Through the Flaming Sword

I’ve just read an article by Benjamin J. Wood of Leeds Trinity University, UK, titled “The Survival of the Gift: An Enchanted Interpretation of Early Quakerism.” On page fourteen, he adds a nuance about early Friends’ relationship with the Bible that I’ve not seen before.

First, he quotes Francis Howgill’s wonderful description of a gathered meeting:

The Lord of Heaven and earth we found to be near at hand, and, as we waited upon him in pure silence, our minds out of all things, his heavenly presence appeared in our assemblies, when there was no language, tongue nor speech from any creature. The Kingdom of Heaven did gather us and catch us all, as in a net, and his heavenly power at one time drew many hundreds to land. We came to know a place to stand in and what to wait in; and the Lord appeared daily to us, to our astonishment, amazement and great admiration . . . And from that day forward, our hearts were knit unto the Lord and one unto another in true and fervent love, in the covenant of Life with God; and that was a strong obligation or bond upon all our spirits, which united us one unto another.(1)

Wood follows with this:

How could a community gathered around Scripture have such intense experiences? As Mary Douglas has wryly suggested, ‘Fundamentalists who are not magical in their attitude to the Eucharist become magical in their attitude to the Bible’.(2) Similarly, it could be said that although early Quakerism stripped back the ritual basis of religious life to a bare minimum, such a reduction found rich compensation in an approach that treated the Scripture as a living reality that was continually being enacted in the present. Just as the Eucharist took place in the bodies of individual Friends, it was the Quaker conviction that one’s inner life could be reorganized so that one’s thoughts and actions could mirror Biblical events. Take, for instance, the early Quaker treatment of the Cross. Much like the devotion of Medieval contemplatives, early Friends frequently treated the crucifixion, not merely as a historical event (a past ‘redemptive’ act), but a living symbol, which expressed a worshipper’s conflict with, and eventual freedom from, sin. One did not simply read off the crucifixion, one lived it. As Fox expressed this idea in an epistle of 1653:

“. . . the cross overturns the world in the heart. . . . Where the world is standing the Cross is not lived in. But dwelling in the Cross to the world, here the Love of God is shed abroad into the heart, and the Way is opened in the inheritance, which does not fade away.”(3)

The truth of the Bible, when read in the Spirit which gave it forth, can reveal its truth, not just to us, but within us.

(1) Francis Howgill, “Testimony Concerning Edward Burroughs,” Quaker Spirituality: Selected Writings, Douglas Van Steere, ed., Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1984, pp. 9–10.
(2) Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, London: Routledge, 1970. Quoted from a 1996 edition, p. 21.
(3) George Fox, A Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles, Letters and Testimonies of George Fox, Philadelphia: Isaac T. Hopper, 1831, pp. 66–67.

Tagged: bible