Give Living Word in Every Voice: Biblical Translation systems as a Quaker Invitation

A Reading Transformed

A reading of the Gospels was recently transformed for the writer when I picked up the International Children’s Bible (ICB). Its simplicity opened a view to living truth and many new versions. It cut out layers of theologic jargon. Words of Jesus became immediate and impossible to ignore.

Later, this led me to FGC versions of Quaker context ministry. Matthew 5: “They are blessed who realize their spiritual poverty, for the kindom of heaven belongs to them” (5:3). This named a spiritual humility required to truly listen. “They are blessed who hunger and thirst after justice” (5:6)—not passive longing but urgent craving for things made right. “They are blessed who work for peace” (5:9)—legitimized action as a form of prayer.

What happened was we can discover Simplicity in our ways of reading. Childrens ministry isI not a dumbing down. It was a clearing away. ICB, celebrates “the first Bible translation just for kids.” Thought prepared for children its simplicity speaks with unexpected power of anyone weary of theological abstraction. When the words of Jesus become direct, they close the distance between readers and text. Similarly, in the FGC linkages are openings to find us confronted not with doctrine but felt living invitations.

The Quaker Inheritance of Translation

Friends have long known that how we translate shapes what we can hear. The Quaker Bible of 1764—Anthony Purver’s A new and literal translation of all the books of the Old and New Testament—was a monumental labor of thirty years by a self-taught translator who worked single-handedly. It was not widely successful, but it testified to an essential part of our tradition: the conviction that Scripture belongs to the people, not to scholars alone.

That conviction continues. Quaker translator Sarah Ruden reminds us, “the authors of the Bible were hilarious, they really enjoyed composing these texts, you can tell. They had gorgeous nuance and expressiveness”. Much nuance is lost in translation. “When you have in Greek or in Hebrew, two really distinct words with distinct tones and functions, you might find them translated in the exact same way in English, so that the flavor of that text is just not there”.

The Quaker Universalist Fellowship has carried this work forward. Joanne Spears prepared Friendly Bible Translations “from Hebrew and Greek, as parts of a larger translation plan for the Bible as a whole,” translations “sensitive to accuracy in the use of gendered pronouns” and “structured to comply with modern standards of simple sentence structure and syntax”. These translations were used in First Day Schools and Bible Half Hour presentations at Friends General Conference Gatherings.

Early Friends understood the Bible not as a rulebook but as a tool for encounter. As the Bible Odyssey project explains, “For Friends, the holy book was a tool that enhanced the revelations they gained through looking inward. It was not a guidebook for life”. George Fox himself insisted that Quakers “do not offer what we say as a ‘rule or a form to walk by'”. The Bible, rightly read, opens us to the Spirit rather than closing us into dogma.

An Inclusive Table

Quaker inheritance in the USA matters more now. We include nontheists, agnostics, humanists, and those who “describe their experiences in ways that avoid the use of the word God entirely”. Friends may feminist language to describe their Divine. We may bring wisdom of diverse faith communities —Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Indigenous, secular humanist. Still others are simply seekers, uncertain what they believe but hungry for truth.

What would it mean to read Scripture together in a way that radically welcomes and honors our diversity? Friends General Conference offers a method of adapting Lectio Divina for Quaker use: “read Scripture in the same Spirit that inspired its writers. When we become spiritually open, we are more able to hear how the Spirit might speak to us today”. This moves through silence, reading, reflection, and the writing of queries—open questions that “help you notice how God may be speaking to you through the text”. It does not require a particular theology. It requires only openness.

Quaker Universalist Friendlies offer similar resources: “practical procedures for productive Bible study, Faith and Practice Study, and universal scripture study in a manner consistent with Friends’ testimonies”. These are simple downloadable memes for use in Meetings of any theological complexion.

An Arising Tech Challenge and Query for Our Society

Using websites like Bible Gateway is a great asset for comparing different biblical traditions and translations. But Bible Gateway aggregates the products of publishing houses and academic committees. It does not gather the distinctive voices of Friends—the Friendly Bible Translations, the Quaker Bible of Anthony Purver, the inclusive-language experiments, the queries and reflections that Friends have developed over centuries of reading together.

How would access to the many Friends’ translations and traditional uses of verses be an asset to our society if it was compiled and accessible in a similar online format?

