I immediately got to work correcting her most egregious errors in the hope of getting an e-mail to the hitherto-unknown-to-me woman who had written a paper about me, before she turned her computer off; and I succeeded, on her own account, with half an hour to spare. Nevertheless, she did not read my reply or make any of the corrections I offered before presenting her paper. She took a printed-out copy of my comments with her to Woodbrooke, then consulted with some unnamed set of "colleagues" as to whether she should risk losing a night's sleep by actually reading what I had sent her and using it to make her paper more accurate. By her own account all these Quaker scholars agreed that such exertion wasn't necessary; so the paper was presented with the same mistakes in it that I had tried to correct.
My present paper, therefore, was originally intended to go only to the conference attenders, 40 of whom I was told heard what Susan read aloud there. I thought it in good order to limit my criticisms to those who had heard the original paper. My ensuing efforts, however, to gain the addresses of those 40 persons ran into stubborn resistance from Ben Pink Dandelion, Pam Lunn, and Susan Robson herself. Somehow the attenders' privacy would be violated, I was told, if it were made easy for me to reach them with corrections to Susan's misinformation, which she had presented to them without my consent and without their having any way to know how misleading it was. Appeals to the Quaker testimonies for truthfulness, carefulness of other people's reputations, and common justice, fell upon deaf ears. At last I pointed out to Susan that it had been for the sake of fairness to her that I had intended to limit my response to just those people who had heard her presentation -- and lacking her cooperation in obtaining those people's addresses I no longer felt required to observe that limitation; I said that I would therefore mail my reply to all QSRA members listed in the organization's Register (to which I have access because I am myself a QSRA member) and to other Friends who express interest. The QSRA Register actually lists all but 11 of the 40 persons who heard Susan's paper -- plus an additional 111 members.
I am still seeking postal addresses for: Sue Bell, Gill Coffin, Gerard Drewett, Margaret Johnston, Jenny Paull, Kathleen White, Terry Wood, and Owen Young.
In this book, the authors describe an unusual group of people, loosely structured but led for the most part by Marian Keech, a woman who believed she received telepathic messages from superior beings on another planet (she sometimes called them "spacemen"). The chief of these, known to her as "Sananda," claimed to have once been Jesus, though he now lived on a planet he called "Clarion." His identity as Jesus, however, does not seem to have played any significant function in Mrs. Keech's thinking or in the messages she produced by automatic writing. Indeed the members of the groups seem to have welcomed "messages" from almost any source other than ordinary reason or sense perception.
The group came to the attention of Festinger and his colleagues through a newspaper article which read:
PROPHECY FROM PLANET. CLARION CALL TO CITY: FLEE THAT FLOOD. IT'LL SWAMP US ON DEC. 21, OUTER SPACE TELLS SUBURBANITE.Most of the book describes what happened to this group, as observed by Festinger's students who infiltrated it pretending to believe Mrs. Keech's teachings. An introductory section explains that the authors were applying their theory of Cognitive Dissonance to test the hypothesis that the group would increase its proselytizing activity if their prophecy failed. Cognitive Dissonance theory deals with the need people have to make their beliefs fit together with some kind of consistency -- it says that dissonant cognitions are uncomfortable for those who have them, so people try to reduce this discomfort in some way or another. Faced with evidence that one's beliefs are untrue, the authors argue, many people will perversely go about to persuade others of them, for "If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct." [3] In particular, if a messianic or apocalyptic prophecy fails, the "prophet" and his or her followers will try all the harder to convince the world that it is true. Some anecdotal historical material is presented to give initial plausibility to this hypothesis.
Lake City will be destroyed by a flood from Great Lake just before dawn, Dec. 21, according to a suburban housewife. Mrs. Marian Keech, of 847 West School street, says the prophecy is not her own. It is the purport of many messages she has received by automatic writing, she says. ... The messages, according to Mrs. Keech, are sent to her by superior beings from a planet called 'Clarion.' These beings have been visiting the earth, she says, in what we call flying saucers. During their visits, she says, they have observed fault lines in the earth's crust that foretoken the deluge. Mrs. Keech reports she was told the flood will spread to form an inland sea stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, she says, a cataclysm will submerge the West Coast from Seattle, Wash., to Chile in South America. [2]
This is a very readable book -- and therefore has become rather popular. The title alone could explain why Susan Robson thought it would be useful for analyzing my Farmington prophecy, for one version of my prophecy, widely published, did fail. Unfortunately the qualities which make the book interesting reading do not necessarily make it good science.
Normally, when researchers test a hypothesis, they observe numerous examples for conformity or failure to conform to that hypothesis, and then run a statistical test to see how likely or unlikely it is that the same results might have occurred by chance or due to other causes than what the theory suggests. "N=1" is laughed at by scientists ('n' being the usual abbreviation for the number of examples studied), for no statistics can be run on a sample of 1. A study based on one single complex situation may provide suggestions for future research, but if anyone claims to have replicated Festinger's experiment in such a way as to meaningfully substantiate his conclusions, I have not heard of it.
Susan Robson writes of Festinger's research, "This was an example of covert participant observation and there are several methodological and ethical arguments which can be raised against it." Indeed there are -- and the authors mention one methodological problem in an appendix, having to do with the fact that the observers deceitfully infiltrated a religious group and unavoidably influenced other members in the course of keeping up the pretense of being true believers. They seem more conscious of this as a defect in their science than as a defect in their ethics, though to this Friend it is a bit shocking to see them casually acknowledge so many blatant and manipulative lies and call them "necessary." [4]
Liars can, of course, reason -- and researchers sometimes fail to recognize in their field of study the moral reality which hopefully they respect in other contexts. I personally am a little suspicious of any writer who is so easily able to cast honesty aside in order to get an experiment done -- might he or she not also take liberties with truthfulness in order to get the results published? But I will assume in this paper that Festinger and his co-workers really did report honestly what they observed.
The theory of Cognitive Dissonance contains a large element of truth, I believe -- in fact I notice the effects of Cognitive Dissonance in my own life and in the actions of other people I know. Commoner terms, such as "rationalization" or "self-justification," probably cover many such cases. Many times a failure in one aspect of one's life or work lowers self-esteem to the point of depression -- and this may reduce one's activity for a while -- but alternatively sometimes it stimulates a person to work harder in some other aspect of their endeavors to recover the self-esteem that was lost. Most people have probably observed in themselves or others such efforts to compensate for failure, whether or not they apply the Cognitive Dissonance theory explicitly.
The evidence reported in When Prophecy Fails is intrinsically interesting provided that we remember that the interpretations and analyses offered by Festinger et al. are made by human beings about other human beings in a very complex social situation, and are not proven facts. Any reader who thinks critically as they follow the narrative can probably think of other possible explanations for specific words or actions of the observed people. I myself have both heard and given out "prophecies" that later failed during my 38 years as a Christian, so I am not entirely naive about the psychological dynamics involved. Perhaps I even understand them better than these academic observers could.
