Continuing with the narrative of Isaac and Rebecca, we noticed the important place the women in the story have - more important than we're sometimes led to believe the Bible could reflect. Sarah who played a critical role in the birth of Ishmael and the eventual promise God makes to Hagar and the becomes the one anchor the Hebrews have in the Promised Land. Her small tomb is Isaac's only possession there at the time of his death. Similarly Jacob's wife will play a critical role in the evolving family tale that will follow.
Gen. 23 - Sarah dies at age 127 and is buried at Machpelah (Hebron). The owner of the site tries hard to give it to Abraham, but he finally tells Abraham that it is worth 400 shekels and Abraham pays that amount. The spot is the first land Abraham takes possession of in “the promised land.” It is interesting to me that the promise - the promised heir and the first land right - comes concretely through Sarah — despite the fact that she is depicted as far from perfect in her relationship to God. The faithfulness comes from Abraham.
Gen. 24 - The matter of finding a wife for Isaac occupies this chapter. Abraham sends his steward back to his family’s kinsmen at Haran in Upper Mesopotamia. He finds Abraham’s nephew’s daughter, Rebecca (Rivka) at the well there. Finding that she is indeed of the family of Abraham – she is the daughter of Bethuel who is a son of Abraham’s brother Nahor and his wife Milcah [1st cousin once removed of Isaac]. They show the servant of Abraham great hospitality and the family agrees to the marriage of Rebecca to Isaac; they only ask that she remain with them for ten days. At the end of the ten days, she goes with a “nurse” back to Abraham’s territory with the steward. Rebecca’s brother, who is introduced to us here as well, is named Laban (Lavan).
Gen. 25 - Abraham marries again (Keturah) and has another 6 sons – a strange ending to the story of this man who is said to be 100 when son Isaac was born. He must be nearly 120 at this point. All of the progeny of this period are sent to the east. Abraham dies at 175 and is buried with Sarah. Isaac makes his home near the well of Lahai-roi (well of the Living One who sees me).
Ishmael’s 12 sons are listed in verses 11-18 (northern Arabian tribes), and then the story returns to Rebecca and Isaac. Rebecca is barren. Her pregnancy comes as a result of Isaac’s prayer—the twins struggle even within her—Esau, the hunter and Jacob, the quiet one, his mother’s favorite. They are who they are but they also represent two rival nations—Israel and Edom (the land south of Moab, a land marked by the prominence of a reddish sandstone). Esau is more like his father’s half-brother—Ishmael. He is like Ishmael the first-born, but he is not the promise bearer. Jacob, the quiet man, his mother’s favorite is that. Yaakov also means “heel-holder” or even “heel-sneak” according to the Schocken Bible. The name he will get in the future (Israel-Yisrael) means “God-fighter.”
Gen. 26 - We find another echo-story to the Abraham/Sarah story in Egypt. Here it is Isaac and Rebecca, though, who go into the kingdom of Abimelech in Gerar (see chapter 20). Here in 26, the Lord renews the promise to Isaac, and Isaac and Abimelech “cut a covenant” together too. The NAB says this is the Yahwist version of the story the Elohist writer told in 20.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Monday, November 7, 2011
Genesis 20 Through 22 - Abraham's Son is Born
We looked at a few of the most important stories in the Old Testament - the birth of Abraham's son, Isaac and the later offering of that son up in sacrifice, a sacrifice that God interrupts by providing an alternative sacrifice:
Gen. 20 - A doublet of 12:10, but involving not the king of Egypt but the King of Gerar, a kingdom south of Gaza, Abimelech. Abraham, now age 100 approximately - he will be 100 at the birth of his son Isaac in the next chapter - goes with Sarah to Abimelech's kingdom and presents Sarah as his sister. We are also told here that Sarah is indeed Abraham's half-sister (same father, different mother), so Abraham wasn't lying completely. After Abimelech sends for Sarah and "had [her] taken" God comes to Abimelech and tells him he must die because Sarah was Abraham's wife. Abimelech confronts Abraham over the deception and they a peace is arranged between them.
We talked about a couple of things in connection with this story: 1) the obvious repetition of this little anecdote and why it carried such importance, 2) the really blatant non-realism of the story [their extreme age and unlikelihood of Sarah being any kind of a temptation to the king]. Eileen pointed out that the extreme ages of Old Testament figures might have to do with uncertainties regarding their ages, discrepancies in the various sources, etc. But we also discussed the fact that unrealistic details in the story could be seen as a way of forcing the reader to "see" the reality of the story on a spiritual level rather than a strictly factual level. St. Augustine reminds us in one of his homilies that we should "not go looking with your eyes for what can only be observed with the mind" (Homily 13 of John's gospel).
Gen. 21 - Abraham, now 100, finally has his son Isaac (meaning ‘God smiled,’ or laughed). Sarah is also very old. Ishmael who, by Chapter 16 reckoning would be 15 years old here is pictured as still a child (14)—on his mother’s shoulder. At Sarah’s request, they are banished (again?). God promises Abraham to look after them and make a nation of Ishmael as well. This is a kind of an echo or shadow of the promise to Abraham. In the desert Hagar is reassured personally by an angel. They go to the wilderness of Paran (on the Sinai Peninsula south of the Negev,) and there Hagar gets a wife for her son from Egypt -- remember Hagar might be Egyptian as well.
Abimelech and Abraham make a covenant and settle a dispute over a well at Beersheba, just east of Gerar.
Gen. 22 - God puts Abraham to the test at Moriah (said to be where Jerusalem would later be built). Told to offer up his son, his only son, as a sacrifice, Abraham obeys. He has Isaac carry the wood on which he will be offered up - so many "types" and "figures" here that early Christian writers will see as shadows of Christ's crucifixion. On the way, Abraham says “God himself will provide the lamb. . .” (a prophecy of Christ?), and of course he does—not only ultimately but here proximately. God is looking only for Abraham’s willingness to obey and his recognition that the son he has is also a gift, something that the Lord has provided, not anything really belonging to him. What strikes me here is that having been asked to renounce the past (his ancient clan, the traditions and lands of his father in Ur), he is now asked to renounce the future (or at least any personal goal he might have for the future). He is to live in the relationship of faith only, not in any notion of what faith may get him.
Verse 20 traces the genealogy of Abraham’s brother Nahor to trace the relationship of Rebecca to Isaac. One of Nahor’s sons, Bethuel is Rebecca’s father, so Isaac and Rebecca will be cousins. The offspring of Nahor’s relationship with a concubine—Reumah—are also introduced.
Gen. 20 - A doublet of 12:10, but involving not the king of Egypt but the King of Gerar, a kingdom south of Gaza, Abimelech. Abraham, now age 100 approximately - he will be 100 at the birth of his son Isaac in the next chapter - goes with Sarah to Abimelech's kingdom and presents Sarah as his sister. We are also told here that Sarah is indeed Abraham's half-sister (same father, different mother), so Abraham wasn't lying completely. After Abimelech sends for Sarah and "had [her] taken" God comes to Abimelech and tells him he must die because Sarah was Abraham's wife. Abimelech confronts Abraham over the deception and they a peace is arranged between them.
We talked about a couple of things in connection with this story: 1) the obvious repetition of this little anecdote and why it carried such importance, 2) the really blatant non-realism of the story [their extreme age and unlikelihood of Sarah being any kind of a temptation to the king]. Eileen pointed out that the extreme ages of Old Testament figures might have to do with uncertainties regarding their ages, discrepancies in the various sources, etc. But we also discussed the fact that unrealistic details in the story could be seen as a way of forcing the reader to "see" the reality of the story on a spiritual level rather than a strictly factual level. St. Augustine reminds us in one of his homilies that we should "not go looking with your eyes for what can only be observed with the mind" (Homily 13 of John's gospel).
Gen. 21 - Abraham, now 100, finally has his son Isaac (meaning ‘God smiled,’ or laughed). Sarah is also very old. Ishmael who, by Chapter 16 reckoning would be 15 years old here is pictured as still a child (14)—on his mother’s shoulder. At Sarah’s request, they are banished (again?). God promises Abraham to look after them and make a nation of Ishmael as well. This is a kind of an echo or shadow of the promise to Abraham. In the desert Hagar is reassured personally by an angel. They go to the wilderness of Paran (on the Sinai Peninsula south of the Negev,) and there Hagar gets a wife for her son from Egypt -- remember Hagar might be Egyptian as well.
Abimelech and Abraham make a covenant and settle a dispute over a well at Beersheba, just east of Gerar.
Gen. 22 - God puts Abraham to the test at Moriah (said to be where Jerusalem would later be built). Told to offer up his son, his only son, as a sacrifice, Abraham obeys. He has Isaac carry the wood on which he will be offered up - so many "types" and "figures" here that early Christian writers will see as shadows of Christ's crucifixion. On the way, Abraham says “God himself will provide the lamb. . .” (a prophecy of Christ?), and of course he does—not only ultimately but here proximately. God is looking only for Abraham’s willingness to obey and his recognition that the son he has is also a gift, something that the Lord has provided, not anything really belonging to him. What strikes me here is that having been asked to renounce the past (his ancient clan, the traditions and lands of his father in Ur), he is now asked to renounce the future (or at least any personal goal he might have for the future). He is to live in the relationship of faith only, not in any notion of what faith may get him.
Verse 20 traces the genealogy of Abraham’s brother Nahor to trace the relationship of Rebecca to Isaac. One of Nahor’s sons, Bethuel is Rebecca’s father, so Isaac and Rebecca will be cousins. The offspring of Nahor’s relationship with a concubine—Reumah—are also introduced.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
October 23 Bible Study
Eileen Cass, Finn Mauritzen, Bill McCarthy and Herb and Rene Lape were present and we read through Genesis 17 through 20. The following is pretty much the bare bones of what we read and we were amazed at the "R" rated content.
Gen. 17 -When Abram is ninety-nine, the Lord appears to him again and restates his promises to him a third time: 17:2 – You will be the father of many nations, the covenant will be perpetual and is sealed by the act of circumcision. The first two are in 12:2 “I will make you a great nation, your name a blessing” and 15:18: “your descendants shall be countless, you will receive the land from Egypt to the Euphrates.” Perhaps what we have here is simply another version of the original covenant God makes with Abram, but the repetition of it highlights the fact that God’s promises and God’s intervention is on its own timetable, not ours. Nothing Abram or Sarai do will hurry the process. God changes Abram’s name here to Abraham and institutes the practice of circumcision. Thus, God says, the covenant “shall be in your flesh as an everlasting pact” (17:13). Sarai’s name is modified to Sarah and the birth of their son is foretold. The pact with Ishmael is confirmed as well. He shall be the father of twelve chieftains and will become a great nation. The chapter ends with Abraham and Ishmael being circumcised even while it is clarified that Ishmael is not to be the heir God has been promising all along.
Gen. 18 - This chapter shows us Abraham sitting at the entrance to his tent near a small tree called a Terebinth at Mamre. It is just getting to the hot part of the day, when three strangers appear. Abraham runs over to them and begs them to accept hospitality from him. He enlists Sarah’s help and arranges for meat and cheese to be offered. While they are eating, they ask where his wife is and one of them says “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah will then have a son” (18:10). Sarah, inside the tent laughs to herself for she is well beyond child-bearing age and knows it. But the speaker, now identified as “the Lord” repeats to Abraham what she has only said to herself. Sarah tries to deny she laughed, but of course we all know that Sarah is having trouble really believing that this promise will ever be brought to pass—that is why she resorted to the scheme with Hagar.
The three men then set out from there and Abraham goes with them a ways toward Sodom. The voice changes back and forth from that of the men (or one of the men) to that of YHWH himself (18:9 and 13) and later again at verses 16 and 17. It is clear that they are to be seen as His voice. He does tell him he plans to destroy Sodom. This is an interesting passage both for its content and the point of view it pretends to speak from. Here the writer presents to us the inner workings of the Lord’s mind concerning not only Abraham, but the whole plan of the future he has initiated through Abraham. The conferring of the redemption promises on Abraham bring him into relationship with God in such a way that God feels he has a right or need to know how God will deal with men, to understand God’s justice and even to mediate mankind’s needs to God. That this spurs Abraham to intercede for Sodom flows naturally from God’s including him in the divine reflection, which ultimately effects the action God takes. There is an inter-action between the divine intention and man’s response to that intention which ultimately shapes what happens, what God puts into effect. Also interesting is the point that God is going to punish Sodom because he is responding to an outcry against their wickedness. In all this, the inter-involvement and interplay between God and man, not simply God’s omniscience and omnipotence, seem to be that which shapes events.
Abraham pleads with God not to destroy the innocent with the guilty. Noah didn’t do this (presuming that there were other innocent destroyed in the flood), but Abraham, like Moses and Jesus after him will take the part of man at least to a point and intercede for us. In a sense this makes Abraham God’s first “prophet.” The Lord finally does agree to spare Sodom if ten righteous men can be found there, and perhaps would have gone further, but Abraham does not presume to push Him beyond ten.
Gen. 19 - Two angel messengers are entertained by Lot whose hospitality is implicitly praised. The men of the town beat at his door demanding that he turn them over to them so they can “abuse” them –“be intimate with them” [Tanakh, 5]. There is virtually no discussion or follow up on the particular evil implied. The whole focus is on the fact that destruction will come, but the virtuous Lot and those he loves are given a path to follow to avoid the destruction.
Lot’s daughters seem to be affected by the sexual decadence of the times in their own plot to sleep with their father. The older daughter gives birth to Moah, the younger one to Ben-ammi (the Ammonites). The note suggests it is a gibe at Israel’s enemies to link them in this way with such conduct.
Gen. 20 - A doublet of 12:10, but involving not the king of Egypt but the King of Gerar, a kingdom south of Gaza, Abimelech. Abimelech has a dream from God revealing the truth of what Abraham is doing and he confronts Abraham. The idea of God’s prophets being favored and being people who can intercede with God for us is reinforced here (20:7). Abraham learns that there is fear and respect for God outside his own people, so at Abraham’s intercession, God does lift the sanction he had imposed on them for their inadvertent violation of his will.
