Sections that can have not been put into HTML documents can still be read online by going to the complete Fostering PDF.
Adapted from an article in FGC Focus, Feb. 1992, Friends General Conference
The chart on the other side of this page elaborates on the elements from Bill Taber’s circle chart. It can be considered as another way of looking at the elements found on the wheel; it goes into more detail and in addition names what often happens when we allow our faith to fracture out of that center in which paradoxes can be held in creative tension. It illustrates the implications of allowing ourselves to fly out of the living center of Quakerism.
Our view is that a whole Quaker-Christian faith includes some element of both central columns. A complete absence of either is likely to lead to a distortion in the element which is retained. Thus, a person whose faith is best described by the left center column, and who does not resonate at all with the elements in the right-center column, may find without that balance that the reality of experience moves towards its spin-off extreme in the far left column. If this distortion does not occur in the life of a given Friend, it is likely to happen in the faith experience and expressions of his or her spiritual descendants. The equivalent pattern is likely to hold for a faith experience described primarily by the right-center column, without counter-balancing from the left-center.
The chart also illustrates how people have trouble understanding one another’s religious language. One’s viewpoint—far left or far right—has a tendency to create a distortion in perspective, making it difficult to distinguish between the two degrees on the opposite side. As either central viewpoint fails to be balanced by an element of the other, the person with that perspective tends to assume that the viewpoint represented by the opposite central column includes its aberration.
It would be an unusual Friend whose faith and life experience is a perfect balance of the two central columns. Most of us experience one side more fully than the other, at least at a given period of our lives. It is our understanding that a living growing faith experience which starts out heavily on either left or right, will often, when it remains vital, expand in time to include some understanding of the opposite side of the paradox.
In reflecting on this chart, it is useful to take a long-term view. Although it may appear so at a given point in history, neither side represents an intrinsically “conservative” or “progressive” view. That depends on historic context. It has flipped twice since 1800. Also, neither side is intellectually more respectable in a long-range view. That, like the question of which one is conservative, is a matter of current fashion.
The chart is neither definitive nor infallible. It is merely a description of tendencies we have noticed among Friends, intended to simulate reflection on our own spiritual journeys and on the way we communicate with other Friends and hear them.
(Of the center two columns, people can be both/and, rather than either/or)
SPIN-OFF
OR ABERRATION |
UNIVERSAL |
JESUS
CHRIST-CENTERED |
SPIN-OFF
OR ABERRATION |
| Liberal, vague intellectualism | Affirmation of truth experienced by others | Affirmation of truth as I've experienced it in the context of Christian history | Fundamentalist, exclusive intellectualism |
| Powerlessness, hopelessness, fatigue (the tired liberal) | Seeking to embody and express the love of God | Being empowered by God | Misuse of power, apparent lack of love |
| Limited God from powerful action in time | Affirmation of God as inhabiter of a space unconfined by time | Affirmation of God as acting in time | Limited God's actions to a particular context |
| Limitation of God's actual transformation in our lives | Immanent--God as expressed in creation | Transcendent--God as greater than any expression we can know | Limitation of God's actual transformation in our lives |
| Focus on psychic | Intuitive | Intellection system of theology | Association of psychic with demonic |
| Inability to put experience in words with any strength | Felt, sensed, experienced, uncontainable in words | Verbally explained | Rigid, exclusive creed |
| Lack of clear relation to God | God understood as beyond personalhood | God understood as personal | Limited nature of relation to God |
| Relationship confined by the limitations of my own viewpoint | "Spiritual" relationship to God, Inward Light as impersonal presence | "Personal relationship to God | Relationship confined by the limitations of my own viewpoint |
| Life of Jesus Christ is without power for me | Life of Jesus Christ as example, model, source of teaching | Life of Jesus Christ as unique, and essentially relevant to me | Those who don't know Jesus Christ are benighted. |
| There is nothing intrinsically unique about the Jesus in history | Jesus as God-filled or inspired revealer | Jesus Christ as Son of God and redeemer | Those who do not connect with the Jesus of history are lost |
| God's actions so generalized as to lose force | God acts everywhere, at all times, whether we area ware of it or not | God acts in this specific time, in this specific way | God's actions in other ways is not perceived |
| Tendency to have a fuzzy, ineffective concept of God | Mystical--experiencing God | Theological--thinking about God | Tendency to confine God to the ways we have described God |
| Hope diffuse, ungrounded | Hope | Faith | Faith narrowly focused, brittle |
| I'm OK, you're OK, we're all OK | Appreciation of other's viewpoints | Concern for other's spiritual welfare | Judgment and control of others |
| Religious experience so ineffectively communicated its reality seems unclear | Religious experience as ultimately indescribable | Religious experience described | Religious experience prescribed |
| Equalizing all experience--all of same value--no sense or criteria of maturing | Appreciation of others' experience | Evaluation of others' experience | Discounting of others' experience |
| Emphasis on proclamation equated with underestimating importance of material needs | Social action | Proclamation | Emphasis on social action equated with lack of essential grounding in faith |
| Failure to communicate the ground out of which action comes | Social action | Proclamation | Failure to translate faith into action |
See part one:
Bill Taber's The Unity of Paradoxical
Quaker Extremes
These articles are from Resources
for Fostering Vital Friends Meetings
See also: the FGC Quaker Library
