Can we have Unity without Doctrinal clarity?
One of the things I've noticed as I've read more of John Wesley over the years is that he frequently makes lists of the "fundamental" or "basic" beliefs that go down "to the root" of Christian faith and Christian living. Not all of his lists of the 'basic' teachings are exactly the same, but they all cover the same great themes of Creation by God, the Fall of Mankind into Sin, and the Redemption through Christ. This is the heart of Wesleyan (and all Christian) faith.
Unlike some traditions (such those stemming from Medieval Scholasticism), Methodism has never attempted to have an official answer to every possible theological question that every good Methodist is expected to believe; there has always been a degree of diversity, but beginning with Wesley it has been recognized that we must have unity on the basics if we are to live and work together.
Over the last several generations, while we increasingly do give lip service to the Wesleys and the other major lights of our theological tradition, we United Methodists have very often attempted to embrace doctrinal pluralism in the name of "inclusivity." We (rightly) want to include as many people as possible within our church, but rather than trying (like the early Methodists) to teach all of these diverse people the same basic beliefs, we have downplayed the importance of beliefs or doctrine altogether, embracing (with a shrug) a sort of "anything goes" attitude, saying things like "it is not what you believe that matters, but how you live."
Ultimately, however, I believe this approach is self-destructive, especially to church unity. How we live is necessarily related to what we believe. How we live together is necessarily related to the beliefs we hold in common.
How can we indeed walk together if we are walking in different directions, following different guiding lights?
This is the major point of an excellent new post by Dr. David F. Watson.
Dr. Watson was my Greek teacher in seminary at SMU, and is now dean of United Seminary in Ohio. I encourage you to read it in full at the link above; below are some highlights from his piece (in bold), with my own comments.
Watson argues that if we are to think, feel, and finally live as Christians, we simply cannot get away from "doctrine" (that is, official teachings). Dr. Watson writes:
The Christian mind is necessarily doctrinal. Without an understanding of proper teaching about God and what this God has done for us in Jesus Christ, it makes no sense to talk about a Christian mind at all. We may claim to love God, but who is this God whom we love? Why do we love God? Why should other people do so? How do we know any of these things? The answers to these questions don’t just shape what we believe, but how we live.
The attempts to neglect or reinvent Christian doctrine - particularly, I would argue, in the seminaries and ivory towers of academia - are largely responsible for the massive degree of division that now exists within the Historic (often called "Mainline") Protestant churches, almost all of which have seen major schisms in recent years. The "publish or perish" approach to scholarship that now dominates the Academia of the Western World, by its very nature, rewards innovation rather than the passing down of the time-tested faith that has been received.
Dr. Watson expresses well why this constant need to innovate and revise has led to dis-unity in the church:
We build upon the beliefs of those who came before us. We honor their work, their lives, and sometimes their martyrdom. Though many have succumbed to the temptation to try to reinvent the Church’s faith based upon foundations more palatable to the modern or postmodern mind, these attempts have been unable to sustain the Church. They have neglected the wisdom of the ages.
The end of such revisionism can only be division. If each culture, each era, each philosophical movement reinvents the faith on its own terms, Christian unity is impossible. True Christian unity can only come about when we share common beliefs about the nature of God, human life, and salvation. If we continue to de-emphasize doctrine in our faith communities, we will continue on the painful road of denominational fragmentation.
Dr. Watson goes on to lament the lack of serious attention to doctrine in the Historic Protestant churches, noting the contradiction that necessarily results from this neglect:
The Christian mind requires doctrinal formation, and in mainline Protestantism, we have most often avoided this. We have chosen to focus on forming our congregations into socially just people who will live in socially just ways, but without teaching them how we might reach conclusions as to what constitutes just behavior. We are supposed simply to know right and wrong intuitively. If the 20th century shows us anything, however, it is that right and wrong are not things that human beings know intuitively... Our thoughts are disordered, and we need guidance. Teaching the faith once and for all handed on to the saints is a step toward the proper ordering of our minds.
We all call ourselves "Methodists", and we do have a standard liturgy and a standard set of doctrinal commitments. As I see it, this is a bit like all the restaurants in a chain sharing the same recipes for their meals: You know what you are going to get based on the name of the restaurant. Otherwise there would not really be any point in branding them all the same, would there? If one KFC served fried chicken and the next served Italian food, what would be the point in calling all of them KFC and giving all of them the same logo? It would be a meaningless moniker that would only confuse people. The same happens to Methodism (or any denomination) when we neglect the official teachings (and the basic liturgical praxis) of our church.
Because of this neglect, United Methodism has now come to the very brink. There are serious discussions about how to divide up the denomination. The next 5 years will be decisive in the history of our denomination (and whether that denomination continues to exist in its recognizable form).
I fully agree with Dr. Watson that there is really only one way to Christian unity: to recover, embrace, hold-fast, celebrate, and actively teach "the faith once delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), the faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic church that she has learned from listening to the Spirit speaking through the Bible over 2000 years, the faith that is focused upon the person and work of Jesus Christ.
This Classic faith, this classic way of understanding the Bible, is in fact already clearly expressed in our doctrinal standards (including the writings of J. Wesley), our liturgy, in the creeds and the lectionary, in our hymnody, and so on. The question is whether we will trust these grand resources of the Great Tradition to help us rightly receive and live the Biblical faith (as I have tried throughout my ministry to do, in keeping with my ordination vows), or whether we will continue to neglect them and hope that goodwill is enough to hold together a body of people with disparate beliefs.
