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Friends and Scripture |
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The early Friends, and certainly George Fox, were raised on Scripture; for any literate person of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, the Bible was, if any book could be deemed so, required reading! One's education had Scripture at its core. While it is true that knowledge of Scripture per se had no "assigned" value, it was certainly an assumed one! How to explain to a Seeker who Jesus Christ was/is if not through the stories of Scripture including the Old Testament prophesies and their later fulfillment articulated in the Gospel narratives? The early mystics spoke of the experience of "God within" as being a process not of searching but of growing in awareness of something already there; something that, as in John 1, had always been "In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God and the Word was God. . ." Their concept of God/Christ was, however, formed from reading the Gospel and creating an inner "picture" and experience of Jesus that could be meditated on and contacted through the development of the "prayer without ceasing" spoken of by St. Paul - without the reading, no such idea of Christ could have been manifested and no experience of God within could have been named. Additionally, the early Friends called themselves so because Jesus stated that he had called his disciples, "Friends." The simple truth is that Scripture was central to the development of all Christian faith and cannot be less so today. The Good News ( the Gospel ) was written down to be read and passed on. Quaker Christianity was, I believe, a way of making the experience of what Teresa of Avila called the "interior castle" central to the life of the Christian; central but experienced within an assumed didactic knowledge of the person and character of Jesus of Nazareth! George
Fox was an avid student of Scripture as was any professing Christian
of the day; perhaps he only omitted something he felt to go without
saying? In terms of Salvation, we need to make a distinction
between our inner experience of the Light and what the Light
represents, between our mystical reality and our Faith and eternal
Hope. We are told, through Scripture, that our Salvation rests
on our Faith and Belief in Jesus as Lord . . . how would we
know that Truth without the words? Is the reading of Scripture
essential to Salvation as a thing in itself?
Yours in Christ, |