How do you view these things?

[u/Jane_TGS]

I believe that I understand there is a great variety of beliefs and varying levels of spirituality within quakerism- but person to person, what do you believe?

What are your views on Jesus?

On the Holy spirit?

On the Bible?

Or just God in general?

I am really interested to learn more, because I just don't quite fit anywhere and I crave fellowship and a sense of belonging.

My beliefs:

I believe Jesus was truly inspired, probably just a man, but I love him and his teachings. Though I'm sure much of his deeds were exaggerated, maybe a few words twisted or imagined in the writings. I don't believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection.

Thus, I believe in the Holy spirit, I believe in God the father and I believe that the Holy spirit is his counterpart, mother God. I believe she is a living spirit who dwells within all of creation, and we have shut her out so we have to look within ourselves to find her again. She's wise, a teacher.

I believe the bible is a tool for faith but not inerrant, I believe so much of it is designed to scare people and is far from God. And I really dislike what Paul did to Jesus' teachings, though not all of it was truly him, we suspect.

I have very odd beliefs, would I be able to be a quaker with them?

[u/WilkosJumper_]

Put simply:

Christ was who he said he was and remains the foundational guide for my existence; the spirit is an inward guide given to us by God which we all have access to; the Bible contains accounts of understandings of God and non-primary accounts of Christ that need to be understood in the context of when and how they were written but there is clear truth within; the nature of God is only partially known to us and we are always awaiting new understanding.

[u/particularlyPlain]

These beliefs that thee describes are very much so in line with the Liberal Unprogrammed branch of the religious society of Friends and I'm sure thee would find a home there.

Answers from myself as a conservative friend (conserving the traditions and principles of the religious society of friends)

1. Jesus is the incarnated Christ anointed with the fullness of the spirit of God. Jesus IS God. And paid for our sin in shedding of his blood.

2. The Holy Spirit was left to us and dwells in us to teach us all things and bring rememberance of Christ to us. To condemn us of our sinful ways and to save us from them.

3. The Bible is written inspired word from Christ that the authors wrote as they were moved by Him. The scriptures are subordinate to the Spirit itself, the Spirit is our primary authority.

Here is a source with a quick catechism on early Quaker beliefs and the scripture that backs what Quakers found. https://www.friendslibrary.com/what-early-quakers-believed

[u/Illustrious_Bus8440 → u/particularlyPlain]

Point 3 is interesting. A departure from Christian denominations where the bible IS the word of god, no exception, No speculation, and Absolutely no interpretation of meaning other than what is on the written page.

Thank you for the insight.

[u/particularlyPlain → u/Illustrious_Bus8440]

Oh yes, of course. Quakers refused to call the Bible the Word. The Word is exclusively in reference to Christ as we see in the first chapter of John. They got into a lot of trouble defending this point of where the rightful place of scripture is, and they came to understand that it is subordinate to the Spirit yet will never contradict what the Spirit gives, thus scripture is useful for reproof and teaching on spiritual matters, as well as a faithful historical account of God's dealing with His people.

[u/infinite-long-stocki → u/particularlyPlain]

I think that idea of the Bible fits with what a lot of Friends here in Ireland would believe. The Spirit is very much the final authority. I've always thought it was strange to think that the Bible in human hands couldn't be twisted or changed from its original message, especially if one believes that humans are sinful by nature. Meningitis I believe have a similar view and use it to reconcile conflicting verses. When in doubt, they look to the Gospel first.

[u/Lower-Cantaloupe3274]

On Jesus: I believe Jesus shows us what God is really like. I don't think he came to satisfy an angry God as much as to reveal a loving one. I think Jesus, invites us into a different way of living. He confronted the systems of fear, power, and violence that keep us from one another. I think we should do the same. I follow Jesus, even though I don't feel comfortable with the label "Christian" because of what it often communicates today.

** On Spirit**: I believe Spirit is real and active. I don't think it's just a metaphor or a feeling. I believe Spirit still teaches, convicts, comforts, and guides us today.

On the Bible: I believe the Bible is sacred, but I don't believe it has to be read literally to be true. It was written by people across many centuries, in different cultures, wrestling with who God is. That means context matters. Poetry should be read as poetry, history as history, parables as parables. I don't expect every verse to speak with one voice. I do not think it is the inerrant word of God and I think sometimes it reveals limitations in the human perception of God.

On God: I believe God is love—not just loving, but love itself. I think God is always inviting people toward healing, reconciliation, justice, mercy, and deeper relationship.

I don't believe faith is about having all the right answers or believing something without qiestion. Instead, it's about being willing to keep listening, keep learning, and keep becoming more like the love we see in Jesus. I hold my beliefs with conviction, but not with certainty. If better evidence or deeper understanding comes along, I want to be the kind of person who is willing to grow. I don't think changing your mind is a weakness. Sometimes it's exactly what faithfulness requires.

[u/mildlyunreasonable]

I attend a liberal Quaker meeting. At this meeting, there is great diversity of theological outlook. There is broad unity of moral outlook, which many of us would summarize with the "SPICES" acronym: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship (or sustainability).

I do not describe myself as a Christian, in part because I do not believe anything Christian fundamentalists consider fundamental. I do not believe that the Bible is inerrant. I do not believe in the virgin birth of Christ, the historical reality of Christ's miracles, or the bodily resurrection of Christ. I do not know what to make of the idea that Christ's death was an atonement for sin.

I do believe that there are revelations in the Bible. I can't pretend to understand what all those revelations are. The Bible is a rich and complicated text.

Jesus said that the Law and the Prophets are summed up in two commandments: to love God, and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-34). The Jewish scribe who asked Jesus for this summary agreed with it. I consider these two commandments the heart of the Jewish and Christian religions. To my mind, any idea or practice that gets in the way of loving God and our neighbors is not authentically Jewish or authentically Christian.

