REVOLUTIONARY SOTERIOLOGY

With grieving openness one asks the question: is there salvation in history[1]? In this dark night of capitalism’s reign discernment can become malnourished, corrupted, co-opted. With searing honesty Ignacio Ellacuria stated: ‘the coming of Jesus does not appear to have turned history into a history of salvation. It does not seem as if salvation, insofar as it comes from Jesus, has made enough of an impact as to divide history into what came before and after his birth. It might have seemed so when history was confused with Western civilisation and during the ten centuries or more when Western civilisation was dominated more by ideology than by Christian faith. Even then, without denying the great contribution of faith to improving history, we were far from being able to speak of a human history, let alone a divine history.’[2]

Humanity can seem to be mere chattels of sin and evil, possessed by bitterness and hatred, as the enveloping absence of the Reign – and of salvation – continues relentlessly. This attitude must be acknowledged honestly and fought against. Looking through Christological lenses, we may ask: ‘Did Jesus fail, during his mortal life, in the proclamation and realisation of the Reign of God? Did that experience of failure force him to describe the task of realising the Reign in less historical terms? Was it necessary to resort to an imminent Parousia in which a triumphal second coming would correct the failure of his humble first coming?’[3] From fighting the good fight of faith, and from the spiritual trenches of the Lamb’s War, we have this to say: ‘the fact that salvation has not reached a satisfying fullness in history is not a definitive proof of its failure. Rather it proves that human beings, especially those specifically called to proclaim and historicise salvation, have failed in their mission. In the covenant, God’s promise has not failed, but rather humans’ responses have failed.’[4] This is our word of hope, the source of our contumacious tenderness, and our revolutionary apostolic duty.

The theology of liberation speaks of the crucified people of the global South. In the North, society is terminally diseased. Signs of ‘how far history is from being a reign of freedom and of self-giving love’[5] are everywhere. Its populations are both captive to neoliberal capitalism and in a state of collective mortal sin. Western society, after thirty years of this pernicious ideological and economic system (and over 300 years since England made its fatal covenant with capital), is the place of today’s crucified people. What can we Christians do – coheirs of the Reign of apostolic revolution – but unleash the Good News of God crucified and leading captivity captive (Ephesians 4:8), liberating and giving life in abundance? Isn’t it about time we treated these wounds of crucifixion/oppression? Shouldn’t we give spiritual chemotherapy to this cancerous dehumanisation/alienation? Will the risen Jesus then be recognised among us, rising anew even now, in this cruel night?

We urgently need collective coproanalysis (examination of faeces). We in the West have made ourselves into the faeces of capitalism’s reign. Our Christian task is opposing this barrage born of centuries of alienation and dehumanisation, let alone de-Christianisation. Luckily we have a deadly weapon (and it’s one close to the sacred heart of Jesus): the Reigning of God with and for human beings!

Revolutionaries of incarnate soteriology, we must take seriously and make concrete Christ’s word to closed hearts and minds of today’s western human being – ‘Be opened’ (Ephphatha, Mark 7:34). We must build trenches for the Lamb’s War, taking with us all the prophetic words of scripture. To the place that calls itself the “first world”, we Christians have something to say: ‘many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first’ (Matthew 19:30), and ‘all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted’ (Luke 14:11).

Christians ought to become mothers, sisters and brothers of Lazarus, crying out and striving as the crucified and risen Jesus points the Way to God’s Reign.

In this complex dance of grace and sin, life and death, we must keep vigil at the foot of the cross, constantly stirring up hope, liberation, and Good News.

Let us bear witness in our lives to the agapic prophesies falling like lightning strikes of grace upon us, pouring from the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and sweeping us up in the transcendental tide of Christ’s own Sacred Heart.

[1] History here is used in the sense of being within time, space, the present, and concrete reality.

[2] Ignacio Ellacuria, Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation, p185.

[3] Ibid, p186.

[4] Ibid, p188.

[5] Ibid, p185.

