reason – Salvaged Faith

UMC 101: Our Theological Task and the Quadrilateral

Posted on January 30, 2022Leave a comment

Text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Over the last several weeks, we have been exploring what it means to be United Methodist.

We’ve talked about some of the core beliefs we affirm, how we came to get our distinctive United Methodist flavor by emphasizing faith and love in action, and both standards for teaching those core beliefs… but also the love, grace, and humility that leaves room for opinions and difference around practices and positions.

After all, as our scripture for this morning reminds us – we could have all the right answers, and do all the right things but if we don’t love – we are nothing.

As long as we seek to love God and love our neighbors, we can join hands for God’s work in the world.

Does that mean that anything else goes?

Absolutely not.

I shared with you last week from a portion of John Wesley’s sermon, “Catholic Spirit,” in which we talked about those core essential things and how love gives us guidance for how we relate to others who disagree.

But he is very clear at the end of that sermon that holding such a charitable spirit that leaves room for others does not mean you are indifferent to other’s opinions.

And, it doesn’t mean that you are unclear in your own thoughts, practices, or community, “driven to and fro, and tossed about with every wind of doctrine.” (“Catholic Spirit”, John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology, p. 307)

In fact, he says if you have a sort of “muddy understanding” with “no settled, consistent principles” that “you have quite missed your way…” (p. 308).

In other words, do your work.

Take responsibility for what you believe, how you act, and the community to which you belong.

Don’t simply parrot what someone before you has taught, or change your perspective when a new pastor comes along.

You are responsible for diving into the gospel of Jesus and figuring out what impact it has on the world.

This is the work of theological reflection.

A theologian is anyone who studies God.

Now, I am a theologian. I have a Masters of Divinity from Vanderbilt University and spent three and a half years studying scripture and ancient texts and history and the thoughts of other theologians.

But YOU are a theologian, too.

A theologian is anyone who “reflects upon God’s gracious action in our lives.” (BoD, p.80)

And United Methodists believe that every single one of us is called to this work.

Every generation has to wrestle with what it means to be faithful in a changing world.

We have to figure out how to communicate the good news of our faith to people who are hurting and lost and broken.

But we also need to figure out how to see the problems and challenges around us like the climate crisis or sexual abuse or global migration and ask what our response should be.

And to do that, we need more than just the basic teachings of our faith, or doctrines.

Doctrine is important, because it helps us remember the core of Christian truth in ever-changing contexts… But our task is to test, renew, elaborate, and apply those teachings in the world.

You see, we take the love of Christ for this world and we figure out how to share and live out that love right here and right now.

There are a couple of important things that the United Methodist Church believes are important to remember, and I think that we can think about these through the description of love that the Apostle Paul offers to us in his letter to the Corinthians.

First, as we do this, we should be willing both take apart and put together our understanding of faith in love. In other words, don’t strut around with a big head forcing your beliefs on others, but ask if this position is still true, credible, and based in love. At the same time, we should always be looking forward for where new truth is flowering and helping to creatively put together a message for tomorrow.

Second, the work of theology is both your responsibility and our responsibility. It is about “plain truth for plain people” – every Christian… young and old alike, is called to grow and learn about how to follow God into this world. But we also believe that it is in our conversation and sharing and work together that all of our individual reflections are strengthened. This is why we come together at our church conferences, and annual, jurisdictional and general conferences to make decisions. Like a love that isn’t always “me first” and that cares for others more than self, we believe everyone has something to contribute and we should be aware of how everyone is impacted.

Third, this work of reflection has to be grounded in what God is doing in the world. We believe that God so loved this world that Jesus came to make a home among us… in a particular time and in a particular place. And we believe that God is still present in our time and in all of our diverse places. Paul tells us that love should not be envious or boastful… and I think about how important it is for us not to force a practice from one culture onto another, or for a culture to give up their own practices to be more like another.