One aspect of the book's popularity -- and strangely uncritical acceptance -- is that the authors speculate about the application of their theory to early Christianity. Ideas that challenge traditional orthodox doctrines often become popular among people who for whatever reason disagree with traditional religion. It has been common among Christian apologists to refer to the vigorous missionary activity of the early Church as evidence that Jesus really was resurrected from the tomb. [5] The argument runs: these people would not have risked their lives proclaiming as truth something which never really happened; therefore the proclamation must have been true. The book When Prophecy Fails suggests that Cognitive Dissonance theory offers a counter-argument to this apologetic -- for its hypothesis is that disconfirmation of prophecy leads to increased proselytizing by the group which had believed in the prophecy. The early Christian missionaries, on this theory, may have just been compensating for the cognitive dissonance they had to endure when Jesus died. [6] Such an argument was bound to become popular no matter how weak it was -- and I think it very weak.
I had read When Prophecy Fails twice before, at the point when I picked it up again in order to refresh my memory of it for the purpose of commenting on Susan's paper. The first time I read it I was a college student -- the year was probably 1963. I had no experience whatsoever of prophecy and just took the authors' word for everything. The second time I read this book was in about 1989 -- and my husband and I had experienced a great deal in the intervening quarter century. Now, despite important spiritual differences between me and the group surrounding Marian Keech, [7] I could relate inwardly to their experiences. Larry and I had even once stayed up all night awaiting a promised revelation at "daybreak" on the very same day of the year (the winter solstice) that Marian Keech's group sat up waiting for their predictions to come true. I knew what it was like. And I could easily see that Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter didn't know what it was like.
Nobody rushes out to proselytize or even publish their group's ideology after a major disconfirmation. Festinger and his colleagues focused so exclusively on the question of whether proselytizing activity increased after a disconfirmation that they failed to take in some complexities of the situation. Marian Keech and her followers had predicted a cataclysmic flood for the dawn of December 21 (around 7 a.m.); this was the prediction which had received widespread publicity. She had also, less publicly, made other predictions to her own followers, centering on how they were to be rescued from the impending disaster by flying saucers. None of these predictions had come true, and in the time between midnight and 4:30 a.m. of December 21, the group was struggling with cognitive dissonance due to Marian Keech's having said that a "spaceman" would come to the door at midnight and escort them to the rescuing saucer: no spaceman had shown up. The reactions of group members were what one would expect: distress, puzzlement, disappointment, a search for new "messages," a few defections -- but no active seeking of publicity. Of course the press was primarily interested in the flood, or rather in the humorous story that they might have written about how the flood failed to happen. But the Keech group must have been most interested in getting rescued from an approaching disaster which might otherwise drown them all -- unless the seeds of doubt were sprouting to such an extent that what they really feared was public humiliation, along with whatever difficulties awaited those who had given up money or jobs in the belief that the present world would not last. I think that in Marian Keech's mind these doubts had by 4:45 a.m. become so strong that she changed her tactics.
Had she continued to insist on her flood prediction right up until daybreak, hoping and urging her followers to keep hoping for a last-minute rescue, the reporters would have found her group embarrassed and dispirited. Subconsciously at least, Marian Keech knew this -- and I think this is why, at a quarter to 5 in the morning, this "prophet" called off her own prophecy! Her new inspiration read:
For this day is it established that there is but one God of Earth, and He is in thy midst, and from his hand thou has written these words. And mighty is the word of God -- and by his word have ye been saved -- for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room and that which has been loosed within this room now floods the entire Earth. As thy God has spoken through the two who sit within these walls has he manifested that which he has given thee to do. [8]Festinger et al. comment:
This message was received with enthusiasm by the group. It was an adequate, even an elegant, explanation of the disconfirmation. [9] The cataclysm had been called off. The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction. [10]Marian Keech then entitled her new message "A Christmas Message to the People of the Earth," noting significantly that "it had been received at 4:45 a.m.," [11] and promptly telephoned the most sympathetic newspaper reporter she knew of. Festinger et al. make a point of the fact that in the past Mrs. Keech had not taken the initiative to call in the press -- but they completely miss the reason why she had to do so now. It had nothing to do with proselytizing -- it had to do with timing. Reporters were expecting to pounce at daybreak on evidence of disconfirmation of the flood prediction -- making Mrs. Keech look foolish. Therefore the news of her new "prophecy," saying that the flood had been called off by God himself due to the light spread by her group, had to reach reporters before daybreak -- and she had only a couple of hours. She could hardly count on reporters to call her at five in the morning to ask whether a flood was still on for seven. Other members of the group were soon busy phoning other newspapers, since "Their sense of urgency was enormous." [12] Indeed.
Of course the "good news" would have seemed absurd to anyone who had not been expecting a flood in the first place. Perhaps in their relief at not having to face unequivocal disconfirmation of their whole belief system immediately they all kidded themselves a little, pretending that the cheery Christmas spirit in their new message to the world called for greater openness and friendliness to all. It didn't last long -- Festinger et al. write, "Late in December an unfriendly world finally forced the small band of Lake City believers into diaspora," [13] and "By January 7 there was no group in Lake City." [14] Nothing in this story illuminates any general principles about what happens when prophecy fails.
To understand the Quaker concept of prophecy one must first know what the Quaker concept of God was -- for Quakers never prophesied as the agents of any other being than the one true God -- or that was always their intention. I must speak historically here, for as Susan hints at without trying to explain it, there are other concepts to which modern British Quakers apply the term "God." Most of these, however, are not relevant either to understanding my experience or to understanding early Friends. The early Quakers took the basic Christian belief in God for granted -- and therefore did not usually make any attempt to explain that basic belief: it was simply understood that there is one God, that He created the universe (all early Friends referred to the Creator with the masculine pronoun), that He and Jesus were one, and that He inspired the Scriptures of Truth (Bible). Like other Christians, they understood God to be all-powerful and to require man's obedience. They differed from many contemporary Christian church-members in stressing immediate communication from God to man, continuing in the present day -- i.e., in their own day, and to themselves. Arising as it did among Calvinistic Puritans, who held that immediate revelation had ceased when the Bible was complete, [15] the Quaker movement was criticized for maintaining that God sometimes says things not deducible from the words of the Bible. [16]
Probably the most frequently debated question between Quakers and other Christians during the early years of Quakerism was: does God still speak? Most of their opponents felt that it was dangerous to receive any purported revelation which was not provable from the Bible -- Friends replied that without the immediate inspiration of God's Spirit we would not even know that the Bible was reliable:
"...the Scriptures of Truth...are only a declaration of the fountain, and not the fountain itself, therefore they are not to be esteemed the principal ground of all Truth and knowledge ... for as by the inward testimony of the Spirit we do alone truly know them, so they testify, that the Spirit is that Guide by which the saints are led into all Truth; therefore, according to the Scriptures, the Spirit is the first and principal leader (John 16:13, Rom. 8:14). Seeing then that we do therefore receive and believe the Scriptures because they proceeded from the Spirit, for the very same reason is the Spirit more originally and principally the rule, according to that received maxim in the schools, Propter quod unumquodque est tale, illud ipsum est magis tale: That for which a thing is such, that thing itself is more such. [17]The term "Spirit" has changed its popular meaning since the time of Barclay, so it must be emphasized that Barclay was not attributing ultimate authority to just any "spirit" or inward feeling or impulse. The Spirit of God was, in his doctrine, that which authored the Scriptures, hence,