“HANDLE ME, AND SEE”

Christianity is not primarily about private emotion or reason; it is about reality; it is about being seized by the Real. Direct and immediate confrontation with reality is one of its demands.[1] The Franciscan sine proprio (with nothing of one’s own) shows this with admirable simplicity.[2] There is a correlation between absence of ‘self-love, self-will, and self-interest’[3] and grasp of reality. Spiritual and even actual poverty are places of crucifixion and resurrection: they demonstrate, in a concrete way, one’s response to reality and one’s ability to analyse and change it. Responding in this way is humility and devotion, both to God, to the reality He created, and to the Son He sent for our salvation. ‘Ego quos amo, arguo, et castigo’[4], says God to John of Patmos, ‘those I love, I rebuke and chasten.’ This chastening, this castigation arises from reality and points to God. Examination of individual and collective conscience, in the light of the Gospel, leads to a challenge, a castigation, and an imperative: act for the Kingdom of God and against the reign of sin and oppression in the world.

Participation in liturgical sacraments alone is not enough: ‘worship, including the celebration of the Eucharist, is not the whole of the presence and continuity of Jesus; there must be a continuation in history that carries out what he carried out in his life and as he carried it out.’[5] One must live and die as Friends of Christ, for the reign of God on earth as in heaven. Jesus’ words to Peter are addressed to each of us: ‘When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God.’[6] Maturity, detachment, spiritual poverty and actual poverty: these are marks of the Eucharistic tenderness and the martyrial openness required of all Christians. We are called to put our hearts and our hands into the spiritual and actual wounds of the world and those who suffer the false crucifixions brought about by structures of iniquity. Our discipleship depends on the ability to follow the Lamb wherever he goes. Our discipleship presupposes a forensic analysis of reality on the basis of where the Lamb went and the wounds He sustained. Then we may stretch forth our hands in sacramental solidarity with the temporal and historical proclamation of Jesus, allowing ourselves to go the way of the Lamb even unto death and especially against the deaths imposed by the structures of iniquity governing the global society.

Ignacio Ellacuria writes: ‘the life of the Risen One is the same life as that of Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified for us, so that the immortal life of the Rison One is the future of salvation only insofar as we abandon ourselves in obedience to the Crucified One, who can overcome sin.’[7] The Our Father provides extremely fertile ground for contemplating the meaning of these words. ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’; here we see unification of time/eternity, of history/the will of God; we invoke the presence of a concrete, historical incarnation of that for which Christ died: the reign of God on earth. ‘The Crucified One rises, and rises because he was crucified; since his life was taken away for proclaiming the Reign, he receives a new life as fulfilment of the Reign of God.’[8] Christ crucified and Risen for the coming Reign of God on earth: not only in terms of the self but for history and society: ‘his life and death continue on earth and not just in heaven; the uniqueness of Jesus is not in his standing apart from humankind, but in the definitive character of his person and in the saving all-presence that is his. All the insistence on his role as head to a body, and on the sending of his Spirit, through whom his work is to be continued, point towards this historic current of his earthly life. The continuity is not purely mystical and sacramental.’[9] There is a shocking continuity between the Crucified One of Nazareth and the Risen Christ. It is a continuity apprehended within history and within the sense of touch. In Matthew’s Gospel he records that ‘they came and held him by the feet and worshipped him.’[10] They held the feet of the Risen One, the feet that walked unto death for the Kingdom of God. In Luke’s Gospel the disciples see and are invited to handle the ‘flesh and bones’ of the Risen prophet of Nazareth: ‘Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.’[11] The patterns, the wounds, the memories, the transcendental yet historical proclamation is all present. The apostles received the imprint from Jesus of Nazareth. Reality received an imprint from the Reign of God he proclaimed and was killed for. We are heirs annexed to these sacred incisions in the bitter but real fabric of sin and corruption and division in this world.