Imagine a digital Quaker lectionary: a searchable archive where a seeker could compare how Purver rendered a passage alongside Joanne Spears’s Friendly translation, alongside the ICB, alongside the queries that Friends have written in response to that text. Imagine a resource where a non-theist could engage the ethical core of the Sermon on the Mount without being required to affirm its metaphysical claims. Imagine a tool where a Muslim or Jewish friend could bring their own scriptural wisdom into conversation with Quaker readings, not as an outsider but as a fellow traveler.

This is not a distant dream. The pieces exist. The Quaker Bible is in the public domain. The Friendly Bible Translations are freely available. The Lectio Divina query method is documented. What is missing is a connective architecture—the online home where these and many other resources can be found, compared, and used together.

A Living Word

The simplicity International Children’s Bible taught me is something that years of theological reading had obscured: that words of Christ Jesus are not primarily propositions to be believed but invitations to be lived. “Blessed are those who work for peace.” Peace testimony’s not a doctrine. It is a call.

Friends have always known this; that  Spirit speaks through Scripture when Scripture is read into our living Spirit. We have found that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life. We have known that our Inner Light is not confined to pages of any book, but that written word can become a doorway to that Light when we approach our experience in humility, openness, expectation.

Let us read together. Let us translate together. Let us build New tools to allow every voice in our diverse Society—theist and nontheist, Christian and interfaith, scholar and child—to encounter a living Word in Way that Opens to speaks most truly to their core. Our table is wide. This universal Light is one. The Word (and languages that we are gifted to interpret it) is alive.

Query for South Jersey Friends: How might Meetings create spaces sharing Scripture reading honoring diverse spiritual languages spoken among us?

Spreading the Fire: Quaker Messages of Radical Acceptance and Hope

We live in fractured times. Upwelling fear of Armageddon, AI domination, endless war, it is too easy to toss our own historical leaders into the pyre of frustrations, instability and angst. However, as anyone who is suffering from physical and emotional sickness that often accompanies the realization that our hard work will not be finished in our lifetimes — we can be peoples of diunital thinking who see the arc of history in all our differences between experiences of incompleteness and hope. We gather even as we have to accept conditions and dissonances which are headwinds to how we seek changes.

Quakers know this. We see prophetic voices suffer and die. Erstwhile gifts to integrity in a Society often exist in tiniest numbers, smallest voices who call us to risk moral clarity.

Consider a notion some offer; that Obama and Trump are “two wings of the same bird.” This may actually prove useful to Friends. Both have taken on systems audaciously as divergent to the American dream, they have conducted war and realized the limitations of executive power. . However, like all of us, their humanity, and ours, may be tied to a world in which we learn to communicate. How do we listen deeply to our dreams with a care we can only organize for seven generations before and seven generations hence?

And, they are clearly not from the same seed stocks. The Obama family’s experience is to experience race, racism, and structural and systemic oppression management as inheritors of the Black experience in the United States. Obama ran for President. Hs family did not.  War is not the answer at home or abroad, yet war is the conduct of the Executives. Trump’s experience is maintenance of an overt, white supremacy structure that immigrants sign off for when they accept a racial social contract of whiteness.

Charles Mills, to the author a genius Jamaican philosopher, develops this tension as a racial social contract (like Hobbes). Dr. Harold Weaver with theBlackQuaker Project.org helped to identify how ( in what ways) a reconstruction of race and retrospective justice would need to also be a restructuring by antiviolence in a deconstructing of racism.

Mills wrote in The Racial Contract: “The Racial Contract is that set of formal or informal agreements… between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated… as ‘white,’… to categorize the remaining subset of humans as ‘nonwhite’ and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities…. [T]he general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them”.

All of the United States presidents, including the first three-fourths, which came from Virginia, begin from the experience and bias of their construction of racial hierarchy. All institutions governed so forth by government of laws based on race; conduct racist, performative, maintenance of said system. We are no different. Thusness is living.

However, in spite of a divine seed of truth, which all humanity has access to, this is where history has brought us. Learning from history will be to identify truth, enact the reformation that leads to reconstruction and enable the social body to receive it as a gift in the system with its purpose and basis derived from the testimony of equality. Without dual-testimony of integrity and equality. Without peace-community. Without sustainable pathways to influence seats of truth, no president in the United States will ever succeed.

