02.09.07
Quakerism’s Dirty Secret?
I’m reading Brian Drayton’s On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry. A very good book indeed. Just now I’m looking at a place which suggests, at first glance, that Brian has missed something. I actually don’t believe, based on the rest of the book as well as on personal acquaintance with Brian, that he misses much, so it’s more likely that he has intentionally passed by an important aspect of a passage he quotes.
Here’s what Brian, on page 89, quotes from Job Scott’s Journal:
I have found it my business, sometimes of late, to be more inward in travail, and less active in the exercise of the wholesome rules of society [i.e. the Religious Society of Friends] than I once was; and I believe, when I have obeyed the call into this inward, still abode, and there felt my loins rightly girded, it has contributed much more to the right exercise of the discipline, than when, through a desire for its proper administration, I have, by overreacting, seemed to do a good deal for its execution.
In introducing this passage, Brian says that Scott is writing about a “kind of cumber, arising from over activity in Quaker affairs.” And following the insertion of the passage, Brian elaborates:
“Meeting work” can take up rather more time than is appropriate, and I find myself every year, dring “nominating season,” asking myself what might be my limits and freedom in this connection.
In interpreting Scott’s passage in this way, Brian is reading in Scott both more and less than is there, and doing both in the very same aspect of the reading.
Simply put, Scott is not talking about the entire gamut of “Quaker affairs” or “meeting work.” He is talking about the exercise of discipline, a rather strictly defined subset of Quaker affairs. In this sense Brian is reading more than Scott is writing; that is, he is seeing a whole of which Scott is only talking about a part.
In another sense, Brian is seeing less than is there, in that Scott is talking about an aspect of Quaker work that is scarcely even done any more, and which many Friends wish had never been part of Quakerism: the execution of discipline. Only in the context of modern Friends’ denial of the historical role of discipline can I say that Brian is missing anything. Put another way, only because Brian is glossing over something that modern Quakerism loves to gloss over do I think his interpretation is noteworthy. While I have no disagreement with Brian’s aim, I think it’s a bit sad to lay before modern Friends such a meaningful passage, without helping them understand its meaning.
I believe there are many lessons to be learned by asking how Quakerism gave up slavekeeping. A part of the answer will be “discipline,” this very thing we are now so uncomfortable with. Unless the Society of Friends had been willing effectively to say, “this is our standard of conduct, and those who do not abide by it are not Friends,” it would have been impossible to corporately give up slaveholding.
Does is matter to us today? Only if we ever want to do make a truly prophetic corporate witness again.