The Nature of Belief: A Discussion with Thomas Gates

A Quaker author chat. Thomas Gates’s “Beyond What Words Can Utter: Moving Past the Question of Belief” appears in the December 2025 issue of Friends Journal.

In this conversation, Martin Kelley and Thomas Gates delve into the complexities of Quaker beliefs, exploring the diversity of perspectives within the Quaker community. They discuss the challenges of articulating a unified belief system, the significance of personal experience in faith, and the importance of outreach to newcomers. The dialogue emphasizes the evolving nature of Quaker identity and the global context of these beliefs.

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Quaker Beliefs
05:12 The Nature of Belief in Quakerism
10:09 Understanding Quaker Outreach and Identity
15:15 The Global Perspective on Quaker Beliefs

Links

• “Nine Core Quaker Beliefs,” a 2018 QuakerSpeak interview with Arthur Larrabee.
• “What Do Quakers Believe?,” QuakerSpeak, 2018.
• Heart of Christianity, by Marcus Borg (QuakerBooks of FGC).
• Saul’s Errand to Damascus, by James Nayler and George Fox, 1653 (Quaker Heritage Press)
• A Reader’s Companion to George Fox’s Journal, by Joseph Pickvance.

Bio

Thomas Gates is a retired family physician and medical educator. He is a member of Lancaster (Pa.) Meeting, where he serves on the Worship and Ministry Committee. He is the author of several Pendle Hill pamphlets and a recent book, Turning Toward the Victim: The Bible, Sacred Violence, and the End of Scapegoating in Quaker Perspective (Wipf and Stock, 2025).

---

Transcript

Martin Kelley (00:01)
Hi, I’m Martin Kelly and I’m with Friends Journal and we do these author video chats and I’m very happy today to be here with Thomas Gates. Welcome Thomas.

Tom Gates (00:11)
Thank you. Nice to be here.

Martin Kelley (00:13)
And Thomas’s recent article here is Beyond What Words Can Utter, Moving Past the Question of Belief. And this is in the December 2025 issue of Friends Journal. We gave ourselves a tough question. What do we believe? Most, religious bodies could answer that pretty easily. tell us some of the challenges friends might have on this.

Tom Gates (00:32)
Well, it seems like it’s a question that comes up with some regularity. I and another woman in our meeting recently did a couple sessions for newcomers. And we have quite an influx of young adults, interestingly enough, who are coming with no particular knowledge. They just have heard it’s kind of cool to sit in silence.

Martin Kelley (00:52)
Yeah. That’s great.

Tom Gates (00:55)
They want to know what do Quakers believe. It’s a real challenge. As I said in the article, I’m not sure I can pick out any one thing that I believe that I share with every other Quaker in the world. There’s such a diversity of beliefs. And so in the article, I talk about this exercise that Philadelphia Yearly Meeting did. Gosh, it’s now, it must be, oh, 10 or 15 years ago.

Arthur Larrabee, who was then the general secretary, brought forth this document, What Do Quakers Believe? And it had nine nicely ordered points. I didn’t find them particularly controversial, but the discussion ensued. It was clear that the body of the early meeting and session did not believe that was a legitimate question and that no body could

Martin Kelley (01:45)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Gates (01:52)
answer that question with any kind of authority. So that really has set me thinking.

Martin Kelley (01:57)
Yeah, I mean, it was an interesting phenomenon. You know, I know Arthur, of course. And as a general secretary, part of his job is to represent friends to outside organizations. General Secretary of PYM goes to the World Council of Churches meetings and goes to any kind of ecumenical gathering that’s happening in the Philadelphia area. And of course, everyone’s going to ask him, like, well, who are the Quakers and what do they believe?

He’s a lawyer by training. you know, he’s going to be very thoughtful. He’s going to, come up with these statements. I was looking at them again today. You know, there is that of God and everyone was one, which is about as generic a quicker statement as you can get. And each person is capable of direct and unmediated experience of God. Not too controversial. Shouldn’t be, but so do you think the yearly meeting people didn’t agree or just think that this was not even a question for us to

be able to answer.

