A page for those who wonder why they don't find theology very helpful...
From
the writings of Henry J. Cadbury (1957)
[ Note:
Most religions agree that God is, in a sense, unknowable to us. Cadbury is
suggesting that it is perhaps more reasonable to act first and theologise later
(if at all), feeling that a deeper sense of God flowed from the experience of
this action. ]
“Someone
ought to write a pamphlet The Appeal of Quakerism to the Non-Theological to
help them with their inferiority complex….They seem to others and
perhaps to themselves subject to some defect. Perhaps it is intellectual
laziness, or some congenital skepticism….
The
repetitious recourse to any doctrinal framework, including the one most in
fashion in the Society at the time, they do not find helpful to themselves, and
they regard it as perhaps their duty and privilege to seek for or to exemplify
other aspects of truth to supplement the limited emphasis. It is not that they
wish to deny what the theologian affirms, but that they find his approach
uncongenial and irrelevant to their own spiritual life, and they are
indifferent or even pained or estranged when it is made central in the
definition of Quakerism…
.It does
not speak to their condition. Their search is not for a more satisfactory
theology, they do not believe that for them spiritual progress depends upon
such factors. The obscurity of the mysteries of God does not really bother them
and they have no confidence that even the most rational of religious analyses
would add a cubit to their moral stature. They have, therefore, neither the
will nor the competence to deal with the situation, but they hold their peace
by simply keeping their own counsels without contradiction or
controversy.”
From: Cadbury, Henry J.
(Quakerism and Early Christianity (1957 Swarthmore lecture) London: Allen &
Unwin
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