What is the “Wesleyan” Part of a
1. The
Nature of
A college or
It is not so with a Wesleyan university. The
But the
This is an important fact about a Wesleyan college or
university. Its boss is The Wesleyan Church, and it serves the pleasure of The
Wesleyan Church. To be sure, the
But this factor is not a matter for debate. There are things
that can be changed and things that cannot be changed. This is an issue that
will not change for the foreseeable future.
Here is a warning to the naive who think that academia—anywhere—is just
about truth and that an intellectual can argue his or her way into existence no
matter what the college. Rare is the
institution that has no expressed or unexpressed boundaries around what a
professor can or cannot say.[1]
Duane Litfin has suggested that for many Christian
institutions, something he calls the “voluntary principle” is in force.[2] In this principle, faculty at a Christian
college or university are free to publish whatever they want as long as the
hiring process has taken place successfully.
What he means is that an honest applicant will not agree to come teach
at an institution if they cannot freely operate within the bounds of its
identity. Similarly, an academic
institution will not hire or continue the contract of a faculty member who
cannot freely operate within its boundaries.
While concrete situations will naturally stretch the boundaries of these
sorts of considerations, Litfin’s notion of a “voluntary principle” seems
coherent and appropriate to the nature of what he calls the “systemic”
Christian institution of higher learning.[3]
2. A Little Genetics
2.1 The
Broader Family
0-1054 The Church Catholic
If you were a Christian during the first thousand years of
Christian history, you were part of the church catholic, the church universal
(P.S., you still are). Protestants often
forget that the first 1500 years of the church were “catholic” (small c)
years. But it was during this period
that God led the church to formulate such foundational
concepts as the New Testament, the Trinity, the Fall of Adam, and so many
other things that are only hinted at in Scripture. It would be possible to read Scripture and
come to different understandings, as the history of heresies and cults
testifies. Most cult leaders have
hyper-conservative views on the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. It is because they are in discontinuity with
the church that they end up with perverse interpretations. In the first thousand years of Christian
history God worked out far more than most imagine of who—not only Wesleyans,
but who all Christians are and should be.
The year 1054 saw the Great Schism between the Eastern and
Western church. The Eastern church was
willing to consider the Pope the “first among equals,” but the Pope of that
time insisted that he was above, not equal to the other bishops. A flurry of mutual excommunication ensued,
and the first really major split between segments of the church catholic took
place. We might hereby note that the
supreme authority of the Pope is not a matter of Christian consensus.
1500’s The Anglican
Reformation
With the power of the Roman Catholic Church in ebb, a number
of reformers successfully challenged its authority both on a political and
theological level. The most famous is of
course Martin Luther, the “father” of Protestantism. As part of what we might call a “Back to
Scripture” movement, Luther questioned things like celibacy in priests,
purgatory, and especially the idea that you could get years off of purgatory
because of the merits of the saints (indulgences). His pruning would lead him to reject the deuterocanonical
books that the church had used throughout its history—we get a feel for how
radical this move was when we see that Luther also felt free to question some
New Testament books like James. With a
lesser basis for rejection, he retained all the New Testament books.
From a scholarly standpoint, some of Luther’s pruning was
likely overreaction. For example, it is
the consensus of the scholarly community that his reading of Paul was skewed at
a number of points, particularly on his formulation of justification by faith.[4] On many other issues a significant portion of
the scholarly community would take issue with Luther, including issues that are
important to the Wesleyan tradition.[5] Finally, we can question whether it is even
possible to divorce Scripture from the church and remain orthodox. Certainly the nature of the biblical texts is
such that context must be provided in order for them to take on meaning, and at
this point the Protestant dictum of sola
scriptura becomes very problematic—and indeed the primary culprit behind
Protestant fragmentation.