Let us have the zeal of Thomas who said: ‘except I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger in the holes of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.’[12] Reproducing this pattern, both personally, ecclesially, and socially, would show a living faith not only inherited but inhabited. Through the Wounded yet Risen One we could strive to touch the imprints of nails driven into the flesh of God’s oppressed and poor (including Mother Earth itself), remembering that Christ is sacramentally present in them, waiting to redeem those crucified by the sins of history and humanity by rising forth and pouring blessings upon them and those who come to liberate them, in turn confirming our own salvation by this concrete solidarity. In the peace of Christ we could show perfect Christian obedience: ‘put in thy finger here, and see my hands, and put forth thy hand and thrust it into my side, and be not without faith: but believe.’[13] Christ is exhorting all his followers to trace the continuity of the sufferings of Jesus of Nazareth with the Risen One. He expects us to go to the place where wounds abound and to touch them with the hands of an active faith, not standing aloof from the crucified ones of today but going forth to proclaim, in our lives, the Reign of God on earth, for ‘the ongoing passion of the people and paralleling it the historic reign of sin – as opposing the Reign of God – do not permit a reading of the death and resurrection of Jesus removed from history.’[14] This is the radical challenge the cross poses to each of us individually as well as collectively: ‘salvation does not come through the mere fact of crucifixion and death; only a people that lives because it has risen from the Death inflicted on it can save the world.’[15] For those of us here in the West, Death here means death in life via ideological and social toxins. It also means recognising where a risen, transformed – via crucifixion and resurrection – people actually exists and entering into the salvific portals of their wounds: ‘the world of oppression is not willing to tolerate this. As happened with Jesus, it is determined to reject the cornerstone for the building of history; it is determined to build history out of power and domination, that is, out of the continual denial of the vast majority of oppressed humankind. The stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone, stumbling-block, and rock of scandal. That rock was Jesus, but it is also the people that is his people, because it suffers the same fate in history.’[16]

 

[1] Heeding the counsel of Christ is, as Erik Varden writes, to ‘remember reality as such, to let it be illumined by the light shining into and out of the empty tomb’ (The Shattering of Loneliness, p109). This approach is a valuable antidote against both the epistemic escapism of modern ideologies, and the excessive privatisation of central theological concepts. It might be worth coining the phrase a Christology of doceticide, that is, a Christology rooted in the historic meaning of the Incarnation, Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection to transform and make all things new. Bernard Kelly’s words should serve as a reminder that the holiness of the Catholic Church ‘is not that of an ideal somehow raised above reality, but of reality itself made sacred by the Incarnation, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ’ (A Catholic Mind Awake: The Writings of Bernard Kelly, p127).

[2] This intellectual openness is nothing other than the virginity of those true followers of the Lamb referred to in the Book of Revelation: ‘These follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from men being the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb, and in their mouths were found no guile. For they are without spot before the throne of God’ (14:4-5). Their analytical capacity is free from ideological concupiscence. Their intellectual perspicacity descends and rises from the scent of the Lamb, and it knows the places where the Lamb’s scent stays, haunts, and redeems.

[3] Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, p55.

[4] Revelation 3:19.

[5] Ignacio Ellacria in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, p265.

[6] John 21:18-19.

[7] In Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, p261.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, p265.

[10] 28:9.

[11] 24:39-40.

[12] John 20:25.

[13] John 20:27.

[14] Ignacio Ellacuria, in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, p260.

[15] Ibid, p278.

[16] Ibid.

Revelation, Revolution, and Martyrdom

One of many things early Quakers have in common with early Christians is a conception of the equivalence of prayer and martyrdom. This is rooted in what Rosemary Moore calls their ‘theology of suffering’. For Moore, ‘they developed a theology of suffering, the “daily cross” and the “cross to the will”, a unity with the experience of Christ through which suffering came to be seen as a necessary part of salvation and entry into God’s Kingdom’ (The Light in Their Consciences p157). With the Book of Revelation at the heart of their faith and practice, early Quakers saw persecution as the ‘activity of the Antichrist, or the great Beast described in Revelation 13’ (Moore p156). Their experience of prayer and contemplation as involving a rebuking and chastening encounter with the Light is organically linked to their conception of martyrdom and suffering as part of the Gospel’s revolutionary demands. For Christ, suffering was linked to solidarity in pre-Messianic tribulation. As Albert Schweitzer writes: ‘Looking forward to the sufferings which He expects for Himself and His followers in the pre-Messianic tribulation, Jesus exhorts them to be faithful to Him in His humiliation, if need be even unto death, since suffering along with Him means glory along with the Son of Man in the Messianic Kingdom’ (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle p106). Fourth century ascetic Evagrius Ponticus extended this communion in suffering to the act of prayer itself. For him ‘ardent prayer is contemplation’ (The Praktikos and Chapters of prayer p48), and contemplation is ‘the equivalent of martyrdom’ (p48). The monastic practice of steadfast prayer amidst the thorns and briars of despair, temptation and distraction was seen as a participation in martyrdom. The Quakers updated this interior practice with a blistering revolutionary external confrontation with the forces of death, meaningless, evil and destruction in the world. Monastic demonology was, as it were, given an outward layer in the Lamb’s War: the demons which assaulted the monks were seen by Quakers to have taken form in the nascent ideologies of brutal capitalist exploitation and wholesale alienation from God miring their world in violence, coercion, and the offal of concupiscence.
The equivalence of prayer and martyrdom in early Quakerism is linked with five elements: time and convincement, inward revelation as battleground/absence of time, interiorised eschatology, triumph of the cross over divisions, and apocalyptic martyrology.