As William Abraham, another great United Methodist theologian (and teacher of mine at SMU) puts it, we need to "wake from our doctrinal amnesia" if we are to move forward in faith together.
Unlike some traditions (such those stemming from Medieval Scholasticism), Methodism has never attempted to have an official answer to every possible theological question that every good Methodist is expected to believe; there has always been a degree of diversity, but beginning with Wesley it has been recognized that we must have unity on the basics if we are to live and work together.
Over the last several generations, while we increasingly do give lip service to the Wesleys and the other major lights of our theological tradition, we United Methodists have very often attempted to embrace doctrinal pluralism in the name of "inclusivity." We (rightly) want to include as many people as possible within our church, but rather than trying (like the early Methodists) to teach all of these diverse people the same basic beliefs, we have downplayed the importance of beliefs or doctrine altogether, embracing (with a shrug) a sort of "anything goes" attitude, saying things like "it is not what you believe that matters, but how you live."
Ultimately, however, I believe this approach is self-destructive, especially to church unity. How we live is necessarily related to what we believe. How we live together is necessarily related to the beliefs we hold in common.
How can we indeed walk together if we are walking in different directions, following different guiding lights?
This is the major point of an excellent new post by Dr. David F. Watson.
Watson argues that if we are to think, feel, and finally live as Christians, we simply cannot get away from "doctrine" (that is, official teachings). Dr. Watson writes:
The Christian mind is necessarily doctrinal. Without an understanding of proper teaching about God and what this God has done for us in Jesus Christ, it makes no sense to talk about a Christian mind at all. We may claim to love God, but who is this God whom we love? Why do we love God? Why should other people do so? How do we know any of these things? The answers to these questions don’t just shape what we believe, but how we live.
The attempts to neglect or reinvent Christian doctrine - particularly, I would argue, in the seminaries and ivory towers of academia - are largely responsible for the massive degree of division that now exists within the Historic (often called "Mainline") Protestant churches, almost all of which have seen major schisms in recent years. The "publish or perish" approach to scholarship that now dominates the Academia of the Western World, by its very nature, rewards innovation rather than the passing down of the time-tested faith that has been received.
Dr. Watson expresses well why this constant need to innovate and revise has led to dis-unity in the church:
We build upon the beliefs of those who came before us. We honor their work, their lives, and sometimes their martyrdom. Though many have succumbed to the temptation to try to reinvent the Church’s faith based upon foundations more palatable to the modern or postmodern mind, these attempts have been unable to sustain the Church. They have neglected the wisdom of the ages.
The end of such revisionism can only be division. If each culture, each era, each philosophical movement reinvents the faith on its own terms, Christian unity is impossible. True Christian unity can only come about when we share common beliefs about the nature of God, human life, and salvation. If we continue to de-emphasize doctrine in our faith communities, we will continue on the painful road of denominational fragmentation.
Dr. Watson goes on to lament the lack of serious attention to doctrine in the Historic Protestant churches, noting the contradiction that necessarily results from this neglect:
The Christian mind requires doctrinal formation, and in mainline Protestantism, we have most often avoided this. We have chosen to focus on forming our congregations into socially just people who will live in socially just ways, but without teaching them how we might reach conclusions as to what constitutes just behavior. We are supposed simply to know right and wrong intuitively. If the 20th century shows us anything, however, it is that right and wrong are not things that human beings know intuitively... Our thoughts are disordered, and we need guidance. Teaching the faith once and for all handed on to the saints is a step toward the proper ordering of our minds.
We all call ourselves "Methodists", and we do have a standard liturgy and a standard set of doctrinal commitments. As I see it, this is a bit like all the restaurants in a chain sharing the same recipes for their meals: You know what you are going to get based on the name of the restaurant. Otherwise there would not really be any point in branding them all the same, would there? If one KFC served fried chicken and the next served Italian food, what would be the point in calling all of them KFC and giving all of them the same logo? It would be a meaningless moniker that would only confuse people. The same happens to Methodism (or any denomination) when we neglect the official teachings (and the basic liturgical praxis) of our church.
Because of this neglect, United Methodism has now come to the very brink. There are serious discussions about how to divide up the denomination. The next 5 years will be decisive in the history of our denomination (and whether that denomination continues to exist in its recognizable form).
I fully agree with Dr. Watson that there is really only one way to Christian unity: to recover, embrace, hold-fast, celebrate, and actively teach "the faith once delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), the faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic church that she has learned from listening to the Spirit speaking through the Bible over 2000 years, the faith that is focused upon the person and work of Jesus Christ.
This Classic faith, this classic way of understanding the Bible, is in fact already clearly expressed in our doctrinal standards (including the writings of J. Wesley), our liturgy, in the creeds and the lectionary, in our hymnody, and so on. The question is whether we will trust these grand resources of the Great Tradition to help us rightly receive and live the Biblical faith (as I have tried throughout my ministry to do, in keeping with my ordination vows), or whether we will continue to neglect them and hope that goodwill is enough to hold together a body of people with disparate beliefs.
As William Abraham, another great United Methodist theologian (and teacher of mine at SMU) puts it, we need to "wake from our doctrinal amnesia" if we are to move forward in faith together.
Labels: Christian Unity, church renewal, Ecclesiology, John Wesley, Methodism, Theology and Ministry
posted by Rev. Daniel McLain Hixon at 8/30/2017
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home