Gen. 17 -When Abram is ninety-nine, the Lord appears to him again and restates his promises to him a third time: 17:2 – You will be the father of many nations, the covenant will be perpetual and is sealed by the act of circumcision. The first two are in 12:2 “I will make you a great nation, your name a blessing” and 15:18: “your descendants shall be countless, you will receive the land from Egypt to the Euphrates.” Perhaps what we have here is simply another version of the original covenant God makes with Abram, but the repetition of it highlights the fact that God’s promises and God’s intervention is on its own timetable, not ours. Nothing Abram or Sarai do will hurry the process. God changes Abram’s name here to Abraham and institutes the practice of circumcision. Thus, God says, the covenant “shall be in your flesh as an everlasting pact” (17:13). Sarai’s name is modified to Sarah and the birth of their son is foretold. The pact with Ishmael is confirmed as well. He shall be the father of twelve chieftains and will become a great nation. The chapter ends with Abraham and Ishmael being circumcised even while it is clarified that Ishmael is not to be the heir God has been promising all along.
Gen. 18 - This chapter shows us Abraham sitting at the entrance to his tent near a small tree called a Terebinth at Mamre. It is just getting to the hot part of the day, when three strangers appear. Abraham runs over to them and begs them to accept hospitality from him. He enlists Sarah’s help and arranges for meat and cheese to be offered. While they are eating, they ask where his wife is and one of them says “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah will then have a son” (18:10). Sarah, inside the tent laughs to herself for she is well beyond child-bearing age and knows it. But the speaker, now identified as “the Lord” repeats to Abraham what she has only said to herself. Sarah tries to deny she laughed, but of course we all know that Sarah is having trouble really believing that this promise will ever be brought to pass—that is why she resorted to the scheme with Hagar.
The three men then set out from there and Abraham goes with them a ways toward Sodom. The voice changes back and forth from that of the men (or one of the men) to that of YHWH himself (18:9 and 13) and later again at verses 16 and 17. It is clear that they are to be seen as His voice. He does tell him he plans to destroy Sodom. This is an interesting passage both for its content and the point of view it pretends to speak from. Here the writer presents to us the inner workings of the Lord’s mind concerning not only Abraham, but the whole plan of the future he has initiated through Abraham. The conferring of the redemption promises on Abraham bring him into relationship with God in such a way that God feels he has a right or need to know how God will deal with men, to understand God’s justice and even to mediate mankind’s needs to God. That this spurs Abraham to intercede for Sodom flows naturally from God’s including him in the divine reflection, which ultimately effects the action God takes. There is an inter-action between the divine intention and man’s response to that intention which ultimately shapes what happens, what God puts into effect. Also interesting is the point that God is going to punish Sodom because he is responding to an outcry against their wickedness. In all this, the inter-involvement and interplay between God and man, not simply God’s omniscience and omnipotence, seem to be that which shapes events.
Abraham pleads with God not to destroy the innocent with the guilty. Noah didn’t do this (presuming that there were other innocent destroyed in the flood), but Abraham, like Moses and Jesus after him will take the part of man at least to a point and intercede for us. In a sense this makes Abraham God’s first “prophet.” The Lord finally does agree to spare Sodom if ten righteous men can be found there, and perhaps would have gone further, but Abraham does not presume to push Him beyond ten.
Gen. 19 - Two angel messengers are entertained by Lot whose hospitality is implicitly praised. The men of the town beat at his door demanding that he turn them over to them so they can “abuse” them –“be intimate with them” [Tanakh, 5]. There is virtually no discussion or follow up on the particular evil implied. The whole focus is on the fact that destruction will come, but the virtuous Lot and those he loves are given a path to follow to avoid the destruction.
Lot’s daughters seem to be affected by the sexual decadence of the times in their own plot to sleep with their father. The older daughter gives birth to Moah, the younger one to Ben-ammi (the Ammonites). The note suggests it is a gibe at Israel’s enemies to link them in this way with such conduct.
Gen. 20 - A doublet of 12:10, but involving not the king of Egypt but the King of Gerar, a kingdom south of Gaza, Abimelech. Abimelech has a dream from God revealing the truth of what Abraham is doing and he confronts Abraham. The idea of God’s prophets being favored and being people who can intercede with God for us is reinforced here (20:7). Abraham learns that there is fear and respect for God outside his own people, so at Abraham’s intercession, God does lift the sanction he had imposed on them for their inadvertent violation of his will.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
October 2nd Bible Study
There were just three of us at this morning's meeting, and we had no key to the Meeting House Center, so we had to sit out in the glorious sunshine God blessed us with. We read through Genesis 12 through 16 and had a wonderful discussion. First here is the narrative in brief form:
Gen. 12 - God addresses Abram and tells him to leave Haran, the home of his father’s clan, to go to “a land that I will show you” (12:1). And then come the great promises – God promises to make of him a great nation, and God tells him He will make Abram’s name great and him a blessing to “all the communities of the earth” (12:2-3). Abram is 75 when they leave.
When they get to Shechem, the Lord appears to Abram and tells him that this is the land he is promising him. Abram builds an altar there and invokes the Lord’s name. Then we are told that they go into Egypt to escape famine. Abram worries about Sarai’s beauty being a source of conflict, so they agree to say she is his sister. The Pharaoh indeed does send for her, and we are not told what transpires there, if anything did. But Abram benefits from the Pharaoh’s favoritism; the Lord, however, is very displeased and strikes Egypt with severe plagues. There are a number of “foreshadowing details” here in this story that will be repeated at several points in the later narrative—a move to Egypt forced by famine, a position of honor accorded the wandering man of God from Canaan; God’s infliction of a series of plagues; and sending of God’s favored one away from Pharaoh’s kingdom to bring peace back to the kingdom. Even the wealth Abram obtains there (see 12:16), he gets to take with them. Surely this is a “type” of the later exodus.
Abraham is the first of the three key players in the redemption story—he will be followed by Moses and Jesus—who will in a sense “come up out of Egypt” to begin their ministries. The story of his sojourn in Egypt (one of a triplet of like stories in the Old Testament) establishes his prosperity, even if it comes as a result of deceit, and Sarah’s value and importance. Like his people he comes out of Egypt loaded with goods, so much he must separate from Lot (13:5-11).
Abram is told from the beginning that he is only the first of many, that through him a faithful people will be formed, and that this people will have an impact far beyond the borders of the nation they will form—that blessing will come through him and his seed to all mankind. There will be much hardship along the way—exile, slavery and oppression and who knows what else in the distant, distant, future that will come before “all the nations of the earth” will “bless themselves by his descendants.
The process begins with Abram hearing God’s voice and obeying it.
Gen. 13 - In response to God’s call, Abram goes to the Negeb and on to Bethel, to the place where he builds an altar. Abram and his extended family have so much property that he suggests to his nephew Lot that he go off and find himself a separate place to settle. Lot chooses the Jordan plain. Abram stays in Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the Plain, near Sodom. The first thing we hear about Sodom is that in inhabitants were very wicked (13:13). The chapter ends with the Lord recapitulating the promises he made to Abram: “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that is one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I will give it to you” (13:14-17).
Gen. 14 - There is a war in the region between the two main alliances of kings. When Lot gets taken by the winning alliance, Abram goes and with 318 of his retainers, he recaptures Lot and his possessions and brings them back. When he returns, not only does the king of Sodom greet him, but a King by the name of Melchizedek, King of Salem (Jerusalem), greets him as well. Melchizedek is a priest of “the Most High God,” (our God, the God of Abram) and he gives Abram offerings of bread and wine (14:18-20). In turn Abram givens him a tenth of all he has.
Gen. 15 – God’s word comes to him again and takes him out to see the stars of the sky. And God promises in words similar to those later given to Moses—“I am YHWH who brought you out of [Ur] to give you this land.. .” (15:7) and I will make [your] Abram’s descendants as many as the stars. That Abram has faith (or trusts) in God’s promises is “credited . . .to him as an act of righteousness” (15:6). Then God repeats the covenant, and solemnizes the occasion by having Abram offer a heifer, a she-goat, a ram (all age 3), a turtle dove and a pigeon. Each of the first three is split in two and Abram guards them all day. In the evening, Abraham falls into a trance and “a deep, terrifying darkness envelope[s] him” (15:12). God reveals to Abram that his descendants shall suffer a period of slavery before God delivers them. When it is dark, a “smoking brazier and a flaming torch” pass between the severed pieces of animal and the covenant is concluded with respect to the lands God intends to confer on Abram’s line.
Gen. 16 - Discouraged that NO CHILD has come from all the promises thus far, Sarai, discouraged with her own infertility and not quite as ready as Abram is simply to trust in the word of God they have received becomes impatient and comes up with her own plan to make the promise of God come to pass. She offers Abram her maidservant Hagar with the idea that perhaps any children that result might be considered hers. Hagar is an Egyptian woman. She does become pregnant, but the success of Sarai’s scheme only creates problems. Hagar now thinks she is better than Sarai. Sarai is jealous and blames Abram for her problems. Abram allows Sarai to decide what shall happen with Hagar (16:6) and the child, and Sarai has no pity now. She “abuses” Hagar so much that she finally runs away. The tragedy of human machinations here will require deep and on-going redemptive intervention by God—an intervention that is not yet at an end in our day.
The Lord’s messenger finds Hagar by a spring in the wilderness and asks her where she is going. Then he advises Hagar to return and submit to the mistreatment, and in return she will be given a promise parallel to the one given to Abram. She is the first woman with whom a covenant is contracted with the Lord. Soon after her return, Ishmael is born. Abram is 86.
We found the story is interesting for many reasons. First there is the great patience Abram shows in his faith. He is not young when God makes all these promises to him. And yet he does not complain or ever become impatient with his God. And we talked about the fact that no land in the promised region comes into Abram's hands at all. WE, living in the 21st century can see that the faith he shows in his God will eventually draw the interest of many nations and many people; but the patience and faithfulness of Abram must have had more subtle and interior rewards.
Then there are the interesting consequences of Sarai's IMPATIENCE. She apparently simply cannot believe that God will be able to bring forth an heir for Abram from her aging body. So she must say to herself something like, "How is this promise to be realized?" Certainly God doesn’t expect them just to sit around and wait for a miracle. “God helps those who help themselves—right?” We reason like this all the time. And what we learn from this story is that God, while clearly not behind this “solution,” will eventually accept it and redeem it. There will be many times in this story that a similar thing will happen. God will promise something. We will become impatient or get some inspiration of our own how we can “make” God’s promise happen and we will get it wrong—we will grasp a way he is not behind—and he will make it work in spite of us. It will happen with Ishmael’s birth; it will happen again with the institution of the monarchy in Israel; and perhaps it happens all the time. Perhaps every redemptive “effort” that man has made will ultimately be transformed by God into real redemption by God’s deep and unrelenting love and redemptive work in us, in our lives and in our history.
The appearance of Melchizedek, "Priest of the Most High God" drew interest among us as well. He shows that while God clearly had a process being started with the Hebrew descendants of Abram, He was also part of the worship of other people. The model of Melchizedek will inspire early Jewish converts of Christ, who see that God can act outside the tradition, he can raise up priests who are not of the family of Aaron. Perhaps this gave them the freedom to lay down other aspects of the Mosaic law that were impediments to gentile converts. The balance this Abram story shows between strict terms of faith and what seems a fair amount of latitude God permits us in the exercise of our freedom and our inevitable impatience and imperfection was also something we talked about.
We will begin before Meeting on October 23, or as our forebearers would have said - First Day of 23rd day, Tenth Month, 2011 (10 o'clock). We will start at Genesis 17. If you can read on, great. Or will will read together. Hope you can make it.
Gen. 12 - God addresses Abram and tells him to leave Haran, the home of his father’s clan, to go to “a land that I will show you” (12:1). And then come the great promises – God promises to make of him a great nation, and God tells him He will make Abram’s name great and him a blessing to “all the communities of the earth” (12:2-3). Abram is 75 when they leave.
When they get to Shechem, the Lord appears to Abram and tells him that this is the land he is promising him. Abram builds an altar there and invokes the Lord’s name. Then we are told that they go into Egypt to escape famine. Abram worries about Sarai’s beauty being a source of conflict, so they agree to say she is his sister. The Pharaoh indeed does send for her, and we are not told what transpires there, if anything did. But Abram benefits from the Pharaoh’s favoritism; the Lord, however, is very displeased and strikes Egypt with severe plagues. There are a number of “foreshadowing details” here in this story that will be repeated at several points in the later narrative—a move to Egypt forced by famine, a position of honor accorded the wandering man of God from Canaan; God’s infliction of a series of plagues; and sending of God’s favored one away from Pharaoh’s kingdom to bring peace back to the kingdom. Even the wealth Abram obtains there (see 12:16), he gets to take with them. Surely this is a “type” of the later exodus.
Abraham is the first of the three key players in the redemption story—he will be followed by Moses and Jesus—who will in a sense “come up out of Egypt” to begin their ministries. The story of his sojourn in Egypt (one of a triplet of like stories in the Old Testament) establishes his prosperity, even if it comes as a result of deceit, and Sarah’s value and importance. Like his people he comes out of Egypt loaded with goods, so much he must separate from Lot (13:5-11).
Abram is told from the beginning that he is only the first of many, that through him a faithful people will be formed, and that this people will have an impact far beyond the borders of the nation they will form—that blessing will come through him and his seed to all mankind. There will be much hardship along the way—exile, slavery and oppression and who knows what else in the distant, distant, future that will come before “all the nations of the earth” will “bless themselves by his descendants.
The process begins with Abram hearing God’s voice and obeying it.
Gen. 13 - In response to God’s call, Abram goes to the Negeb and on to Bethel, to the place where he builds an altar. Abram and his extended family have so much property that he suggests to his nephew Lot that he go off and find himself a separate place to settle. Lot chooses the Jordan plain. Abram stays in Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the Plain, near Sodom. The first thing we hear about Sodom is that in inhabitants were very wicked (13:13). The chapter ends with the Lord recapitulating the promises he made to Abram: “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that is one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I will give it to you” (13:14-17).
Gen. 14 - There is a war in the region between the two main alliances of kings. When Lot gets taken by the winning alliance, Abram goes and with 318 of his retainers, he recaptures Lot and his possessions and brings them back. When he returns, not only does the king of Sodom greet him, but a King by the name of Melchizedek, King of Salem (Jerusalem), greets him as well. Melchizedek is a priest of “the Most High God,” (our God, the God of Abram) and he gives Abram offerings of bread and wine (14:18-20). In turn Abram givens him a tenth of all he has.