Dr. Harold Weaver of the BlackQuaker Project asks Friends to look at societal problems through new lenses: confronting systemic violence with antiviolence; acknowledging institutional and systemic racism, rather than merely individual racism; considering a retrospective justice program that compensates for and helps remove the historical inequities related to the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, and their legacies. Weaver admonishes us: “Just as a doctor must treat the root causes of an illness, not merely symptoms, so must we act similarly as social, progressive, analytical activists. We must be ‘antiviolent,’ not merely ‘nonviolent’”. How does that truth measure for you?

“Racism is an inclusive term. There are basically two types of racism: individual racism and institutional racism. Racism equals power plus prejudice, power plus discrimination. A person cannot practice racism unless that person has power to implement his or her prejudice — the prejudice being white supremacy, an attitude of white superiority”.

Early Quakers accepted spiritual equality, at least in theory, periodically reaffirming Fox and Barclay’s insistence that God “is no Respecter of Persons,” that all humans are created of one blood and one family, that grace is available to all, that God is at liberty to call whomever God chooses to serve in ministry. Fox declared: “Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one”. The Bible affirms it in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them”. In Acts 17:26, we read that God “made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.” Divine presence is living witness.

Friends, the equality testimony means radical acceptance and Love even in the face of loss and dissatisfaction. It means seeing that of God in the Obama who inherited the weight of the Black experience and in the Trump/Obama who inherit architectures of white supremacy — not to excuse, but to understand, to heal, to transform. It means recognizing that both are caught in the same Racial Contract, as are we all, and that liberation requires us to dismantle that contract together.

Isaac Penington, contemporary of Fox, spoke of “the seed which God sows in the heart.” He urged Friends to set aside their own egos, “sink down” to the seed, to “let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee”. Our work, radical acceptance, sinking down beneath noisiness of parties in fury, before fear of Armageddon, between and betwixt our exhaustion of incomplete missions. Are we allowing the Seed to grow?

Equality may be our earliest revolutionary social testimony. It lives in Jesus: Equality lives “in all worlds and beings. It does not imply equality of ability or economic resources. It is based on our experience and the moral concept that each person is due equal respect. This has led to “a conscious effort to eliminate all words and behavior that arise from distinctions in class, race, nationality, age, creed, gender, sexual identity, or social status”.

Friends, we are called to be a people of hope. Not a naive and senseless hope would ignores salted wounds of history; we offer hopes rooted in being convicted. Conviction that an inner Light in every person — Obama and Trump, immigrant and native, Black and white, Friend and stranger — is that same Light that spoke the worlds into being. This hope does not deny present reality of systemic racism, an ongoing violence of war, or, unfinished work of justice. It embraces our lived reality. It transforms through Love.

Let’s share words of our peace testimony: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever; this is our testimony to the whole world. The Spirit of Christ by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil, and again to move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the Kingdom of Christ nor for the Kingdoms of this world. Therefore, we cannot learn war any more”.

Let us hold forth and proclaim, as our ancestors did, visions of community; and, how Meeting community provides a framework to lovingly care for those in need and forms a basis from which we can test, find support for, and exercise leadings of the spirit.

As we F/friends seek to live into radical acceptance, let’s hold these Queries before us:

• How do I answer that of God in politics, history, or identity difficult to embrace?
• In what ways does Mills’ Racial Contract shape our understanding of justice, safety, and belonging even if we have not known it to exist in consciousness?
• What does retrospective justice require of me — not as charity, but as reparation?
• How can I be antiviolent, not merely nonviolent, in words, actions, and witness?
• Where is a Seed of Truth growing in soil of my heart. How am I tending it?
• What do I do to care for seven generations before and seven generations hence?

This work, a clear Way Open to us, cannot be finished in 7 lifetimes. But, isn’t that also a calling into an examination of the nature of faithfulness? We may not be called to finish this; we are called to be faithful to an inner Light. We know how our guide plants Seeds emerging within us. We seek a Love that binds creation one to another. In faithfulness, there is hope. In hope, newness, peace. In peace, there is our Beloved Community. It is already a breakthrough. To profit from this interbeing is experience, experimental in us. 

Now, let’s walk cheerfully over this entire world, answering that of God in everyone.