THE QUAKER VISION AND THE DOING OF THEOLOGY

THE QUAKER VISION of the inaugural period of Quakerism wasunderstood through and articulated in theological language. Yet many Friends today believe theology to be antithetic to that vision. They see theology as preoccupied with the letter while the Quaker vision is about the life—the life of spirituality lived in the presence of God and the life of social action seeking, in Penn’s phrase, “to mend…the world. ” (Tolles 53) While the life of the mind can be actively engaged with rigor and precision in any other field—scientif-ic, political, economic, social, historical, literary, even artistic (as wit-nessed to by this conference)—when it comes to what is most important to us, to what are the roots of all our intellectual and eth-ical undertakings, we become strangely silent. We avoid making sense of them to ourselves, to our children, and to non-Quakers, in the belief that our lives will speak and that this will suffice. I agree that lives must and do bespeak what is of central impor-tance to us, that fine words disengaged from our ethical behavior ar