Gen. 15 – God’s word comes to him again and takes him out to see the stars of the sky. And God promises in words similar to those later given to Moses—“I am YHWH who brought you out of [Ur] to give you this land.. .” (15:7) and I will make [your] Abram’s descendants as many as the stars. That Abram has faith (or trusts) in God’s promises is “credited . . .to him as an act of righteousness” (15:6). Then God repeats the covenant, and solemnizes the occasion by having Abram offer a heifer, a she-goat, a ram (all age 3), a turtle dove and a pigeon. Each of the first three is split in two and Abram guards them all day. In the evening, Abraham falls into a trance and “a deep, terrifying darkness envelope[s] him” (15:12). God reveals to Abram that his descendants shall suffer a period of slavery before God delivers them. When it is dark, a “smoking brazier and a flaming torch” pass between the severed pieces of animal and the covenant is concluded with respect to the lands God intends to confer on Abram’s line.
Gen. 16 - Discouraged that NO CHILD has come from all the promises thus far, Sarai, discouraged with her own infertility and not quite as ready as Abram is simply to trust in the word of God they have received becomes impatient and comes up with her own plan to make the promise of God come to pass. She offers Abram her maidservant Hagar with the idea that perhaps any children that result might be considered hers. Hagar is an Egyptian woman. She does become pregnant, but the success of Sarai’s scheme only creates problems. Hagar now thinks she is better than Sarai. Sarai is jealous and blames Abram for her problems. Abram allows Sarai to decide what shall happen with Hagar (16:6) and the child, and Sarai has no pity now. She “abuses” Hagar so much that she finally runs away. The tragedy of human machinations here will require deep and on-going redemptive intervention by God—an intervention that is not yet at an end in our day.
The Lord’s messenger finds Hagar by a spring in the wilderness and asks her where she is going. Then he advises Hagar to return and submit to the mistreatment, and in return she will be given a promise parallel to the one given to Abram. She is the first woman with whom a covenant is contracted with the Lord. Soon after her return, Ishmael is born. Abram is 86.
We found the story is interesting for many reasons. First there is the great patience Abram shows in his faith. He is not young when God makes all these promises to him. And yet he does not complain or ever become impatient with his God. And we talked about the fact that no land in the promised region comes into Abram's hands at all. WE, living in the 21st century can see that the faith he shows in his God will eventually draw the interest of many nations and many people; but the patience and faithfulness of Abram must have had more subtle and interior rewards.
Then there are the interesting consequences of Sarai's IMPATIENCE. She apparently simply cannot believe that God will be able to bring forth an heir for Abram from her aging body. So she must say to herself something like, "How is this promise to be realized?" Certainly God doesn’t expect them just to sit around and wait for a miracle. “God helps those who help themselves—right?” We reason like this all the time. And what we learn from this story is that God, while clearly not behind this “solution,” will eventually accept it and redeem it. There will be many times in this story that a similar thing will happen. God will promise something. We will become impatient or get some inspiration of our own how we can “make” God’s promise happen and we will get it wrong—we will grasp a way he is not behind—and he will make it work in spite of us. It will happen with Ishmael’s birth; it will happen again with the institution of the monarchy in Israel; and perhaps it happens all the time. Perhaps every redemptive “effort” that man has made will ultimately be transformed by God into real redemption by God’s deep and unrelenting love and redemptive work in us, in our lives and in our history.
The appearance of Melchizedek, "Priest of the Most High God" drew interest among us as well. He shows that while God clearly had a process being started with the Hebrew descendants of Abram, He was also part of the worship of other people. The model of Melchizedek will inspire early Jewish converts of Christ, who see that God can act outside the tradition, he can raise up priests who are not of the family of Aaron. Perhaps this gave them the freedom to lay down other aspects of the Mosaic law that were impediments to gentile converts. The balance this Abram story shows between strict terms of faith and what seems a fair amount of latitude God permits us in the exercise of our freedom and our inevitable impatience and imperfection was also something we talked about.
We will begin before Meeting on October 23, or as our forebearers would have said - First Day of 23rd day, Tenth Month, 2011 (10 o'clock). We will start at Genesis 17. If you can read on, great. Or will will read together. Hope you can make it.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Genesis 12 through 15 - Abraham
The following questions are the ones that come to my mind when I think of the Abraham stories that are contained in chapters 12 through 25. If you see other questions that should be address, please feel free to add them in comments.
Genesis 12 [Beginning of Abraham story – through 25] • What importance do you see in the story of Abraham’s journey to Egypt?
• Quakers saw Abraham as the first of three key players in the redemption story [to be followed by Moses and Jesus]. Why do you think they saw him as so important?
Genesis 13 • Who is Melchizedek and what is his importance?
Genesis 14 • What is God’s promise or covenant with Abraham? What is the irony in this promise to this point?
Genesis 16 • What do you think of Sarai’s role here, and what are the consequences of it? • What is God’s response to Sarai’s plan for making the original promise to Abram come true? • How does God deal with Hagar?
Genesis 17 • What is different in this telling of the covenant promised by God with the ones in chapters 12 and 15? • What is the significance of the circumcision of Abraham and Ishmael?
Genesis 18 • What is the nature of this visitation by the three strangers? Why does the story make it so confusing who is speaking to Abraham? • Why does Sarah laugh when she hears what they promise? • What is the importance of Abraham’s intercession for some of those who live in Sodom? Compare him a little here with Noah. • Would you describe the God of this narrative as “omniscient” or “omnipotent”?
Genesis 19 • The story in this chapter is often cited as one of those passages that prove God condemns homosexuality, and is the foundation of the term “sodomy” – what are your thoughts?
Genesis 20 • This chapter is a “doublet” or repetition of what happens in chapter 12, but it involves the King of Gerar [south of Gaza] and not the king of Egypt. What are your thoughts on what these stories teach?
Genesis 21 • The name Isaac means “God smiled” – why do you think he was named this? • There are some repetitions in this chapter as well – can you identify some inconsistencies with earlier parts of the narrative?
Genesis 22 • Moriah is said to be where the city of Jerusalem would later be built. What is the significance of this fact and of the story generally? o How could Abraham reconcile this demand from God with the promise God has made on several occasions? • The language in the story – where Abraham tells Isaac that “God himself will provide the lamb. . .” was seen by Christians as prophetic. What are your thoughts?
Genesis 23 • What is the importance of Abraham’s insistence that he pay for the burial site for Sarah?
Genesis 24 • How does Abraham find a wife for Isaac?
Genesis 25 • Well over 120, Abraham marries again, but where is he buried when he dies? • How many children does Ishmael have? • What aspects of the story about Rebecca do you find interesting and important?
Genesis 12 [Beginning of Abraham story – through 25] • What importance do you see in the story of Abraham’s journey to Egypt?
• Quakers saw Abraham as the first of three key players in the redemption story [to be followed by Moses and Jesus]. Why do you think they saw him as so important?
Genesis 13 • Who is Melchizedek and what is his importance?
Genesis 14 • What is God’s promise or covenant with Abraham? What is the irony in this promise to this point?
Genesis 16 • What do you think of Sarai’s role here, and what are the consequences of it? • What is God’s response to Sarai’s plan for making the original promise to Abram come true? • How does God deal with Hagar?
Genesis 17 • What is different in this telling of the covenant promised by God with the ones in chapters 12 and 15? • What is the significance of the circumcision of Abraham and Ishmael?
Genesis 18 • What is the nature of this visitation by the three strangers? Why does the story make it so confusing who is speaking to Abraham? • Why does Sarah laugh when she hears what they promise? • What is the importance of Abraham’s intercession for some of those who live in Sodom? Compare him a little here with Noah. • Would you describe the God of this narrative as “omniscient” or “omnipotent”?
Genesis 19 • The story in this chapter is often cited as one of those passages that prove God condemns homosexuality, and is the foundation of the term “sodomy” – what are your thoughts?
Genesis 20 • This chapter is a “doublet” or repetition of what happens in chapter 12, but it involves the King of Gerar [south of Gaza] and not the king of Egypt. What are your thoughts on what these stories teach?
Genesis 21 • The name Isaac means “God smiled” – why do you think he was named this? • There are some repetitions in this chapter as well – can you identify some inconsistencies with earlier parts of the narrative?
Genesis 22 • Moriah is said to be where the city of Jerusalem would later be built. What is the significance of this fact and of the story generally? o How could Abraham reconcile this demand from God with the promise God has made on several occasions? • The language in the story – where Abraham tells Isaac that “God himself will provide the lamb. . .” was seen by Christians as prophetic. What are your thoughts?
Genesis 23 • What is the importance of Abraham’s insistence that he pay for the burial site for Sarah?
Genesis 24 • How does Abraham find a wife for Isaac?
Genesis 25 • Well over 120, Abraham marries again, but where is he buried when he dies? • How many children does Ishmael have? • What aspects of the story about Rebecca do you find interesting and important?
Friday, May 20, 2011
Genesis 5 through 11 - A Punishing Yet Saving God
The next seven chapters of Genesis set forth the early history of "fallen" man as they saw it. The descendants of Adam and Eve are told of and some early legends and myths set in the narrative build a sense of God's frustration with how his creation has turned out. Man's heart "fashioned nothing but wickedness all day long" (5). So God decides to basically start over again, to wipe everything out, saving only Noah and his family to start the "human being project" over again. Noah's name means "may this one comfort our sorrow" and I do think it is God who is sorrowing. It's kind of interesting but God's work too - like man's - is burdened with a sense of frustration and futility.
God tells Noah to build an ark and give him very specific instructions for constructing it. He will be equally specific later when He instructs His people to build an ark for the covenant and even later to build a Temple under Solomon. Whenever God punishes us in the narrative - in Eden - and now here, He also helps. Throughout the story we see the same paradox - God punishing man and simultaneously offering the hand of salvation.
What is also interesting is that the story shows us a God who punishes the innocent along with the guilty. The innocent animals God created to be with man in the creation. There is a sense in these early stories that the one given dominion by God - here generic "man" but later the kings and priests set over "man" - stands for everyone over whom they wield authority. So here, when man does evil, all the innocent creation must endure the punishment imposed on those in position of responsibility. Later, when there is a monarchy, or a priestly leadership class, the innocent, poor and dependent people they are responsible for also bear the chastisements brought on by the "shepherds" who fail. There is a tension in the story between this kind of "collective" vision and an equally strong vision of individual responsibility and existence before God. Later we will be told in no uncertain terms that children will not be held responsible for the sins of their fathers, that each person will be judged on his or her own "merits" whether those merits be earned or won through faith in Christ. But the "collective" dimension has a continuing reality too. We do bring the innocent down with us when we sin.
So Noah and his family build the ark , gather a remnant of the creation onto it, and endure forty days of God's wrath. Forty is a magical number in Scripture. Later there will be forty years in the desert for Moses and the people with him. And Christ will spend forty days and nights in the desert as well. When Noah and his family leave, they offer up a sacrifice of those "clean animals" on board [there are two accounts woven into the story - one giving two of each animal and one that provides a few others so that this offering can be made]. God makes a "covenant" with Noah, expanding his "dominion" over the creation by giving him meat to eat as well as plants, but man is to refrain from eating the blood of the animals, and God places a rainbow in the sky as a "sign" of his covenant with man.
So God tries to start the project over, but it doesn't take long for us to see that things are not going to change much. Noah, being a descendant of Cain, is a tiller of the soil and he plants a vineyard. He gets drunk on its grapes and his son Ham disgraces himself by looking on his father's nakedness while he is drunk. In punishment for this, Ham is consigned to a destiny of servitude. 19th c. pro-slavery apologists used this to justify the perpetual slavery of the black race, which was believed to be included as descendants of Ham.
And chapter 11 describes the splintering of man's language into many tongues as a result of man's pride in building a tower of Babel to "make a name" (11:4) for themselves. So the overall narrative leaves us with a creation still far from what it is God intended. In His next attempt, he will take another tack, starting instead with one faithful man.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 6
- Is the God of the Noah story a punishing God or a saving God?
Genesis 7
- How long do the rains fall?
Genesis 8
- How can we interpret the sacrifice Noah offers to God when the flood ends?
Genesis 9
- How is the “covenant” with man changed as God re-makes it with Noah?
God tells Noah to build an ark and give him very specific instructions for constructing it. He will be equally specific later when He instructs His people to build an ark for the covenant and even later to build a Temple under Solomon. Whenever God punishes us in the narrative - in Eden - and now here, He also helps. Throughout the story we see the same paradox - God punishing man and simultaneously offering the hand of salvation.
What is also interesting is that the story shows us a God who punishes the innocent along with the guilty. The innocent animals God created to be with man in the creation. There is a sense in these early stories that the one given dominion by God - here generic "man" but later the kings and priests set over "man" - stands for everyone over whom they wield authority. So here, when man does evil, all the innocent creation must endure the punishment imposed on those in position of responsibility. Later, when there is a monarchy, or a priestly leadership class, the innocent, poor and dependent people they are responsible for also bear the chastisements brought on by the "shepherds" who fail. There is a tension in the story between this kind of "collective" vision and an equally strong vision of individual responsibility and existence before God. Later we will be told in no uncertain terms that children will not be held responsible for the sins of their fathers, that each person will be judged on his or her own "merits" whether those merits be earned or won through faith in Christ. But the "collective" dimension has a continuing reality too. We do bring the innocent down with us when we sin.
So Noah and his family build the ark , gather a remnant of the creation onto it, and endure forty days of God's wrath. Forty is a magical number in Scripture. Later there will be forty years in the desert for Moses and the people with him. And Christ will spend forty days and nights in the desert as well. When Noah and his family leave, they offer up a sacrifice of those "clean animals" on board [there are two accounts woven into the story - one giving two of each animal and one that provides a few others so that this offering can be made]. God makes a "covenant" with Noah, expanding his "dominion" over the creation by giving him meat to eat as well as plants, but man is to refrain from eating the blood of the animals, and God places a rainbow in the sky as a "sign" of his covenant with man.
