Comment by Patricia Dallmann on 11th mo. 15, 2012 at 10:13am

I appreciate your asserting that there is a connection between Scriptures and Friends belief, however, disagree with your stating that belief is based on the Bible. Friends belief and Scriptures have a common basis or foundation: knowledge of God, also called life eternal. It is this common basis that produces coherence between the two. In Fox's Journal (Nickalls p.332), there is a passage in which Fox identifies the spirit as the source of Scriptures and knowledge of the spirit as necessary to be reconciled to (in unity with) the Scriptures:

 

he said the Scriptures were above the spirit...and were the Word of God, and I told him the Word was God and the spirit gave forth Scriptures, and that he must know in himself both the Word and spirit which reconciles to the Scriptures, to God, and to one another; and that he must know it in his heart and mouth

 

Comment by Irene Lape on 11th mo. 16, 2012 at 8:05am

I think your observations are very good, very interesting. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about this issue - the relationship of Friends' insights/theology with scripture. The simplest thing I can say about it here is that they fundamentally "interiorized" the narrative. I wrote a book that includes a lengthy summary of what I found and experienced when I came to Christ, to Christianity again through Friends - early Friends. It is in my book Leadings: A Catholics Journey Through Quakerism. I am going to try to make the chapter available as a document. Thank you again for your words.

Comment by Lee Nichols on 11th mo. 16, 2012 at 3:15pm

Dear Patricia,   I am reluctant to comment on your position on this lest I be accused of being hostile or unQuakerly toward you, but since any attempt to communicate is fraught with risks,  I will make some comments.   

While it is good to have learned one lesson Fox taught in his discussion with a Biblical scholar who misused the Scripture, it would not be helpful to extend that point beyond its appropriate use and obscure the prominent place of Scripture in the hands of those who spread the early Quaker teachings.  Fox and early Quakers taught others that Jesus is the Word above and before Scripture using Scripture to make that point.  

Therefore since many of us are concerned to bring the Quaker message to those yet unconvinced by the Quaker understanding of Christianity, it would be useful to know how early Quakers used Scripture to convince others to join with them.  I hope to contribute to this understanding with first this introduction to be followed by a look at various parts that reflect the Biblical Basis for Quaker Beliefs.

Now if anyone can show that in even one place, Quakers failed to use Scripture or rely on the audiences' familiarity with Scripture to teach others about the Quaker experience, they would be bringing into question the concern expressed here.

Comment by Irene Lape on 11th mo. 16, 2012 at 5:25pm

The chapter I wrote on Friends and the Scripture can be accessed at the following site - I hope:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pCoJc76UrK76RROahwjhMQgVBWXhj0I...

And if you can't get to it directly, you can from my blog at http://catholicquaker.blogspot.com/ - it is in the list of Blogs and Documents on the Home Page.  I hope you like it.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 11th mo. 16, 2012 at 11:04pm

Everyone and his dog knew the Christian Bible in Fox's day; and most of them believed it quite literally.

Much more has been learned about it since then -- Secret Origins of the Bible provides a pretty cogent account of what is known, and how it is known, about the text of the Bible, the stories and religious practices of Israel and its neighbors, and their history. (There's nothing secret about this, except secret from people who haven't looked into the matter -- but as I've said this book provides a particularly good introduction. It is not very good in finding the significant truths that make the Bible worth reading despite the inconsistencies and errors that leap out at anyone paying critical attention.)

The basic story implied by the Bible -- that God has been working to heal the estrangement of the human race for some long time now, first using the Hebrew people and then the man Jesus to help people see more clearly and cooperate with God's intention for us -- is certainly there. But it's also a long story of people getting it very wrong, even as they imagined they were writing the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. You can believe what your father tells you -- but if you were a little child at the time, you may not have been told what he'd say to an adult about it. You may not have understood what he meant to say by it. The Bible is very much like that.

And today, there is a minority who make an idol of the Christian scriptures -- and a majority who see nothing there but primitive superstitions. Those who read this anthology intelligently, and consider it important, are a very tiny minority. The Biblolatrous will be as offended by Fox's interpretations as were their counterparts in his day. The majority, in my experience, prefer to ignore the whole thing. The others are likely to be put off by your attachment to certain unsupportable notions about the Bible and the position of early Friends towards it.

Comment by James C Schultz on 11th mo. 18, 2012 at 1:24am

I think the point Lee makes is that too many Quakers minimize the Scriptures while they make no attempt to study them for themselves.  Just as too many have taken as "Gospel" what preachers, priests and Rabbis have told them the Scriptures say, too many Quakers have taken as truth what the authors of books denigrating or marginalizing the scriptures have written.  I don't know of anyone having been transformed by reading a book about the origin of the scriptures but I personally know many who's lives have been transformed by reading the Scriptures themselves under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Comment by Jim Wilson on 11th mo. 18, 2012 at 11:48am

Lee, I look forward to further posts from you on this topic.  I wonder if some of the difficulty some people have with the centrality of scripture for people like Fox, Barclay, et al, has to do with how, in my opinion, the early Quakers diverged from the doctrine of 'sola scriptura'.  My sense is that the early Quakers had an intimate relationship with the scriptures, but that relationship differed from the kind found among reformation Protestant as well as that found among the Orthodox/Catholic of the time.  I think this is missed in the sense that today people reading what Quakers say about scripture tend to impose on it a different approach than the one they were developing.  These are tentative opinions; I'm kind of hoping that your posts might address some of these perspectives.

 

Friend James:  You wrote, "I don't know of anyone having been transformed by reading a book about the origin of scriptures . . ."  Thee speaks my mind.  An additional aspect of this kind of writing is how rapidly the academic fashion changes on these issues.  It can make your head spin.

 

Thy Friend Jim

Comment