Salvation begins when we realize that we are poor, helpless people and seek God’s help to obey Him, both in setting aside what we should not do and in doing what we should. George Fox’s coming out of his spiritual wilderness and into God’s kingdom meant giving himself up to the Lord in a whole series of acts—leaving evil company, taking leave of his relations, and setting aside outward supports to rely wholly on the Lord. Fox’s moment of hope flashes forth when he faces his own helplessness: “When all my hopes…in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy” (Journal, p. 11). For Fox, Scripture could not do what our present Lord did, for living in the presence of, and at the direction of, our Lord is the work of salvation. Fox observes:
Though I read the Scriptures that spoke of Christ and of God, yet I knew Him not but [except] by revelation, as he who hath the key did open1, and as the Father of life drew me to his Son by his spirit. And then the Lord did gently lead me along, and did let me see his love, which was endless and eternal, and surpasseth the knowledge that men have in the natural [human] state, or can get by history or books; and that love let me see myself as I was without him (Journal, p. 11-12).
In addition to testifying that an individual’s personal salvation experience happens through Christ, early Friends understanding that Christ enlightens all people, and thereby leads into salvation even people who do not have access to the Christian Scriptures. Of course, early Friends did have the Christian Scriptures, but although they used them extensively, early Friends did not claim the Scriptures to be “essential” to spiritual salvation. God’s power and love are the essentials of salvation; where there is no Bible, God’s power can still reach and save men and women. The Old and New Testaments are living witnesses to the fact: God’s power was already working to direct men and women to save them, before the Testaments existed. Today, too many people dismiss the Scriptures by drawing the unexamined conclusion that “inessential” means “useless,” “of little value,” and “can be readily skipped and ignored.” They take what they thing is the shortcut, which is actually the very long, circuitous, difficult, and dangerous route.
Terry Wallace explores several dangers of too casually asserting the “inessential” nature of the Scriptures for being saved from the World.2
First, we can too easily become centered on our individual experiences with Scripture and our own experiences of being drawn to Christ Jesus. While our witness to our own rescue from the World can be useful to a point, it can also lead us inadvertently to equate our experience as the common or even universal experience of men and women today. Yes, some do find that early on in their lives they’re turned off by Scripture or have no significant acquaintance with it and yet Christ Jesus leads them along until they are finally open to Him, engaged with Him, and have passages of the Bible opened to them by His Spirit. Yet many others have grown up with an appreciation and love of the Scriptures. The use of a word like “inessential” to describe the Scriptures will simply move many of those people to reject what we have to say, because they are aware of how significant (this is not to say “sufficient”) the Scriptures have been in their own salvation and sanctification.
Second, we must be sensitive to how others than ourselves may read and respond to the words we are using. We live in a time in which the World denigrates Scripture, ridicules it, and seeks to dismiss it. After all, its words from God stand too often as a judgment against the World’s evil actions, destructive politics, lack of responsibility and self-control. If we say that the Scriptures are “inessential” to salvation, the ready response of fallen human nature is “Good! I don’t have to deal with them….”
[Third, we] must be most careful in the words we use, because we should not imply that the gospels and the words of our Lord are “inessential”; that our Lord’s life, crucifixion, sacrifice, and resurrection are “not required”; that, if such knowledge is “not required” and “insufficient” for our salvation, we may ignore them completely and consign them to the ash heap of history. Certainly these are the easy spins the World can put on our words, spins that point out where our words might lead others.
Fourth,… [in] our haste to point to what is essential to salvation, we risk inadvertently throwing into the negative much of what the Lord has given us to assist us in finding and walking on the straight and narrow Way….
Rather than an inessential impediment, the Scriptures are a God-given gift to help us seek and find Him, but they are not absolutely essential to salvation.
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1 A Biblical allusion to Revelation 3:7
2 From Terry H.S. Wallace, “Scripture and Salvation: To those who say that the Scriptures are inessential to our salvation” {Accessible at crossroadsquakers.org/reflections}
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From Traditional Quaker Christianity, Assembled and Edited by Terry H. Wallace, Susan S. Smith, John C. Smith, and Arthur Berk, (Ohio Yearly Meeting, Barnsville OH: 2014) Section 2.B, pp. 31-34.
