Certainly our religion arises from our immediate and present experience, and we rightly consider it one of the most important parts of our testimony that only religion on this basis can be the genuine article. Nevertheless, we cannot stop at this point, for it is the place where certain problems arise. If we are to be a community, if we are to bear a collective witness, we have to give form and structure to experience, we have to be rational about religion. We have to go as far as we can to meet the challenge of Robert Burns’s couplet about seeing ourselves as others see us. We are loyal to hidden values, and our statements are often based on unspoken assumptions. The secret hand of history tugs at strings which operate many of our practices, habits, and forms of expression. We must go beyond the raw material of personal experience to see ourselves in a wider setting.
So how do we see the Abbey of Quakerism? Is it a negative response, a rejection of unwelcome and misunderstood aspects of other Christians’ beliefs, or have Friends produced something positive, worthy to be ranked with Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Classical Protestantism as an independent but equally valid interpretation of the mind of Christ and the message of the New Testament?