But John Wesley was not a Lutheran. He was an Anglican. To be sure, Wesley could be quite vitriolic
with regard to the Pope. We should
remember that the post-Vatican II Popes of the Roman Catholic Church have been
cut from a different cloth from the Popes of the Reformation Era. But as an Anglican, Wesley was prone to be
more “catholic” in flavor than the reformers of the Continent. Henry VIII initiated the separation of the
Anglican Church for more “practical” than theological reasons and in fact had
written a treatise against Luther as Luther began to remove from the Church (Henry
really wanted an annulment of his marriage from the Pope). But we should not equate the virtuous
reformers of
These formative Anglicans were also quite catholic in
flavor. It is to this day considered
ironic that Cranmer was burned at the stake in part for his Protestant role in
the separation (by Bloody Mary), given how catholic in nature he was. Some reformers like John Jewel argued that
the Anglican Church was in fact catholic in a truer sense than the Roman
Catholic Church, which he believed had departed from the true catholic
faith. Make no mistake, Wesley was
Protestant. But Wesleyans take in their
DNA a Protestantism that by its very nature has a larger role for Christian
tradition and the church to play than other Protestant groups might. We see this factor especially in Wesley’s
Quadrilateral, the sense that in addition to Scripture, tradition, experience,
and reason are factors in discerning God’s will. Gary Cockerill of Wesley Biblical Seminary
has referred to the Wesleyan hermeneutic as prima scriptura rather
than sola scriptura, “Scripture first”
rather than “Scripture only.”
If we accept the Protestant Reformation at least as
partially legitimate, we must also accept along with it some other
ecclesiological conclusions. The most
significant one is the principle of
reform. That is, that not all
Christian development is strictly evolutionary or permanent. Indeed, if we are to accept the legitimacy of
the Protestant Reformation, then we must accept that even items of consensus
can be wrong. Here I am thinking in
particular of the fact that in the medieval period, the universal church
believed that priests should ideally be celibate. The Orthodox half of the church was more open
to married priests to be sure, but one needed to be married before one was
ordained and could not marry thereafter.
If we are to remain Protestants, we must affirm the principle of even
consensual reform.
We might also note that perhaps the primary catalyst for Protestant reform was the original meaning of
the biblical writings. To be sure,
the reformers did not have at their disposal the kinds of information and
critical tools that we have. Their
ability to arrive at the original meaning was far inferior to that of us
today. In addition to the multiplicity
of additional sources we have, we also stand today on the shoulders of five
centuries of interpretive dialog along these lines. We would not be fully Christian without the
church after the New Testament, but the original meaning remains an important
voice of potential critique within the church.
1700’s John Wesley
You will notice that Wesley is background to The Wesleyan
Church rather than its founder. This is
a point of some significance. One might
think that with the name Wesleyan,
John Wesley would be the founder of this church. But Wesley was the “father” of Methodism and
the Methodist Episcopal Church in
Some important benefits result from this historical
situation. For example, while we hold
Wesley in high regard (after all—we would not call ourselves The Wesleyan
Church if we did not), our beliefs and practices are not limited by his. As part of a broader Wesleyan movement, we
are particularly free to critique Wesley and even possess beliefs and practices
that are not in complete concordance with his.
We can freely engage in critique of this great thinker and
churchman.
A second benefit is the fact that we look less
cult-like. We do not worship John Wesley
or come even close to thinking the man to be perfect (no pun intended). I will confess to getting a little
uncomfortable—even a little irritated—when I have heard Wesleyans begin to
reference Wesley’s thought and works in any almost Scriptural way. Wesley was a truly great man and a great
theologian (I believe). But he was a
product of his age as well and could no doubt have used therapy at times. There is a sense in which we cannot “recover”
our roots in John Wesley because he is before our roots. He’s our grandfather—in our genes but not our
closest relative.
