WITHOUT DOGMA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 778, 18 June 1954, Page 5

WITHOUT DOGMA

Sir,- James K. Baxter in his review of The Quaker Approach to Contemporary Problems. criticises the "absence of any creed to which the _ individual Quaker is required to subscribe" as "the toot of much confused thinking." I wonder if indeed the Quakers are any more subject to confused thinking than other Christian groups who do possess a defined theology. Can confused thinking lead to such remarkable unity of action as the Quakers show? The essence of Quaker belief is an inner light both rational and mystic that leads men from different starting. points towards the one still centre of unity in God. All religion stems from someone’s direct personal experience of God-your own, that of the authors of Scripture, or of the saints who make up the Church. The Quaker position rests upon the directly personal, not the second-hand experience. And an experience of God cannot be described in ordinary prose. Like its nearest human passion, falling in love, it calls for symbolism, hyperbole, flights of imaginative comparison, a describing of the indescribablepoetry. , The man who sets out to write a psychological analysis of his beloved is probably no longer in love. A group of theologians attempting to describe the nature of God (surely the height of human impossibility!), or to produce any joint statement of what they know about Him, are bound to be trite, or meaningless, incomprehensible, or compromisingly dishonest, if not all four. God is all things to all men, and knowledge of Him does not stay put. How many people nowadays, for instance, really believe with complete intellectual assent in what the compilers ,of the creed meant by "the resurrection of the body" or the descent "into Hell," or even "the communion of saints"? By an intellectual assent I do not mean that abnegation of intellect that mistakenly passes for faith, but something that can be more truly described as loving God with all ofie’s ‘mind.’ A church that requires assent to any joint: credal statement about God cannot be truly Catholic, for it must either split into sections or involve its thinking members in some inner dis-integrity. Better the honest if decently-unexpressed doubt, than the dishonestly-expressed affirmation. The strength of the Quakers lies in a unity of Spirit that defies verbal analysis. The fruit of the Spirit never has been correct orthodox theology, but love, joy, peace, the doing of the Will

of God,

JEAN

IRVINE

(Rawene).

(Abridged.-Ed. )