Are Quakers Christian? Not all of them (and that’s fine) | QuakerSpeak ▶️

Much of Christianity is what we might call “cataphatic” spirituality, which you can think of as a list of all the sentences that you could make that begin “God is…” Quakers have lifted up in large part an “apophatic” spirituality, which you can think of as all the sentences that begin, “God is not…” and you fill in all the blanks. Which is not to deny God but to recognize that all our intellectual constructs and our language and our words are not quite it…

I think Quakers remind the rest of Christianity that words are insufficient, that there is something beyond words, something beyond intellectual constructs that is there and is vital about this Christ who lived 2,000 years ago and who we say we encounter today in our worship and in our silent meditation and in our relationship with the divine.

Lloyd Lee Wilson

According to a Gnostic Revelation, we fall short of the Most High when we call Him infinite, for He is, it is said, much more than that. I should like to know the name of this author who has so remarkably seen the nature of God’s extravagant singularity.

E. M. Cioran

Are Quakers Christian? We talked to eleven Quakers from across the United States and asked about their relationship with Christianity.

Lloyd Lee Wilson: Are Quakers Christian? Many Quakers are Christian. Worldwide, most Quakers are Christian. I’m a Christian. I’m a Christian today because there was a place for me in the Religious Society of Friends when I wasn’t a Christian.

Are Quakers Christian?

Chloe Schwenke: Are Quakers Christian? I would almost turn that question around and say, “Ok, tell me what a Christian is.” And it goes to the heart of what I think is the magic of Quakerism, which is that we don’t try to define God. We let God be God and we just experience God. Some of us including myself feel a great connection to the experience and testimony of Jesus Christ. The way that Jesus Christ brought love into the world as a tangible and important and central piece of what it means to be a human being is a very powerful testimony that many, many Quakers would feel absolutely at home with who may not call themselves Christians. But they don’t need to call themselves Christians.

The History of Quakerism

Lisa Motz-Storey: My practice is definitely Christian. But it doesn’t mean that I feel like Christianity is the only way. It’s our history as Quakers, too. George Fox would have answered, “Yes” to that question and everybody else.

David Johnson: Certainly the first Quakers were Christian. Their whole life and spirituality were centered around the light within them, which they experienced as the light of Jesus as the Christ working within them.

A Distinctive Approach to Christianity

Mark Wutka: I would say from its beginning, Quakerism was rooted in Christianity but it wasn’t necessarily the same kind of Christianity that was surrounding it. I would say one of the distinctives is that Quakerism tended to take external things and understand them from an internal perspective.

Gregg Koskela: For me one of the ways that a Friends perspective helps me to follow Jesus is probably best described for when I first walked into this room as a freshman at George Fox College: I was really moved by the attentiveness to the Spirit of God and I remember calling my Mom and saying, “These people believe what all these Christian churches I’ve been a part of have believed but not taken seriously.”

Lloyd Lee Wilson: Much of Christianity is what we might call “cataphatic” spirituality, which you can think of as a list of all the sentences that you could make that begin “God is…” Quakers have lifted up in large part an “apophatic” spirituality, which you can think of as all the sentences that begin, “God is not…” and you fill in all the blanks. Which is not to deny God but to recognize that all our intellectual constructs and our language and our words are not quite it.

Valerie Brown: This is one of the things I really love about Quakerism, is that it is so unconventional. It is noncomformist. I really appreciate that element of the mystery of Quakerism.

The Universal Light of Christ

David Johnson: The Light is a universal light, and that’s clear in Penn’s original statement, that the spirit of God is in every person. That’s taken primarily from the ninth verse of the first chapter of John’s Gospel. I’m sure that that light which comes from a universal spirit of God is experienced by every other person.

Lloyd Lee Wilson: I think that Quaker corner of the big tent of Christianity doesn’t bring anything from outside Christianity, but highlights and lifts up things that were in the Christian tradition always but have been neglected or almost lost over the millennia. One of the things is the direct and immediate and perceptible encounter and relationship with God. That idea that God pours out God’s spirit on everybody, and that’s a life-changing encounter. More: https://fdsj.nl/christian