these divine inward revelations, which we make absolutely necessary for the building up of true faith, neither do nor can ever contradict the outward testimony of the Scriptures, or right and sound reason. [18]I usually speak of having received my leadings and revelations from Christ, not meaning some different source from Barclay's "Spirit of God," simply because Barclay was writing for an entirely Christian audience which took the Bible as a given. Today's Society of Friends in many parts of the world, including the U.K., does not make this assumption; therefore it is necessary to be explicit that one is speaking of the same God that inspired the Christian scriptures. [19] Even in the United States, many liberal Friends do not center their religion on Jesus Christ -- though on the whole America has remained far more Christian (in the sense of accepting traditional or orthodox Christian doctrines) than its mother-country. In Farmington, most people seem to be Christians. Most of the major Christian denominations are represented here; there is even an unusual group corresponding to the church which in my novel I called "Friends of God," which draws heavily upon the pastor's acquaintance with early Quakerism. I first became acquainted with Farmington while interacting with this unusual group, yet they never joined my community of Publishers of Truth, nor did we join theirs. We and they share a prophetic orientation to Christianity -- and this has made for some interesting conflicts, for as my husband once remarked after a difficult session with some of their members, "There is nothing so incompatible as two true churches." Indeed, prophecy divides -- almost by definition, for God never bothers to ask someone to deliver his message where it is already known and accepted. Prophets have always been outside the mainstream. (The converse, that everyone outside the mainstream is a true prophet, is of course not my position.) For examples one need only look at the biblical prophets, at the founders of Quakerism (before it became a large and relatively "respectable" denomination), or at any person or group that takes the idea of a speaking God seriously. I have often been told that if my prophecy had been endorsed by an established Friends meeting it would be more credible -- I think the reverse is more likely to be realistic. No new prophecy was ever endorsed by an established institution, that I know of. The "Friends of God" are in their own way as far outside of the mainstream as I am -- though there are some 15 of them and only one of me. They too are interested in eschatology -- though they lean toward the catastrophic type of envisioned future, as do many Evangelicals. [20]
It is in fact very unusual to prophesy good things, without attaching some sort of warning to the wicked (however one perceives that obscurely-defined portion of the human race). In my novel, a newspaper editor is amazed at the Farmington prophecy which my protagonist, Kathy Lee, submits as a paid advertisement:
she had never seen an end-time prophecy -- Miriam supposed this had to be classified as such -- that was so unremittingly cheerful! Where were the warnings of doom? Whose cadavers would the birds eat on the battlefields of Armageddon? Who was the enemy? [21]Even a would-be terrorist, sent to bomb Farmington on a suicide mission, finds himself perfectly safe, with no-one to arrest him when he confesses what sort of intent he came with:
he had fully expected to be killed when the plane crashed and the bomb went off; but instead, when he cut the power to the engine the plane had gently glided down onto [Eleanor's driveway]. [22]"This isn't a battlefield, friend. This is Farmington," says the local snowplow driver to whom the "terrorist" tries to surrender; they then get busy disabling the bomb, and the newcomer goes off to Thoughtbridge to rent a room. Everyone in Farmington is a friend.
Only God, of course, can give true prophecy. Human beings may, by luck or natural reasoning, predict things which later happen; but they have no certain ground for believing their own predictions in the meanwhile. God controls all events whether or not they follow the usual "laws of nature." I cannot of course prove this other than by saying it is inherent in the very concept of God as our Creator and the Creator of all things. If God chooses to relay a message to a human being, no law can prevent Him from doing so. If He tells the human being to publish that message, the human being is constrained by God's omnipotence to obey, regardless of whether other people believe the prophecy or approve of its being published. However unfamiliar these ideas may be to Friends like Susan Robson, there would be no Religious Society of Friends had not early Friends believed them and acted upon them. [23]
One of the most frequent questions I have been asked during the past two years is whether any Quaker meeting or "clearness committee" has endorsed the prophecy I publish. When I say no, I am usually told that this fact makes my prophecy less believable. I point out to such Friends that no prophet in the Bible had a clearness committee, nor did George Fox or any of the First Publishers of Truth -- and it is then often replied that the Society of Friends has learned since those days that prophecy works better when overseen by a group. Just when or in what way this odd doctrine was learned by the Society of Friends is a mystery, for the modern tendency to assume that a group has more light than any individual has not produced any notable prophecies that I am aware of.
God is of course not required by any law to conform to the expectations of any group of people -- since by definition God is the highest power in the universe. We reasonably expect the words of God to be consistent -- so if God promises something we may expect the promise to be fulfilled -- but when or where did God ever promise to speak only through groups? I have been shown no reason why it should be thought impossible or incredible that God would give a message to only one person -- yet many of my critics treat it as obvious that God never does this. To be sure, many of these critics do not believe in God.
My personal history is in a sense irrelevant to the Farmington prophecy, since I claim no credentials as a spokesperson for God other than my own unverifiable inward experience. But Friends have often written the story of God's "dealings" with them, as George Fox put it in the opening sentence of his Journal, [24] and no hearer of Susan Robson's paper would get anything close to an accurate idea of who I am or what my spiritual history has been. Susan writes,
Kuenning and her husband Larry have been well known among US Quakers since the early 1970s. As to whether she is a Quaker or not it seems suitable to borrow her own device qualifying her novel and say 'sort of'. Licia and Larry Kuenning moved among conservative Friends in the 1960s, including contacts with James Wolfe's community in Maine.Considering that I have been some kind of Quaker since 1967, am on nearly all the Quaker internet forums, am a member of the very organization (Quaker Studies Research Association) whose conference Susan wrote her paper for, am the sole editor of Quaker Heritage Press well known for reprinting classic Quaker texts, wrote a novel in which the main characters are Quakers, and have never professed membership in any other denomination, I would have thought I could be identified as a Quaker without "sort of" qualifying the term -- but probably Susan means that I do not at present belong to any yearly meeting.
I have in the past belonged to two yearly meetings in the United States: New England YM and Ohio YM, and I resigned from each of them for the purpose of living more in accordance with the teachings of early Friends. In general I have found that British Friends think their yearly meeting includes nearly all the Quakers in the world and do not understand the diversity of American Quakerism. Nevertheless FWCC has long listed in its Directory the small independent meeting I belonged to in Glenside, Pennsylvania, before I moved to Farmington at Christ's leading in May 2005. I meet for worship twice a week with the two other former Glenside Meeting members who have also moved to Farmington. I laughed at the statement that my husband and I "moved among conservative Friends in the 1960s," since I didn't even meet Larry until 1971, and we had rather little contact with Conservative Friends until the late 1980s. When she adds, "including contacts with James Wolfe's community in Maine," she errs on two points: (1) James Wolfe's community is not part of Conservative Friends and explicitly disidentifies with the Society of Friends; (2) we never so much as heard of the Wolfe group until 1977. If nevertheless Susan has detected some ambivalence about the Religious Society of Friends in my writings, there is a reason for it: I think the Society has mostly outlived its historic purpose:
"The Society of Friends no longer needs to exist: our mission was accomplished about a century ago. We have taught the world that Christ is still alive and still speaks to his people -- and this is now known in nearly every church, even where the official dogma excludes immediate revelation. And here in Farmington Christ speaks to everybody most of the day long, and we all cooperate in our respective assignments; so there doesn't need to be a separate group to bear witness to this truth." [25]Susan continues expounding my background, making some true statements and some false ones -- detailed comments on these might become tedious, especially since she never even tries to demonstrate the relevance of any of this history to my prophecy. She wants to claim, of course, that I didn't get the prophecy by direct revelation from God; she states explicitly, "I would claim that the prophecy is socially constructed, influenced by other people, both past and present." If I have allowed human influences to modify what I received from God this would be a serious error -- so some evidence for Susan's claim is in order from her; but none is given, nor do I see how any could be. What conceivable social influences would have inclined me to believe that a miracle would occur in Farmington, Maine? or which of the Quaker groups that I have been involved with since 1967 ever thought there was anything special in God's eyes about one particular town? I think my claim that I received my prophecy from Christ is supported by the fact that it is something I would never have thought of myself and could not possibly have learned from books or from other people.
