What does it mean to be a witness to Truth? The author draws from the experiences of the captive Hebrews as told in the Book of Isaiah, as well as the discoveries and practices of early Friends, to offer perspective and insights for 21st-century Quakers who are trying to live in faithful witness to the Light. What is our testimony today, and how can we best express it in the context of a modern world filled with "false idols," such as the lure of wealth and comfort, side-by-side with overwhelming powers that wreak havoc on peace and environmental sustainability? Poised between the temptation of complacency and despair, how do we live our witness?

What does it mean to be a witness to Truth? The experiences of the captive Hebrews as told in the Book of Isaiah, as well as the discoveries and practices of early Friends, offers perspective and insights for 21st-century Quakers who are trying to live in faithful witness to the Light. What is our testimony today, and how can we best express it in the context of a modern world filled with "false idols?"

This pamphlet takes off from Isaiah 44:8, "You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me?" and explores what it means to be God's witnesses. After discussing both transcendence and immanence, this leads Gates on to ask us, What is Friends' testimony now, as we live in this modern age of "empire and exile?" He also asks the crucial question of how we transcend the temptation to despair, or our tendency to avoid facing our fear and grief for the world. He explains the basic principles of Active Hope, citing the book of that name by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone.
This is a lovely and enlightening discussion of faithfulness and testimony in our own age, making crystal clear the oneness of what we often think of as two: spiritual devotion and testimony. The theology is useful as part of the project of renewing Quakerism for our times. The pamphlet is based on a series of Bible talks at New England Yearly Meeting 2014. ( )

This pamphlet spends three quarters of its space with exegesis/history and one quarter on environmental concerns. Gates is identifying attempts at ecological salvation for the earth with a testimony the 21st century needs to embrace for human survival, but the work is unbalanced.

The section in the middle of the pamphlet subtitled "Testimonies as Stories of Witness," is quite moving. In it, Gates speaks to the notion (I'm sure it is not original with him) that God does not call us to be successful, but to be faithful; acting with faith, we become effective. We can be proud of our history, "but what are we doing now?" he asks. We need to be aware that each of us has a personal testimony (Thomas Kelly, _A Testimony of Devotion_) that we need to uncover and pursue--that "we cannot die on every cross, nor our we expected to" (Kelly).

But then the last quarter prescribes our 21st c. testimony to be focused on the sustainability of our biosphere. It seems that Gates has determined that he is to take up the cross that Joanna Macy, Chris Johnstone, and Doug Gwyn have recently lifted up...and that we each of us also need to shoulder.

It is a pamphlet worth reading, but I expected more coherence from Gates. ( )

Reviewed by Paul Buckley in The Friends Journal, April 2016
https://www.friendsjournal.org/witnesses-witness-testimony-biblical-quaker-tradi...

The use of eyeglasses spread rapidly in Europe following Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1452. For many people, placing a single lens between an eye and a printed page made blurry letters clear and readable. In less than half a century, it was discovered that lining up multiple lenses allowed an individual to see what had previously been unimagined: very small structures such as the cells in an organism, and very distant objects, like the mountains on the moon and the myriad stars in the Milky Way. Compounding the effects of lenses didn’t just make the known more visible, it gave people the ability to see and think about things in ways that had been impossible before.

It is common these days to talk about examining a text through a lens as a way to provide context for a reader. We all carry bits and pieces of our life stories and experiences along when we read and selectively use that information as we try to make what another has written clear and readable. For example, I read the gospels through a Quaker lens and as a result, I probably see Jesus as more of a pacifist than someone from a more traditional Christian background. The lens I use brings certain aspects of the text into focus—but sometimes at the cost of obscuring other attributes. In this pamphlet, Thomas Gates uses multiple lenses; each illuminates a particular aspect of a story in the scriptures or in Quaker writings, but in addition, he lines them up to reveal the unexpected.

This pamphlet is based on a series of Bible Half-Hours that Gates presented to New England Yearly Meeting in 2014. They were a close consideration of the theme of the annual sessions, “You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me?” (Isaiah 43:10, 43:12, and 44:8). Gates examined what it means to witness, who a witness is, and what a witness does in the context of ancient Israel, in the New Testament, and among Friends. He uses the expected works of early Quakers—Fox, Penn, and Barclay—but also less well-known seventeenth-century voices such as Sarah Blackborow and Thomas Lurting. He follows the evolution of Quaker thought through later Friends such as Thomas Kelly, Doug Gwyn, and the authors of recent articles in Friends Journal. To these sectarian viewpoints, he adds those of outsiders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Walter Brueggemann.

If this were simply a survey of past witnesses to Truth, it would be of value; Friends should know and be proud of what we have accomplished, and how we rightly claim a place in a millennia-long cloud of witnesses. But Gates challenges us to go deeper, “Will we be content with merely polishing the Quaker museum, or will we discern new ways of doing Truth, of bearing witness . . . to suffer for the Truth?” Are we observers or witnesses?

There is a lot packed into this short pamphlet. Reaching beyond each passage and each separate context, Gates presents an amalgam, with each lens focusing its light into the others. The result is challenging, but the prize is worth the effort.

(Friends Journal, April 1, 2016, Reviewed by Paul Buckley)