Derek Guiton: A Man That Looks on Glass

I hesitated before writing about this book, because it’s a very personal choice, and a rather arcane one, too, but I don’t like to censor what I write about what I read.

It’s a theological work, aimed at a very small minority – Quakers who are interested in the possible future of the Religious Society of Friends; it’s a very demanding and also a very thought-provoking book, that clearly links in to my own life and spiritual journey. The author explores theist and non-theist approaches to religion – if you can see how that might be possible – and looks at the difference between the immanent and the transcendent, as he considers what God is, the nature of God, and just how much it’s possible for us to understand about God, if there is one. (My italics).

To me increasingly it seems that in order to have some comprehension of, and some way to approach the idea of God, we necessarily make God in our image, and yet obviously, if there is a God, then that anthropomorphic deity is not God, for God must be much more. In other words, we are very much hemmed in by the limitations of the human mind, and what we can see. And although science is doing its best to dispel God and the spiritual, there are evidently things science will never be able to tell us: what was there before the Big Bang? What will there be after the death of the universe? What is there outside our universe?

And, from his evidently very wide and scholarly reading, Guiton shows us that scientists are actually rather less dogmatic about many of these questions than popular beliefs would suggest… His book is well-written (although headache-inducing in some places); he explains and illustrates his arguments well, and he is clearly arguing from a very specific viewpoint within a small religious society, and one with which I have a great deal of sympathy.

Quakers haven’t really done theology very much, apart from an astonishing treatise by Robert Barclay at the end of the seventeenth century, the masterly An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, in which he argues and would prove that Quakers have gone back right to the basics of early Christianity. That is a book to which I frequently return, as I shall to Guiton’s.