I joined Acton Friends Meeting (NEYM) in 1968, at the age of 27, feeling strongly drawn to join Quakers even though I knew next to nothing about early or original Quakerism and might not have agreed with early Quaker doctrines at that time if I had known what they were. One week after my formal acceptance into membership Christ visited me very powerfully -- converting me to faith in Himself. In the weeks leading up to that experience I had not been in contact with any Christian believers (there were none in Acton Meeting); the only human influence which might have predisposed me to become a Christian was the writings of C.S. Lewis, which I had very much enjoyed. C.S. Lewis, however, spoke from an Anglican viewpoint and knew little about Quakers; he rejected a number of Quaker distinctives, including pacifism and the idea that water baptism is unnecessary to a Christian's life; and he did not emphasize immediate revelation. I soon found myself in conflict with my meeting and started searching for an explicitly Christian church -- but when I visited those in my locality I not only felt no sense of being drawn to them, it seemed obvious somehow that those churches were not the place God wanted me. One member of Acton Meeting suggested that I go to the Quaker Theological Discussion Group conference taking place the following summer (1969) and showed me some sample issues of Quaker Religious Thought, which sparked my interest in that there were articles in them by Christian Friends.
Accordingly I registered for the conference -- and the first paper I heard delivered was one I have since e-mailed to hundreds of people, Lewis Benson's essay, "That of God in Every Man: What Did George Fox Mean By It?" The phrase was, of course, familiar -- but like most Friends I hadn't had the slightest understanding of Fox's real meaning. Meticulously footnoting every Fox reference, Lewis Benson appeared to me to be both a scholar and a man of passionate faith -- and I approached him during the conference weekend to let him know I appreciated his paper. He gave me a copy of his book, Catholic Quakerism.
When I read this book my cognitive dissonance about being both a Quaker and a Christian was resolved. Not only had Quakers originally been Christian, but they had had a unique form of Christianity for which they suffered. They learned how to be Christians from Christ Himself, living and present with them. It took some time for me to learn how to practice this kind of Christianity; no community or organization at that time existed to promote its practice. Finding no sympathy in Acton Meeting, and hearing from Lewis Benson himself that no group of Quakers had ever taken up the challenge of applying Fox's message in our time, I wandered from counselor to counselor not unlike the young George Fox, seeking someone who might help me find a true Christian/Quaker community. In the course of this search I visited the New Swarthmoor community in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, where I met a young man named Larry Kuenning.
"What are you looking for?" Larry asked me, and I immediately replied, "I'm looking for the church." Within minutes we established that we both longed for Lewis Benson's vision of the church to be realized.
It would of course take much too much space for me to narrate everything that Larry and I went through in the ensuing 25 years, as we tried to live out our understanding of Christian fellowship as obedient hearers of the living Christ. Few people joined us, and when I received the Farmington prophecy in 1996 we were a group of only four people. We all lived in Glenside, not because we thought all Christians should live in the same town (we had at various times had members in many far-flung locations) but because we were getting old, had lost a number of members, and no longer had the energy to travel or to do much evangelizing. I thought that locality was unimportant to Christian unity, so I was greatly surprised when Christ told me He intended to establish his new church entirely in the town of Farmington, Maine.
Susan Robson maintains that my novel, Farmington! Farmington! "reduce[s] the impact of the prophecy where it expresses known preferences" of the writer. Her only explanation of this statement (offered in the part of her paper that she didn't read) is:
Kuenning is clear that she herself would like both to be healthy and to live forever.I think these are everyone's preferences. Susan, however, points out that "contributors to Quaker-B were equally clear that they did not want that kind of anodyne infinite existence, and wrote movingly of personal experience of spiritual learning in terminal illness." I interpret this type of remark as making a virtue of necessity -- people who think there is no hope of a world without illness or death find ways to pretend that they like these things. The issue resolves to whether this universe was created by a loving God who will eventually put an end to things which nobody really loves; so I do not think the impact of my prophecy is lessened just because I admit to hoping for what other people do not dare to hope for.
But if one were looking for a nontrivial "preference" of mine that might have made the Farmington prophecy attractive to me, it would be that I had long loved Farmington. Just why I loved Farmington might be very difficult to explain. I was completely unaware of the existence of the town until missionaries from James Wolfe's church set up an outpost in Boston in 1977 (while I was living in Cambridge) -- and the Wolfites were far from attractive. After our first encounter they lost little time in proclaiming that Larry and I and our whole community were on the primrose path to Hell. We did feel challenged by their prophetic zeal and sense of certainty about their leadings. After several months Larry felt led to make a return visit to this group, but finding that their emissaries had left Boston we had to seek them out in their meetinghouse in Farmington, Maine, about 200 miles away.
Over a period of many years I not only fell in love with Farmington but lost much of my interest in James Wolfe's group. It was, paradoxically, the ordinary people here, as distinct from the unusual discipleship community we never did manage to find much unity with, whom I found interesting. In a tongue-in-cheek dialogue between God and Gabriel "in heaven," I wrote,
"I have a plan," said God.This is not intended as serious theology. It does in some small degree describe the way I have long felt about Farmington. When my fictional prophet, Kathy Lee, goes to one of the Old Crow Indian band concerts on the eve of the expected fulfillment of her prophecy,
"I suppose it's about Farmington."
"How did you know?"
"You spend half the day staring at that town."
"Well, it's beautiful."
"Granted."
"And I like the band concerts in the park," God added, a little defensively.
Gabriel sighed. "The heavens and the earth ring with music, and you have ears only for the Old Crow Indian Band in Farmington."
"It's not only the music. I like to watch Stanley Harnden's face when he's conducting. So intense. And the people! Enjoying themselves so innocently, the way people were meant to do. Not fighting, or competing, or yelling swear words, or spitting, or trying to make a buck. The little kids run around and around the bandstand as if it were the sun and they were little planets. So do the dogs."
"And what does this have to do with your plan?"
"I want the town to be that way every day. I don't mean concerts every day: I just mean happiness. People should be enjoying life, not dead, sick, or worrying about when they, or their loved ones, will be dead or sick."
"But that's not the way you've set the world up. There must be a reason why it isn't that way -- and why would Farmington be any different?"
"Only because I thought a small-scale experiment might be instructive. What if we figure that there has been enough suffering and see how well the human race can get along without it -- in one small town?" [26]
tears came to Kathy Lee's eyes as at last she felt she understood why Christ had chosen Farmington. But she could not have explained it. [27]And neither can I. Readers may draw their own conclusions.
