by Marshall Massey

Marshall Massey was a convinced Friend who participated in soc.religion.quaker from its early years and was known for his careful, historically grounded writing on Quaker theology and practice. In May 2004, during a thread about women's meetings and the testimonies, he interrupted to offer what he called a "short Excursus on the testimonies" — which turned out to be one of the most compressed and useful treatments of the subject in the group's archive.

His central argument challenges something that many modern Quakers take for granted: that Friends have a standard set of "testimonies" — usually listed as simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality (the SPICE acronym). Massey shows that this list is a recent and individual construction (attributed to Howard Brinton's mid-twentieth-century work), and that different Yearly Meetings across the history of Friends have maintained quite different lists. Philadelphia, New York, Ohio Conservative, and Iowa Conservative Yearly Meetings all differ substantially in what they count as testimonies. The implication is significant: what modern Friends treat as the core ethical structure of the tradition is actually a contested and historically variable set of emphases, not an ancient consensus.

But Massey's deeper point is about the singular "Testimony." Drawing on Geoffrey Hubbard and John Punshon, he argues that the testimonies are best understood not as a list of distinct commitments but as branches of a single central trunk — "Our Christian Testimony," the Quaker expression of the Christian faith in its entirety. Individual practices (plain speech, pacifism, separate meetings for women) are not isolated principles but expressions of this deeper unity. The essay closes with a plea for the kind of mutual respect across differences that early Friends demonstrated even when they could not personally follow a given Distinctive.

The question arose in a discussion about separate women's theological conferences: which of the testimonies — simplicity, community, harmony, integrity, equality — did these conferences bear witness to? In response, I had said that there is no standard list of Friends testimonies; what had been listed were merely the five particular testimonies that one Quaker author — Howard Brinton — decided to focus on in his best-known book.

Well, in my (now twelve years' old) project of writing a book on Quaker discipline and practice as it pertained to daily life, I have found this list sadly deficient. It is both very incomplete and confusingly vague.

The discipline of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting during the period 1955–1997 — which represented the collective voice of one of the largest Quaker yearly meetings in the world — offered this list of testimonies:

• Peace
• Brotherhood
• Education
• Individual and the State
• Simplicity
• Stewardship of Our Means

The current (1995) discipline of New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM) de-emphasizes the term "testimony", stating merely (on page 21) that

A personal concern ... might become a concern involving our meeting. ... The method Friends have developed to do this involves the progression and deepening of concerns from monthly to quarterly to yearly meetings. This process is another part of our gospel order.... In this way Friends have developed (sometimes slowly and painfully) the social witness that we have traditionally called our testimonies.

NYYM provides its list of such "witnesses" or testimonies in the table of contents, where it distinguishes them from what it calls "fruits of the Spirit." Its list of "witnesses" (or testimonies) is as follows:

• Equality
• Nonviolence and Reconciliation
• Peace and International Understanding
• Social Justice
• Poverty and Stewardship
• Education
• Religious Education
• Responding to that of God in the Creation

The current (1992) discipline of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative) has a back section in which it discusses the topics of Capital Punishment, Education, Oaths, Peace and War, Racial Equality, Recreation, Simplicity, Temperance, and Wills and Revocable Living Trusts. All these are issues to which the term "testimony" was applied by earlier generations of Friends, so presumably this is Ohio (C)'s list of testimonies. However, the only one it explicitly calls a testimony in this current edition of its discipline is "our testimony against the use of oaths."

The current (1974) discipline of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) mentions "testimonies" in two places. In the first (p. 39) it lists the testimonies of Peace, Simplicity, Equality, and Community. In the second (p. 78), it states:

Friends' beliefs are reflected in what are called testimonies. Some of these are simplicity, honesty, temperance in all things, waiting for divine guidance, peace as opposed to war, "affirmation" instead of "swearing" in court, the worth of each individual regardless of race, sex or religion.

So I would offer this list of four whole Quaker communities who have come up with four quite different lists of testimonies.

There is no standard list of testimonies. None.

The Singular Testimony

The broader point I would submit is this: the testimonies are not a list of independent commitments but branches of a single central trunk.

Geoffrey Hubbard wrote of this Testimony (singular, not plural) in his book Quaker by Convincement, 2nd edn. (1974, 1985), pp. 87–88:

There is, moreover, the sense of corporate testimony, a unity of action stemming from a deeper unity. ... L. Hugh Doncaster has observed that "It is a fact of experience that faithful following of the Light leads us into unity with those who also seek to follow it." It is this unity which we call our corporate testimony. What Quakers believe is not, in any sense, dictated by the majority view. ... The obligation is not on [the person who dissents from the majority] to disregard his personal convictions and fall into line, nor with the majority to compromise in order to achieve a spurious unity. But the obligation rests on all to reconsider their positions, to ask themselves whether they are indeed following the Light; whether from pride or laziness they are not allowing themselves to stand in the way of the Light. From such an examination it is then possible to move on toward a true unity of testimony.

John Punshon also wrote of the Quaker "Testimony" in the singular form, in his Swarthmore Lecture Testimony and Tradition (1990):

We can see from [the Friends' eighteenth century Books of Extracts] that the word "testimony" in our sense is a shortening of a longer form of words arranged round the notion of branches of one central testimony. Thus we get phrases like "any branch" or "the several branches" or "in all its branches." The trunk from which the branches come is single and entire, it is "Our Christian Testimony," or in other words, the Christian faith in its Quaker understanding. ... There are matters that could be called theological or doctrinal, as well as ethical, which can be the subject of testimony, like not ordaining ministers, or baptizing in water, or holding that good works are necessary to justification. They may not preoccupy this Yearly Meeting at this time, but elsewhere in the Quaker world the preservation of the "Distinctives" is of considerable importance. The concept of testimony is less than comprehensive unless due weight is given to them.

— John Punshon, Testimony and Tradition (Swarthmore lecture, 1990), pp. 22–23

On Respect for the Distinctives

Traditionally, Friends who felt they could not practice such-and-such a Distinctive personally still showed some respect for others who felt that they had to, or needed to, practice it.

• Friends who could not personally hold to the Distinctive of pacifism in wartime still respected those others who were pacifists.
• Those who could not practice the Distinctive of plain speech were still respectful of those who refused to address others with vain titles.
• Those who could not practice the Distinctive of women keeping their heads covered in Meeting, and men wearing their hats in meeting except when a minister prophesied or prayed, would still show respect toward those who did feel led to worship in that manner.

The concept of testimony is less than comprehensive unless due weight is given to what John Punshon called the "Distinctives" — the practices that one Yearly Meeting may not preoccupy itself with but that elsewhere in the Quaker world remain of considerable importance.

Colophon

Written by Marshall Massey and posted to soc.religion.quaker on May 18, 2004 (Message-ID: [email protected]). The post was written as an "Excursus on the testimonies" within a longer thread about women's theological conferences and the Quaker testimony of equality. Massey was twelve years into a writing project on Quaker discipline and practice as it pertained to daily life, and this Excursus draws on that research.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected]

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