Tom Gates (02:46)
Yeah, so first of all, I thought that for the purposes that Arthur wanted to be able to present Friends to the outside world, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable attempt at getting at the kind of core beliefs. But I think underneath everything was the Quaker belief that we can’t try to crystallize our beliefs in any kind of creed. And this was just getting too close to doing it.

there was no kind of decision. It was just, it was clear that we were not in unity to approve it. And so I took away from that, that it was not a question we were willing to address for historical and contemporary reasons.

Martin Kelley (03:23)
Yeah, now it does have an afterlife. Art was interviewed for the Quakerspeak video series that Friends Publishing does and Nine Core Quaker Beliefs is one of the more popular videos month after month. People are searching online, what do Quakers believe? And here they have Arthur Larabee’s list of things that he thinks Quakers believe, but not an official list, but it’s a good list. And I think it does represent pretty well.

Tom Gates (03:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, yeah, I agree. Yeah, in fact, we use that in our our session for newcomers. I think there was a pretty recent Quaker speak video that was a kind of a collage of people answering that question. What do Quakers believe? Am I remembering that or was it?

Martin Kelley (03:53)
Okay. Yeah.

There is a, not that recent now. So I think it’s about 20 minutes long, what do Quakers believe? And we’ve used that in my meeting, shown it, and it opened up all sorts of interesting discussions, people I’ve known for years now, to saying things that, you know, surprised me So that’s another way of asking what do friends believe, just get a whole bunch of friends together. I think there’s…

Tom Gates (04:11)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Martin Kelley (04:26)
at least a dozen friends, maybe more in that video. And if you see what each of them believe, you get the, perhaps the consolation of what friends all over might be said to believe.

Tom Gates (04:36)
Yeah, and I think several people in that video emphasized that it’s hard to come up with a common core set of beliefs beyond the nebulous, that of God and everyone.

Martin Kelley (04:42)
yes.

Yes, always, well, frequently will freeze if someone asks me, what do Quakers believe? And I’m like, do I believe, do most believe? It’s a tough one. And then if you get beyond just the US and Philadelphia area, if you’re like African friends and Latin American friends, then it becomes even more challenging because there’s such a diversity of belief that’s going on. So, but you tried to attempt another way of getting around this question about belief. Why don’t you share some of…

that thinking you’ve been doing about the nature of belief.

Tom Gates (05:15)
Yeah, and I think what set me off on this was many years ago reading Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity. I think it’s The Heart of Christianity. I can’t remember. was in the article where he talks about kind of the etymology of the word belief. And that pointed out that until kind of early modern times, the object, the grammatical object of a statement, I believe, would not be a proposition or

theory, but it would be a person, as in, you know, I believe in you. And he points out the, again, the etymology, believe is closer related to beloved. And so the idea of instead of talking about what Quakers believe as a list of propositions, what do we love?

What do we be love? And that gets us to, think what’s always been essential to Quakers is the idea of experience. What is it we experience? I keep coming back to this. I didn’t put this in the article, but what I consider kind of one of the foundational things in early Quakers, I think probably the first pamphlet,

any Quaker ever published was Saul’s Aaron to Damascus by Naylor and Fox. And it’s a kind of mix of things. But one of the things is the account of the trial of James Naylor when he was on trial in the, I think, 1653, so the very early days on trial for blasphemy. And he was asked by the questioner, doesn’t this emphasis on the inward light of Christ, doesn’t that?

Martin Kelley (06:42)
A trial for blasphemy, yeah.