But loving a town is not the same thing as believing it will be the New Jerusalem -- and I have never been given to gushy religious emotionalism. Nothing prepared me for the revelation I was given in 1996, which remains on record where I paid for it to be printed, in Farmington's local newspaper. [28] I received no support for it -- in fact Glenside Meeting disowned me for prophesying on the Internet without corporate approval (I was later reinstated but still without approval for the prophecy). James Wolfe offered his opinion that it did not fit well with the eschatology he believed Evangelicals rightly derived from the Bible, and nobody on the several e-mail lists where I shared the prophecy thought it likely to be true. I moved to Maine -- but my own confidence wavered after winter set in with no sign of the miraculous changes I had predicted, and in a weak moment I agreed to return to Glenside with Larry, abandoning for the moment any further prophetic efforts. In a vague way I assumed I must have imagined the whole thing -- though I could not get Christ to tell me anything I had done wrong. Eight years passed.
Susan Robson says that her paper
gives a more detailed account of Licia Kuenning's Farmington prophecy to which she has born witness since 2004.She doesn't say "more detailed" than what, and in fact she does not give any detailed account of the prophecy -- nor can I imagine where she got the date of 2004. She makes this chronological assertion only in her Abstract and does not footnote it to any source. I in fact did no prophesying in 2004. I was going through a long dry spell that I had been in ever since I stopped believing what Christ had told me about Farmington. I did not connect my spiritual depression with the abandoned prophecy -- I assumed that it had some natural cause and only now and then wistfully wished that God had seen fit to do what I had believed he was going to do. I figured I would probably spend the rest of my life in Glenside, and die there. But in mid-January of 2005, to my great astonishment, God re-opened the Farmington prophecy to me even more powerfully than He had in 1996.
In addition to the Web, my prophecy has chiefly been circulated (a) in Farmington, and (b) among Quakers. I have used e-mail lists, Quaker magazines (those willing to print the prophecy as a paid advertisement -- which not all of them have been), and mass mailings to meetings and individual Friends. I am not sure whether the limited circulation has been due more to my lack of contacts through which to circulate a prophecy in other subcultures or to God's being chiefly interested in having Quakers receive the information. Certainly I do not have enough money to advertise in major newspapers such as the New York Times (though I recently submitted a display ad about one-quarter page in size to the Portland Press Herald of Maine).
I prophesy to inform -- not necessarily to convince. Nothing depends -- at least for most people -- on their believing the Farmington prophecy. The gates of the New Jerusalem always stand open [29] -- or in modern terms, there is no tollbooth on any of the roads into Farmington, and there never will be. When the Change occurs it will be dramatic enough to receive widespread media coverage -- and at that time those who have read the prophecy will be better able to understand the news reports and decide what to do about them than those who never knew there had been any prophecy about this town. Let them be skeptical in the meanwhile, if that is the best they can do -- they will still be welcome in Farmington any time they arrive.
Nor -- apart from my natural desire for social support -- is there the slightest need at the present time for me to be surrounded by a group of fellow believers: the prediction clearly states that the change is to be wrought by God directly, not by human efforts.
In her entire paper Susan Robson nowhere states exactly what I predicted. She does give the URL of my website where a clear, organized statement of the prophecy can be found (http://www.megalink.net/~klee) but then discourages her audience from looking it up by saying the information isn't there any more. This is not true -- the prophecy is clearly stated on the website, but for readers' convenience I copy it here:
About the Coming New Order in FarmingtonIn the town of Farmington, Maine, a new state of affairs will soon exist which the world has never seen before. This change will occur within the next few years. Thereafter, there will be no death and no illness (except the remnants of earlier illnesses which will go away in three days or less) within the municipal limits of Farmington. Nor will there be any crime or bad behavior. You will be safe in Farmington; nothing will harm you here. The rest of the world will still be the way it has been for millennia, so if one goes outside the borders of Farmington at that time one will not be protected in this particular way, though one will be no worse off than before. Farmington will, of course, remain as free as any other American town. Anyone may stay or leave as they choose. Nobody will try to make anyone stay or make anyone leave. Nor will we in Farmington try to keep anyone out. We will all do whatever God leads us to do. F. A. Q.Q. How long will the new state of affairs in Farmington last?A. The abolition of death and other evils will last forever. Q. Will this happen in other parts of the world? A. Some day the new order will be worldwide. It is not known when that day will be. Until that day, Farmington will be the only place changed. Q. Won't Farmington become overcrowded and lose its small-town character that residents love so much? A. Farmington will never be overcrowded in the way that many cities are now crowded. The population will increase, but there is plenty of open space in Farmington to accommodate many more citizens. If more space is needed this will be accomplished by annexing another town to Farmington, though this will not be necessary for the next several years. Also, since people will live in harmony with one another, the problems that attend overcrowded places -- crime, filth, etc. -- will never be problems in Farmington. Q. What will happen if I leave Farmington? Will old diseases that I have been healed of here come back? A. Nothing that has been healed in Farmington will come back. I.e., if you had cancer, and it goes away, that cancer will not return when you leave the town. But new diseases can start outside Farmington as has always been the case. Q. What will cause this amazing change? A. God will cause it by his own will. Q. Why has Farmington been chosen? A. I do not know. Q. What Scripture foretells the new order? A. Revelation 21:2-4 (the New Jerusalem). The name "Farmington" is not in the Bible, since no town by that name existed when John wrote. The location of the New Jerusalem was revealed directly to me by Christ. Licia Kuenning
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Susan doesn't have a good word to say about this work of fiction. When I first read her paper I assumed that she had not read the book, because I could not see how anyone who had read it could have found so many things in it that are not there, and missed so many things which are there. I thought she had just confusedly picked up some ideas about it from other people; in correspondence, however, she claimed, "I have read it twice, and it is interleaved with marking stickers." Here are some of her comments:
Kathy Lee, of indeterminate age, arrives in Farmington at the end of April 2006, with little tangible impedimenta or history.Kathy Lee, like any fictional character, appears on the stage as an adult before much has been said about her history. In the course of the novel it comes out that she is in her sixties, that she is the lonely offspring of unhappy, unloving parents, and that all members of her immediate family are deceased. [30] Perhaps Susan, whose personal communications suggest that she is other-directed, cannot easily understand Kathy. The year 2006 is never mentioned in the novel.
She moves into a trailer home, sets up her computer and does what Christ tells her. She uses all her money placing three advertisements in the local press announcing the new dispensation, attends meeting for worship with the local Quakers and the Zion's Hill evangelical community.There is no Zion's Hill evangelical community in Farmington -- either in real life or in my novel. Some sort of confused patching together of information from different contexts must have gone into this error -- but it's a little hard to see how Susan came up with it.
As dawn breaks on June 6th a sort of 'eruv' forms on the Farmington line, or boundary. [In a footnote Susan states, "In Judaism an 'eruv' is a fence, either real or symbolic, within whose boundaries different religious rules apply.]There are major differences between the two sides of the Farmington town line, but the differences are not a matter of what "religious rules" apply. Indeed there are no "religious rules" in eschatological Farmington: different denominations keep up their different traditions, and nobody is required to embrace any of them.
The second half of the book explores the stories of those who had serious 'suffering' to contend with before Farmington.I do not know what Susan considered to be "the second half of the book," for the major division (between Part I and Part II) is simply the story before and after Kathy Lee's prophecy about Farmington is fulfilled. Everyone has suffering (why the scare-quotes?) to contend with in this present world -- nobody in Farmington has any suffering to contend with after the Change. The division Susan makes here corresponds to nothing in my own plan or understanding of the novel.
