Write It in Pencil

Some of us like to write comments and notes in the margins of the books we read, and that’s a good practice for Bible study too. For Bible study I recommend marking the book in pencil. You never know when you might change your mind about what you once held as dogma.

Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography relates how in the 1740s, when French and Spanish privateers were raiding towns along the Delaware River, even threatening Philadelphia, the Quakers, who controlled the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, refused to fund arms or a militia to defend themselves. They were pacifists. It’s what they were. They controlled the Assembly, and this most important doctrine had to be defended more than the people of Philadelphia. At least that was their official position.

The Assembly did, however, appropriate funds “for the King’s use” while not inquiring how such funds were to be used. Sometimes when they were considering appropriations for defense, Quaker members simply didn’t show up for the vote, assuring passage.

Another time the assembly approved funds for purchase of “bread, flour, wheat, and other grains”, the governor interpreting the term “other grains” as “gun powder”.

Franklin then describes a conversation he had with a Dunker, a descriptive nickname that described the mode of baptism of that denomination. When Franklin asked why they refused to commit to writing their set of beliefs, the Dunker replied, “When we were first drawn together as a society, it pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once assumed truths, to be errors; and that others which we once esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we have arrived at the end of our progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.”

Said Franklin, “This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth.”

In reflecting on my own spiritual journey I am amazed how ideas I once accepted as undeniable truths of scripture I now erase from my Bible’s margin and replace with a more mature understanding. Thankfully, my personal insights were all written in pencil. I suppose that’s what Peter meant when he said to grow in grace and knowledge.

Lenny Cacchio
www.kccog.org