Last year, some of us read together, “I’m Black. I’m Christian. I’m Methodist.” and were surprised by stories of how many of these black leaders felt as if they had to become more white in order to be faithful and found great strength as they reclaimed their own identity.

Finally, if we are going to connect the love of Jesus with the world, then we have to focus on what we do. We can say all the right words and have endless conversations, but as Paul would say, if we aren’t dealing with love – then we are just noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. We know what is true when we see the impact in real lives. United Methodists are all about practical divinity.

The Apostle Paul describes how our understanding of the truth changes through time as we mature and grow and put aside childish thoughts. We are continually doing our best to comprehend – knowing that today we can capture the fullness of God’s truth and love only partially.

But still we try. And we keep trying to do our best in faith, in hope, and in love.

As Paul wrote to the Philippians, we can focus our thoughts on what is excellent and true, holy and just. We can practice what we have learned and received from our mentors and teachers in the faith.

Our job as a theologian is simple: What can I say and do that is faithful to scripture as it has been passed down through tradition, and that makes sense in light of human experience and reason? (Book of Discipline, p.81)

Chalkboard with a drawing of four quadrants for scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. — From https://joshuanhook.com/2018/10/24/how-the-wesleyan-quadrilateral-helps-us-understand-god/

These four theological tools we refer to as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

All four are important lenses to help us see how God is working and moving in the world.

As we explored a few years ago with our Bible 101 series, scripture is at the center and is the foundation of all that we do so, we had better be reading and pouring over scripture in our lives.

But… and… scripture itself is always being interpreted.

First, scripture is interpreted by other scripture.

You cannot take a single verse out of context but need to look at the fullness of the entire passage and story.

And, we come to see as we read the bible that there is an overarching story within the scripture itself… a story of creation and redemption, a story of mistakes and forgiveness, a story that ends in the restoration of all things.

In the gospels, religious leaders ask Jesus to interpret scripture for them and his response gives us a general guide for our own interpretation: how does this verse lead us to love God and love our neighbor? (Matthew 22:34-40)

Next, we have the witness of how people have interpreted that scripture through time. Tradition shows us the “consensus of faith” that has grown out of a particular community’s experience. (p. 85-86)

Not all contexts and communities are the same. The experience of Czech immigrants in the Midwest was very different than that of African slaves in the Deep South. Each community passed on the gospel and created practices of faith that show us how the scripture made sense in their lives. We also connect tradition with the theology of previous generations that have been passed down to us in creeds and writings.

Tradition shows us how communities have understood God, but we also each have or own unique experiences.

Who you are and what you have been through is always with you when you open up the Bible – tragedies and joys, gender, economic reality…

It is why you can read the same passage of scripture repeatedly over time and discover something new with each reading.

But Wesley also talked about how God continues to be revealed through our experiences and the fruit that we are bearing in the world.

One example is how he relented to license women as preachers in the circuits after he saw the call of God bearing fruit in their ministry.

Our final tool for theology is reason. As the Book of Proverbs reminds us, each person is called to “turn your ear toward wisdom, and stretch your mind toward understanding. Call out for insight, and cry aloud for understanding. ” (Proverbs 2:2-3)

We believe God reveals truth in many places, not only in scripture, and that we should pursue such knowledge and truth with our whole selves. Science, philosophy, nature: these are all places that help us to gain understanding and sometimes reveal even deeper truths within the written word.

Why does this matter?

Because as our Book of Discipline reminds us, every day, there are new concerns “that challenge our proclamation of God’s reign over all of human existence.” (p. 88)

A black man is murdered in public on a city street by a law enforcement officer.

A derecho destroys the infrastructure of a community.

A virus takes the lives of 8,501 of our neighbors in this state.

Where is God’s justice, protection, and healing?

What does it mean to love our neighbor in light of these realities?