It skirts round the practical problems about resurrected first spouses and the aftermath of sexual abuse and treats as almost irrelevant the questions of social justice which arise locally, nationally and internationally.I can only take these statements as indicating that Susan did not find the kind of answers she was looking for -- as nothing has been "skirted around" in my novel. It is true that I did not describe in complete detail every relevant experience of every character -- no novel can do that. Kathy Lee makes regular TV broadcasts in which she addresses the issues of the day that are under discussion in the wider world.
It particularly focuses on the reluctance of religious people, significantly Quakers and the Zion's Hill community leaders to yield to the leading of Christ.What can she mean? The nonexistent "Zion's Hill community" of course has no "leaders." I cannot recall a single incident in the book in which someone experienced a leading from Christ but didn't yield to it -- indeed, in Farmington, everyone is constantly being guided by Christ. Leadings from Christ are also experienced (though less often) outside Farmington, and the characters who receive these leadings obey them. How can someone claim she has read my book and assert that it "particularly focuses on" things which it never even mentions?
The 'Transcriptionist's Introduction' to 'Farmington! Farmington!' explains that Kathy Lee resembles the transcriptionist (Kuenning) in some respects, and also that readers may observe correspondences between the characters Errol and Eleanor Fisch and Larry and Licia Kuenning. It is useful to know that fact, fiction and prophecy are thus entangled, though the effect is to reduce the impact of the prophecy where it expresses known preferences of the transcriptionist.A novelist writes from experience -- and many of the characters in Farmington! Farmington! are based on people I know. Two of the characters (Kathy Lee and Eleanor Fisch) are in part based on myself. If I had tried to write a novel using only characters so unlike myself that I could only guess at how they would feel in specific situations -- it would have been a poor novel. I have already commented (on p. 17 above) on Susan's statement about my preferences.
Susan obviously did not enjoy my novel -- and in the part of her paper she didn't get time to read at Woodbrooke she complains that the characters are one-dimensional and that "It is difficult to suspend disbelief." Her literary taste may not be all that important for other people to judge -- for after all it is not necessary that my literary skills be such that everyone likes a work of fiction I have written, in order for my prophecy to be understood or considered credible. The novel can be, and often has been, read simply as an enjoyable story, even by people who disbelieve the prophecy. I encourage Friends to read it.
Getting back to Susan's narrative of real-world events -- she writes,
Announcing Farmington! Farmington!In reality I first posted the full text of the Farmington prophecy on Quaker-B on February 18, 2005. It had no date in it. Nor does my novel say anything about the year 2006 -- Kathy Lee predicts the Change for "Tuesday, June 6," [31] leaving readers to guess the year if they choose to. It was a fictional date. I chose a date in early June to ensure the maximum duration of warm weather after the great influx of seekers that the news of the miraculous events would bring, since there would not be enough room for all of them in existing buildings: many would have to camp in fields and parks while new housing was being built, and nobody builds housing during Maine's severe winters. My plot also called for Kathy to attend the first band concert of the season the evening before. The band concerts in Farmington are given every Monday evening throughout June, July and August; so I identified the day of the fulfillment as Tuesday. The choice of the 6th was arbitrary, as the criteria permitted any date from June 2 to 8; and I was not assuming that the real-life plans of Christ would correspond in every detail to the novel: for anything He has revealed to me the New Jerusalem might descend in December.
On the 11th August 2005 Licia Kuenning announced on Quaker-B that she had written a book, 'a novel (sort of)', to publicise a message which had been given to her by Christ. This prophecy, which was her term, foretold that on June 6th 2006 there would be a new dispensation in the small town of Farmington, Maine. It would be a new Jerusalem, where suffering and death would cease.
However, my ever-curious husband (once he had read the opening of my novel) couldn't resist checking out which years had June 6 coming on a Tuesday, and he cheerfully announced to me that this would happen in 2006, and not again until 2017. I knew better than to place any weight on this fact, but the idea that my prophecy might be fulfilled as early as June 6, 2006, was very attractive. (I was pretty sure that Christ hadn't intended me to expect a 12-year wait.)
But although I rationally knew that "Tuesday, June 6" was only a fictional date, my subconscious mind apparently made something more of it -- for on February 24, 2005, I felt led to type an e-mail giving June 6, 2006 as the date when Farmington could be relied upon as a place for healing every kind of illness. (This was posted on a list called thefriend@yahoogroups.com, which has since been discontinued.) Most "leadings," I have long realized, are generated by our own brains -- we process data unconsciously, and not always rationally. The conclusions that jump into our minds need not be supernatural messages from God. In my delight at apparently being given an early date to look forward to, I forgot this important fact.
Later that day I posted the same mistaken information on Quaker-B:
"I thought I should report one more thing about Farmington that I've been led to prophesy since the last time I posted about it here.Thus the evidence is in the Quaker-B archives: the prophecy posted on Feb. 18, 2005, had no date; my post of Feb. 24, 2005 clearly indicates that a date was being added. Susan either missed this fact or ignored it -- her entire project depended on assuming that if nothing supernatural occurred on June 6, 2006, my prophecy would be unequivocally disconfirmed.
"Namely that the new order of things there will begin on June 6, 2006."
Probably Festinger's theory of Cognitive Dissonance is most relevant at this point: once I had admitted to my thinking the idea that God had supplied a date for the Farmington prophecy, it didn't take long before all my computer files on Farmington contained that date -- for the more often I published the date, the more committed to it I became. Many of us have noticed that once one publishes a belief it is harder to be objective or to reconsider it: one's self-esteem becomes attached to defending and supporting what one has published. I even reasoned that if the date were not correct, Christ would not have let me mail out thousands of copies of the Farmington prophecy giving the June 6, 2006, date for its fulfillment -- though the very fact that I reassured myself with that sort of reasoning suggests that I knew that I didn't have as good grounds for believing in the date as I had for the original prophecy.
What are the grounds for believing in any prophecy -- or rather in a revelation of God to oneself? Barclay stated them succinctly:
this divine revelation and inward illumination, is that which is evident and clear of itself, forcing, by its own evidence and clearness, the well-disposed understanding to assent, irresistibly moving the same thereunto, even as the common principles of natural truths do move and incline the mind to a natural assent: as, that the whole is greater than its part, that two contradictories can neither be both true, nor both false. [32]A true revelation is self-evident -- this has classically been the Quaker justification for our faith that God is the primary source of all truth -- ultimately not subordinate to human reason, Scripture, or any outward test. I had such a self-evident revelation in January 2005, even though its content is of course not self-evident to anyone to whom the revelation was not given: the truth about the eschatological future appeared to me as if a veil had been withdrawn and I had been shown the only possible future -- the way things had to be. It was probably the most powerful revelation I ever experienced, subsequently reinforced by many other remarkable experiences too numerous to discuss here. By contrast, the inward impulse to add a date to it on February 24, 2005, was only something which felt superficially similar to many leadings I have followed of which it might be said they were not so much "true" or "false" as just what I felt right about doing at that moment. I still follow such impulses -- but I have learned to be careful about drawing inferences from them: what seem like natural inferences from felt leadings have often turned out to be mistaken.