So God tries to start the project over, but it doesn't take long for us to see that things are not going to change much. Noah, being a descendant of Cain, is a tiller of the soil and he plants a vineyard. He gets drunk on its grapes and his son Ham disgraces himself by looking on his father's nakedness while he is drunk. In punishment for this, Ham is consigned to a destiny of servitude. 19th c. pro-slavery apologists used this to justify the perpetual slavery of the black race, which was believed to be included as descendants of Ham.
And chapter 11 describes the splintering of man's language into many tongues as a result of man's pride in building a tower of Babel to "make a name" (11:4) for themselves. So the overall narrative leaves us with a creation still far from what it is God intended. In His next attempt, he will take another tack, starting instead with one faithful man.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 6
- Is the God of the Noah story a punishing God or a saving God?
Genesis 7
- How long do the rains fall?
Genesis 8
- How can we interpret the sacrifice Noah offers to God when the flood ends?
Genesis 9
- How is the “covenant” with man changed as God re-makes it with Noah?
Genesis 4 - Cain & Abel
The consequences of "the fall" are inescapable when we look at the history of "civilized" man. The story of Cain and Abel reveals to us the broader consequences of man's fall as they extend beyond the lives of the perpetrators into the lives of their children (all of us). Cain and Abel represent two ancient modes of life - the shepherd's and the farmer's. Both are already in the practice of relating to God through the giving of gifts, offerings or sacrifices. Why this mode of relating to the creator is adopted is not explained. It is simply assumed.
The two first children of "the woman" are Cain and Abel, a tiller of the ground (now cursed) and a tender of sheep (4:2). We see them here offering the work of their hands to the Lord. Cain gives offerings from his labors - fruit of the soil, and Abel from his labors, "the first-born of his flock" (4:4). We are not told, nor is Cain why his offerings are found less pleasing (4:6). Perhaps God favors offerings that are "living" over those from the soil and the wits of men. Perhaps it is because the soil is weighed down with the curse He placed on it in Gen. 3:17. God will favor shepherds throughout His story and also will favor the "younger" sibling over the older. But we may also perhaps assume that there is something awry in the heart of Cain, something only God can discern but which makes all the difference between them. God's displeasure with Cain enrages Cain and the jealousy he feels leads directly to his act of violence against his brother. The soil--cursed along with Adam--is Cain's medium. He will further debase it by pouring his brother's blood out on it. We see in his violence and violation of family love the furthest consequences of the alienation which Adam and Eve initiated.
God's words to Cain - ". . . is not sin at the door like a crouching beast?" - are, I think true of all men in the fall. But God tells Cain he must "master" it (4:8), and so must we. We can do this. The warning comes before Cain's act. There are some fascinating details in this story when God confronts Cain with what he has done: God tells him his brother's blood calls out to Him (4:10). God does not kill Cain (no capital punishment here - yet) but bans Cain from the soil, which is what he takes his living from, and forces him to be a wanderer, thus deepening the alienation and exile imposed by the first fall. Whereas the soil for Adam was cursed, for Cain it will yield nothing. He is exiled from it completely and must live from his "technologies" alone. He will be a fugitive and a wanderer, belonging to no real community, yet still alive. This is the completion of that spiritual death begun by his parents. Cain will be the founder of a "city". This adds a sociological dimension to the fall narrative. Then the text traces the descent from Cain and goes on to tell of the birth of Seth to Adam and Eve, a boy that will take the place of Abel in the family.
The sin of Cain ramps up the tension in the narrative, a tension that was introduced by the fall. For George Fox, the key wisdom to be taken from the narrative was to see the "state" of Cain as a "state" we too must struggle with (Journal 30). But other details of the story intrigue me as well.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 4
- What meaning can be drawn from the story of Cain and Abel?
- What are your thoughts on Fox’s Journal entry below?
“And I saw the state of those, both priests and people, who in reading the Scriptures, cry out much against Cain, Esau, and Judas, and other wicked men of former times, mentioned in the Holy Scriptures; but do not see the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Judas, and those others, in themselves. And these said it was they, they, they, that were the bad people; putting it off from themselves: but when some of these came, with the light and spirit of Truth, to see into themselves, then they came to say, ‘I, I, I, it is I myself that have been the Ishmael, and the Esau’” (30).
The two first children of "the woman" are Cain and Abel, a tiller of the ground (now cursed) and a tender of sheep (4:2). We see them here offering the work of their hands to the Lord. Cain gives offerings from his labors - fruit of the soil, and Abel from his labors, "the first-born of his flock" (4:4). We are not told, nor is Cain why his offerings are found less pleasing (4:6). Perhaps God favors offerings that are "living" over those from the soil and the wits of men. Perhaps it is because the soil is weighed down with the curse He placed on it in Gen. 3:17. God will favor shepherds throughout His story and also will favor the "younger" sibling over the older. But we may also perhaps assume that there is something awry in the heart of Cain, something only God can discern but which makes all the difference between them. God's displeasure with Cain enrages Cain and the jealousy he feels leads directly to his act of violence against his brother. The soil--cursed along with Adam--is Cain's medium. He will further debase it by pouring his brother's blood out on it. We see in his violence and violation of family love the furthest consequences of the alienation which Adam and Eve initiated.
God's words to Cain - ". . . is not sin at the door like a crouching beast?" - are, I think true of all men in the fall. But God tells Cain he must "master" it (4:8), and so must we. We can do this. The warning comes before Cain's act. There are some fascinating details in this story when God confronts Cain with what he has done: God tells him his brother's blood calls out to Him (4:10). God does not kill Cain (no capital punishment here - yet) but bans Cain from the soil, which is what he takes his living from, and forces him to be a wanderer, thus deepening the alienation and exile imposed by the first fall. Whereas the soil for Adam was cursed, for Cain it will yield nothing. He is exiled from it completely and must live from his "technologies" alone. He will be a fugitive and a wanderer, belonging to no real community, yet still alive. This is the completion of that spiritual death begun by his parents. Cain will be the founder of a "city". This adds a sociological dimension to the fall narrative. Then the text traces the descent from Cain and goes on to tell of the birth of Seth to Adam and Eve, a boy that will take the place of Abel in the family.
The sin of Cain ramps up the tension in the narrative, a tension that was introduced by the fall. For George Fox, the key wisdom to be taken from the narrative was to see the "state" of Cain as a "state" we too must struggle with (Journal 30). But other details of the story intrigue me as well.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 4
- What meaning can be drawn from the story of Cain and Abel?
- What are your thoughts on Fox’s Journal entry below?
“And I saw the state of those, both priests and people, who in reading the Scriptures, cry out much against Cain, Esau, and Judas, and other wicked men of former times, mentioned in the Holy Scriptures; but do not see the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Judas, and those others, in themselves. And these said it was they, they, they, that were the bad people; putting it off from themselves: but when some of these came, with the light and spirit of Truth, to see into themselves, then they came to say, ‘I, I, I, it is I myself that have been the Ishmael, and the Esau’” (30).
Genesis 2 and 3 - The Fall & the Protoevangelium
The Fall (Chapters 2 and 3)
There are a good many interesting things in the story of the "fall" but the things most interesting to me in the past have been what I mentioned yesterday
The nature of the "death" that Adam and Eve suffer as a result of their disobedience?
The "fallen" nature of our lives on this earth, and do we continue to live in that fallen world/nature?
What Christians and especially early Quakers understood about what you might call God's "Ur-Promise" [original/first promise made] in verse 3:15?
But first, I just want to point out something I think most writers have missed - the fact that there is a whole lot of "irony" and sophistication in the story. First of all, the serpent says to Eve, that the creator God has lied to them. God has told them if they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they will "die." But the serpent says, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (2:4-5). And then when they both eat of the fruit, the text tells us "the eyes of both of them were opened." They see that they are naked and they feel ashamed. But God is not trying to keep them from being like gods; he has created them specifically to be like Him - the one and only God. And when the text tells us that their eyes were "opened" I think we should see this as irony. They have by their disobedience become less like Him and less able to see and less alive. Their fallen condition will be one of spiritual death, spiritual blindness and spiritual debasement. I think early Friends saw that these results of the fall were all internal. They have separated themselves from the divine nature God planted in them.
But then comes the promise (also called by early Latin speaking Christians the "protoevangelium" [original "good news"] - mysterious and embedded in the punishments God imposes - and this needs to be presented in one of the older translations to be appreciated in the Quaker context I am trying to present: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (KJ Version). This promise that someday a descendant of Eve - her "seed" - would defeat the serpent. Early Christians took this to be a prophesy of Christ's victory over sin. Christ was to be the second Adam, and his victory over the seed of the serpent (evil/sin/the fallen condition of man) would permit things to revert to the original intention God had for us - to be His presence on earth, to be faithful in all things to Him. Fox's famous quote -
“And when I myself was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great, that I thought many times I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same Devil, and had overcome him and bruised his head, and that through him and his power, light, grace and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him.” (12)
It is because of Christ's victory over the serpent that Friends believed spiritual "perfection" could be achieved, the spiritual "death" could become life once more in us and the earth restored to become God's "kingdom" again. The testimonies of Friends are all elements of faithfulness that can only be achieved through overcoming of our fallen condition: the equality of man and woman as it was meant to be (see Genesis 1), the peaceable kingdom, our ability to walk day to day with God as our guide.
It is challenging trying to keep up with all the good comments that are made by people, and I am having a little bit of a hard time figuring out how to get to the latest comment and negotiating the site, so I am going to put my posts (same ones as I make here) on my own little blog http://catholicquaker.blogspot.com/ so if anyone wants to just go there to follow along, it might be a little simpler there. I was a little surprised that the "Second Adam" part of the Fall story - the first "good news" to be proclaimed in the scripture narrative - did not draw a little more attention. It was such a key part of the scriptures for Fox and early Friends. It is interesting that it is also the only "promise" in the Old Testament part of the Bible that did not get much attention in later books. It was seen by Christians as really important in understanding Christ's role in the unfolding drama of God's "creation" for there is a sense in which the creation God starts here in Genesis is not fully accomplished. His intention with respect to our creation is not fulfilled here.
There were some comments on how important the statement was that we were created in God's image (1:27). A few thought perhaps the word "image" here was meant to be taken with a grain of salt - that images were idols in OT thinking. But some Bibles use the term "likeness" and that's a little less loaded, but it conveys the same idea that we were actually intended to be "like" God. Another thought I've had on it is that in some ways our likeness to God in chapter 1 is similar to Eve's "likeness" to Adam - being taken from his body. In chapter 2, we see Adam, created first this time, but he is lonely and so God creates all the animals that will populate the earth, but none of them is a suitable companion for Adam. So Eve is created, not out of the ground, like all the other animals, but out of Adam's rib or side. And when she is presented to Adam, he recognizes her as part of his own flesh. It is my sense that this creation of woman from Adam is meant to echo the first creation of "man" in chapter 1. But there the lonely one is God. After all He created, He still wanted something in the creation that reflected His image and likeness, to be "bone of His bone" if you will. And His answer was man. As the unity of Adam and Eve finds its pinnacle in the coming together as "one flesh," so the redemption of mankind will take shape as a great eschatological wedding and banquet. But that will come later.
Another thing which a few people said or implied was that the "fallen" condition of man was not necessarily an issue, but I don't agree. It was critically important to early Christians and to early Friends that the fall be overcome and to in fact celebrate that it had in fact been overcome by Christ. But it isn't a simple fact. It is a process that happens as we somehow go through, experience personally, the different "ministrations" or parts of the salvation narrative. Fox struggled with it for some years before he felt it born in him:
“Again I heard a voice which did say, ‘Thou Serpent, thou dost seek to destroy the life but canst not, for the sword which keepeth the tree of life shall destroy thee.’ So Christ, the Word of God, that bruised the head of the Serpent the destroyer, preserved me, my inward mind being joined to his good Seed, that bruised the head of this Serpent the destroyer. And this inward life did spring up in me, to answer all the opposing professors and priests, and did bring in Scriptures to my memory to refute them with” (13).
This Second Adam thing is fascinating to me. Very recently I also learned another aspect of it I had never known. Apparently the Ur-promise of Genesis 3:15 is an important part of the "Mary" focus (the Mariology) so prevalent in the Catholic Church. The reason for this is that the translation of Gen. 3:15 the early church "fathers" used translated the Hebrew pronoun (which is not gender or number specific) as "she" (in Greek), so that it read to them that "she" bruised the serpent's head - so interesting. It is seem as a victory for the Seed of the Woman - Mary and her Seed, Jesus.
Anyway, there is more - much more - I could talk about, but enough for now.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 2
- What is “man’s” place in the creation?
- How do you interpret the part that talks about the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit?
- Why does God create Eve?
Genesis 3
- How does the serpent convince Eve to eat the fruit? How can you interpret this?
- Do you see any irony in what happens in this story?
- How does your bible translate verse 15?
- What is the “death” that we suffer as a result of the disobedience we read of in this story?
- What do these first chapters teach us about the relationship of men and women in this creation?
There are a good many interesting things in the story of the "fall" but the things most interesting to me in the past have been what I mentioned yesterday
The nature of the "death" that Adam and Eve suffer as a result of their disobedience?
The "fallen" nature of our lives on this earth, and do we continue to live in that fallen world/nature?
What Christians and especially early Quakers understood about what you might call God's "Ur-Promise" [original/first promise made] in verse 3:15?
But first, I just want to point out something I think most writers have missed - the fact that there is a whole lot of "irony" and sophistication in the story. First of all, the serpent says to Eve, that the creator God has lied to them. God has told them if they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they will "die." But the serpent says, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (2:4-5). And then when they both eat of the fruit, the text tells us "the eyes of both of them were opened." They see that they are naked and they feel ashamed. But God is not trying to keep them from being like gods; he has created them specifically to be like Him - the one and only God. And when the text tells us that their eyes were "opened" I think we should see this as irony. They have by their disobedience become less like Him and less able to see and less alive. Their fallen condition will be one of spiritual death, spiritual blindness and spiritual debasement. I think early Friends saw that these results of the fall were all internal. They have separated themselves from the divine nature God planted in them.
