Tell Me About the God You Don’t Believe In

When some people discover that I have a religious affiliation, they feel the need to tell me that they do not believe in God. It’s not always clear if this is an invitation to open or to close the conversation, and so I will ask which one it is. If it’s the former, I will then say, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” 

The God they describe is usually part umpire and part accountant, keeping score in a ledger. Sometimes he is a remote puppeteer, intervening in curiously specific matters like a football match or Mrs. Next-door’s minor eye surgery, while ignoring disasters and even genocide. Sometimes he—and it is almost always a “he”—is simply absent. Almost always, I discover I do not believe in that God either.

While one of the great attractions of Quakers is its absences—priests, rituals, creeds, sacred objects—we can’t be a faith of absent things, and I certainly don’t want to add God to that list. However, the question persists: What do Quakers believe? 

For me, the most helpful way of answering has been to revisit something I once dismissed: the Trinity. It is not in the familiar form of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: that feels like a formula that has been repeated until it has lost meaning, and it has never spoken to my condition. Instead, I think of it as three lenses to approach God: the transcendent, the radical life of Jesus, and the immanent.

The Transcendent 

The transcendent lens is the acknowledgment that reality exceeds my grasp. However much I explain, analyze, or categorize, there is always more. This is both humbling and necessary. Without it, I am too easily tempted into certainty; with it, I am reminded that my knowledge is partial, provisional, and dependent on something beyond me.

It is not simply a surrender to a “God of the Gaps” view, where God fills in the bits that modern science can’t answer, but an acknowledgment that the “gaps” are okay. The Book of Job is helpful here. When Job’s life is upended by terrible things, he eventually discovers how small his vantage point really is. This is not a tidy answer but perhaps the honest one. Asking why God let this happen is the wrong lens, especially when the mess is often our own creation.

Like Job, I don’t need everything answered to act faithfully; I need to accept that my knowledge is limited, suffering won’t always make sense, and the world does not improve by waiting for everything to be certain.

Jesus, the Radical One

The lens of the life of Jesus matters to me because of how he lived. He was radically inclusive of those society had cast out; he unsettled the religious authorities; and he confronted political power. He embodied a truth so disruptive that it led to his death. For me, Jesus is not the miracle worker to be admired from afar but the agitator whose fidelity to justice still disturbs.

His death and resurrection are not a theological deal breaker. I don’t need to resolve the arguments about historicity. Like Tom Harpur in The Pagan Christ, I see the enduring power in the message: that renewal is possible and that despair and injustice are not the final word. To say I find God in Jesus is not to revere him as set apart from humanity but to recognize in him a pattern of life that continues to challenge me.

I realize, however, that such a view has long been suspect. Early Adoptionists, the Ebionites and later Unitarians, were all branded heretics for refusing to make Jesus fit the creeds. Friends, too, were accused of heresy when they declared that Christ had come to teach his people himself. But if heresy means refusing tidy answers and insisting that authority lies in a living Truth rather than in formulas, then I am content to stand in that company. Orthodoxy may seek certainty, but Jesus’s life points to something riskier and more unsettling: the possibility of transformation here and now.

The Immanent

The immanence of God is perhaps the most recognizable Quaker lens. We gather not to remember only what was, nor to speculate about what lies beyond, but because we believe God is best known here and now. There is that of God in everyone. We wait in silence because we expect something of that living God to be revealed among us.

The immanent is present when we are called to stand and offer spoken ministry or when we hold the meeting in the Light. The immanent is that still, small voice within, which we find when we sink down to the seed.

These three lenses—transcendent, radical, and immanent—form a trinity that orients my faith. They are not a creed; they are not a test of belonging. They remind me, however, of the breadth of the Divine: the mystery that humbles, the example that disrupts, and the presence that sustains. In naming them, I find myself echoing voices like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, though for me, their meaning rests in the lived simplicity of Quaker practice.

Quakerism does not require that we all agree on the language. Some of us avoid the word “God” altogether. Some center the life of Jesus; others do not; some speak of Spirit, Light, or Love. The variety does not erase our common ground. It may, in fact, be our common ground: that we continue to ask, continue to wait, and continue to test our lives against what we encounter in silence.

So what do Quakers believe? For Friends, belief is not our organizing principle. We are a “show me” faith, not a “tell me” one. We believe in practice more than propositions: that our lives are our creed. It is not an answer that satisfies everyone. It leaves things open, but perhaps that is the point: it is not a tidy answer because neither is God.