Unlike the group that Festinger and his colleagues examined, I was a lone individual -- not that I think general principles about prophecy and cognitive dissonance necessarily depend upon all of Festinger's conditions being met. Susan Robson indeed noted that my experience did not meet Festinger's fifth condition, that "social support must be available subsequent to the disconfirmation," for
Not only was there no social support for Kuenning when the dispensation did not come, there had never been any. No-one had ever believed that there would be a new dispensation.(It is a little puzzling why Susan proceeded with her paper at all, since she purported to be testing Festinger's theory, and she had never had any reason to think other people supported my prophecy; but we need not examine her motives.)
From my point of view, however -- the presence or absence of social support was irrelevant: no honest person rationalizes away clear evidence that she has prophesied a falsehood. And a Christian placing her trust in the Lord needs to know where she went wrong. Putting on a good public face does not answer this question. On the morning of June 6 I knew only that what I had expected did not happen; I did not know why. I offered no explanation or rationalization to the crowd that came to hear me that evening in Meetinghouse Park [33] -- for I had none. [34]
It took a couple of days to realize that the problem lay in the super-added date (something nobody else could have told me due to not having had my two quite different experiences). The simplicity of the solution had been masked by my excessive commitment to what I had widely published.
Susan Robson writes,
The length of the prophecy run up was 17 months.I am not sure what a "prophecy run up" is, but the figure of 17 months corresponds to nothing in my understanding of my own prophecy. It has been nearly ten years since I was first given the Farmington prophecy. It has been about 22 months since it was renewed to me in 2005. I put a mistaken date on it and published it in that form for 15« months. It has no cut-off date.
Friends in the States did not accept the prophecy, nor did the Friends on Quaker-B, firstly they battled with her, then they accepted it and treated it with little interest and some gentle humour, but as the time approached they began to get worried, for her finances, for her sanity, for her inevitable disappointment. British Friends encouraged USA Friends to go to her side to offer comfort....They did nothing of the sort.
So the anxiety grew and Quaker-B held its breath and almost expected something to happen.Maybe this describes Susan's own reactions -- I wouldn't know, since although she is subscribed to Quaker-B she never posts to it. There is in any case no such thing as an e-mail list "holding its breath," and Quaker-B went right on as usual, with limited interest in me or my prophecy.
In October 2006 someone asked 'Is Licia Kuenning still reading?' on Quaker-B. A prompt reply told us that she is a little tired, withdrawing from caffeine, working slowly on the third volume of Nayler, and keeping her prophecy in the public eye in Farmington. There is a short poster outside the information centre....There is no "short poster" anywhere -- and Farmington has no "information centre." Probably Susan misunderstood a reference I made to the Thoughtbridge billboard -- the only billboard in Farmington -- which is some 6 feet high and 15 feet long and displays my prophecy in letters large enough to be read by every driver who crosses our Center Bridge: see page 31 below.
Susan asks, "How might things have been different if [Licia] had found a group to work with her in discernment and clearness?" Behind this question lies the modern Quaker assumption that groups discern better than individuals -- which I have already discussed on p. 13 above. Beyond discussing my prophecy with members of Glenside Meeting I never made any attempt to work with a group, since I did not at that time, nor do I at present, know of any group capable of discerning an issue which depends on God's immediate revelation.
She also writes,
As Kuenning interpreted Benson after several years, perhaps someone else will one day interpret Kuenning and breathe new life into her prophecy.I don't feel comfortable with the idea that I "interpreted Benson," and much of what Susan writes about Lewis Benson and me is too incoherent to try to unravel and correct in this paper. He is in any case dead; and he can interpret himself afresh when he is resurrected in Farmington. Meanwhile I am alive and plan to stay that way, so there is no need for someone else to interpret me. My prophecy does not need new life breathed into it, since it too is alive and well.
One paragraph near the end of Susan's paper needs especial comment, reflecting as it does a serious misunderstanding of my situation:
It may be interesting to offer some personal reflections at this stage, which I was encouraged to record throughout by Pam Lunn. Before the significant date/dispensation day I had found this very difficult. I could not think what to write except to record my general amusement at the whole process and Friends reactions to Kuenning. However by June 9th, two days after the non-event, my reflections were very different. Unusually for me I found that Christian narratives sprang to mind as the most expressive way of communicating my feelings. I wroteWhile the comments about Quaker-B are merely absurd (the list did not "mourn with me," did not send "a wave of caring," and neither experienced nor needed a "resurrection"), it is more serious that anyone should think I was "crucified" at Farmington's quaint little bandstand. I wish Susan Robson could visit this town and get a feeling for what a friendly place it is -- we do not crucify people here! Nobody even jeered me when my prophecy failed; in fact I was enthusiastically applauded and called a "hero" when I stood shakily on Farmington's bandstand, having called a meeting in the park to discuss a revolutionized new Farmington that had failed to materialize, and doubting anyone would be interested in talking with me under the disappointing circumstances. Some 80 people showed up anyway, and I didn't hear a negative word from any of them -- it was as if everybody thought we were in the New Jerusalem already. Enough time had passed since daybreak that people must have known that ordinary infirmities continued as usual; I was astonished therefore that anyone would encourage or applaud this foolish-looking prophet. Hardly knowing what to say, I asked, "I realize I was wrong, but still, if God were to choose one town to be his New Jerusalem, wouldn't it have to be Farmington?" A roar of agreement followed -- then someone asked me whether my faith was hurt by the disconfirmation. I replied, "My faith has taken quite a beating over the years, but I just go on following the big guy upstairs, since I don't know a better way to live"; another round of cheers and applause followed.Crucifixion at the bandstand. Nothing has happened. Licia has shown continuing modesty and humility. Chuck Fager and John P Wilmerding have hammered nails into the cross. Quaker-B has mourned with her and sent a wave of caring. But this is only the second day and Pentecost is still to come. As so many times before -- because of Licia Quaker-B is in resurrection today.
So I am not lying in the cold tomb waiting for resurrection. My life goes on, and Christ keeps leading me despite (or even by means of) my mistakes. If I was astonished by the local response at the bandstand, perhaps I had underestimated the spirit of this wonderful town. I do not know (for of course one cannot do a controlled experiment with a prophecy) what might have happened if I had prophesied that some other town would become the New Jerusalem on a certain day, posted a huge billboard with this prediction, and then had to stand in the downtown park to confess failure the same evening. Maybe, for all I know, there are places where people love their home town so much that my enthusiasm for it would win me forgiveness for my error -- but I am not convinced that local patriotism alone explains the reception I was given. I am more inclined to think that people who know Farmington well already sensed that there is something very special about this town, and saw me as giving expression to what they intuitively felt but could not articulate. But there is no way I can prove this.
Unfortunately Susan's misunderstanding of the true situation caused her audience to react with sadness: Susan herself wrote to me that "Afterwards several Friends spoke privately to me saying they felt this was an important subject, that they admired your obedience and that they felt a great sadness at the end of the paper." The "great sadness" can only have been triggered by Susan, as I have not communicated "sadness" to British Friends in general or QSRA Friends in particular. There is indeed nothing to be sad about.
2. When Prophecy Fails, pp. 30-31. I assume that Festinger et al. have changed the names of persons and places.
3. Ibid., p. 28.
4. When Prophecy Fails, pp. 234-249.
5. The argument goes at least as far back as William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794). One of many modern occurrences of this apologetic can be found in Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), pp. 246-247.
