The Word Within: Essays on Prophetic Quaker Faith

The substance of these essays has...little to do with any particular theological view, being rather an existential analysis of and prophetic advocacy for the experience of our creature-hood exposed to the glory of God. From one angle or another, all these essays encourage us (1) to accept the profound inadequacy of our natural resources to meet our spiritual needs and (2) to understand ourselves as called to participation in the empowering otherness of the divine. The most basic fact of human nature, Dallmann reminds us, is that we are self-transcending beings groping blindly within the disaster of lives centered on ephemeral human selfhood. Having therein corrupted a moral character structured around life in Eden, that is, around self-surrendering responsiveness to God, we can find enlightened wholeness of life only through the corrective dynamics of centering our persons on the eternal Truth revealed in the Inward Light. Reconstructing ourselves around this new center of being, Dallmann shows us, is our responsibility, a choice of our free will, enabled and enacted through the inwardly known life and power of God. - from the introduction by Wood Bouldin