EDITORIAL
Life alternates between a movement outward and a turning inward, between expansion and concentration. The Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology is no exception. Last year the annual conference was of the expansive variety: we welcomed a record number of attenders who had never been to our conferences before; and our speaker, till then unknown to most of us save through his books, transported us on the wings of the mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, into the vanguard of psychological discovery in the field of religion. (Ira Progoff’s talks on History and Spiritual Working appeared in the Fall-Winter number of Inward Light, and are still obtainable at 75 cents a copy.)
This year was devoted to evaluating last year’s theme in terms of our Friends tradition and our situation of today and tomorrow. The overall topic at this seventeenth annual conference was The Authority of the Spirit in Quakerism. Howard Brinton’s historical outline on the first evening forms the opening article in this issue. We hope he will forgive us for including here one of his inimitable stories which he has there omitted. A theologian had given a Japanese scholar a book on the Trinity to read. The scholar in due time returned it, and courteously reflected: “Honorable Father—ver’ nice. Honorable Son—ver’ nice. Honorable Bird—ver’ diff’cult!”
“Ver’ diff’cult,” according to Joseph Havens, the psychologist finds it too, not to mention the simple layman, to recognize with any assurance marks and tests of the Holy Spirit. The central portion of Joseph Havens’ two talks is reproduced here in the article, Toward a Pastoral Theology of the Holy Spirit.
Teresina Havens illustrated and supplemented the theses of the other two speakers by her study of John Woolman’s guidance by the Spirit, as recorded in his journal. Her study and the very original Queries she educes from it for modern Quakers are given in full in these pages.
Of the conference in general we may say it was one of the happiest we have ever had. Haverford College was as beautiful and welcoming as last year, and more used to us by now. The mid-June weekend turned showery for a day, but since that brought hoped-for coolness nobody complained. Charles Perry chaired and organized us with humor and quiet effectiveness, and one felt that Isaac Sharpless, notable former President of Haverford, must be glad to be witnessing this grandson of his standing before the mighty mantelpiece in the conference room, with his grandsire’s framed and illuminated Commencement Advice above his head! We missed our ex-chairman, now in the Orient, and her two predecessors also; on the other hand one of the very nicest things was the return of several of the founders and former chairmen and executive committee members now living far afield, or otherwise prevented from attending in recent years.
E. P. K.
“Quakerism, for Rufus Jones, carried out a more radical revolution than either Luther or Calvin. These reformers were absorbed in such violent celebration of the transcendence of God and the miracle of saving Grace in the historical redemptive act of Christ that in spite of Calvin’s protests, there was little attention left for the greatest miracle of all: the actual presence and operativeness of the Holy Spirit in the souls of men and women here and now, an operativeness which can gather up and refashion and redirect their gifts into a powerful causative force for the coming of his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. The revolutionary Christian humanism for Rufus Jones lay in the fact that early Quakerism experienced this outpouring of the Holy Spirit and that out of ordinary human beings, there were fashioned extraordinary vehicles that could enjoy corporately the tendering rapture of the Presence, could withstand persecution, could create fresh forms of worship and business procedure, shape new constitutions for corporate civic life, engage in a fresh sensitizing of the public conscience on the matter of participating in war and on the treatment of Indians, slaves, the insane, prisoners, and the victims of war.
“Here was a resurgence of spiritual power which recaptured the vision of redeemed men and of a redeemed humanity and began to translate the text into acts. It was from this perspective that Rufus Jones rejected the monotonous emotional stereotype of the conventional revivalism that threatened to engulf all Quakerism in his day. And at the close of his life, he resisted as stoutly the stereotypes of human depravity and their consequent paralyzing of Beatitudinarian action which Neo-Orthodoxy sought to fasten on man. With Michaelangelo, he believed in criticizing by creating, and it was in terms of holding before Quakerism and his wide circle of non-Quaker readers and hearers, a Picture of a redeemed man in the full flood of his radiant powers that he hoped to touch them in the quick of their souls, to kindle their yearning, and to encourage their boldness.”
From a review by Douglas V. Steere of Friend of Life: The Biography of Rufus M. Jones, by Elizabeth Gray Vining. By permission of Pendle Hill Bulletin.