6. When Prophecy Fails, pp. 23-25.
7. Most obvious of these is that the Keech group is not Christian. Despite superficial identification of "Sananda" with Jesus, or use of the name of "God" or "the Creator" in some of their purported telepathic messages, there is no evidence of commitment to Jesus Christ in frenzied search for "messages" from "spacemen" thought to be communicating in code through telephone calls and TV programs or appearing in disguise as teenaged boys. For examples see When Prophecy Fails, pp. 140-43, 151-55, 178-80.
8. When Prophecy Fails, p. 169.
9. I suppose Festinger means the disconfirmation of the midnight visit prediction, though readers could easily get the impression that he thought the flood prediction had been disconfirmed -- which of course it had not, since the time when it was supposed to happen had not yet come.
10. When Prophecy Fails, p. 169.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 171.
13. Ibid., p. 230.
14. Ibid., p. 231.
15. An assembly called by Parliament to write a formal Confession of Faith (now known as the Westminster Confession), more suited to the Calvinistic views held by Puritans than was the traditional "39 Articles" of the Church of England, published the following in 1648:
...it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church ...to commit the same wholly unto writing; which maketh the holy Scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people being now ceased. (Westminster Confession of Faith [Philadelphia: Great Commission Publications, no date], p. 3. Italics are my emphasis.)16. See, for instance, Francis Higginson's "A Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the Northern Quakers": "Never did heretics speak greater swelling words of vanity, and more exalt themselves and throw down others, than those who are of that synagogue do. They commend themselves up to heaven, they give themselves the title of saints, they boast themselves to be equal to the apostles, to speak from the immediate revelation of the Spirit...." (London, 1653).
Another opponent wrote:
"And Luke did ill in those Quakers' account to commend the Bereans for being so noble as to search the Scriptures, to know and try Paul's doctrine, whether it was agreeable thereunto, Acts 17:11. Are we not bid to try the spirits? And how must that be? By a light in us? Oh strange unheard of doctrine! yet why say I unheard of? the old enthusiasts hold thus, and thence came in visions and immediate revelations with him, as doth begin now, some saying they have the Scripture by immediate revelation. Let us view that word of 1 Pet. 1:10: We have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto ye do well to take heed, as unto a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawn, and daystar arise in your hearts.
"What's this sure word of prophecy Peter would have the Jews that were believing take heed to or keep, but the prophets which was more certain than any voices or revelations? and therefore be careful ye receive no other doctrine but agreeable to the Scriptures. How long must we take heed to them? until the dawn or daystar arise? that is, until Christ rise in and raise up your hearts to perfect glory.... So to me the Scriptures is our rule till Christ bring us to the day of perfect glory, where shall be no more night; until then keep to the Scriptures, as the more sure word than all visions or the like. And this is safest, for every man to suspect his own spirit and opinion, that it's not from God, if it concurs not with the Scriptures" (Joshua Miller "Antichrist in Man the Quakers' Idol," London, 1655, pp. 21-22).
17. Robert Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Third Proposition (Quaker Heritage Press edition transcribed from the 1678 edition, pp. 62-63).
18. Ibid., Second Proposition, pp. 21-22.
19. Another difference between the religious culture of 17th-century England and my own is that most of the people I communicate with do not use Bible texts to argue with me or expect me to use Bible texts in support of my assertions: it is more acceptable in the 21st century to admit that one does not know the meaning of every verse in the Bible. I think early Quakers sometimes went beyond their knowledge in stretching the text of the King James Bible to prove every Quaker belief -- using proof-texts to counter their opponents' proof-texts. Such a climate of debating through Bible verses actually does not lead to better understanding of the Bible. I therefore am not bound by my faith to explain away every verse in the Bible that is difficult to reconcile with what I received inwardly from Christ -- sometimes I just point out that a text is obscure, and that I may feel confident of what Christ tells me even though I don't claim to understand some texts. There is hardly anything in the Bible more obscure than what it says about the eschaton (in various scattered texts, and especially in the whole book of Revelation). In my novel God says to the angel Gabriel (a thoroughly fictional device -- I do not believe in literal angels), "I could never make much sense of it myself." Needless to say, this is humor: I'm sure God knows exactly why He inspired the authors of the eschatological passages to write what they did. I am equally sure that He knew that 21st-century readers would not be able to make sense of it and certainly could not deduce what would happen, with any rationally justified confidence. Perhaps God all along intended it to be somewhat obscure, lest people should think they could figure out God's plans by their unaided reason God's. (This has not stopped some Evangelicals from trying to figure it out -- but their constructs depend on selective emphasis and heavy interpretation, and in my opinion often result in grossly implausible scenarios being predicted.) I think that eventually it will become apparent why the Farmington prophecy is entirely consistent with Scripture; in the meanwhile I just take God's word for it.
20. For more information
about this group and its beliefs, see their own website:
http://www.calledtoholiness.com.
21. Licia Kuenning, Farmington! Farmington! (Farmington, ME: published by the author, 2005), pp. 9-10.
22. Ibid., p. 258.
23. See, for instance, George Fox's conversation with the priests at Swarthmoor:
"I asked them whether any of them could say they ever had a word from the Lord to go and speak to such or such a people and none of them durst say so. But one of them burst out into a passion and said he could speak his experiences as well as I; but I told him experience was one thing but to go with a message and a word from the Lord as the prophets and the apostles had and did, and as I had done to them, this was another thing.
"Could any of them say they had such a command or word from the Lord at any time? But none of them could answer to it. But I told them the false prophets and false apostles and anti-christs, could use the words and speak of other men's experiences that never knew or heard the voice of God and Christ....
"And at another time, there were several priests at Judge Fell's, and he was by; and I asked them the same question, whether they had ever heard the voice of God or Christ to bid them go to such or such a people, to declare His word or message unto them, for any that could but read might declare the experiences of the prophets and apostles. Hereupon Thomas Taylor, an ancient priest, did ingenuously confess before Judge Fell that he had never heard the voice of God or Christ, to send him to any people, but he spoke his experiences, and the experiences of the saints and preached that" (The Journal of George Fox, Nickalls ed., p. 123).
24. "That all may know the dealings of the Lord with me" (Nickalls ed., p. 1).
25. One of the speakers at a called meeting of different types of Quakers in Farmington after the town has become the New Jerusalem -- the account is fictional, but the statement reflects my own beliefs (Farmington! Farmington!, pp. 361-62).
26. Farmington! Farmington!, pp. 1-2.
27. Ibid., p. 75.
28. The Franklin Journal, January 10, 1997, p. 9.
29. See Revelation 21:25.
30. Farmington! Farmington!, pp. 5, 18, 137.
31. Farmington! Farmington!, p. 8. All dates in the novel are given merely as month and day.
32. Apology, The Second Proposition (QHP ed., p. 22).
33. A public meeting for 7:30 p.m. had been announced by me in a full-page paid advertisement, along with the prophecy, in the June 2, 2006 issue of The Franklin Journal.
34. Farmington is a small enough town that even the nonoccurrence of a predicted miracle is front page news. Under the headline, "Miracle prophecy fails to make an appearance," The Franklin Journal reported, "Before a crowd of 80 or more people silently assembled in a large semi-circle surrounding Meetinghouse Park's gazebo, author Licia Kuenning admitted, from the gazebo's high perch, she was wrong. As she held the speaker's small microphone in her shaky hand, the 64-year-old Farmington resident said simply the miracles she had expected to see on Tuesday didn't occur." June 9, 2006, p. 1.