That is the work of theology… seeking an authentic Christian response to these realities so that the healing and redeeming love of God might be present in our words and deeds. (p.89)

As we affirm in the Book of Discipline:

“United Methodists as a diverse people continue to strive for consensus in understanding the gospel… while exercising patience and forbearance with one another. Such patience stems neither from indifference toward truth nor from an indulgent tolerance of error but from an awareness that we know only in part and that none of us is able to search the mysteries of God except by the Spirit of God. We proceed with our theological task, trusting that the Spirit will grant us wisdom…”
Book of Discipline p. 89

May it be so. Amen.

Reflections a week after General Conference… #umcgc

Posted on May 29, 20162 Comments

As Psalm 146 reminds us: human leaders and human institutions aren’t everything. They won’t save us.

We are finite and we make mistakes.

Only God is forever faithful.

Yet, any denomination or tradition comes from God’s followers attempting to live out their faith and their discipleship together.

Fully knowing that we are not perfect, we nevertheless seek to do the best we can to respond to God’s movement and calling in the world in a given place and time… based on where our forefathers and mothers have led us and based on where the Holy Spirit is calling us anew.

That is what we tried to do at General Conference. Over 10 days, we attempted to be faithful to God’s leading and yet we are not God and our plans are just that… ours.

Over these last two weeks, we very nearly split our denomination into pieces. Our differences are stark. Our life together is marred by conflict as much as collaboration. And I’m going to be honest… I’m not quite sure yet what comes after General Conference.

We asked our Bishops to help us find a way forward out of our predicament and that way forward is still vague.

So rather than making predictions, maybe it would be better to share who we are and how we got to this place. I think fundamentally, there are three key things to keep in mind as we wrestle with what it means to be the United Methodist Church.

First, I think it is helpful to understand that the United Methodist Church is a global church.

We are the only protestant denomination that is worldwide. Our churches span from Manila to Legos to Moscow. And, while the church in the U.S. has been declining, the global church is growing exponentially.

In the last ten years, the U.S. has declined in membership by 11%, while the church in the Africa Central Conference grew by 329%!

42% of United Methodists now live outside of the United States.

One of the most important things we do at General Conference is listen to one another, try to understand more about our contexts, and find ways to help ministry flourish all across the world. And that is not an easy task.

But because of our global partnerships, we can do amazing things like Imagine No Malaria and our United Methodist Committee on Relief is the first to arrive on the scene of disaster and the last to leave.

And we can learn from one another.

I remember listening to a committee four years ago debate the process for closing a church. A woman from Liberia stood and said that she was extremely confused as to what we were talking about… not because of a language barrier, but because she simply couldn’t comprehend why we would close a church. The church in the United States needs that passion for the gospel that is growing so fast we can’t build enough churches!

As we continue to debate the inclusion of LGBTQI people in the life of our church, I also heard clearly from our African delegates, like my new friend Pastor Adilson, that their contextual struggle is not with homosexuality, but with polygamy. Rather than asking if same-gender marriages are allowed in their churches, they are struggling with how to welcome and include a man who has four or five wives. Does the church ask him to divorce all but one? What happens to the other wives? Or the children? How is the entire family welcomed?

We are also learning to reframe our conversations to be more global than United States centric. One of our debates this year was about a resolution for health care that referenced the Affordable Care Act. When 42% of United Methodists live outside the United States, these kinds of statements need to be broader in scope. It was hard to be talking about a system that only applies to some of us, when so many people in that room had little to no access to care, much less health insurance.

One of the realities of being a global church is that multiple languages play a role in all of our meetings. While we have four official languages as the UMC: French, English, Portuguese and Kiswahili, we had simultaneous interpretation in Russian, German, Spanish, and many others.

An ever present reality is also that in many of these global areas Christianity arrived along with colonialism. “Most Africans teach their children that Jesus and other biblical characters are muzungu (Kiswahili, “white”) notwithstanding the fact that Jesus would likely have been dark complexioned because he was born in the Middle East.” (http://unitedmethodistreporter.com/2016/05/11/are-africans-grown-a-response-to-bishop-minerva-carcano-dealing-with-wounded-united-methodist-church/)

We, as a church, have tried to combat colonial impulses by allowing the conferences outside of the United States to adapt our Book of Discipline to their local contexts. However, that means that 42% of the church doesn’t have to abide by all of what we vote on… and that we need their votes in order to make changes to the rules only we follow.

