A much reduced edit of this piece appeared as a letter in the 22 May 2026 edition of the Friend.

In spoken ministry at Britain YM in session in May 2026 we heard of aletheia, truth. It’s used in the Gospels, and in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. This was during a session asking us how the Spirit can bring us together across our differences.

Readers of Philip Pullman will recall the alethiometer, the golden compass which shows the truth, if you can read it.

We have the technical term in English, “alethic”, an adjective marking approaches to truth.

Over the 20th century the sense of aletheia, as a loan word, came to mean truth approached through revelation: claims not only true, but shown to us to be true. Shown by something more fundamental. Shown by something greater. And you may recall that this is how Pullman’s alethiometer works. And our worship, too, at its best.

In some classical Greek thought aletheia, truth, is contrasted with doxa, mere opinion. From doxa we get orthodoxy, the “right” opinions.

Friends are very glad that we do not suffer the oppression of creeds, our Elders do not police the beliefs of Friends. There was a time when they did police the behaviour of Friends, dropping in on Friends at home to ensure that no one was distracted from God by frivolous pastimes, such as novels.

No more, and we may be glad of that.

But even without a creed Britain Yearly Meeting very much has an orthodoxy, a collection of “right opinions”, that Friends are expected to hold whatever they do or don’t believe. And these are policed by the social structures within our Meetings. Here are differences that divide us: marginalisation and social exclusion can await the Friend who has the “wrong” opinions on for example, capitalism, or on sex and gender, or on Israel. You can doubtless fill in the rest of the list.

But how much revealed truth is there in mere orthodoxy?