Time and convincement
The early Quakers saw in convincement, that is, conviction and change of life, an altered relation to time. ‘Time drags in the early stages of the convincement experience, but culminates in a sense of eternal life. Howgill comes to see how all he has done previously has been part of the ongoing crucifixion of Christ but that now he can stand in the place of the cross, the seals opened, after Revelation, the Serpent’s head bruised (after Gen. 3:15, Rom. 16:20), the place of the inward Second Coming (after Jer. 31:31-4), a new man…’ (Ben Pink Dandelion, The Liturgies of Quakerism p17). For Douglas Gwyn this standing in the place of the cross is apocalyptic: ‘The presence of the covenant is revealed (the Greek term for “revelation” is apokalypsis) within and among us, judging our faithlessness, calling us to repentance, and leading us into reconciliation. This revelation is eschatological (end-timely) because it manifests our ultimate destiny with God, the utopian realm of shalom, the kingdom of God’ (Covenant Crucified p17). Being convinced and changed by communion with the Light meant becoming a vessel through which revolutionary energies would be unleashed upon a diseased society: ‘The light had power to transform individuals and to gather communities that could challenge and overturn an unjust and violent society. Early Quaker preaching and ethical practice thus enacted the end of the world, a rupture in the normal state of affairs’ (Gwyn, A Sustainable Life, p97). Immersion in time is displaced for immersion in end-time revelation. Allowing the self to be torn from the fabric of time was a form of martyrdom, both inwardly and outwardly. Following early Christian teaching, Quakers were concerned ‘to prepare those who belong to the last generation of mankind, and are prepared to give credence to his message, for entry into the Kingdom, thus making the most of the last moments of the present time order, between his announcement of the imminence of the Kingdom and its advent’ (Albert Schweitzer, The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity p94). Acute eschatological awareness became interiorised martyrdom: the Lamb’s War revealed the Second Coming as an inward phenomenon.

Convincement, in changing one’s relation to time, redeemed early Quakers from bearing scars born of the smell and scent of time. Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart saw the necessity for an altered relation to the temporal order: ‘For nothing is as opposed to God as time. Not only time is opposed to God, but even clinging to time, not even having contact with time but even the smell or scent of time – just as a certain smell hangs in the air where an apple has lain: this is what is meant by contact with time’ (Selected Writings p137). Liberated from the smell and scent of time, early Quakers were primed for participation in the second last supper – the marriage supper of the Lamb. Their liturgical sensibility bore witness to this transcendence of time. Meister Eckhart foreshadows the Quaker understanding: ‘Everything that touches of time or smacks of time must be removed’ (p212). Hence the continuity of apophatic forms of worship and prayer. Changed relation to the temporal order meant metanoia which, in ‘its true meaning…is a call not only for repentance over past sins, but above all for a new way of thinking in the period of waiting for the Kingdom’ (Schweitzer p74).

Inward Revelation as battleground/absence of time
Coming after liberation from temporal captivity, cruciform rays of Light were an inward manifestation of the Quaker theology of suffering and martyrdom. As Hugh Barbour writes: ‘The essence of pain was to know one’s sins and self-will, but the source of the pain was the Light itself. To modern Friends it is startling to find the inward Light described in terms of such fierce judgement. The Light that ultimately gave joy, peace, and guidance gave at first only terror’ (The Quakers in Puritan England p98). For one early Friend, ‘in measure I see that Witness Raised that never Gives rest day nor night to that in me that Worshipps the beast’ (in Barbour p99). Detachment from the temporal order meant immersion in the battleground of interior martyrdom. An inward war raged between forces of appropriation, self, concupiscence, pride, will, vanity, and the discipline of discipleship. Ethics, contemplative practice, and liturgical practice were submerged in this cosmic battle between liberation and captivity, between good and evil.

