Gerald Priestland (1927–1991)

Transcripts of 26 wide ranging radio talks by the author. Priestland doggedly maintains he is a Journalist: one that happens to believe there is more to the world than people killing each other or demanding higher pay.

"According to the Queries, Friends have declared themselves to be within the worldwide Christian church. Yet they mostly abstain from the doctrines that define that Church. How alien are such doctrines to the spirit of Quakerism? Should Friends take more interest in them, or would that risk ... betraying our traditions?"

“I tried throughout my Progress, to commence each stage by recording as honestly as I could what I found I believed…. I found that I had no doubt of the existence of a personal God with whom there was a two-way communication. What I did doubt was the reliability of the Bible as the key to understanding his will… (page 30)
“The doctrine of the Holy Spirit, of which I made such heavy weather, seems to me essentially about our response to God: the divine within responding to the divine show more without. I am persuaded that it is a useful tool, especially for those seized with the conviction of God’s active presence in eth Church today….
Much the same thing happened with the Trinity. Again, I can see how the doctrine arose and there is no doubt that many of Christendom’s best minds still find a useful tool. More than that they find it a convincing expression of the God they experience. I heard many justifications of Trinitarians…[but] All of them seemed to me to be straining our language to the point where the creaking and groaning of it was proving distraction; and when in conversation with , .. we began to wonder ‘Why not a Quaternity, to include the feminine element in the Godhead?’ I became convinced it was time to keep mathematics out of religion. So I shall defend Trinitarianism to the death, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” (pg 213) show less

No one would claim that all the churches are the same; but Priestland's Progress shows that beneath the differences of detail there really is something that can be called the Christian Faith.