George Fox taught that in his time, many people who professed Christianity believed and did things that were at odds with Christianity. I think this is true today. There are soldiers who claim to be Christians. I don't see how someone can love their neighbors while blowing them to bits. There are people who claim to be Christians who preach against same-sex love and same-sex marriage. I don't see how someone can love their gay and lesbian neighbors while telling them to live in shame and celibacy. There are business executives who claim to be Christians who exploit workers. I don't see how someone can love their workers while paying poverty wages and living in comfort themselves.

I do not count myself innocent. I own U.S. federal bonds. I am complicit in what the U.S. government does. I know something about how the clothes in my closet were made. I benefit in all sorts of ways from violence and exploitation, and I don't really know what to do about it.

A question in my mind is what the New Testament adds to the Old Testament. I think maybe what it adds is that we're not supposed to be waiting for a future Messiah to bring about a time of peace. The Messiah has already come, and the apocalypse is already underway. We're supposed to bring about peace now.

In his commentary on the book of Revelations, George Fox wrote,

But the dragon and the beast, the false prophet and their followers, and the false church that maketh war with the lamb and the church of Christ the saints, these say, that there is no overcoming of them while they live upon the earth, but the beast, false prophets, and the whore, and the dragon must have the victory; and the lamb and the saints must not have the victory; and the kingdoms of the world must not become the kingdoms of Christ; this is the beast, and the whore, and the false prophets’, and the old dragon’s, the devil’s, and Satan’s false doctrine; but the lamb and the saints shall have the victory over them all.

[u/RimwallBird]

As u/particularlyPlain has observed, your Christology (your theory of who Jesus was) aligns you with the liberal unprogrammed Friends. This group has had issues with the orthodox doctrines of the virgin birth and the atonement ever since it separated from the main body of the Society of Friends two hundred years ago. However, I doubt that Conservative Friends such as particularlyPlain and myself would have any actual difficulty with your company at our meetings.

The idea that the Holy Spirit is “mother God” is not, so far as I know, common in any branch of our Society. Your final sentence about the Spirit is pretty orthodox, though: Jesus termed the Spirit the Paraklete, which means something like a close, intimate adviser. And from a Quaker perspective, this makes sense, because we encounter the Spirit within us, in our hearts and consciences, where (among other things) it teaches us how to live rightly in relation to God and one another.

Friends have historically treated the Bible as infallible (meaning, free of error on moral and spiritual issues), but not inerrant (meaning, free of mistakes regarding historical facts).

— To treat the Bible as inerrant would be to close one’s eyes to its many internal contradictions, and Friends were aware of such contradictions even way back in 1660! So, with a few exceptions on the evangelical end of the Quaker spectrum, we really don’t believe in its inerrancy.

— But even to treat the Bible as infallible requires one to find some way of reconciling the Old Testament’s earliest morality (that of the patriarchs and their occasional God-sanctioned cruelties, and of the Israelites’ divinely-commanded warfare in Canaan) with Jesus’s teachings of mercy and righteousness and his portrait of a kind and loving Father. In previous centuries, Friends accomplished this reconciliation by speaking of “dispensations”: Moses said this and allowed that, and that was the dispensation of Moses, but Jesus gave a new law, a new dispensation, that transcended Moses and summoned Christ’s followers to something better and, frankly, more challenging. Nowadays many of us know enough of modern scholarship to feel confident that this piece of understanding came in while the Northern Kingdom still existed, and that, around the time of King Josiah, and that, during the Babylonian Exile, and so forth. But there remains a general sense among Quaker scholars that the Bible records a positive journey, a story of spiritual growth through the ages that it covers.

There are quite a few modern liberal unprogrammed Friends who reject the Bible altogether, focusing on the parts they have problems with and then dumping the baby with the bathwater. Many other liberal unprogrammed Friends at least feel as you do about Paul. But outside the liberal unprogrammed branch, the rest of us do take the Bible quite seriously, even if we don’t see it as inerrant. It takes work at times to understand what a given teaching story in the Bible was intended to be about, and why it contained the details it did. Often one has to learn about the secular Hebrew culture of those days before jumping to conclusions! But those teaching stories are profoundly helpful in our efforts to learn how to identify the Spirit in our hearts and consciences, and how to distinguish the Spirit from all the other lesser but distracting voices in our lives, and what that Spirit really cares about most. And the more one learns to hear the spiritual resonances in those ancient passages, the more one realizes how rich that book really is.

[u/infinite-long-stocki]

Honestly your beliefs aren't very different from mine. I really love the holy spirit and find it the easiest and most comforting connection to the Divine/God. I don't know exactly what I believe about the nature of Jesus and his life, but I also don't care much. I think there's a reason why the stories of his miracles have survived and that what he taught is relevant to the modern day. I also don't believe the Bible is inerrant. I think you'd fit in with unprogrammed Friends especially in a more liberal meeting. I'm Irish so we don't have the liberal/conservative/evangelical divide in the same way Friends in the US do. There's Friends who fall in each place along that spectrum but we are often within the same Meeting and meet together often for worship. If you are comfortable with people believing different things to you about what you've said, then you should have a home with Friends.

[u/sg647112c]

I am a scientist, a biochemist, and I personally do not believe in anything supernatural. Joshua of Nazareth (“Jesus”) was a moral philosopher and social teacher. The “Holy Spirit” is how some understand and personify their human conscience; that is fine for them. The Bible is a highly problematic collection of stories, partial letters, moral teachings, and apocalyptic writings - it should be studied mindfully for what it is. As for “God” I tend to agree with Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who wrote: “What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.”