IMYM Faith & Practice, 2009, pp 156-157

2.01       Concerning the Holy Scriptures, we do believe that they were given forth by the Holy Spirit of God, through the holy men of God, who (as the Scripture itself declares, 2 Peter 1:21) “spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” We believe they are to be read, believed, and fulfilled (he that fulfills them is Christ) and they are “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:16).

George Fox, 1671

2.02       And the first words that he spoke were as followeth: “He is not a Jew that is one outwards, neither is that circumcision which is outward, but he is a Jew that is one inward, and that is circumcision which is of the heart.” And so he went on and said, How that Christ was the Light of the world and lighteth every man that cometh into the world, and that by this Light they might be gathered to God, etc. And I stood up in my pew, and I wondered at his doctrine, for I had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the Scriptures, and said, “The Scriptures were the prophets’ words and Christ’s and the apostles’ words and what as they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it come from the Lord.” And said, “Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light and has walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?”

 This opened me so that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat me down in my pew again, and cried bitterly. And I cried in my spirit to the Lord. “We are all thieves, we are all thieves, we have taken the Scriptures in words and know nothing of them in ourselves.” … I saw it was the truth and I could not deny it; and I did as the apostle saith, I “received the truth in the love of it.” And it was opened to me so clear that I had never a tittle in my heart against it; but I desired the Lord that I might be kept in it, and then I desired no greater portion.

Margaret Fell, about 1652

2.03       How much the Bible has to teach when taken as a whole, that cannot be done by snippets! There is its range over more than a thousand years giving us the perspective of religion in time, growing and changing, and leading from grace to grace. There is its clear evidence of the variety of religious experience, not the kind of strait jacket that nearly every church, even Friends, have sometimes been tempted to substitute for the diversity in the Bible. To select from it but a single strand is to miss something of its richness. Even the uncongenial and the alien to us is happily abundant in the Bible. The needs of men today are partly to be measured by their difficulty in understanding that with which they differ. At this point the Bible has no little service to render. It requires patient insight into the unfamiliar and provides a discipline for the imagination such as today merely on the political level is a crying need of our time.

 Further, the Bible is a training school in discrimination among alternatives. One of the most sobering facts is that it is not on the whole a peaceful book—I mean a book of peace of mind. The Bible is the deposit of a long series of controversies between rival views of religion. The sobering thing is that in nearly every case the people shown by the Bible to be wrong had every reason to think they were in the right, and like us they did so. Complacent orthodoxy is the recurrent villain in the story from first to last and the hero is the challenger, like Job, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul.

Henry Joel Cadbury, 1953

2.04       The quality of his life and the profound things he said drew me to him, not the myths of his birth and resurrection. His life and teachings commanded my allegiance then, and still do. If being a Christian means accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, then I am probably not a Christian. If being a Christian means accepting his teachings as the norm for my life, striving to live out those terribly difficult precepts, then I am a Christian.

Elizabeth Watson, ‘This I Know Experientially,’ 1977