The Light That Is Given: Prophetic Quaker Faith

By Patricia Dallmann. Resource Publications (an imprint of Wipf and Stock), 2024. 172 pages. $37/hardcover; $22/paperback or eBook.

Patricia Dallmann came to Quakerism hungry for the Truth early Friends had written about so vividly. She was disappointed by what she experienced in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Then she found the New Foundation Fellowship, a small group of Friends gathered around Lewis Benson and others in the mid-twentieth century to deeply study the writings of George Fox and other early Friends. Benson’s work has not only influenced the scholarship of Fox and early Quaker beliefs, but has also inspired participants in the New Foundation Fellowship to live more deeply centered lives. They claim to have rediscovered early Friends’ understanding of Christ and all his “offices.” The limited orthodox belief that the main function of Jesus Christ was to atone for humankind’s sins, reconciling them to God, was found by Fox to be much too narrow.

“To bring meaning and beauty into being through the use of words is what I love to do,” writes Dallmann in the introduction to The Light That Is Given, “and trusting the Truth to guide and monitor my expression is pure delight.” The book is a series of short essays written over about a decade, in which she draws on the writings of early Friends, Scripture, ministry she has offered in meetings for worship, correspondence, and other sources to speak to our times. She offers helpful new understandings of some of the more problematic passages in the Bible. Seeing them through the lens of early Friends’ experience brings into focus both the universality of the Christ as well as the specificity of Jesus—without severing the person of Jesus Christ.

Early Friends understood and used many verses and stories in the Bible as metaphors for their own inward struggles against the evil within them. At the same time they apparently were content to accept the stories as literally true—but they were not reading the Bible for history or geology. Dallmann, who has studied these texts for nearly four decades, offers helpful insights into “walking in the Light,” the story of raising Lazarus from the dead, and part of Revelation, among others.

Dallmann draws on the Bible and early Friends’ writings not to copy them per se, she explains, but as authentic witness to the Truth as testified to across time and culture. To this she adds her own witness to the Truth. God calls each person to come into a conversational relationship with God, and each person thus called can respond in righteousness. Her message is that we are to “know experientially the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent, whom he raised from the dead, the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” This is declared to be the Truth of prophetic Christian faith known by Paul, early Friends, Lewis Benson, and Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, among a host of other witnesses.

As Dallmann found inadequate the human-inspired and human-directed efforts to make Quakerism more palatable to modern Western folks, she invites readers to taste what she has found. The book will not be an easy read for many Friends of any of our branches. But that does not mean it is not an important book to read, ponder, and be open to experiencing its Truth. If we want to reclaim and live into the power of early Friends, or at least get curious to know more about what that was like, Dallmann’s The Light That Is Given is a good place to begin.

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Marty Grundy is a member of Wellesley (Mass.) Meeting, part of New England Yearly Meeting.