#robert griswold

[beguines]

I specifically reject all imaginings that have grown up around this name [God] and all the games that ask pseudo-theological questions such as, "Can God be in two places at once?" or "Can God keep secrets from himself?" These are games invented by those who have no experience of God and who are confined to the presupposition that God can be the product of their efforts to understand. What I want to discuss is the impact on me of the experience I have had and that I can see (by the fruits of their actions) others having as well. When I get clever and try to describe God, I find myself alone with my cleverness. My relationship with God is not an understanding relationship. It is a "standing under" relationship. I can describe the relationship because I am in it and I know its effects, but describing God requires a presumption I lack. Friends theology is about a relationship based in experience.

Robert Griswold, "No Creed Is Not the Same as No Theology"

[beguines]

God finds us—not the other way about. No act of self can bring us closer to the Divine. The foundation is a new relationship that happens when we let go so that the "still, small voice" can be heard and come to lead us. If God, the Christ within, is here now with us, the meaning of our lives depends on our being in a relationship with that reality. We have to discipline our lives by ceasing to follow where our egos lead us and let the Teacher within find us and become our guide. This is the meaning of Matt. 10:34, "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" and Matt. 10:38, "and anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me." This new relationship has to sever us from our old allegiance to self, and when we begin to act from lives centered in the Divine, the fruits of our actions will show a difference.

Robert Griswold, "No Creed Is Not the Same as No Theology"

[beguines]

Friends have long felt that if you have been convinced by an experience of the Divine within you, you have a totally new meaning and context for your life. You are shaken (and do quake) and your foundation in self is overthrown. Everything must change. Subscribing to a patch of belief wasn't enough for us. We understand in our personal lives Jesus' saying,

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins. (Mark 2:21-22)

Some early Friends demonstrated this estrangement from their own past self by odd locutions. For example, James Naylor who, when asked who he was, responded, "One that the world calls James Naylor."

A relationship with God changes us or it is not a relationship with God.

Robert Griswold, "No Creed Is Not the Same as No Theology"

[beguines]

A third point of Friends theology concerns our understanding of Christ. Many liberal Friends of today would like to shed the concept of "Christ" and avoid any connection to a Christian past. I have even heard of Friends reprimanding other Friends for offending them by using the word "Christ" in their presence. I, also, have, in the past, declined to count myself a Christian. I now believe that what I was rejecting was something that came out of my experiences with the Jesus Christ I encountered in the fundamentalist and evangelical churches of my childhood. You most likely know the Jesus Christ I am referring to here. This is the one who came along about 2,000 years ago and preached until he got himself killed and came back to life and went up to heaven (whatever that is, it always seems to be up) and, if I now believe (a willful action on my part) that he did that for me, personally, I (ego intact) can get off the hook of my own mortality and be up there with him when I die.

This theology has two fundamental errors in it. The first is that it connects Christ solely with the person of Jesus. One might get the impression in following this erroneous theology that Christ was Jesus' last name. The second is that it reduces the relationship between Christ and the individual to a voluntary contract. Historically, Friends have declined to be in any quid pro quo relationship with the Divine. We are the Friends of Christ and friends are bound by love, not by contract. The Christ put forward in Friends theology is much different and much more than the "contract" Jesus. In saying this I do not want to imply that Friends think Jesus' life is without significance. The Christ of Friends was certainly manifested completely in Jesus, but early Friends could not leave Christ in that singular embodiment, however important that was to them. For Friends, Christ (by whatever name) is a reality that we can know personally and be in a relationship with now. This is why we do not consider the Bible to be the Word of God and why we do not believe that revelation is finished. Revelation is not finished because the Divine is not done with revealing to us an understanding of our relationship with God.

Robert Griswold, "No Creed Is Not the Same as No Theology"