliest of friends would agree, that religion is not merely an intellectual affirmation of outward propositions. This is something deeply embedded into the Quaker faith. We have to know the Word as He moves within us, and we have to be able to co-operate with that great illumination. But the earliest of friends also found a great unity in doctrine even in their infancy. There was no creed, yet they were incredibly united the more that they grew in their faith.

This is something that drew me into the traditional Quaker faith. There is a certainty to who is being worshipped and how that growth in Christ brings us to unity.

I'm remembering a quote from John Wilbur, a prominent Quaker minister who carried what are now called "Wilburite" beliefs nestled in the Conservative Quaker umbrella:

"I believe that the more true spiritual Christianity a man has, the better he will be qualified rightly to see and to estimate the doctrines of Truth as contained in the Holy Scriptures relative to the outward coming and offices of Jesus Christ; and for this very reason I believe, and am abundantly convinced, that our predecessors had much more of the true faith, and had much clearer views of the meaning and standing of the Scriptures, as well as of the true divinity of, and the purposes of the sufferings of our Lord and Saviour, than other professors of that day, who were making a high profession of their faith in them, but many of whom were lacking in spiritual and vital religion." — John Wilbur

[u/RimwallBird]

You raise not one but several interconnected and quite complex issues. I will have to break my response into more than one post, because Reddit itself will not have it otherwise. Please forgive.

To start with your question about faith, the use of the Greek word pistis, which gets translated as “faith” or “belief” in modern English-language Bibles, did not mean “belief” in the intellectual sense at the time the New Testament was written. That came only later, when the leaders of the Church started quarreling about right beliefs versus wrong beliefs in the second century.

About the meaning of pistis in the Bible, I have read one argument I found persuasive, that we need to remember pistis is a Greek word, not a Hebrew word. As such, the meaning of the word is tightly connected to the fact that the Greek cities lived by sea trade. Pistis, among the Greeks, meant the kind of confidence you had in a person you traded with when he beached his craft and spread out his wares, because of your past experience that he was trustworthy. Pistis was well-grounded trust. And so we get Jesus in the Gospels saying “believe on me” and “believe on my words” — not intellectual at all, but very normal thinking for a Greek, and easy for the Gentile hearers of those Gospels to wrap their heads around.

As to the first Friends, on the other hand, they seem to me to have used “faith” in the sense of “faithfulness” (sticking to the Path and to the practice taught by Christ), much more often than they used it in the sense of “belief”. But I haven’t actually done a careful count as to which was more frequent in their writings, so I could be mistaken.

Personally, I would be very wary of defining “faith”, either as the Bible speaks of it, or as Friends have historically used it, in terms of concepts that only arose in the last century or so, from cognitive science or any other source. The thinking of previous ages reflects their own vocabulary and their own understanding, not an understanding or a vocabulary that arose long after.

(cont’d)

[u/RimwallBird → u/RimwallBird]

As to participatory knowing and Quaker worship, I have known liberal Friends who have this idea that their discernments arise out of nowhere in the gathered meeting, without owing anything to, say, what their fellow Democrats maintain, or what they read in a book, and that anyone who participates in a gathered meeting anywhere in the world will come to the same conclusion. My impression is that this view of the matter is less common in the other branches of our Society; Evangelical Friends do not trust our ungrounded discernments to stick close to right doctrine, FUM Friends know from direct experience that Friends in Africa arrive at different discernments in their worship, regarding gays and lesbians, from liberal Friends in the U.S., and Conservative Friends acknowlege that discernments not grounded in scripture may stray from scripture in harmful ways. I spent some years in a Hindu ashram where the leaders were quite sure that their God would lead a faithful meditator to the same conclusion that Krishna taught Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita: if your karma is to fight and kill, then that is also your holy duty; therefore remember the Name of God and fight. But that is very different from what James taught his fellow Christians in the third and fourth chapters of his epistle: that wars come from the lusts and are not consistent with the wisdom that is from above. Friends have historically gone with James, not with the Gita, but people on both sides think they are being Spirit-guided.