Second, it is helpful to know how we make decisions.

The roots of our church lie in England, but we were born during the American Revolution. And our polity, our government is modeled upon our national government.

Just like the government, we have a judicial branch and a Judicial Council.

Our Bishops function as the executive branch.

And the General Conference itself is the legislative branch… just like Congress.

864 of us were elected as voting delegates to represent the worldwide church and we were half clergy and half laity.

The General Conference is the only body that can speak for the United Methodist Church and everyday people like you and me are the ones who make the decisions.

So those of us gathered there had the responsibility of pouring over legislation and making changes to our structure, rules, and positions… four years worth of work condensed into two weeks.

I believe that to discern the Holy Spirit, one has to be humble, empty yourself, and allow other voices to influence you.

The first week of conference is largely spent in legislative committees and in those smaller groups some of that discernment could happen. I had truly transformative experiences in my committee and the work felt good and holy.

But all of those relationships and trust falls apart when an item comes to the floor of the plenary session. There, the decision making process moves away from consensus building and instead creates winners and losers.

On the FIRST DAY of conference… we spent hours debating the rules that we would use in order to debate. We used and we abused Robert’s Rules of Order.

And when we were presented with an alternative decision making process (what you might have heard as Rule 44) to use for particularly contentious issues, we debated it for two days and then voted not to use it.

But we did accomplish some things. We approved the creation of a new hymnal for our church. We strengthened our process for the affirmation of clergy. We created new pathways for licensed local pastors. And we added gender, age, ability, and marital status to the protected classes in our constitution.

Third, it is helpful to understand that while it appears that our conflict as a church is centered around the inclusion of LGBTQI people, our division is deeper.

Our church is a very broad tent and the likes of both Dick Cheney and Hilary Clinton call our church home. This is one of the things that I love about the United Methodist Church.

But I think what came into focus for many of us at this General Conference is that our disagreements may no longer be sustainable.

Perhaps fundamental to our conflict is how we interpret scripture. For some, scripture is absolutely central and the only tradition, reason, or experience that matters is that which scripture can confirm. For others, scripture is absolutely central and yet we have to interpret scripture through the lenses of our tradition, reason, and experience. That shift might seem subtle, but it can make the difference between allowing women to be ordained or not in our church.

We also fundamentally disagree about whether we are a church of personal piety or social holiness. Of course, John Wesley thought it had to be both… but where we place our emphasis determines how we engage with the world and the moral stances we choose to take.

All of this difference is floating beneath the surface of any conversation about how LGBTQI people are included or not in the life of our church.

If you asked me a month ago what was going to happen at General Conference I would have been full of optimism. You see, I’m a bridge builder.

And so I went to General Conference with all kinds of hopes about how we would make decisions to benefit the church all over the world and how in spite of our differences we would find a way forward together.

I don’t think it was naïve to believe this going in.

But in the midst of our gathering in Portland, something shifted. Something shifted in my own life and in the hearts and minds of countless other delegates.

We realized that we could no longer keep doing what we have been doing together as a denomination.

We realized that our differences were tearing us apart.

And in Portland, we made a very conscious choice to avoid the end of our denomination through our votes. We voted to seek unity, to try to find a way to remain together for the sake of God’s mission in the world. But there is a phrase we kept using that I think is important. Unity does not mean unanimity.

As we look at our differences, particularly in the three areas I named, for many, we avoided the end, but are only delaying the inevitable.

Maybe our global structure is unsustainable.

Maybe our decision making process has to change.

Maybe our fundamental disagreements will only continue to allow conflict to rule our work together and we would be better to split amicably and allow each part of our church to be the most faithful it can be to God’s will.