But then comes the promise (also called by early Latin speaking Christians the "protoevangelium" [original "good news"] - mysterious and embedded in the punishments God imposes - and this needs to be presented in one of the older translations to be appreciated in the Quaker context I am trying to present: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (KJ Version). This promise that someday a descendant of Eve - her "seed" - would defeat the serpent. Early Christians took this to be a prophesy of Christ's victory over sin. Christ was to be the second Adam, and his victory over the seed of the serpent (evil/sin/the fallen condition of man) would permit things to revert to the original intention God had for us - to be His presence on earth, to be faithful in all things to Him. Fox's famous quote -
“And when I myself was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great, that I thought many times I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same Devil, and had overcome him and bruised his head, and that through him and his power, light, grace and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him.” (12)
It is because of Christ's victory over the serpent that Friends believed spiritual "perfection" could be achieved, the spiritual "death" could become life once more in us and the earth restored to become God's "kingdom" again. The testimonies of Friends are all elements of faithfulness that can only be achieved through overcoming of our fallen condition: the equality of man and woman as it was meant to be (see Genesis 1), the peaceable kingdom, our ability to walk day to day with God as our guide.
It is challenging trying to keep up with all the good comments that are made by people, and I am having a little bit of a hard time figuring out how to get to the latest comment and negotiating the site, so I am going to put my posts (same ones as I make here) on my own little blog http://catholicquaker.blogspot.com/ so if anyone wants to just go there to follow along, it might be a little simpler there. I was a little surprised that the "Second Adam" part of the Fall story - the first "good news" to be proclaimed in the scripture narrative - did not draw a little more attention. It was such a key part of the scriptures for Fox and early Friends. It is interesting that it is also the only "promise" in the Old Testament part of the Bible that did not get much attention in later books. It was seen by Christians as really important in understanding Christ's role in the unfolding drama of God's "creation" for there is a sense in which the creation God starts here in Genesis is not fully accomplished. His intention with respect to our creation is not fulfilled here.
There were some comments on how important the statement was that we were created in God's image (1:27). A few thought perhaps the word "image" here was meant to be taken with a grain of salt - that images were idols in OT thinking. But some Bibles use the term "likeness" and that's a little less loaded, but it conveys the same idea that we were actually intended to be "like" God. Another thought I've had on it is that in some ways our likeness to God in chapter 1 is similar to Eve's "likeness" to Adam - being taken from his body. In chapter 2, we see Adam, created first this time, but he is lonely and so God creates all the animals that will populate the earth, but none of them is a suitable companion for Adam. So Eve is created, not out of the ground, like all the other animals, but out of Adam's rib or side. And when she is presented to Adam, he recognizes her as part of his own flesh. It is my sense that this creation of woman from Adam is meant to echo the first creation of "man" in chapter 1. But there the lonely one is God. After all He created, He still wanted something in the creation that reflected His image and likeness, to be "bone of His bone" if you will. And His answer was man. As the unity of Adam and Eve finds its pinnacle in the coming together as "one flesh," so the redemption of mankind will take shape as a great eschatological wedding and banquet. But that will come later.
Another thing which a few people said or implied was that the "fallen" condition of man was not necessarily an issue, but I don't agree. It was critically important to early Christians and to early Friends that the fall be overcome and to in fact celebrate that it had in fact been overcome by Christ. But it isn't a simple fact. It is a process that happens as we somehow go through, experience personally, the different "ministrations" or parts of the salvation narrative. Fox struggled with it for some years before he felt it born in him:
“Again I heard a voice which did say, ‘Thou Serpent, thou dost seek to destroy the life but canst not, for the sword which keepeth the tree of life shall destroy thee.’ So Christ, the Word of God, that bruised the head of the Serpent the destroyer, preserved me, my inward mind being joined to his good Seed, that bruised the head of this Serpent the destroyer. And this inward life did spring up in me, to answer all the opposing professors and priests, and did bring in Scriptures to my memory to refute them with” (13).
This Second Adam thing is fascinating to me. Very recently I also learned another aspect of it I had never known. Apparently the Ur-promise of Genesis 3:15 is an important part of the "Mary" focus (the Mariology) so prevalent in the Catholic Church. The reason for this is that the translation of Gen. 3:15 the early church "fathers" used translated the Hebrew pronoun (which is not gender or number specific) as "she" (in Greek), so that it read to them that "she" bruised the serpent's head - so interesting. It is seem as a victory for the Seed of the Woman - Mary and her Seed, Jesus.
Anyway, there is more - much more - I could talk about, but enough for now.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 2
- What is “man’s” place in the creation?
- How do you interpret the part that talks about the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit?
- Why does God create Eve?
Genesis 3
- How does the serpent convince Eve to eat the fruit? How can you interpret this?
- Do you see any irony in what happens in this story?
- How does your bible translate verse 15?
- What is the “death” that we suffer as a result of the disobedience we read of in this story?
- What do these first chapters teach us about the relationship of men and women in this creation?
Bible Study and Discussion for Friends
Narrative Approach to the Bible Text
OK, so let's get started. I remember the day in 1986 when I stood up before a fresh class of Friends Academy (Locust Valley, NY) 7th graders and started to teach Quakerism for the first time. And since the early Friends writings that had been so critical to me in returning to Christ were so inaccessible to young readers, I decided to just use the biblical narrative to introduce them to Quakerism. We started talking about the Bible as if it were just another book you would take off the shelf, and I surprised even me when I realized that it is a narrative that starts at the beginning of the creation and ends at the end of that same creation. It presents itself as if it were the complete story.
Early Friends did not use this kind of language in discussing the Bible. Like others of their time they did not use that kind of language - describing the Bible as a "narrative" - that language is comfortable to me because of the reading I've done in "narrrative theology" and in particular in reading Stanley Hauerwas. But early Friends did seem to see the book as containing truths that needed to be "interiorized." But we'll get to that as we go.
I think the most important books of the Bible to Fox and early Friends were Genesis and the Gospel of John, so going over Genesis will take a while - especially the first several chapters. The Bible I use is the Jerusalem Bible, but I often check multiple translations when the translation is particularly important.
Genesis 1 - There are two accounts of the creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. There is so much in the first chapter, that I will just deal with it today. In the first God creates the universe and the earth through the power of his Word, and the first "thing" created is Light - not the light of the sun or the moon - those lights come later, on day four. The separation of the waters below the dome of heaven and above it comes on day two, the gathering of the waters beneath the dome and the proliferation of the earth's vegetation comes on day three, the sun and moon and stars - necessary for calculating time and seasons - comes on day four, the teeming forth of life comes on day five, and then on day six, God creates the human species - both male and female - "in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them" (27). They are given the power to "conquer" the creation or "subdue" it, an authority early Friends saw as a power to both use and to care for, be responsible for. God rests after man is created.
For me the most interesting insights I've had on the first creation story are the following:
1. The creator in this story is fundamentally "other" that everything we can see. God is not created, not contingent in any way. But we are created and contingent, and there is no other way of our understanding any part of God's nature without accepting the lines that we are somehow "like" Him - male and female, we share qualities with God. Ludwig Feuerbach and later Karl Marx wrote that God was merely our "projection" of our human nature out onto the universe. The Bible supports this, and it will be for us one of the critical ways we come to understand anything about God or ourselves.
2. When you consider how ancient this literature is, it is amazing to me how profoundly "modern" it is - modern in the simultaneity of the creation of male and female, modern in the closeness to what evolutionary theory says about the order of things in the creation of the universe - not exact but close.
3. It gives us a view of "man" that is not easily charicatured. It claims for man a dignity and goodness that defies all that we know of man in the history that will unfold for him, but it shows us God's divine intention, the impetus and engine of the divine determination to redeem what he has created when it disappoints Him, a determination that we will see played out in the biblical narrative
So that is some of what I see in this chapter. I would love to know what others see that is important to them personally.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 1
- What does it mean to you that we are "created in God's image"?
OK, so let's get started. I remember the day in 1986 when I stood up before a fresh class of Friends Academy (Locust Valley, NY) 7th graders and started to teach Quakerism for the first time. And since the early Friends writings that had been so critical to me in returning to Christ were so inaccessible to young readers, I decided to just use the biblical narrative to introduce them to Quakerism. We started talking about the Bible as if it were just another book you would take off the shelf, and I surprised even me when I realized that it is a narrative that starts at the beginning of the creation and ends at the end of that same creation. It presents itself as if it were the complete story.
Early Friends did not use this kind of language in discussing the Bible. Like others of their time they did not use that kind of language - describing the Bible as a "narrative" - that language is comfortable to me because of the reading I've done in "narrrative theology" and in particular in reading Stanley Hauerwas. But early Friends did seem to see the book as containing truths that needed to be "interiorized." But we'll get to that as we go.
I think the most important books of the Bible to Fox and early Friends were Genesis and the Gospel of John, so going over Genesis will take a while - especially the first several chapters. The Bible I use is the Jerusalem Bible, but I often check multiple translations when the translation is particularly important.
Genesis 1 - There are two accounts of the creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. There is so much in the first chapter, that I will just deal with it today. In the first God creates the universe and the earth through the power of his Word, and the first "thing" created is Light - not the light of the sun or the moon - those lights come later, on day four. The separation of the waters below the dome of heaven and above it comes on day two, the gathering of the waters beneath the dome and the proliferation of the earth's vegetation comes on day three, the sun and moon and stars - necessary for calculating time and seasons - comes on day four, the teeming forth of life comes on day five, and then on day six, God creates the human species - both male and female - "in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them" (27). They are given the power to "conquer" the creation or "subdue" it, an authority early Friends saw as a power to both use and to care for, be responsible for. God rests after man is created.
For me the most interesting insights I've had on the first creation story are the following:
1. The creator in this story is fundamentally "other" that everything we can see. God is not created, not contingent in any way. But we are created and contingent, and there is no other way of our understanding any part of God's nature without accepting the lines that we are somehow "like" Him - male and female, we share qualities with God. Ludwig Feuerbach and later Karl Marx wrote that God was merely our "projection" of our human nature out onto the universe. The Bible supports this, and it will be for us one of the critical ways we come to understand anything about God or ourselves.
2. When you consider how ancient this literature is, it is amazing to me how profoundly "modern" it is - modern in the simultaneity of the creation of male and female, modern in the closeness to what evolutionary theory says about the order of things in the creation of the universe - not exact but close.
3. It gives us a view of "man" that is not easily charicatured. It claims for man a dignity and goodness that defies all that we know of man in the history that will unfold for him, but it shows us God's divine intention, the impetus and engine of the divine determination to redeem what he has created when it disappoints Him, a determination that we will see played out in the biblical narrative
So that is some of what I see in this chapter. I would love to know what others see that is important to them personally.
Questions to Ponder:
Genesis 1
- What does it mean to you that we are "created in God's image"?
Friends and Scripture
When modern liberal Friends talk about the how the scriptures are not the Word of God but only the words, they do so, I think, with an eye to justifying the space they believe Quakers put between themselves and scripture, to distinguishing themselves from those benighted Christians who take a more literal or authoritative view of scripture or those who believe that the scripture is an essential element in the learning of truth. The space they believe early Friends put between themselves and scripture justifies the even greater space they have put between themselves and the Bible, a space they believe is healthy because of the limitations they see in it—its “primitive,” warlike aspects, its historical unreliability, its cultural baggage (the exclusivity of its claims and the patriarchal elements that feminists find so irritating) and its authority in other Christian denominations that Friends find hard to take.
But the view that early Friends put any kind of distance between themselves and scripture is simply not true. Early Friends questioned the prevailing approaches to scripture mainly to get people to erase the distance they put between themselves and scripture by seeing it too outwardly, by setting it up as an artifact rather than as something to be entered into and viewed from within. One of the most moving and profound parts of the testimony and writings of early Friends is the way they internalized what they read in scripture, the way they entered into the spirit of it and saw the world in its terms.
I think this is something I always knew about 17th century Friends, but I could never find “outward” words in Friends’ writings that were clear enough to keep other Friends from insisting that Quakers had always viewed the book as less authoritative than other Christians of their day had seen it. Their statements about it being the words, not the Word of God; their (or at least Fox’s) insistence that he had come to his inward revelation without “the help of man” and without the help of “the letter” by which he meant the letter of scripture (Journal, 34) all seemed to justify the claim modern Friends made that Quakers did not view the scriptures as central. But when I read the testimonies of early Friends or read their pamphlets or catechism or debates with others, the one thing I could not understand was why they always couched their ideas in scripture quotations. And if they did not think the scriptures were authoritative, why were they seemingly the most literal of Christians in refusing to take oaths, in refusing to use any term that was not biblical, or in making sure that people understood that they believed Jesus’ teachings on simplicity and non-violence were normative for Christians, not merely ideals he set.
I know my own conversion experience, which resulted in large measure because of my contact with these early Friends’ writings, led me to see from the beginning that the scripture words, contexts and reference points had been utterly central to me. When I tried to tell people what it had been like, feeling reawakened to God and to Christ, I had used an image from a popular move I knew everyone was familiar with, The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. For those who aren’t familiar with it today, the movie is about the childhood of Helen Keller, a well-known celebrity whose victory over blindness and deafness made her a heroine in the early years of the twentieth century. In the story the movie tells, Helen’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, seeks to free Helen’s mind from its dark, silent prison by teaching her a tactile alphabet that can make it possible for Helen to learn words and language. Helen quickly learns the alphabet and the game of fingering words to get what she wants--her D-O-L-L, her M-O-T-H-E-R or the sweet C-A-K-E she loves; but the concept of words, that everything in the world can be named and that words make learning and communication with other human beings possible, this Helen cannot seem to learn. For months Miss Sullivan labors to get the idea across with no success. Finally, as she is about to give up, Helen has a moment of grace at the water pump outside her parents’ home. Forced to refill a pitcher of water that she intentionally dumped on her teacher, Helen holds the pitcher under the spout while Miss Sullivan pumps the water and repeatedly fingers the word W-A-T-E-R into her palm. Something in that moment at the pump--its intensity--its repetition or its evocation of a primitive memory Helen has of a time when she could still see and hear and knew what water was—something--sparks a light in Helen’s mind and she sees what her teacher has been trying to open to her.
This was exactly what I had experienced in my conversion. I was seeing a landscape I had never seen before, a set of realities I had “knocked around” in and stumbled over and been curious about for years but had never really seen. But now I was seeing, not directly because those realities are not directly perceivable but I was seeing them through the medium of this language I had been taught earlier in my life but had never seen the point of—not really. Now I was seeing their point and their power--the Light of Christ, sin, the fall, the cross, resurrection--they had to open up this landscape of spiritual truth in me.