Interiorised eschatology
The early Quaker response to delayed Parousia (arrival of the Second Coming) was interiorisation. This shows continuity with the central part of early Christianity: ‘In what does the primitive Christian faith consist? The fundamental element in it is belief in the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God, as it has been preached by John the Baptist and Jesus’ (Schweitzer p131). Early Quakers were led by a deep experience of eschatological renewal and resurgence. For the early Christians and Quakers alike, as Emil Brunner argues, the New Covenant is animated by ‘the fact that He Himself is now here; He Himself is speaking, but for that very reason He is not merely the One who speaks, He is also the One who acts. That is why the Kingdom of God has now dawned; hence now the old is over and past, even the Old Covenant with all the forms of revelation proper to it’ (Dogmatics, volume 1, p23). Presence and activity of God are seamlessly woven into the garment of interiority. The abyss of inaction and inefficacy to which the Puritans had condemned Christ, as a response to the fetishisation of human fallenness, was targeted by early Friends for destruction. Their alternative was, as for early Christians, a faith and practice which meant ‘a personal encounter, personal communion. He has come, in order that He may be with us, and that we may be with Him; He has given Himself for us, that we may have a share in Him’ (Brunner, Dogmatics, volume 1, p26). Quaker martyrology demanded an inward meeting with this Second Coming encounter: ‘For thy sake are we kylled all daye longe, and are counted as shepe apoynted to be slayne. Neverthelesse in all these thynges we overcome strongly thorow his helpe that loved us. Ye and I am sure that nether lyfe, nether angell, nor rule, nether power, nether thynges present, nether thinges to come, nether heyth, nether lowth, nether eny other creature shalbe able to departe us from Goddes love, which is in Christ Jesu oure lorde’ (Romans p335). Martyrdom is coupled with revelation of the Risen Christ’s transformative powers. Transcendent Presence begets communion via theology of martyrdom, that is, martyrological Christopraxis is the place of intimacy with God’s love. Burning expectation of the coming Kingdom of God led their faith to ‘expect that God will shortly make an end to the present era and bring in the age of perfection’ (Schweitzer p 95).

The cross consumes divisions
The Light of the cross consumes artificial divisions between time and eschatology. In revealing the cross as part of an eschatological backdrop, it frees the participants from the multifaceted divisions inherent in social and economic ideologies and all their coercive brutality: ‘For he is oure peace, whych hath made off both wone, and hath broken doune the wall in the myddes, that was a stoppe bitwene us, and hath also put awaye thorowe his flesshe, the cause of hatred…for to make of twayne wone newe man in hymsilfe, so makynge peace: and to reconcile bothe unto god in one body throwe his crosse, and slewe hattred therby’ (Ephesians p409). Hatred and division are slain on the killing floor of the cross, the intersection where the Kingdom of God is revealed. This apocalyptic showing is part of the Lamb’s liberation from captivity repeated in the inward and outward patterns of Christ’s followers. The cross is part of an eschatological promise in which Quakers were ‘lokynge fore, and hastynge unto the commynge off the daye off God, in which the hevens shall perisshe with fyre, and the elementes shalbe consumed with heate’ (2 Peter p473). The inward burning leads to hope in transformation: ‘Neverthelesse we loke for a neve heven, and a newe erth, accordynge to his promys, wherein dwelleth rightewesnes’ (p473).

Apocalyptic martyrology
Expectation of imminent Parousia entails inversion of worldly ethics. From here springs both the anachoresis (flight from the world and meditation on death) of early monasticism and the Lamb’s War of early Quakers (direct confrontation with the corruptions of the world, mortification of the intellect, and meditation on the Risen Christ). Detachment, or apatheia in the language of Desert Mothers and Fathers, corresponds to the destruction of passions found in Quaker prayer and liturgy. An arsenal of negation is at work in each. For early Quakers, their immersion in the interior baptism of the New Covenant and the corresponding transformation in terms of relation to time, convincement, revelation, eschatology and the power of the cross, is an inward martyrology. The Lamb that stood ‘as though he had bene kylled’ (Revelation p525) had to be followed rigorously. Only then would they make their garments ‘whyte in the bloud of the lambe’ (Revelation p528). Their liberation from worldly divisions and the bitter ideologies at work in society offers an inspiring example. The Book of Revelation describes this contagion of bitterness and alienation from the Divine: ‘And the thyrde angell blewe, and ther fell a grett starre from heven burnynge as hit wer a lampe, and hit fell into the thyrde parte off the ryvers, and into fountaynes of waters, and the name of the starre is called wormwood. And the thyrde part was turned to wormwood. And many dyed off the waters because they were made bytter’ (Revelation p529). Life, resistance, revelation and revolution: these are antidotes nourished by the ‘water of lyfe’ (Revelation p549). Bitterness, meaninglessness, division, and the economically/socially transmitted diseases afflicting the hegemony of neoliberalism are the status quo’s present alternative.