The next four years as United Methodists will not be easy. We have asked the Bishops of our church to lead us in discerning a way forward and that might mean that in the next two or three years we will call a special gathering to decide how to move forward… on what it means to be a global church, on our structure, on our polity, and on our stances regarding human sexuality.

I have about 45 more minutes of things I could share with you and I’m happy to continue to have conversations about our work. But I want to leave you with this one request.

Pray for our church.

Pray for God’s will to be done.

Pray that we might follow the one who is faithful forever, who as Psalm 146 reminds us…

defends the wronged, and feeds the hungry. God frees prisoners— God gives sight to the blind, and lifts up the fallen. God loves good people, protects strangers, takes the side of orphans and widows, but makes short work of the wicked.

In spite of all the good and all of the mistakes that we made at this past General Conference, I take comfort in the knowledge that God’s in charge—always.

Sources of Revelation

Posted on January 12, 2010Leave a comment

The United Methodist Church holds that Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason are sources and norms for belief and practice, but that the Bible is primary among them. What is your understanding of this theological position of the church?

In traditional Wesleyan thinking, scripture must be the central source of theology and all of the other three means listed above are secondary. Yet, that can create an interesting dilemma. Do we use scripture to interpret our experiences and to put hedges around our tradition and to limit our reasoning, or are each of the three ways of interpreting and using said scripture. I think that one of the challenges presented by both postmodernity and the emergent movement is that we are in all cases limited by our human finitude. We simply cannot go back and use scripture in a vacuum. We always interpret it through a lens, through a glass dimly. Our historical understandings of events are culturally flavored. And scientific advances have also challenged tried and true scriptural understandings, leaving us to ask whether we read passages in scripture as absolute truth or as humanity’s best understanding of events, at the time, as inspired by God.

I think the best way of defining our norms and practices is to hold all four of these sources as important and yet also realize that even grounded in all four of these, we might not have the full picture. Our practices and our beliefs might still need to grow and change as we grow in our faithfulness towards the God of all creation. One of the gifts that postmodernity brings is the idea of the intersubjective – that which we hold as a community in common. It allows us to discern together what the best practices are for us right now as we attempt to be faithful, and yet also leaves open the possibility that another truth, a better practice, a more precise or expansive norm may exist.

In effect, that is what we do through conferencing. We leave open the possibility that the Holy Spirit still has places to move us. We share our stories and allow ourselves to be formed by others. We read the bible through new eyes when we hear it read at General Conference in the voice of a brother from India or a sister from Africa. We can communally gain a more holistic picture of God than our own subjective experiences and methods of reasoning and traditions and even versions of the scriptures permit.

Photo by: Jon Wisbey

Moltmann Conversation – Session 2: Method

Posted on September 10, 20091 Comment

Method w/ Tripp Fuller:

• You broke some of the rules of German Protestant Systematic Theology that would have been part of your theological education. “Every consistent theological system lays claim to totality… in principle one has to be able to say everything… everything has to fit in w/o contradiction… an aesthetic charm… this is a dangerous seduction… humanly speaking, truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue: Aquinas – Is there a God or not? 5 ways of speaking about that.. and then he died. b/c all the great theological systems of medieval times must have an open end, because of the paraousia of Christ. Similar to the great cathedrals – they are beautiful, but they are not allowed to be finished, b/c you must keep at least a hole open for the coming of God – otherwise the system of theology would replace the coming of God/presence of God. A theological system begins with prolegomena – the clearing of the throat. Tillich – message, system, everything related to everything.. but he’s rarely quoting the bible, rarely in discussion Barth started w/ presuppotion: prolegomena w/ self-revelation of God. Dogmatics are for those who are inside the church – good for developing Christian doctrines on things like predestination. But very weak and poor at dialoguing with contemporaries. Theology of nature is the task of Christian theology – our theology is not just for Christians, it is for the kingdom of God for the mission for those who are outside. Yale school: Xian theology for Xians, Chicago school: Xian theology for everybody, otherwise no mission! Moltmann: Xian theology for the kingdom, starting with X and the HS

