Not a notion but a way

+ Introduction +

God, words and us[subtitle] is a good thing to have done, +thoughtful, worth reading but, for me, ultimately disappointing, an opportunity +missed. Maybe focussing on the language that divides us was necessary, and the +light this book shines on the nature of that division, what is and isn't +important about it, is valuable. But it feels to me that it got trapped by its +own success and never got past a fundamental assumption which guaranteed its +eventual limitations: it gives good advice about what kind of language +not to use, but is much less useful about what kind of language we +should use.

The key, mistaken, assumption is that what we need to talk about as +Quakers is what we believe (or don't believe). There are a few +oblique mentions of alternatives in the book, but it's almost all about belief. + That's not the right place to look for what unites us as Quakers. After all, +we've all heard it said, indeed many of us have said ourselves, that the +single think we can confidently say unites the membership of +Britain Yearly meeting is that when we can we meet together in something called +Meeting for Worship. Our identity is not fundamentally determined by what we +believe, but by what we do.

If you only look at the language of belief, you miss a whole different +way of looking at religious identity. Choices with respect to the language of +belief are what distinguish many, even most, Christian denominations from one +another, but that's actually a game we Quakers 'officially' declined to play a +long time ago: we don't do creeds. And we're not the only religion that +isn't best understood in terms of belief.

I was moved by my disappointment with where the theology think tank has +left us to try to write down what I see as a better way to +distinguish us, to try to shift the ground of looking for language +that we can unite with, that works for us, from belief to practice, from +orthodoxy to orthopraxy.

I don't claim originality in suggesting this: I think it's at the heart +of what Ben Pink Dandelion has been writing and saying for some time, and I'd +be surprised if there weren't others who will read this and say "But that's +what I've been saying for years". I can only apologise for not +having read more widely or, increasingly likely, that I have simply forgotten +what I have read. My excuse for writing this none-the-less is to +try to encourage people to read God, words and us, but avoid the +not unreasonable conclusion from doing so that +belief-talk is what matters.