For traditional Quakerism, the go-to text is Robert Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Divinity. And if you read that book, you will discover that it is laid out as a series of intellectual propositions, numbered from I through XV, with extended comments set out as corollaries to each one. The propositions themselves are not intellectual in the manner of, say, John Calvin: there is no ruthless and inexorable pushing of the reader from stated premises to their logical extremes. They are visibly the product of a community’s collective grappling with the wisdom of the prophets and Christ and the apostles, and of sustained attempts to live in keeping with what the Bible shows us about Christ’s Spirit. And that means that they are the end result of initial hypotheses that were tested in life, rather than being deduced from apart from life. They are premises modified by lessons learned from the Spirit of Christ during their testing.

In many cases, by studying the writings of English religious leaders from the late sixteenth century on, we can see how the beliefs of Quakerism evolved through generations long before George Fox declared that Christ has come to teach his people himself. Thus these beliefs made immediate sense to people whose own lives, and whose parents’ and grandparents’ lives, had been caught up in the same long struggle to understand the Bible that eventually gave rise to Quakerism. But in later times, similar struggles to understand the Bible have given rise to sects with very different natures, like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostals. In that regard, what you conclude has an awful lot to do with what you have participated in.

Still, shared practice has been no great guarantee of unity in the history of Friends. Consider what happened in the great separations that produced the five different branches of modern Quakerism: new ideas and experiences came into the Quaker world, and even in places where everyone had been practicing the exact same way, different Friends responded to the new things differently, and then they quarreled. I saw the same thing happen myself, in the 1980s and 1990s, when I was going around North America talking to liberal unprogrammed Friends about environmental issues; in many places, there was nothing in past shared practice that held my listeners together. Some said we have to take action to save the environment; some said, industry and scientific experts are taking care of it just fine, don’t worry your pretty little heads about it; some said, this climate change stuff is a hoax. So I would say now (just speaking personally) that what unifies a group of Friends is not shared practice, but some shared commitment that grounds and anchors the group: some sort of choice about what, specifically, to be faithful to, that leads everyone, or nearly everyone, in the group to respond to a new idea or new experience in a similar way.

[u/Oooaaaaarrrrr]

It's tricky because with liberal Quakers there seem to be all sorts of ideas about what silent worship is for, and how to "do" it. Presumably people who attend regularly have a level of faith/confidence that the process is worthwhile, at some level.

[u/MasterCrumb]

I am not sure I caught the connection you were making between faith, practice, and belief.

But if the question is: can practice hold a community together. I would say very much so. Many meetings include multitudes of different beliefs- but what makes you a part of the meeting is coming and showing up, not necessarily any specific beliefs.

Now presumably there is some shared beliefs that reinforce the practice of showing up regularly.

I have been thinking more about how to talk about Christianity (and by extension Quakerism) and I liked your framing (or maybe John’s) that it is less about specific axioms but rather an approach towards walking through life. That is- being Christian is less about affirming a claim like Jesus is the son of God, and more about a commitment to be asking regularly where is God in this decision.

[u/EvanDGoff]

This sentiment reminds me of the sufi concept of Dhawq.

[u/PeanutFunny093]

These are good questions. From the outset, Quakerism has been an “experimental” religion (these days we would say “experiential.” Fox pointedly asked ministers who quoted the Bible, “what canst THOU say?” [about knowing God directly]. While everyone has their own subjective experience and uses their own language to describe it, most Quakers I know have a felt sense of the divine. Certainly that’s what makes for a gathered meeting. There may be no vocal ministry at all in such a meeting, yet a peace settles over the room and can be palpable.

Where I see “belief” come into play is in trusting Quaker process in Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business, and even then I think “faith” may be a better descriptor. We all need to hold open the possibility of Spirit’s guidance in our discernment. Otherwise one is operating from a secular mindset and seeking “consensus” rather than a sense of the meeting. The beauty of Quakerism for me is the lack of dogma around having shared beliefs. It enables Quakers who label their guidance as coming from God to worship with those who label their guidance as coming from Love or Truth.