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.