Baptist to UMC--the Quadrilateral

Switching to the United Methodist Church after a lifetime spent as Southern Baptists, as my family did in the early 1990s, challenged me to re-think my faith practice without many of the components I had long considered essential to that practice. The UMC's connectional rather than congregational structure meant that ministers and congregations worked within a standardized set of procedures and theological boundaries. The closer ties to Anglican and other high-church traditions made services and ordinances more formal.

But the most significant paradigm shifts I had to navigate were theological. As is the case in any denomination as large and longstanding as the UMC, Methodist doctrine is complex and multifaceted. Explaining all of its intricacies is beyond my abilities. I want instead to focus on three elements of UMC doctrine, that gave me a way to think of Christianity beyond evangelicalism.

First, although Methodists revere the Bible as the inspired and authoritative word of God, they do not espouse a "Bible-only" doctrine. I have recounted in past posts the "Bible-believing," plain/literal-sense, no-fancy-learning-necessary ethos underlying much of conservative evangelicalism. All you need, insist many evangelical churches, is a good Bible and the Spirit to lead you in reading it.

Historians of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, however, point out that evangelicalism in practice does not, can not, and has never worked purely by the People of God reading the Divine Words and acting on them in perfect accord. (Indeed, there are many stories in the 1800s of people locking themselves away with a Bible, reading it in the Spirit to see what God was really saying through God's Word, and emerging with profoundly Unitarian-Universalist conclusions). The sick, sad, truth is that different people will read the same text--even a divine text like the Bible--in radically divergent ways. As historians are quick to point out, the early Bible-believers also had strong, charismatic leaders who dictated exactly how believers were to be led in reading the scripture, grappling with its apparent contradictions, interpreting its ambiguities, and deciding (above all) which parts were more important to value than others.

There is to this day surprisingly little admission on the part of evangelicals that interpretive consensus by a few plays any part in shaping the evangelical theology and practice of the many. So dedicated are many conservative evangelicals to the notion of sola scriptura (i.e., Luther's argument that scripture rather than Church tradition ought to be authoritative) that they scoff at the very idea of a hermeneutic practice more complicated than "just read what it says."

I admit that the most common cause of my frustration with evangelical spokespeople I listen to or encounter comes from their tendency to meet differences of belief and practice with a smug, "Well, I just do what the Bible says." And yet, when pressed by a knowledgeable critic about why they manifestly do not do everything the Bible says (e.g., impose the death penalty for homosexuals, refuse to wear clothing made from two different fibers, keep slaves, honor the Jewish Sabbath), out come a whole host of complex interpretive guidelines not themselves contained in scripture: "Oh, see, that's the Purity code, and Christians don't have to follow that..." To be clear: I do not blame people for having interpretive or hermeneutic frames through which they read scripture, but I do expect that they be honest enough to admit such frames exist.

The Methodist tradition mirrors other traditions in recognizing and celebrating the fact that, of the many ways to regard scripture, Methodists practice a particular way. Methodists are not shy about valuing the writings of John Wesley as primary interpretive guides to use when reading scripture. But Methodists do not affirm simply: "Bible alone, with help from Wesley." Indeed, Methodists embrace what they call the Quadrilateral, a philosophy of balancing the testimony of scripture with three other considerations: reason, tradition, and experience.

Instantly, such a view makes scripture into something other than a stand-in for God. The more I learned about reading, writing, and literature, the more I realized how untenable it was to view the Bible as the literal, inerrant, infallible words of God written down by men. Human language is just too tricky a vessel to contain the flow of Divine discourse. Insofar as words are read, heard, or otherwise taken in by people differently, basing the whole of Christian faith and practice on the assumption that all true Christians read the Bible in one particular way strains credulity and produces a culture of heretic-hunting (is everyone reading just the correct way?) and schism (I don't think you're reading correctly, so I'm starting my own church).

The quadrilateral forces other factors than pure reading to share the burden of discerning What It Is We Christians Should Do. It expects and allows for divergent readings while recognizing overtly that limitations around those readings exist. It frees Methodists from being stuck following culturally bound norms espoused in the Bible (i.e., slavery, subjugation of women) while making it difficult simply to shift with the present-day cultural wind.

Most of all, the quadrilateral recognizes that, as Christians, we worship not a book, not even a God contained in a book, but a dynamic God-Spirit-Savior who speaks and acts constantly even today. Certainly that God acts and speaks through the book especially--but not exclusively. God gives us minds to reason, experiences to learn from, and forerunners in faith to converse with.

Encountering a tradition in which I could think beyond the (secretly unique Baptist understandings of) the literal reading of Scripture was life-giving for me.

More tomorrow,

JF