• Did the fact you didn’t grow up in a tradition give you more freedom? We feel like we need to defend the heritage of the system in which we were reared: Christ is more than one denomination! =) reformed theology was my origin, ecumenical is my future

• Many young people met you in the course of theological education where we have read you after 9/11… Moltmann’s theology helps us to talk about God in a world after world tragedy (following WWII) – What advice do you give us as pastors still wrestling with this experience?: Moved by “Night” by Elie Wiesel, God was not absent, but God suffered with them. This is his recommendation to the victims/families of 9/11 – that God suffered with them, that the terrorists did that act against God also… God is not punishing us by these events. “you carried us like a mother who carries a child in her arms, like a father carries a child through the desert, bearing us on eagle’s wings” This carrying gives his world time, and a chance, and a future – this is the omnipotence of God. Not in control of everything, but carrying and bearing everything.

• Idea of an impassable God? The God of Israel is not apathetic, is full of pathos, full of anger (wounded love) and passion for his people. If God is an apathetic God, then his image of us must be apathetic too – but for us, apathy is an illness. Get out of apathy – it is better to be defeated than to not begin the fight. How was this received – controversial “I like to be controversial”

• You use experiences others don’t – mystical experiences, and don’t express doubt. Advice to pastors about how to do that: Put life and death questions together with theological questions – only way to make it unabstract – otherwise it’s a game only for play. Life experiences are the source of theology.

• Scripture and methodology – the church and theologians need to read forwards and backwards in scripture: I read the bible with the presuppotion to meet the divine word in human words. And when I meet the divine word which became incarnate in Christ – his suffering, death and resurrection – then I feel to meet the truth. But then I have also a contrarian over against the human expressions over the human experiences of the truth. Eg: Paul Galatians 3:28 – all one in Christ & heirs of the kingdom. Justified equality of men/women… but Paul also says women should shut up in the congregation! So I ask, what sentence is closer to Christ – and then my decision is clear. If the women silent, we would have knowledge of the resurrection of Christ! And one of the co-missionaries of Paul was female – Phoebe = bishop of small congregation. Some of these are human expressions, not infallible expressions – if we look at the criteria of the incarnate word of God – Christ. In the letters, we read that the Jews crucified Christ, but this is wrong – the Jews couldn’t crucify persons, only stone – this was a Roman affair. The Jews are not the enemies of God. Read in Paul – Romans 9-11, and we say that this is closer to Christ… only criticized based on the criterion that is in scripture itself!

• A lot of strife in the American church – boils down to biblical hermeneutics – we simply read the bible differently – you are advocating a hermeneutic by which we look at what is closest to Christ. How do you determine that? (noting that you don’t discount personal experience) My question to fundamentalists is: do you really read the bible? Do you understand what you are reading? Just to quote the bible on homosexual persons is wrong, because the term doesn’t appear in the original Hebrew words, etc… so we should not leave biblical hermenutics to the fundamentalists, who believe only in 50 fundamentals and not the rest.

• What is it like to be married to a theologian? Convinced me to say not “this is the case” but “I think this is the case.” Not to make objective statements – because this is my experience – to leave room for others to make up their own mind and not just to quote me. There is no theological dialogue in our house before breakfast.

• Other side of 9/11 question – dealing with tragedy justifies the myth of innocence for our own political philosophy. Impact of liberation theology: what kind of invitation to share and proclaim the insights to people who may not even question that there is complicity in American foreign policy: Political theology overcomes hesitations/limitations of our churches during the Nazi regime, question of two kingdoms = don’t mix theology with politics. In fact, supported b/c of political theology. Internal reason for change = the dead of Auschvitz were pressing on our conscience, we had to change in memory of those people. We still have strong social legislation – we take care of people who are vulnerable.