Now Fox would never have described the words of scripture in this way. The concepts were just not part of his intellectual life in the 17th century. But I am convinced that the fundamental experience of coming into those familiar words was the same in his life and in mine. So what I want to explore here is what early Friends did with respect to the scriptures—not what did they say, but how did they use them to encourage others to “enter into” the words.
One of the most revealing passages from Fox’s journal on the scriptures goes into great depth on the problem as Fox saw it. People approached scripture, according to Fox, “without a right sense of them, and without duly applying them to their own states"(Fox's Journal 31).
". . .I saw the state of those, both priests and people, who in reading the Scriptures, cry out much against Cain, Esau, and Judas, and other wicked men of former times, mentioned in the Holy Scriptures; but do not see the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Judas, and those others, in themselves. And these said it was they, they, they, that were the bad people; putting it off from themselves: but when some of these came, with the light and spirit of Truth, to see into themselves, then they came to say, “I, I, I, it is I myself that have been the Ishmael, and the Esau”, etc. For then they came to see the nature of wild Ishmael in themselves, the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Korah, of Balaam and of the son of perdition in themselves, sitting above all that is called God in them"(30).
The characters of scripture were not merely historical personages, people comfortably distant from us in time and place. They were exemplars of every kind of spiritual condition and nature that one might have to contend with—inwardly or outwardly. Those who envied and persecuted the godly were people who dwelled in the nature of Cain; those who chose earthly goods over the heavenly promises of God were in the nature of the earthly Esau. Those who rebelled against God were in the nature of Korah, and those who traded in God’s wisdom for material gain had the nature of Balaam. On the other hand, those who received the living Word of God in their hearts and responded to it were in the nature of Abraham; those who saw into the pure law of God were in the nature of Moses and those who were able to see into the types and shadows had the nature of the prophets. This did not mean for Fox that the historical Moses or Korah or Cain were imaginary. It simply meant that they were more than just human and historical; they represented spiritual realities we all encounter either in ourselves or in others. So we should approach the characters and events of the scriptures with an eye to “types” and “figures” they represented, the truths they illuminated and the insights they gave us into our own spiritual conditions.
Early Friends did this, and they did it in beautifully creative ways. I think, for example, of William Penn’s wonderful comparison of the overcrowded inn in Bethlehem with the state of the average person’s soul. We are all like that inn, crowded with worldly guests, having no room for Christ to be born in us. Or Fox’s use of the Baptist’s proclamation (Matt 3:3) and its reference to Isaiah 40:4 as a description of our readiness to have Christ enter into our lives:
"And I saw the mountains burning up and the rubbish and the rough and crooked ways and places made smooth and plain that the Lord might come into his tabernacle. These things are to be found in man’s heart. But to speak of these things being within seemed strange to the rough and crooked and mountainous ones" (16).
But while examples of this kind of biblical allusion are very common in Friends’ writing, what Friends ultimately came to see and describe was something far more profound. They ultimately came to see that the whole story recapitulated itself in the spiritual lives of people who opened themselves to Christ and became joined to His life by faith. But faith for Friends meant far more than simply assenting to prescribed formulas of doctrine or profession. Faith meant the daily hearing and obeying of God’s living Word both in their personal depths and in the community of those gathered in His name. If one came to a faith like this, one’s spiritual journey would actually parallel the story scripture told—or at least its key events. The story was not Adam’s alone or the Jews’ alone. It was the common spiritual heritage of all men and women. We were the ones cast out of God’s presence, the ones who envied and killed our brothers, who wandered the world in alienation from God and strangers to one another. We were the ones God called to come away from that fallen ancestral “state”, the ones called to claim God’s promise of salvation. We too had to respond to God’s call; we too had to abandon our ancestral homes (the purely outward dimension of “tradition”) and learn to rely on the voice of God addressed to us. As we did what Abraham did, we too would find the redemptive part of their story unfolding within us—not in every outward detail but in substantially the same way. So you will find early Friends seeing themselves as “spiritual Jews” being rescued from bondage and led to freedom. Here is a quote from early Friend Charles Marshall:
". . .in his infinite love and tender pity and compassion [he looked] down upon us, whilst in the land of Egypt, and house of bondage spiritually, and [did] send forth his light and truth, to give us a sense inwardly of the deplorable states of our souls in the separation from, and depravation of the enjoyments of the Lord, which sense and sight begat in us living breathings and a holy cry after the knowledge of him we saw ourselves ignorant of . . ." (Barbour & Roberts 82).
You will find Friends seeing themselves as dead spiritually being brought out of graves like Lazarus or Christ himself. Here are the words of Francis Howgill:
"Wait to see the law set up within. . .and the rebellious nature yoked [earthquakes and thunder]. Wait in patience for the judgment, and let the Lord’s work have its perfect operation in you; and so as you turn to him who has smitten and wounded you; he will bind up and heal. And give up all to the great slaughter of the Lord, to the Cross. . .And as the earth comes to be plowed up, the seed which is sown comes up; and, the rocks broken, the water gushes out. You so will see that some promises will arise in you to the Seed which is coming up out of the grave, and so the love of God will appear in you, and you will be stayed, and see hope in the midst of calamity. . . And as you come to be redeemed from under the bondage of sin, and come above the bonds of death, and the pure principle lives in you, there will be a delight in you to do the will of the father, who has redeemed you from sin and its law to righteousness and its law,. . ." (Barbour & Roberts 177)
This was what they meant when they said you had to enter into the Spirit that gave the scriptures forth—to “see” the same work being carried forth in your own life.
But even this description of Quaker “biblical vision” does not exhaust what Friends did with scripture. Fox saw the scripture story as inexhaustibly revelatory of God’s work in human life. A similar but more detailed approach to the scripture’s narrative line involved breaking it down into “ministrations” or stages of God’s redeeming love. He believed that he himself had passed through a process of redemption substantially the same as what had happened in the history recorded in scripture, and he told the story of his own life in terms of these ministrations. The saga as Fox saw it was a passage through four or five “ministrations”: the “ministration of condemnation;” the “ministration of Moses;” the “ministration of the prophets” which culminated in the “ministration of John the Baptist;” and the last ministration—the ministration of Christ’s immediate presence and power. He does not actually call this last a “ministration,” but it is clear that he saw Christ’s ministration in the new covenant as the substance and culmination of all the preceding ministrations.
The “ministration of condemnation” was the stage we were in when the real truth of our spiritual condition in the fall was opened to us inwardly; it is a condition of spiritual death and darkness. Though it is a painful vision, it is the first opening of Christ’s light in the mind and heart of the seeker. It can be distinguished from despair by the fact that it is always accompanied in some measure by a sense of God’s loving presence and power to overcome the death one is caught up in. Fox enters this first ministration when he sees that people “do not possess what they profess;” indeed even he does not. The problem is deeper than hypocrisy. The problem is that people are alienated from the very power that can help them live by the standards they admire, that can bring them into possession of the things they profess. In this ministration, Fox sees the gulf that separates him from God and wants to bridge it, but he is alienated from the life of Christ within him that is the only power that can bridge that gap and has not yet discovered that Christ. He knows about the Christ of scripture and he knows about the Christ of church doctrine and teaching, but he does not yet know that it is Christ in him that is opening his condition to him or leading him.
The “ministration of Moses” is what the soul enters into next. It is the time of crying out to God, of being led out of the “world” (i.e. Egypt, the flesh, bondage, death) and into a wilderness where we learn to discern what must be left behind and what must be clung to. In this ministration, we also come to see our transgressions through what Fox calls “the pure law of God,” a law which he believed was written on the heart because Christ had brought that new covenant into being. This law is not to be done away with but clung to and obeyed; the time of trial and judgment under it must be endured.
In Fox’s story, the ministration of Moses begins when he heads out to look for some wiser, more knowledgeable Christian who can help him discover why he is caught in the dilemma of not being able to possess what he professes. As he enters this ministration he is brought into a greater sense of clarity concerning the things God loves and the things He condemns. The earliest stages of this ministration might well have been called the ministration of Abraham, for it is really an Abraham-like break from the past that he must first pass through to enter the wilderness God has in mind for him. Like Abraham, Fox is called away from his “ancestral home,” called to “[leave] all the religions and worships and teachers [of the world] behind. . .and follow . . .the Lord” (Fox's Letters 411 4). Fox clearly sees what he is leaving behind as the traditional (mistaken) ways his ancestors have practiced Christianity.
Propelled by distress but also by faith in God’s promises, Fox roams the countryside looking for someone to help him. There is a great sense of the darkness that threatens him everywhere within and without. He thirsts for the reality of God’s presence, but he also struggles with the thirst he has for human comforts and human answers-- just as the people of God thirsted as they wandered forty years in the desert. Like them he too still believes that some human power might save him, but human beings disappoint every time. The entire essence of the ministration of Moses is to bring the seeker “off the world” and off of the world’s wisdom and strength to rely wholly upon the Lord, to learn law God has inscribed on the heart and to learn what can stand in His presence and what must be left behind.
Fox’s major “openings” are experienced in the ministration of Moses. Through these openings or revelations, he realizes he must move from the “fleshly” understanding he is accustomed to, to a more spiritual grasp of God’s work in his life. It is the process of being weaned away from the “common belief of people” that characterizes the openings he has during this stage. The openings he experiences here lead him to rely less and less on those thought to be spiritually wise by worldly standards and more on the sense of what God seems to be saying within him. He is beginning to see what the new covenant is all about--that “believers. . .needed no man to teach them, but as the anointing teacheth them. . .”(Fox 7). The culmination of this weaning process comes in his famous opening concerning Christ’s inward presence which I quoted in connection with my discussion of the theology of early Friends’ vision. This is, of course, always the quote Friends use to describe what it is that Friends believe, that Jesus Christ dwells in the human heart and it is He who teaches and speaks to the condition of every person. But in Fox’s account, what this opening reveals is simply the identity of the light that has been guiding him all along. He is still only somewhere in the middle of the ministration of Moses when he has this opening and it will be years before he emerges from the desert in which his soul is journeying. He has not yet even begun his passage through the law.
Fox goes on in a very depressed state for a long time after this experience, mostly because he sees that he is a creature with a divided heart. Like the people of Israel, he continues to have a thirst for the comforts and pleasures of the world. The thirst for freedom, he discovers, is not unequivocal:
". . . I found that there were two thirsts in me, the one after the creatures, to have gotten help and strength there, and the other after the Lord the creator and his Son Jesus Christ. And I saw all the world could do me no good. If I had had a king’s diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing, for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power. And I saw professors [professing Christians], priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself from whom my help came, and my care was cast upon him alone. Therefore, all wait patiently upon the Lord, whatsoever condition you be in; wait in the grace and truth that comes by Jesus; for if ye so do, there is a promise to you, and the Lord God will fulfil it in you" (Fox's Journal 12-13).
The journey through the wilderness looks to our worldly mind as if it should be short and direct, but in truth it is long and often circuitous. It is not a journey of miles, but of mileposts that are spiritual. We must just go on in childlike trust, seeking God’s presence in the most personal way. It requires great patience to endure the testing and purging process, which constitutes the work of the law. The law of Moses which Christians tend to dismiss as unimportant in the ministration of Christ, Fox sees as essential to the progress of the soul. He does not see it as outward law but as a pure spiritual fire that burns up all that is contrary to God’s will. The painful inner discernment Fox feels throughout this ministration is the work of the law in him, a law that must be passed through to get to the ministration of the prophets and of Christ:
"The pure and perfect law of God is over the flesh to keep it and its works, which are not perfect, under, by the perfect law; and the law of God that is perfect answers the perfect principle of God in every one . . .None knows the giver of this law but by the spirit of God, neither can any truly read it or hear its voice but by the spirit of God" (15).
It is the spirit of repentance that is brought forth by that pure law which the prophets and John the Baptist testify to; and it must be passed through before one can come to a participation in the cross of Christ. Going through the judgment due under the pure law of God is a painful time for Fox as it is for all men, but as he permits God to exercise his just judgment over all that denies or kills his spirit, he passes through the ministration of the law to the ministration of the prophets and of John the Baptist who sees to the fulfillment promised in Christ:
"I saw this law was the pure love of God which was upon me, and which I must go through, though I was troubled while I was under it; for I could not be dead to the law but through the law which did judge and condemn that which is to be condemned. I saw many talked of the law, who had never known the law to be their schoolmaster; and many talked of the Gospel of Christ, who had never known life and immortality brought to light in them by it . . . as you are brought into the law, and through the law to be dead to it, and witness the righteousness of the law fulfilled in you, ye will afterwards come to know what it is to be brought into the faith, and through faith from under the law. And abiding in the faith, which Christ is the author of, ye will have peace and access to God" (11).
In this passage, we see one of the difficulties Fox’s approach sometimes engenders; for even though he sees the ministrations as leading only gradually to the knowledge of Christ, he tends to mix and mingle old testament references with new testament Christology throughout. The reason is because having passed through all the ministrations himself, Fox sees in all of them the Johannine Christ who is with God in the beginning and active throughout the entire story even when his face is hidden: He is in the promise to Eve in Genesis 3: 15--the seed of the woman who will bruise the head of the serpent; he is the voice that leads Abraham away from his ancestral land; the manna that feeds the Israelites in desert and the law Moses transmits to his people. Finally he is the Word that speaks through the prophets and prepares the way for the incarnated Christ. Fox was not really a systematic thinker or writer either, so that one must also admit that the boundaries between the various ministrations sometimes blur in Fox’s retelling. But these elements of potential confusion do not detract from the power of Fox’s insights when we remember that he was trying to communicate about things not really susceptible to clear and logical explanation. Sometimes neat, linear concepts are just not adequate to point to spiritual truth. An example of the type of confusion I am talking about appears in the following passage where Fox clearly sees Christ as the spiritual manna that makes passage through the law possible:
"And when I myself was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great, that I thought many times I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same Devil, and had overcome him and bruised his heard, and that through him and his power, light, grace and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. So he it was that opened to me when I was shut up and had not hope nor faith. Christ it was who had enlightened me, that gave me his light to believe in, and gave me hope, which is himself, revealed himself in me, and gave me his spirit and gave me his grace, which I found sufficient in the deeps and in weakness" (12).