Tom Gates (06:51)
in effect deny the events of 1600, now 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, essentially denying the historical Christ and the things we know as the atonement. And Naylor answered something like, I cannot witness Christ nearer than Jerusalem, I shall have no benefit by him, but I own no other Christ.

than he who witnessed a good confession before Pontius Pilate. And this Christ I witness in me now. So I think in that short statement is kind of the essence. What happened 2,000 years ago is not sufficient. It has to be a present experience. And yet there’s still this sense of

a confidence of faith that what happened 2000 years ago is connected to what I’m feeling now. It’s the same Christ and Christ is a kind of the universal Christ that Richard Rohr talks about. And then his statement that, and that Christ I witness in me now. ⁓ I think that’s most of Quaker theology right there.

Martin Kelley (08:00)
Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Right,

that Christ is still here with us and guiding us and comforting us and doing all the same things that he did back in the biblical days.

Tom Gates (08:12)
Yeah.

And one thing I, if I could add is that,

So I know I’m comfortable with Christ’s language and the inward light of Christ. And I know there are friends who are not, and there are good reasons why they’re not. I’m not denying that. in these newcomer sessions a persistent question is, are Quakers Christian? And how do you understand that? And they’re mostly coming from backgrounds and other kind of more conservative churches.

And so that’s a live question for them because in some sense they all left those churches because the fundamentalism was grating on them. I always pull off this thing from my job. This is the Reader’s Guide to George Fox’s Journal by Joseph Pickvince. And he makes a fascinating statement. The commonest cause of misunderstanding of Fox’s teaching today

is a failure to realize how wide and deep and functional is the meaning that quote Christ had for him. It is mistakenly assumed that Fox means what other Christians mean by Christ and his work. Not so his gospel teaching was intended to challenge the church’s teaching about Jesus Christ and how he saves men. So I think what he’s getting at there is what Naylor was basically saying that again what Richard Rohr would call the

the universal Christ or the cosmic Christ. This idea that

As Lloyd Lee Wilson once told me, Jesus is the Christ, but Christ is much bigger than Jesus.

Martin Kelley (09:43)
Ha ha ha.

Tom Gates (09:45)
So those things have always been helpful to me.

Martin Kelley (09:47)
Sure, so how do we then describe Quakerism though to people before they get to the meeting house? It sounds like once they get to the meeting house, they’re in this class, you’re doing great. How do we describe to them before when they’re walking by on the street, what do Quakers believe? I don’t know if you have an answer for that. It’s an eternal question we have.

Tom Gates (10:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, and these sessions were for people who had already, over the past several months, wandered into meeting and come back at least a few times, so they already had that experience of worship. Yeah, that’s it. Say that question again. That’s a good one.

Martin Kelley (10:16)
Mm-hmm.

Well, and I’m, I mean, I’m just thinking my own experience when I was 18. I started exploring peace activism, long family history. can tell it go into that forever, but I’m not just, I’m in the Philadelphia area. I’m going to like peace events, you know, little rallies or workshops or stuff. And there’s Quakers all around. And so for me, it’s like, my entry was like, there’s something else going on with them. They have something that I want to find.

That there’s they’ve aligned their lives to this. They’ve spent years of discernment They have these processes like for me that was the the draw, but I had already gotten to know them Through these these events. I was going to so how do we? Talk about what Quakers believe when they’re still just walking outside the doors. They haven’t come in They don’t know anything. How do we reach out to them is is a challenge?

Tom Gates (11:13)
Yeah, yeah, and I don’t have a good answer to that. I hope that, and what seems to be happening in our troubled times is that people are discovering us. And I think the…

The live question for me is, okay, so these people are wandering into meeting, they’re sitting through an hour of mostly silence. They may hear some ministry, it may be good or it may be off the wall. And I’ve always said that it’s possible to sit through silent meetings for a long time and miss a lot about what Quakers are about. So these sessions are kind of trying to deepen people’s kind of appreciation for the…

breadth of the tradition. You know, what you said, there’s a lot of resonance with my experience that I came to Quakers when I was 18. Not in Philadelphia. I didn’t know any Quakers. I grew up in kind of a mainline Protestant church. And when I turned 18, there was still a draft. based on

Martin Kelley (12:08)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Gates (12:10)
Kind of my reading of the New Testament I filed as a conscientious objector. And there wasn’t a huge amount of support for that in my mainline church. I started to read a lot. I had Quakers in my family tree. I was fascinated to read about the peace testimony and how the Quakers arising in mid 17th century England at the same time as my Baptist and congregational church, the churches had combined.