We will look at some of the more important Wesley elements
in our genetics in a moment. Some, like
the idea that you can be assured of salvation in this life, have influenced
broader Christendom. However, by far the
most significant teaching of John Wesley in the emergence of the
2.2 Immediate History
The
In 1843 a group of churches that had withdrawn from the
Methodist Episcopal Church over the issue of slavery reorganized as The
Wesleyan Methodist Church. This is the true beginning of the
Nevertheless, the
social values of the early
This is a strong warning to those who assume that God’s
position is always the so called “conservative” position. What is considered “conservative”
is largely a function of the issues of a particular context at a particular
point in time—beyond question, it is a moving target. No one who knows anything
about the history of the Wesleyan tradition would deny its ultra-conservatism
in the earlier part of the twentieth century, yet it fully affirmed women in
ministry as part of the Pentecostal leveling of the spiritual playing field.
Today’s conservatism is not yesterday’s, nor will it be tomorrow’s. Issues of
conservatism do map uniformly from one generation to the next.
So while conservatives fought tooth and nail against the
Equal Rights Amendment of the 70’s, most political conservatives operate today
as if it had passed—their predecessors would have considered them liberal. We
had best always seek out God’s
position on an issue rather than what might seem to be culturally conservative
at a particular point in time. I would argue that those conservative groups
that refused to be a part of the Wesleyan merger in 1968 are largely stuck with
the “look” of the Wesleyan church around the time they emerged as a distinct
group (in other words, the look of mid-twentieth century holiness people). The
Amish are similarly stuck with the “look” of their point of origin. Neither of
these groups look anything like the early Christians.
By the end of the 1800’s, the
The typical Wesleyan church today does not look a lot like
the churches of the holiness revivals, so much so that 10 years ago Keith Drury
pronounced the holiness movement dead as a movement (not the doctrine). We
might speculate on any number of causes. One of the main ones was the fact that
the boomer generation associated holiness with the perceived legalism of their
parents—which they rejected with a vengeance. They invested all their energies
in the church growth movement and disdained the preaching of the previous
generation. The newer generations do not share these experiences with them and
are more open to the doctrine.
Yet there have been other detractors as well. You will
search long and hard to find a Bible teacher at any Wesleyan college or
seminary (or a kindred denomination)—let alone any other biblical scholar
(among whom you will not likely find a single scholar)—who equates the Spirit
fillings of Acts with a secondary
experience of entire sanctification rather than the initial, defining Christian
experience. In my opinion, the core truth of the doctrine biblically is the
fact that the Spirit can empower us to be victorious over sin and temptation
and that, indeed, Paul teaches that the Spirit frees us from the “law of sin,”
the “sin that dwells in our members.” In other words, the Bible teaches freedom both from sin acts and the
power of sin in our lives. This was always the core of the
doctrine. It is Wesley’s form of the doctrine. And it remains perhaps the
greatest potential contribution of the Wesleyan tradition to the broader
church.
The
As the holiness revivals took place, a collection of
individual groups, marking their beginning in 1897, would eventually snowball
into what became the
Such groups, usually with little or no real perspective on
history, must inevitably see a huge gap between the early Christians (as they read them in the biblical text) and
the formation of their group with the truth. Such a claim is highly unlikely,
even irrational. It seems to me that
there are only two sensical positions: 1) that God is less concerned about our heads being right than our hearts,
and there will be a lot of Christians from countless different Christian groups
in heaven or 2) that God is less concerned about our heads being right than our
hearts, but there have only been a few at any point in the history of the
church whose heart was truly right—still from countless Christian groups. Even
those who see the saved on a very, very narrow road must allow for the “heart
more than head” clause. This is because no sectarian group today can point to
some stream of authentic continuity with them throughout Christian history.
There is no narrow ideological group of this sort that we
can identify throughout all of church history. We cannot find medieval
Christians preaching Palmer or Wesley style entire sanctification. We do not
find “Jesus only” types in the third century who believed you are not a
Christian if you do not speak in tongues. Nor will we find anyone immersing in
the medieval period. We will go insane if we insist that God demands our heads
be correct on the issues that splinter Protestant groups squabble over.