It takes about five years from the time Fox begins his pilgrimage in the ministration of condemnation to the point where he passes through the ministration of John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, and enters into the very life and power of Christ the Substance, an experience he describes as a kind of combination of coming up out of slavery, a resurrection from the dead and a restoration to the state Adam was in before he fell—a veritable reentry into paradise. A number of memorable passages combine to describe this experience:
"Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell" (27).
Fox’s account reflects spiritually the entire redemption narrative, from fall to restoration. He was convinced that everyone who opened to the spirit of Christ in them would find themselves involved in a journey like this that patterned itself after the events of the scripture narrative, but that until one had entered personally on that journey, the scripture narrative was not something one could really penetrate.
But of course, the passage of individual believers from condemnation to restoration was not all that the scripture story told of or promised. It also went forward to tell of the final in-gathering of God’s faithful and the establishment of his kingdom on earth. These future times scripture tells of were also very real to Fox, but while these times might not yet be upon us, Fox believed they, like all the other historical events scripture told of, had also an interior parallel. Fox tended to make the “day of the Lord” itself a kind of microcosmic recapitulation of the redemption trajectory—the dawning of Christ’s light, the pain of recognizing our distance from God, Christ’s judgment and the purgatorial, cleansing fires of his presence bringing us to God—but he tended to apply the imagery involved here to the corporate body of believers as well. When people criticized Fox for allowing women to preach, for example, or prophesy, he routinely cited Joel’s famous end-time prophecy as his justification as if the gathering of Friends in response to his preaching was, in effect, the inauguration of those end-times. Peter, who also believed that the end-times were upon them, also cites these same words in his first address to the people of Jerusalem.
"In the days to come—it is the Lord who speaks—I will pour out my spirit on all mankind. Their sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams. Even on my slaves, men and women, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. I will display portents in heaven above and signs on earth below. The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great Day of the Lord dawns. All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved"(Acts 2:17-21).
Whether Fox saw the rapid gathering of Friends in response to his preaching as the beginning of an end that had been delayed because of some early apostasy in the church is something Fox scholars might debate, but what clearly was true was that he saw the scripture story as occurring on several different levels—historical, individual and again in the corporate life of the redeemed community, of which he took Friends to be the vanguard. While numbers are difficult to come by, thousands of people responded to Fox’s preaching in the early years. It has been estimated that by 1657, only eight years after Fox’s first started his preaching, there were at least twenty thousand Friends in England and probably many more.
But the point here is not to explore how Friends viewed themselves in church history but simply to look at how they used the scripture writings. Scripture for Friends was not an artifact of God’s work in the past but a story that recapitulated itself wherever God’s spirit worked unhindered—in the individual heart and among God’s faithful on earth.
Fox was not the only Friend to use “ministrations” to describe the spiritual passage from fall to restoration. Few went into the detail Fox did, but many early Friends make reference to one or more of the ministrations to describe their own journeys. Here is one other example, early Friend, John Banks:
". . .as I travelled in and under the ministration of condemnation, and true judgment of sin and transgression, great was the warfare and combats that I had with the Enemy of my soul, who through this subtility (sic) did what in him lay, to betray me to despair of my condition, as though there was no mercy for me. . .And having nothing whereof to accurse myself, only some little things through childishness which I knew the Lord as a tender father had passed by, so through faith in the power of God and shining of his glorious light in my heart, I overcame the wicked one. . .through a diligent waiting in the light and keeping close unto the power of God, in waiting upon him in silence among his people. . .I came to experience the work thereof in my inward parts, in order to work my freedom from bondage and redemption from captivity" (Barbour & Roberts 184-185).
I spend this amount of time describing Fox’s understanding of the redemption process as paralleling the scripture story because most modern Friends do not attach much importance to these scripture-based “ministrations.” They prefer to pick out of Fox’s account isolated insights or “openings” and then treat these insights as if they were philosophical premises from which the distinctive Quaker practices or testimonies were developed. But this was not the way Fox’s mind worked. He believed that if one was being led by the same light that had led the holy men and women of God in history, one’s journey would of necessity be similar. It was the similarity of the journey that let you know you were on the right path. God’s truth is not changeable.
And I mention it too because my own response to Friends’ biblicism was fascination. Something in their approach just struck me as remarkably contemporary and relevant, like Freud’s use of the ancient Oedipus story as a prototype to describe certain stages in human psychological development; or the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that the development of an individual organism recapitulates the development of the whole group of related organisms. This last reflection is very likely not true or so I have read, but in my college days the idea had many proponents and I found the comparison interesting.
Why couldn’t the scripture narrative be an archetype for the experience of redemption? If God was the same yesterday, today and tomorrow; if God did exist and did work to redeem His creation, then why should his way of working that redemption not be manifest both in history and in the inner lives of people who opened themselves to him. The fact that the historical accounts of scripture were not exactly the kind of history modern secular historians would produce, or the fact that there were undoubtedly elements of myth or legend mixed in with these accounts did not interfere with their archetypal value. Even those parts that were strictly literature might be true in that sense.
Once I started to consider scripture this way, it wasn’t long before I found myself liberated from the skepticism, standoffishness and doubt that modernism had nurtured in me towards the holy books. I could never prove that the events of scripture were historical valid or accurate in a scientific sense, but the interior dimension of truth I found there was trust-worthy. This I was learning “experimentally” as Fox had said, and the more I studied it and meditated upon it, the more I came to trust it and look to it. As I see it now, the very fact that the scripture exists as it does and has such continuing power to open God’s presence and nature and work among us as it does, makes it something commensurate with the greatness we ascribe to God.
But the view that early Friends put any kind of distance between themselves and scripture is simply not true. Early Friends questioned the prevailing approaches to scripture mainly to get people to erase the distance they put between themselves and scripture by seeing it too outwardly, by setting it up as an artifact rather than as something to be entered into and viewed from within. One of the most moving and profound parts of the testimony and writings of early Friends is the way they internalized what they read in scripture, the way they entered into the spirit of it and saw the world in its terms.
I think this is something I always knew about 17th century Friends, but I could never find “outward” words in Friends’ writings that were clear enough to keep other Friends from insisting that Quakers had always viewed the book as less authoritative than other Christians of their day had seen it. Their statements about it being the words, not the Word of God; their (or at least Fox’s) insistence that he had come to his inward revelation without “the help of man” and without the help of “the letter” by which he meant the letter of scripture (Journal, 34) all seemed to justify the claim modern Friends made that Quakers did not view the scriptures as central. But when I read the testimonies of early Friends or read their pamphlets or catechism or debates with others, the one thing I could not understand was why they always couched their ideas in scripture quotations. And if they did not think the scriptures were authoritative, why were they seemingly the most literal of Christians in refusing to take oaths, in refusing to use any term that was not biblical, or in making sure that people understood that they believed Jesus’ teachings on simplicity and non-violence were normative for Christians, not merely ideals he set.
I know my own conversion experience, which resulted in large measure because of my contact with these early Friends’ writings, led me to see from the beginning that the scripture words, contexts and reference points had been utterly central to me. When I tried to tell people what it had been like, feeling reawakened to God and to Christ, I had used an image from a popular move I knew everyone was familiar with, The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. For those who aren’t familiar with it today, the movie is about the childhood of Helen Keller, a well-known celebrity whose victory over blindness and deafness made her a heroine in the early years of the twentieth century. In the story the movie tells, Helen’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, seeks to free Helen’s mind from its dark, silent prison by teaching her a tactile alphabet that can make it possible for Helen to learn words and language. Helen quickly learns the alphabet and the game of fingering words to get what she wants--her D-O-L-L, her M-O-T-H-E-R or the sweet C-A-K-E she loves; but the concept of words, that everything in the world can be named and that words make learning and communication with other human beings possible, this Helen cannot seem to learn. For months Miss Sullivan labors to get the idea across with no success. Finally, as she is about to give up, Helen has a moment of grace at the water pump outside her parents’ home. Forced to refill a pitcher of water that she intentionally dumped on her teacher, Helen holds the pitcher under the spout while Miss Sullivan pumps the water and repeatedly fingers the word W-A-T-E-R into her palm. Something in that moment at the pump--its intensity--its repetition or its evocation of a primitive memory Helen has of a time when she could still see and hear and knew what water was—something--sparks a light in Helen’s mind and she sees what her teacher has been trying to open to her.
This was exactly what I had experienced in my conversion. I was seeing a landscape I had never seen before, a set of realities I had “knocked around” in and stumbled over and been curious about for years but had never really seen. But now I was seeing, not directly because those realities are not directly perceivable but I was seeing them through the medium of this language I had been taught earlier in my life but had never seen the point of—not really. Now I was seeing their point and their power--the Light of Christ, sin, the fall, the cross, resurrection--they had to open up this landscape of spiritual truth in me.
Now Fox would never have described the words of scripture in this way. The concepts were just not part of his intellectual life in the 17th century. But I am convinced that the fundamental experience of coming into those familiar words was the same in his life and in mine. So what I want to explore here is what early Friends did with respect to the scriptures—not what did they say, but how did they use them to encourage others to “enter into” the words.
One of the most revealing passages from Fox’s journal on the scriptures goes into great depth on the problem as Fox saw it. People approached scripture, according to Fox, “without a right sense of them, and without duly applying them to their own states"(Fox's Journal 31).
". . .I saw the state of those, both priests and people, who in reading the Scriptures, cry out much against Cain, Esau, and Judas, and other wicked men of former times, mentioned in the Holy Scriptures; but do not see the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Judas, and those others, in themselves. And these said it was they, they, they, that were the bad people; putting it off from themselves: but when some of these came, with the light and spirit of Truth, to see into themselves, then they came to say, “I, I, I, it is I myself that have been the Ishmael, and the Esau”, etc. For then they came to see the nature of wild Ishmael in themselves, the nature of Cain, of Esau, of Korah, of Balaam and of the son of perdition in themselves, sitting above all that is called God in them"(30).
The characters of scripture were not merely historical personages, people comfortably distant from us in time and place. They were exemplars of every kind of spiritual condition and nature that one might have to contend with—inwardly or outwardly. Those who envied and persecuted the godly were people who dwelled in the nature of Cain; those who chose earthly goods over the heavenly promises of God were in the nature of the earthly Esau. Those who rebelled against God were in the nature of Korah, and those who traded in God’s wisdom for material gain had the nature of Balaam. On the other hand, those who received the living Word of God in their hearts and responded to it were in the nature of Abraham; those who saw into the pure law of God were in the nature of Moses and those who were able to see into the types and shadows had the nature of the prophets. This did not mean for Fox that the historical Moses or Korah or Cain were imaginary. It simply meant that they were more than just human and historical; they represented spiritual realities we all encounter either in ourselves or in others. So we should approach the characters and events of the scriptures with an eye to “types” and “figures” they represented, the truths they illuminated and the insights they gave us into our own spiritual conditions.
Early Friends did this, and they did it in beautifully creative ways. I think, for example, of William Penn’s wonderful comparison of the overcrowded inn in Bethlehem with the state of the average person’s soul. We are all like that inn, crowded with worldly guests, having no room for Christ to be born in us. Or Fox’s use of the Baptist’s proclamation (Matt 3:3) and its reference to Isaiah 40:4 as a description of our readiness to have Christ enter into our lives:
"And I saw the mountains burning up and the rubbish and the rough and crooked ways and places made smooth and plain that the Lord might come into his tabernacle. These things are to be found in man’s heart. But to speak of these things being within seemed strange to the rough and crooked and mountainous ones" (16).
But while examples of this kind of biblical allusion are very common in Friends’ writing, what Friends ultimately came to see and describe was something far more profound. They ultimately came to see that the whole story recapitulated itself in the spiritual lives of people who opened themselves to Christ and became joined to His life by faith. But faith for Friends meant far more than simply assenting to prescribed formulas of doctrine or profession. Faith meant the daily hearing and obeying of God’s living Word both in their personal depths and in the community of those gathered in His name. If one came to a faith like this, one’s spiritual journey would actually parallel the story scripture told—or at least its key events. The story was not Adam’s alone or the Jews’ alone. It was the common spiritual heritage of all men and women. We were the ones cast out of God’s presence, the ones who envied and killed our brothers, who wandered the world in alienation from God and strangers to one another. We were the ones God called to come away from that fallen ancestral “state”, the ones called to claim God’s promise of salvation. We too had to respond to God’s call; we too had to abandon our ancestral homes (the purely outward dimension of “tradition”) and learn to rely on the voice of God addressed to us. As we did what Abraham did, we too would find the redemptive part of their story unfolding within us—not in every outward detail but in substantially the same way. So you will find early Friends seeing themselves as “spiritual Jews” being rescued from bondage and led to freedom. Here is a quote from early Friend Charles Marshall:
". . .in his infinite love and tender pity and compassion [he looked] down upon us, whilst in the land of Egypt, and house of bondage spiritually, and [did] send forth his light and truth, to give us a sense inwardly of the deplorable states of our souls in the separation from, and depravation of the enjoyments of the Lord, which sense and sight begat in us living breathings and a holy cry after the knowledge of him we saw ourselves ignorant of . . ." (Barbour & Roberts 82).
You will find Friends seeing themselves as dead spiritually being brought out of graves like Lazarus or Christ himself. Here are the words of Francis Howgill:
"Wait to see the law set up within. . .and the rebellious nature yoked [earthquakes and thunder]. Wait in patience for the judgment, and let the Lord’s work have its perfect operation in you; and so as you turn to him who has smitten and wounded you; he will bind up and heal. And give up all to the great slaughter of the Lord, to the Cross. . .And as the earth comes to be plowed up, the seed which is sown comes up; and, the rocks broken, the water gushes out. You so will see that some promises will arise in you to the Seed which is coming up out of the grave, and so the love of God will appear in you, and you will be stayed, and see hope in the midst of calamity. . . And as you come to be redeemed from under the bondage of sin, and come above the bonds of death, and the pure principle lives in you, there will be a delight in you to do the will of the father, who has redeemed you from sin and its law to righteousness and its law,. . ." (Barbour & Roberts 177)
This was what they meant when they said you had to enter into the Spirit that gave the scriptures forth—to “see” the same work being carried forth in your own life.