And yet came up, came out at such a different place on questions of war and peace. So when I went off to college, a couple months later, I just fell into going to a Quaker meeting. There was a small group of students who carpooled 20 miles and just immediately felt at home. And in that little, that little meeting, which was in Bennington, Vermont, there were four men who had been conscientious objectors in World War II. So.

It was just an enormously important experience. Yeah. So for the first time in my CO journey, I felt a place where I could feel at home.

Martin Kelley (13:03)
So the memories were there and yeah, the experience. Yeah, that’s great.

where they could accept you, yeah. And when I finally did walk into the meeting house and people could understand, know, what I was searching for, something more than just a conventional life and people are just so supportive in a way that was very refreshing. You do have another good quote in this that I wanted to just ask you about, the Paul Lacey quote. And I can…

Tom Gates (13:35)
Yeah, yeah.

Martin Kelley (13:37)
describe it here, a Quaker is not someone who subscribes to certain doctrines about God or Christ, nor someone who specifically strives to obey the teachings of Jesus, nor even someone who follows a certain inherent testimonies. Rather, to be a Quaker is to have met the inward Christ by whatever name that reality is known. So Paul Lacy, sort of contemporary educator saying that to be Quaker is to have met the inward Christ by whatever name that reality is known.

That’s a nice kind of statement. I don’t know if it would work for, you know, outreach exactly for people who are worried about the language, the Christian language there.

Tom Gates (14:12)
Yeah. And the part by whatever name that is known is my addition to that. a paraphrase. ⁓ I have used that in talking with especially the questions about our Quakers Christian and stuff. And it does seem to resonate with people along the spectrum, both people who are very conventional in their Christian belief can say, yeah, that

Martin Kelley (14:17)
Yeah. ⁓ okay.

Tom Gates (14:39)
that resonates and people who consider themselves post-Christian or something other than Christian, it still resonates as a, I think, a universal experience, especially if we say, you you may know this by another name, but this is what we’re, it gets back to the experience.

Martin Kelley (14:58)
right, that it’s all about our relationship with this inward spirit, both individually to ourselves, but also I think in this communal way when we come to the meeting and are known by not just the inward Christ, but all the other people in the meeting.

Tom Gates (15:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Martin Kelley (15:14)
Wonderful. Well, thank you, Thomas. It’s been great to talk with you and to hear what two Quakers believe from your perspective. The whole issue has all sorts of different perspectives. ⁓ So I invite everyone to read through all the articles. And then there’s a bunch of online articles, Yeah.

Tom Gates (15:24)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and makes you

excited to see the some of the Spanish language things getting into print and stuff. That’s a big step for

Martin Kelley (15:35)
Yes, and we have

a story of what a Quakers believe from a friend from El Salvador and he wrote it in Spanish, his first language, and we’ve translated it and we have a whole lot more. French Journal is getting international, so we’re committed to publishing more Spanish and Swahili articles, translated of course, but for our audience and to really share and maybe make this

Tom Gates (15:43)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martin Kelley (15:59)
question of what do we believe more complicated because we have an even wider geography and theology. But it’s very exciting to ⁓ see what we have in common. Yeah.

Tom Gates (16:05)
It is exciting.

the good work. That’s good. Okay.

Martin Kelley (16:10)
Sure, thanks. Well, and

again, thanks for joining and I hope to hear some more articles from you soon.

Tom Gates (16:17)
Okay, take care.

Martin Kelley (16:19)
Take care.