Can We Think Theologically Together?

My old theology teacher maintained that to have a dialogue there needed to be a common question both parties wanted to answer. But of course this isn’t enough. There needs to be a common language. And most importantly, an understanding of what authorizes the validity of any theological assertion made in the dialogue. 

The latter is the problem in United Methodist discourse. We aren’t clear on what authorizes our theological assertions. 

The Articles of Religion are less than helpful. They specify that the scripture contains all that is necessary to salvation, but don’t explain how scripture authorizes theological discourse. They give us the most important normative theological conclusions, but don’t specify the process by which a theologian moves from scripture to those conclusions. Discussions of “high” and “low” views of scripture are a repetition of vacuous terms with only polemical value. The problem remains. 

An appeal to the so-called Quadrilateral, itself now rejected by many United Methodists, isn’t much more fruitful. That scripture, reason, experience, and tradition are all called upon to validate theological assertions can easily be demonstrated by watching the church come to theological decisions. Appeals are made to all. Still, at an official level primary authorization always comes from whichever rhetorical tricks succeed in garnering the majority of votes at General Conference.

So leaving the politicians we send to General Conference aside, can we find a shared basis for valid theological assertions that become the basis of thinking theologically together? 

Let me sketch what I see as the problem. 

The self-identified traditionalists have given much thought to the problem of authority, which is typical of Anglo-American evangelicalism in general. It was the constant theme when I taught in evangelical schools in Asia. The UM traditionalist answer (not necessarily representative of all Evangelicals) was to locate the authority of scripture in its canonical context, that is in the context of theological reasoning that led to the Nicene Creed. If you have the source (Scripture) and the valid results (the Creeds) then you can discern what authorizes theological claims as valid. 

To this traditionalists extend the process with what they call “thinking with the Church.” This means that valid theological claims also arise out of a post-Canonical process that involves making the theological tradition of the Church a partner in the discussion; taking seriously the reasoning and conclusions it reached even after the formation of the Creeds. If traditionalists hadn’t rejected the quadrilateral this would be “tradition.” What this process validates by attending to one distinct tradition of church thought, is a Protestant theology and polity. 

Nothing I have attributed to UM traditionalists above is different from UM liberals or progressives. Indeed it was a commonplace 40 years ago at self-consciously liberal Perkins School of Theology to look at scripture in its canonical context. We read von Campenhausen. We weren’t required to take two semesters of church history (and read Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Barth, etc. etc.) because it was an interesting story. It was preparation for “thinking with the church” in our own theological work. 

If we use the quadrilateral as a convenient typology we’ll find the same is true of an appeal to either reason or experience. Both progressives and Traditionalists affirm science and rationality. Neither dismisses human experience (including religious experience) as a possibly resource for valid theological assertions. 

The real difference in understanding what validates theological assertions is this: the results. 

For traditionalists valid theological assertions must ultimately affirm the tradition; whether it relates to the nature of God or of human nature and relationships. For progressives validation doesn’t arise from coming to the right conclusion, but having engaged in a process of rational interpretation of scripture in conversation with other sources of theological insight that validates theological assertions. 

The problem is where tradition, or “thinking with the church” ends, and invalid theological assertions begin. That turns out to be a hard line to draw. Thinking with the church with regard to the ordination of women, for example, means thinking with the Methodist church right up through the middle of the 20th century. The same is true of the possibility of divorce and remarriage. Right up to this point both progressives and traditionalists are quite willing to “think with the church.” Beyond this point they diverge. Why?

Because for traditionalists it appears that thinking with the church isn’t bounded in time so much as by the fundamental axiom that God fixes the biological nature of human persons and orders the human social world, both universally and forever. And this conflicts with the fundamental liberal axiom that as God’s stewards, humans must seek to understand their human nature and order their social world as necessary for their different situations, societies, and cultures.

In short Methodism, born on the cusp of the Enlightenment, has never resolved the conflict inherit in the implications of the Enlightenment for theological anthropology. American Methodism, born in the emerging democratic United States, accepted the political results of the Enlightenment (empowering humans to decide who they were and how they would order their world) without examining its radical new view of human nature. 

And this is really the theological question United Methodists need to engage: Does God charge humans with understanding their own human nature and ordering their social world accordingly? Or does God charge humans to obediently submit to a revealed understanding of human nature and an eternal order of the social world? This is the kind of question that I love to have in students in my classroom engage, because this is where we can invite in Methodists of multiple cultures and social situations and approaches to thinking theologically around something really important and fundamental.

In closing it is worth noting that our UM Discipline accepts the Enlightenment view that humans are the stewards of both their own self-understanding and the social order. After all, we believe that by a majority vote we humans, based on no other qualification than being elected by fellow humans, can extensively and normatively declare what it means to be human and to live in human societies. That is the whole Social Principles Creed. 

Creating and amending the SPC through a political process is an assertion of our human obligation under God to decide and make normative claims about both our self-understanding and our right to order our social world.  And yes, we use the same process to determine the order (and sometimes change the order) of the Church. Appeals to “holy conferencing,” times of prayers, celebratory ritual, and appeal to the guidance of God’s Spirit don’t change the fact that the Discipline is definitionally a changeable human artifact created through a human political process that has no precedent in scripture or tradition.  (Properly speaking, now two human artifacts.) 

It’s a bold move to claim that the Discipline contains normative statements about the meaning of Divine revelation, especially without a clear theological articulation of why majority rule is God’s means of confirming God’s meaning. 

So I’ll leave us with a question with profound implications for the order of the UMC. Can we agree on a basic criteria for distinguishing valid theological claims from invalid claims? That’s a theological question I’d like to see our UM theologians give some priority, because until we have an answer we’ll never even begin to have a real theological dialogue, and every division will be the prelude to another division.