But even this description of Quaker “biblical vision” does not exhaust what Friends did with scripture. Fox saw the scripture story as inexhaustibly revelatory of God’s work in human life. A similar but more detailed approach to the scripture’s narrative line involved breaking it down into “ministrations” or stages of God’s redeeming love. He believed that he himself had passed through a process of redemption substantially the same as what had happened in the history recorded in scripture, and he told the story of his own life in terms of these ministrations. The saga as Fox saw it was a passage through four or five “ministrations”: the “ministration of condemnation;” the “ministration of Moses;” the “ministration of the prophets” which culminated in the “ministration of John the Baptist;” and the last ministration—the ministration of Christ’s immediate presence and power. He does not actually call this last a “ministration,” but it is clear that he saw Christ’s ministration in the new covenant as the substance and culmination of all the preceding ministrations.
The “ministration of condemnation” was the stage we were in when the real truth of our spiritual condition in the fall was opened to us inwardly; it is a condition of spiritual death and darkness. Though it is a painful vision, it is the first opening of Christ’s light in the mind and heart of the seeker. It can be distinguished from despair by the fact that it is always accompanied in some measure by a sense of God’s loving presence and power to overcome the death one is caught up in. Fox enters this first ministration when he sees that people “do not possess what they profess;” indeed even he does not. The problem is deeper than hypocrisy. The problem is that people are alienated from the very power that can help them live by the standards they admire, that can bring them into possession of the things they profess. In this ministration, Fox sees the gulf that separates him from God and wants to bridge it, but he is alienated from the life of Christ within him that is the only power that can bridge that gap and has not yet discovered that Christ. He knows about the Christ of scripture and he knows about the Christ of church doctrine and teaching, but he does not yet know that it is Christ in him that is opening his condition to him or leading him.
The “ministration of Moses” is what the soul enters into next. It is the time of crying out to God, of being led out of the “world” (i.e. Egypt, the flesh, bondage, death) and into a wilderness where we learn to discern what must be left behind and what must be clung to. In this ministration, we also come to see our transgressions through what Fox calls “the pure law of God,” a law which he believed was written on the heart because Christ had brought that new covenant into being. This law is not to be done away with but clung to and obeyed; the time of trial and judgment under it must be endured.
In Fox’s story, the ministration of Moses begins when he heads out to look for some wiser, more knowledgeable Christian who can help him discover why he is caught in the dilemma of not being able to possess what he professes. As he enters this ministration he is brought into a greater sense of clarity concerning the things God loves and the things He condemns. The earliest stages of this ministration might well have been called the ministration of Abraham, for it is really an Abraham-like break from the past that he must first pass through to enter the wilderness God has in mind for him. Like Abraham, Fox is called away from his “ancestral home,” called to “[leave] all the religions and worships and teachers [of the world] behind. . .and follow . . .the Lord” (Fox's Letters 411 4). Fox clearly sees what he is leaving behind as the traditional (mistaken) ways his ancestors have practiced Christianity.
Propelled by distress but also by faith in God’s promises, Fox roams the countryside looking for someone to help him. There is a great sense of the darkness that threatens him everywhere within and without. He thirsts for the reality of God’s presence, but he also struggles with the thirst he has for human comforts and human answers-- just as the people of God thirsted as they wandered forty years in the desert. Like them he too still believes that some human power might save him, but human beings disappoint every time. The entire essence of the ministration of Moses is to bring the seeker “off the world” and off of the world’s wisdom and strength to rely wholly upon the Lord, to learn law God has inscribed on the heart and to learn what can stand in His presence and what must be left behind.
Fox’s major “openings” are experienced in the ministration of Moses. Through these openings or revelations, he realizes he must move from the “fleshly” understanding he is accustomed to, to a more spiritual grasp of God’s work in his life. It is the process of being weaned away from the “common belief of people” that characterizes the openings he has during this stage. The openings he experiences here lead him to rely less and less on those thought to be spiritually wise by worldly standards and more on the sense of what God seems to be saying within him. He is beginning to see what the new covenant is all about--that “believers. . .needed no man to teach them, but as the anointing teacheth them. . .”(Fox 7). The culmination of this weaning process comes in his famous opening concerning Christ’s inward presence which I quoted in connection with my discussion of the theology of early Friends’ vision. This is, of course, always the quote Friends use to describe what it is that Friends believe, that Jesus Christ dwells in the human heart and it is He who teaches and speaks to the condition of every person. But in Fox’s account, what this opening reveals is simply the identity of the light that has been guiding him all along. He is still only somewhere in the middle of the ministration of Moses when he has this opening and it will be years before he emerges from the desert in which his soul is journeying. He has not yet even begun his passage through the law.
Fox goes on in a very depressed state for a long time after this experience, mostly because he sees that he is a creature with a divided heart. Like the people of Israel, he continues to have a thirst for the comforts and pleasures of the world. The thirst for freedom, he discovers, is not unequivocal:
". . . I found that there were two thirsts in me, the one after the creatures, to have gotten help and strength there, and the other after the Lord the creator and his Son Jesus Christ. And I saw all the world could do me no good. If I had had a king’s diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing, for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power. And I saw professors [professing Christians], priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself from whom my help came, and my care was cast upon him alone. Therefore, all wait patiently upon the Lord, whatsoever condition you be in; wait in the grace and truth that comes by Jesus; for if ye so do, there is a promise to you, and the Lord God will fulfil it in you" (Fox's Journal 12-13).
The journey through the wilderness looks to our worldly mind as if it should be short and direct, but in truth it is long and often circuitous. It is not a journey of miles, but of mileposts that are spiritual. We must just go on in childlike trust, seeking God’s presence in the most personal way. It requires great patience to endure the testing and purging process, which constitutes the work of the law. The law of Moses which Christians tend to dismiss as unimportant in the ministration of Christ, Fox sees as essential to the progress of the soul. He does not see it as outward law but as a pure spiritual fire that burns up all that is contrary to God’s will. The painful inner discernment Fox feels throughout this ministration is the work of the law in him, a law that must be passed through to get to the ministration of the prophets and of Christ:
"The pure and perfect law of God is over the flesh to keep it and its works, which are not perfect, under, by the perfect law; and the law of God that is perfect answers the perfect principle of God in every one . . .None knows the giver of this law but by the spirit of God, neither can any truly read it or hear its voice but by the spirit of God" (15).
It is the spirit of repentance that is brought forth by that pure law which the prophets and John the Baptist testify to; and it must be passed through before one can come to a participation in the cross of Christ. Going through the judgment due under the pure law of God is a painful time for Fox as it is for all men, but as he permits God to exercise his just judgment over all that denies or kills his spirit, he passes through the ministration of the law to the ministration of the prophets and of John the Baptist who sees to the fulfillment promised in Christ:
"I saw this law was the pure love of God which was upon me, and which I must go through, though I was troubled while I was under it; for I could not be dead to the law but through the law which did judge and condemn that which is to be condemned. I saw many talked of the law, who had never known the law to be their schoolmaster; and many talked of the Gospel of Christ, who had never known life and immortality brought to light in them by it . . . as you are brought into the law, and through the law to be dead to it, and witness the righteousness of the law fulfilled in you, ye will afterwards come to know what it is to be brought into the faith, and through faith from under the law. And abiding in the faith, which Christ is the author of, ye will have peace and access to God" (11).
In this passage, we see one of the difficulties Fox’s approach sometimes engenders; for even though he sees the ministrations as leading only gradually to the knowledge of Christ, he tends to mix and mingle old testament references with new testament Christology throughout. The reason is because having passed through all the ministrations himself, Fox sees in all of them the Johannine Christ who is with God in the beginning and active throughout the entire story even when his face is hidden: He is in the promise to Eve in Genesis 3: 15--the seed of the woman who will bruise the head of the serpent; he is the voice that leads Abraham away from his ancestral land; the manna that feeds the Israelites in desert and the law Moses transmits to his people. Finally he is the Word that speaks through the prophets and prepares the way for the incarnated Christ. Fox was not really a systematic thinker or writer either, so that one must also admit that the boundaries between the various ministrations sometimes blur in Fox’s retelling. But these elements of potential confusion do not detract from the power of Fox’s insights when we remember that he was trying to communicate about things not really susceptible to clear and logical explanation. Sometimes neat, linear concepts are just not adequate to point to spiritual truth. An example of the type of confusion I am talking about appears in the following passage where Fox clearly sees Christ as the spiritual manna that makes passage through the law possible:
"And when I myself was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great, that I thought many times I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same Devil, and had overcome him and bruised his heard, and that through him and his power, light, grace and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. So he it was that opened to me when I was shut up and had not hope nor faith. Christ it was who had enlightened me, that gave me his light to believe in, and gave me hope, which is himself, revealed himself in me, and gave me his spirit and gave me his grace, which I found sufficient in the deeps and in weakness" (12).
It takes about five years from the time Fox begins his pilgrimage in the ministration of condemnation to the point where he passes through the ministration of John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, and enters into the very life and power of Christ the Substance, an experience he describes as a kind of combination of coming up out of slavery, a resurrection from the dead and a restoration to the state Adam was in before he fell—a veritable reentry into paradise. A number of memorable passages combine to describe this experience:
"Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell" (27).
Fox’s account reflects spiritually the entire redemption narrative, from fall to restoration. He was convinced that everyone who opened to the spirit of Christ in them would find themselves involved in a journey like this that patterned itself after the events of the scripture narrative, but that until one had entered personally on that journey, the scripture narrative was not something one could really penetrate.
But of course, the passage of individual believers from condemnation to restoration was not all that the scripture story told of or promised. It also went forward to tell of the final in-gathering of God’s faithful and the establishment of his kingdom on earth. These future times scripture tells of were also very real to Fox, but while these times might not yet be upon us, Fox believed they, like all the other historical events scripture told of, had also an interior parallel. Fox tended to make the “day of the Lord” itself a kind of microcosmic recapitulation of the redemption trajectory—the dawning of Christ’s light, the pain of recognizing our distance from God, Christ’s judgment and the purgatorial, cleansing fires of his presence bringing us to God—but he tended to apply the imagery involved here to the corporate body of believers as well. When people criticized Fox for allowing women to preach, for example, or prophesy, he routinely cited Joel’s famous end-time prophecy as his justification as if the gathering of Friends in response to his preaching was, in effect, the inauguration of those end-times. Peter, who also believed that the end-times were upon them, also cites these same words in his first address to the people of Jerusalem.
"In the days to come—it is the Lord who speaks—I will pour out my spirit on all mankind. Their sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams. Even on my slaves, men and women, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. I will display portents in heaven above and signs on earth below. The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the great Day of the Lord dawns. All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved"(Acts 2:17-21).
Whether Fox saw the rapid gathering of Friends in response to his preaching as the beginning of an end that had been delayed because of some early apostasy in the church is something Fox scholars might debate, but what clearly was true was that he saw the scripture story as occurring on several different levels—historical, individual and again in the corporate life of the redeemed community, of which he took Friends to be the vanguard. While numbers are difficult to come by, thousands of people responded to Fox’s preaching in the early years. It has been estimated that by 1657, only eight years after Fox’s first started his preaching, there were at least twenty thousand Friends in England and probably many more.
But the point here is not to explore how Friends viewed themselves in church history but simply to look at how they used the scripture writings. Scripture for Friends was not an artifact of God’s work in the past but a story that recapitulated itself wherever God’s spirit worked unhindered—in the individual heart and among God’s faithful on earth.
Fox was not the only Friend to use “ministrations” to describe the spiritual passage from fall to restoration. Few went into the detail Fox did, but many early Friends make reference to one or more of the ministrations to describe their own journeys. Here is one other example, early Friend, John Banks:
". . .as I travelled in and under the ministration of condemnation, and true judgment of sin and transgression, great was the warfare and combats that I had with the Enemy of my soul, who through this subtility (sic) did what in him lay, to betray me to despair of my condition, as though there was no mercy for me. . .And having nothing whereof to accurse myself, only some little things through childishness which I knew the Lord as a tender father had passed by, so through faith in the power of God and shining of his glorious light in my heart, I overcame the wicked one. . .through a diligent waiting in the light and keeping close unto the power of God, in waiting upon him in silence among his people. . .I came to experience the work thereof in my inward parts, in order to work my freedom from bondage and redemption from captivity" (Barbour & Roberts 184-185).
I spend this amount of time describing Fox’s understanding of the redemption process as paralleling the scripture story because most modern Friends do not attach much importance to these scripture-based “ministrations.” They prefer to pick out of Fox’s account isolated insights or “openings” and then treat these insights as if they were philosophical premises from which the distinctive Quaker practices or testimonies were developed. But this was not the way Fox’s mind worked. He believed that if one was being led by the same light that had led the holy men and women of God in history, one’s journey would of necessity be similar. It was the similarity of the journey that let you know you were on the right path. God’s truth is not changeable.
And I mention it too because my own response to Friends’ biblicism was fascination. Something in their approach just struck me as remarkably contemporary and relevant, like Freud’s use of the ancient Oedipus story as a prototype to describe certain stages in human psychological development; or the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that the development of an individual organism recapitulates the development of the whole group of related organisms. This last reflection is very likely not true or so I have read, but in my college days the idea had many proponents and I found the comparison interesting.
Why couldn’t the scripture narrative be an archetype for the experience of redemption? If God was the same yesterday, today and tomorrow; if God did exist and did work to redeem His creation, then why should his way of working that redemption not be manifest both in history and in the inner lives of people who opened themselves to him. The fact that the historical accounts of scripture were not exactly the kind of history modern secular historians would produce, or the fact that there were undoubtedly elements of myth or legend mixed in with these accounts did not interfere with their archetypal value. Even those parts that were strictly literature might be true in that sense.
Once I started to consider scripture this way, it wasn’t long before I found myself liberated from the skepticism, standoffishness and doubt that modernism had nurtured in me towards the holy books. I could never prove that the events of scripture were historical valid or accurate in a scientific sense, but the interior dimension of truth I found there was trust-worthy. This I was learning “experimentally” as Fox had said, and the more I studied it and meditated upon it, the more I came to trust it and look to it. As I see it now, the very fact that the scripture exists as it does and has such continuing power to open God’s presence and nature and work among us as it does, makes it something commensurate with the greatness we ascribe to God.
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