Indeed, the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.
(Hebrews 4:12-13, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
The earliest Quakers absolutely saw the word of God as “living and active” in their lifetimes—indeed, they shaped their entire spirituality on the idea that God could (and would) speak to their condition whenever God saw fit to do so.
We still believe in the principle of continued revelation today—but do we believe in it as intensely as they did in the time of Friends like George Fox and James Nayler?
It depends on which Quakers you ask.
We can all too easily fall into the trap of believing that our experience of Quakerism represents conditions throughout the Religious Society of Friends. For example, I’ve spent a quarter-century intermittently attending Quaker meetings in Seattle and New York City, squarely in the tradition of what I sometimes jokingly describe to non-Friends as the “coastal elites” branch of American Quakerism.
Some Friends may find that disrespectful or inappropriate. But the people to whom I’m trying to explain Quakers, starting with the fact that we haven’t actually died out yet, get the point: The liberal, unprogrammed wing of the Society doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the exact contours of anyone’s religious beliefs. Frankly, they often don’t even concern themselves with whether or not you believe in God. They tend to care more about whether you’re living out Quaker testimony—in ways that generally, but not always, fall somewhere on the secular political spectrum between centrist liberalism and progressivism.
I suppose that sounds dismissive, but I genuinely appreciate many aspects of this approach—particularly that it leaves room for my own doubts about God and Jesus and all that. At the same time, I’ve seen folks in business meeting who evince so little concern for Spirit that I sometimes wonder if they have Quakers confused with Ethical Culture. (Ethical Culture, you ask? Imagine a congregation of secular humanists who’ve agreed to speak only about morality, never about God, whatever they might believe in their hearts.) People who seem genuinely nonplussed when Friends try to explain that they’ve brought something to the business meeting as a leading from Spirit, not just a neat idea they had.
But I know that in other meetings, throughout the United States and around the world, the majority of Friends take reports of Spirit-driven motivations quite seriously—not only because they lean into a belief in the existence of God, and not only because they embrace a Christ-centered model of that existence that hews closely to that of the earliest Quakers.

They also specifically lean into the promise of continued revelation.
Whatever the secular, rational, materialist world tells us about the unlikelihood or flat-out impossibility of encounters with the divine, these Friends still believe in the living and active word of God.
(You can, of course, also find Friends like that in the unprogrammed meetings! I don’t want to imply that you can’t. Some of them might not have a strong interest in an explicitly Christian framework, but the living and active word of God, however they envision God? They can totally get behind that.)
I want to zoom in on the influence of secular thinking, which of course spreads beyond our own circumstances in the Religious Society of Friends. My thoughts keep circling back to some recent writings by Jeffrey Kripal, the former head of the religion department at Rice University (and currently the associate dean of humanities). Kripal spends a lot of his time talking about UFOs and near-death experiences and other “fantastic” phenomena, arguing that academics in particular and society in general need to pay serious attention to such things, rather than dismissing them as impossible.
His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly, focuses on the recognition that “impossible” spiritual experiences—including encounters with “otherworldly” or “alien” beings—have material as well as mental components. If you find this hard to believe, consider the physical miracles reported to have occurred to several Catholic saints—up to and including visits from angels and even Jesus himself. The saints didn’t just imagine those events; they experienced them, and sometimes others bore witness. (And maybe add Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible to your reading list!)
To put it in a way Quakers can quickly understand: Something happened to George Fox at the top of Pendle Hill. And something very similar continues to happen to people today—not always as dramatic, certainly not in my experience, but still just as uncanny.
We can try to explain away such events through psychology, or neurochemistry, or some other scientific lens. Or, when events refuse to fit neatly into those boxes, perhaps we should acknowledge them more seriously on their own terms.
Some Friends, I think, already know what that would look like. As for me, I keep doing my best to figure it out.
The Word of G-D IS – yes, IS- living and active in my life!! And I am thankful that I grew up hearing the words of Jesus in my childhood that STILL teach me today! And reading the Psalms: words that still bring me comfort. And it was sitting in unprogrammed Quaker Meetings that I came to understand what it means to “worship G-D in SPIRIT” – in the breath and life and Presence that flows within my very being, and to LISTEN to that ‘still small voice!’ And I will share too, that I’ve learned from Buddhist teachings HOW to sit in stillness and listen. I don’t look for or expect ‘fantastic experiences’ or ‘otherworldly encounters’ – because the Living Presence is HERE/ NOW – where I sit, where I walk, where I-AM : I just have to REMEMBER to open my heart and my inner single-spirit-eye that does not judge, want or worry! Yeah! LIFE is good and all is well, when I do!
That’s a great point, Wanda — Spirit doesn’t always NEED to use the “fantastic experiences” voice, or the “otherworldly encounters” voice, but will speak to each of us about our condition in whatever format is best suited for us to get the message clearly!
Ron,
You speak to my condition, particularly in your description of the secular humanist nature found in the “liberal, unprogrammed wing of the Society.” There are those, like myself, who are both liberal and most comfortable in unprogrammed meetings, but who also know from experience that something beyond ourselves may interact with us, lead, guide, and inform us. In many “liberal, unprogrammed meetings,” it does not feel “safe” to speak aloud of such things.
I understand. I left religion, especially Christianity, for more than thirty years. I did not want to hear the words “God” or “Christ” because my only experience with these words was people using them try to to “save” me. Yet in all those years unchurched, I was never far from the Spirit/the Light/God (“the word is not the thing”) ~ something greater and beyond ~ which consistently showed up in my life experience until I could no longer NOT believe in it. Eventually I submitted to an understanding of what, for simplicity’s sake I call “God,” as a loving, creative Presence, less concerned with what we call it or whether we “believe” in it or not, than with how we learn, how we grow, and how we act with / from love.