[Buddha-l] Universalism?

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 7, 2011, at 10:51 , Richard Hayes wrote:

> Not only members of the Universalist denomination were universalists, of course. One finds some Quakers, some Congregationalists, some Pentecostals and some evangelicals who also subscribe to doctrine of apokatastasis.

There are indeed apokatastatic Quakers, but there is another sense in which some Quakers are called universalists, which has nothing to do with apokatastasis. Rufus Jones, another Harvard man who benefited from his exposure to William James and James's close friend and philosophical adversary, Josaiah Royce, became convinced that Quakers need not draw their inspiration only from the Bible or from any of the other teachings of Christianity. He became convinced that what Quakers had called the holy spirit was another name for a sense of moral conscience that is to be found in all people of all times and that when people worship in various ways they are striving to make contact with the best part of themselves, a part that finds an inexhaustible variety of ways of being expressed and put into action. So, in contrast to the Quakers who saw themselves as exclusively Christian, Jones started a movement of Quakers that welcomed Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, humanists, naturalists, Wiccans and followers of various native American traditions. Jonesite Quakers are sometimes called by some people universalist Quakers.

Rufus Jones also founded the American Friends Service Committee, a humanitarian organization that responds to the sufferings of people wherever they may occur without regard to their religions, political views or other ideological commitments. Many people (among whom I count myself) find the AFSC to be profoundly moral in practice. And since most of the Quakers whom some call universalist support AFSC by donating both time and money to its projects, I suppose we could say that it is not inevitable that a universalist is immoral. I suppose we could say that there is no vyāpti relation between universalism and immorality; on the contrary, it is an anaikāntika relationship. (Sorry for the momentary descent into the hell realm of Buddhist logic.)

Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I am the clerk of the finance committee of a Jonesite Quaker meeting and therefore am quite familiar with the various environmental and social causes that this Quaker meeting collectively supports financially. I see no evidence of indifference to the suffering of the world or to injustices among these so-called universalist Quakers. Members of the meeting to which I belong are or have been active as individuals in humanitarian work in El Salvador, Mexico, India, post-war Japan, post-war Europe, Iran, Senegal and various other African countries, and in the environmental movement in the United States.  

Speaking of suffering, every Quaker meeting since 1650 or so has had a so-called Sufferings Fund, which is an amount of money set aside for those, and the families of those, who face prosecution for speaking truth to power. The phrase "speaking truth to power" has now become widespread and it used in a variety of ways, but for Quakers it has always referred to the policy of witnessing for an alternative to the violence often associated with the exercise of economic and political power. Not surprisingly, those who speak truth to power are frequently at the receiving end of the very violence they witness against. Quakers are no strangers to prisons, torture chambers and gallows; that is true of evangelical Christian Quakers, of Pentecostal Quakers, of Conservative Quakers, of Orthodox Quakers and of universalist Quakers. Theology seems to have no positive or negative correlation to having moral commitments and to having the courage of one's moral convictions.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM