Bible Reading

My response to a post on /r/Quakers about the importance of the Bible. tl;dr: It’s a foundational text for Quakerism.

I’m a liberal un-programmed Quaker who has become very interested in the Bible after a decade, or so, of being involved with Quakers.

I grew up in Canada in an agnostic household. We did Christmas and Easter as cultural, not religious things. In highschool, I took a worlds religions class and got very interested in Taoism. In university, I studied philosophy and got drawn in to Buddhism. Later, looking for a Buddhist community, I visited Quaker House and realized: “Oh, this is my religion for life. This is the thing I’ve been looking for all these years.”

Once I got in to Quakerism, I went on a deep dive of reading. I turned over the whole library. The modern North Americans: Douglas Steere, Rufus Jones, John Yungblut, Thomas Kelly. They all mostly made sense in some kind of liberal-mystical-philosophical-university way. When I dug deeper and went back to the earlier sources: Margaret Fell, Mary Dyer, James Nayler, Isaac Penninton, and George Fox… I hit a wall. I literally could not make sense of what they were saying. Their perspective was SO different. Are the Samaritans the good guys? What’s up with the Pharisees? All this stuff about the bruising the serpent’s head? Is “the fear of the Lord” a bad thing? A good thing? Huh? And then I was like: “Oh dang. I need to read the Bible.”

This is all to say: the Bible matters to (contemporary liberal unprogrammed) Quakers because we can’t understand our roots without it. If you dig down in deep enough in to the literature, you hit a level where none of it makes any sense without Biblical literacy.

I don’t have especially strong feelings about the Bible. It’s a holy book among holy books. It is no more sacred or true than any other book. And yet, I read it every day to make sense of Quakerism.

Published: Nov 30, 2023 @ 18:39.
Last Modified: Apr 15, 2026 @ 22:25.

Bible Reading

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