What I’m trying to express here is not only admiration for skillful pioneering historical scholarship. The work of Larry Ingle and Meredith Weddle, both outsiders to the "root stock," along with others like them, has significant moral weight. It enables us better to see and speak the complex truth about the era of Fox and the First Publishers, tat formative part of our communal past, as we struggle very concretely to figure out how to bear a Friends peace witness today, in a time of renewed and seemingly endless war.

I know this from the experience of conducting numerous workshops and retreats with mostly liberal Friends on exactly this vexed question. Let me itemize some of the things Ingle and Weddle permit me to bring into workshops and retreats, items which were little known or commonly denied even as recently as the Gulf War, never mind Vietnam or the two world wars:

First, that the "canonical" Peace Testimony of 1660 was preceded by lots of Quaker involvement in military.

Second, that the 1660 Declaration was more of an emergency stopgap than a grand manifesto.

Third, that it was by no means immediately or universally accepted among Friends.

Fourth, that in any case, the full text is, as we have just seen, far more ambiguous than the few oft-repeated excerpts from it indicate.

Fifth, that its image of peace, and "program" for attaining it, were worlds away from the media-driven activism of today’s public radio-obsessed liberal Quakers.

Sixth, and finally, that Fox was much more comfortable with official violence (as long as it wasn’t aimed at Friends) than we have long been led to believe.

These disclosures might have been regarded a treasonous by many liberal Friends who knew only the aphoristic amnesiac version. But I can tell you that in the world of 2002, to learn that earlier Friends, even Fox, struggled over their witness and its ambiguities is actually comforting to many. If it deprives us of our knee-jerk answers, it puts us in some very good company, ready as Paul says to "work out our salvation in fear and trembling." And yet many of my hearers would not believe me now, if I didn’t have the chapter and verse, produced by some of the best of today’s scholars, to back it up.

The best of Quaker scholarly work is also aimed at another, broader target: the persisting liberal Age of Amnesia, which is still very much with us. Here there have been a few promising signs. One came when FGC observed its centennial in 2000. (Parenthetically, the event’s planners were almost finished with their work when I stumbled upon a report that the body had celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, not in 1950, but in 1942, counting from when the first informal FGC was held, and not when the body became "official." Oh well, we said, after a good laugh. Whatever.)

On and around the centennial there were some useful opening discussions of where FGC had come from, its founding assumptions and affirmations, and where it might be headed. But on the other hand, when the centennial planners, flush with the success of their observance, asked to be made an ongoing FGC subcommittee on history and records to continue this process of self-reflection, the notion was unceremoniously killed by the Executive Committee. Not to put too fine a point on it, at the top in FGC, history is still bunk.

Thus, despite the availability of a remarkable body of new scholarly work, the awakening from the long liberal slumber has as yet been fitful at best. Or at least it was until what earlier elders would have euphemized as the recent worldly tumults and commotions gave us all a good traumatic shaking. Since those shocks, along with buildings and airliners, many of our received Quaker shibboleths have come tumbling down as well.

As we paw through the rubble, one big item overdue for reassessment and reconstruction is our liberal image of George Fox: Let me suggest some initial queries that might usefully be part of this process:

What shall we do with his much more nuanced – or was it merely confused – thinking about war and peace?

Are we ready to grapple with his mix of radical and conservative social ideas, and not only his stubborn individualism?

How about sorting out his theology? (Contrary to my friend Larry Ingle, I persist in believing that he had one – or more likely, several.)

Or his by now-undeniable penchant for rewriting his and the movement’s early history?

And where shall we put his evident sense of the miraculous, and "psychic" experiences?

(Actually, this last may not be as big a challenge for FGC, where in our annual Gatherings we already consider past lives, Wicca, and the prospect of UFO aliens among us, not to mention workshops for non-theist Friends. The mix of mystics, psychics and skeptics remains alive and well in this still vital liberal stronghold.)

Fortunately, if and when we sleepers do awake, there are many new, and some not so new, resources of undoubted excellence available to assist us, and I expect to see more coming forth. I can hardly overestimate their potential value for the work of equipping the saints for the new fronts of the Lamb’s War that are opening before us.

Many of the authors of these works are in this room. As an amateur among professionals, a relative dabbler among adepts – but most of all as one Friend among others seeking to make some faithful sense of a difficult and disorienting time – my debt to you is incalculable. As the months and years unfold, many another Friend will be equally beholden to you as well.

Indeed, what "George Fox" said in closing to Isaac Post in 1851, I can only repeat to you now, but slightly paraphrased; ours, he declared,

"must be a life ever on the watch, ready to examine whatever draws (our) attention, and if selfishness is sufficiently subdued, and prepossessions banished from the mind, then with an honest purpose of heart . . . a judgment will be formed that will elevate and prepare the mind for advancement while in the body . . . ."

Thus, along with that spirit, I bow to you in gratitude. My prayer is that you will have courage in tackling the unasked and hitherto unaskable questions, fortitude in your research, and clarity and conciseness in your writing. I believe that more than our progress, indeed our health and survival as a people of God may depend upon it

In the words of a new verse for Sydney Carter’s song I heard in North Carolina just this summer:

With our old bumper stickers & our ragged Birkenstocks

Thank you.

WORKS CITED OR CONSULTED

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