Two Poems

Both are from section IV of Lightgnawn (Wild Goat Press, 2018).

 

24.

For John Woolman

 

Dark liturgies

of tranquilicide reign

 

as red the Christspawned Mother

deepens the flow of absence

 

until One enters

Truth-baptised

 

to tell

 

as cloven history, aswarm with clay,

greyens Godward

 

and griefsnakes rattle in mercy.

 

25.

Time’s self out-realed

in feasts of ashen

where beyondstayed

gleams

wriggle in cross-silk

skin, and motions of Truth

lust-silent, purge the deathdrips

of state

and stains usurp

the robe’s killing floor.

 

Remnants sound a new liturgy.

 

Lightdead hollows

of abeyant lives

mired in cruelty

 

Christ-squall dawns.

 

 

Gnawn light parts

gaping darkflesh still

 

lamb-hearted

true Presence

mindthorn dissolved

 

made new –

 

Beyond:

 

Christ conducts

the eyesilence of Light

 

and bodies

are Lambpsalms

formed of incense

Liberal Quakerism’s eroded Peace Testimony

It is by subjection to the Light that ‘the exacter and violent doer in them might be thrown out: and they that had been hypocrites, might come to bring forth first fruits of repentance, and their mountain of sin and earthliness might be laid low in them…’ (George Fox, Journal, p32). This is a timely reminder of the obligation, set out by early Friends, to wage the Lamb’s war of resistance against the forces of violence, militarism, and hypocrisy. Some Liberal Quakers deflower the peace testimony in the name of psychology and rationalism. Others subject it to relativist revisionism. For many, consent or denial of the peace testimony is optional. The only absolute recognised is that of the vicissitude of the individual’s notions and phantoms. Why are many today not willing to ‘seal with my blood’ (Fox, Journal, p493) the Quaker ‘witness against all violence’ (p493)? Perhaps understanding of the realm of Force has been diminished? For what does connivance with it entail? Consent to violence transforms a living being into an inert fragment of matter; likewise, concupiscence ossifies the soul into inert matter. In the realm of Force both vanquished and vanquisher are subject to this demiurgic transformation. We must not forget that ‘violence overwhelms those it touches. In the end, it seems as external to the one who wields it as to the one who endures it. Here is born the notion of a destiny under which executioners and their victims are similarly innocent: conquerors and conquered are brothers in the same misery, each a heartache to the other’ (Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force, p57).

Force wants to impose itself everywhere. It demolishes the Christian witness of the Testimonies: by setting up another being as an enemy the testimony to equality is destroyed. Its eschatological meaning is denied in setting oneself up as the enforcer of a judgement which uses carnal weapons in order to obscure a greater Judgement at hand.  The testimony to Truth is likewise destroyed in the process. In Truth, equality, and the Spirit of Christ, admitting to the false oppositions (and consciousness) born of violence and its geometric concupiscence, is to worship a false god. Consent to violence makes a person dwell in the ranks of those which Revelation describes as seeking death but being denied it.

Against this assault on the prophetic foundations laid by early Friends we have to remain clear-sighted enough to proclaim that the Testimonies are eschatological incisions in time, space, and mortality. They are the marks of the Lamb’s teeth curtailing the cult of concupiscence and reproving the wrath of humanity, greed, acquisitiveness, and complacence. If we are to maintain the covenant of peace, then let us reaffirm with courage: ‘It is impossible to love and to be just unless one understands the realm of force and knows enough not to respect it’ (Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force, p67). Lewis Benson summed it up perfectly: ‘When we walk contrary to the customs of the world, our behaviour should indicate that our singularity is a consequence of hearing a word that comes from God’ (The Future of Quakerism Part 3).We may then ‘witness the crown that is immortal that fades not away, from him who to all your souls is a friend, for establishing of righteousness and cleansing the land of evil doers, and a witness against all wicked inventions of men and murderous plots, which answered shall be with the light in all your consciences, which makes no covenant with death, to which light in you all I speak, and am clear’ (George Fox, Journal, p493).