Through the Flaming Sword

In theory, the Bible is an obvious choice for a discernment touchstone. It’s held up for thousands of years as a vehicle for revelation. (And as a weapon by those who wield religious authority against their dissenters.)

But in practice, the Bible’s useful but not decisive, especially in areas that it does not directly address. And even then, problems always arise.

Continuing illumination. The conservative evangelical Quaker understanding of “continuing revelation” prefers to call it continuing illumination. They insist that innovations that cannot claim scriptural authority are illegitimate—heresy or sacrilege, in the language of Paul Anderson. Legitimate new testimonies rest on new illuminations of scripture. Think of Margaret Fell’s defense of women speaking in meeting in “Women’s Speaking Justified”, countering the clear prohibition of women speaking in First Corinthians. Along similar lines, several pamphlets and books have been published countering the apparent prohibition of same sex sex in the Bible.

Weaponizing the Bible. The problem with scripture as a touchstone is that it forces proponents and opponents to weaponize the Bible, and often, to pick and choose, and sometimes to torture its testimony, thus further undermining its authority. For liberal proponents of a new testimony, it just demonstrates how useless, or at least compromised, scripture is as a test. For conservative opponents, it takes the Holy out of the Bible by wielding it as a weapon. 

Picking and choosing. The reality is that everyone picks and chooses the passages that serve their interests and ignores the rest, Quakers included. We don’t practice the outward forms of the sacraments that Jesus explicitly commands, for instance. And almost nobody washes feet. So then it comes down to who gets to pick and choose; it comes down to power dynamics in the community. To stick with the signature example of same sex marriage, yearly meetings that oppose the practice have exerted their authority, and monthly meetings that embrace the practice and/or resent the exercise of ecclesiastical power leave.

Interpretation. After choosing your passages (and ignoring the rest), you then have to interpret the passages you’ve chosen, and the Bible is notoriously open to variant interpretations. To keep with our test case, whole books and pamphlets have been written to counter the interpretations of scripture that seem, at least on the surface, to condemn same sex sex. So, once again, it comes down to ecclesiastical authority, not scriptural authority. Meetings that exercise ecclesiastical authority against heresy or sacrilege under the aegis of scriptural authority are placing their ecclesiastical authority first, before the Bible—in other words, their interpretation—no matter what they say, given the reality of exegetical ambiguity and multivalence.

The book is not holy. Meanwhile, for Quakers, the Holy Bible isn’t “holy”, no matter that the word debossed on the front cover says. God is holy; the book is not. God is the ultimate authority; the book is not. 

The spirit in which it was given forth. Accordingly, we claim to try to read the Bible in the spirit in which it was given forth, which spirit early Friends understood to be the Holy Spirit, which inspired the book’s authors. I embrace this approach myself; as a spiritual exercise, seeking the spirit of inspiration behind the text is a truly powerful tool for personal and corporate spiritual openings. And I include the spirit of the times—the zeitgeist—in this exercise: what did the passage mean to those who wrote it and those who read or heard it first, in their cultural context, to the degree that we can understand that? But now we’re discerning spirits rather than interpreting texts, and that means we must turn to the community for confirmation. We’re back to where we started, in the field of ecclesiastical process and authority.

The Bible is an unreliable touchstone for discerning new leadings, though it is not, therefore, useless. You have to start somewhere with the conversation, and scriptural testimony is as good a place to start as any, in my opinion.