The
The
The current form of The Wesleyan Church was formed in 1968
as the merger of the Wesleyan Methodist and Pilgrim Holiness churches. The
Reformed Baptist Church of Canada was a holiness denomination as well that had
merged with the
3. The
A church does not necessarily have a fixed identity.
Churches can ebb and flow in their priorities; they can even reject who they
have been in the past in favor of some different future. With the holiness
movement pronounced dead, the church growth movement in decline, and the
cultural shift away from centralized denominations, the
We have done something like this in our brief retelling of
the history of The Wesleyan Church and its location within broader Christendom.
Now let us suggest three characteristics of its past that fittingly might
define it as the church moves forward into the future:
3.1 Wesleyans are people of the Spirit.
We are a revivalist denomination that was Pentecostal before
tongues came in the
One of the implications of this emphasis is that things like
the fundamentalist modernist controversy—arguments about higher criticism, the
virgin birth, evolution—these things were pretty far removed from us when they
were taking place. We were looking for the Pentecostal power at the time,
understood as entire sanctification rather than tongues. These debates of the
broader culture had little overall affect on our tradition. A few of our
academics paid notice, but the bulk did not.
So as the post-modern age dawns, the Wesleyan Church as a
whole can by pass some of the quirks of modernism and catch right up with where
the flow of history is at the moment. Here I have particularly in mind
mistaking certain cultural paradigms in any number of disciplines for dogma, as
the only possible Christian ones. Admittedly, Wesleyan institutions of higher
learning are more likely to have taken on modernist baggage than the broader
church. By their very nature, our colleges have been more engaged with the
intellectual issues of the age than the broader church.
Yet most of
our Wesleyan colleges and universities have thus far been more about teaching than
about pushing the bounds of knowledge. Most of our colleges
have been content to teach the basics than to engage directly the intellectual
currents of the day. Few Wesleyan faculty publish in anything like mainstream
academic journals. And, rightly or wrongly, a conflict between the
Let me finally re-mention the Pilgrim Holiness motto of “in
essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” This
spirit of limited, but generous orthodoxy befits a Wesleyan educational
institution. This spirit will play into my suggestions for a Wesleyan model for
the integration of faith and learning. In particular, it would seem that a
Wesleyan model should allow for a greater diversity of the mind than a
3.2 Wesleyans are people of the Bible.
Wesleyans are people of the book.
The Bible is our playground, the air we breathe. As good Wesley-ans, we wisely
recognize that there are always other factors in play, factors like Christian
tradition and the experience of the Holy Spirit (cf. the discussion of the
Quadrilateral below). But we usually factor these things into our discussion as
we look at biblical texts. And when we reach the end of the discussion, we
usually express our conclusions in biblical terms.
From where we stand today looking
back, we recognize that our fathers and mothers read the Bible much the way the
New Testament authors and church fathers did. They joined their “Spiritual common sense” to an intimate knowledge of
the biblical text. As they did this, they typically read the Bible as God’s
Word to them, often without paying too much attention to the meaning God
intended for its original audiences.
It is good for us now to pursue a
deep understanding as a denomination and as educational institutions of the
original meaning as well. But we are also in a good position now to recognize
that the “Spiritual, church” approach of our forebears is what the Bible itself
models, as indeed have the “community of saints” throughout the ages. When the
Spirit speaks to the church through the words in this way, woe to the one who
questions the message!
Yet in addition, many of our
biblical scholars have also been classic evangelicals. Dr. Stephen Paine,
president of Houghton, single-handedly convinced the
But the
As we will see subsequently,
individuals and denominations must prioritize the content of the Bible as they
move from its diverse texts toward constructing a sense of “the Bible” as a
unified voice and theology. This process involves selecting certain control
texts and concepts through which the other texts are filtered. For example,
most Christians filter the teaching of the OT law through the teachings of
Paul. Accordingly, our denominational identity is more revealed by the specific
passages and interpretations that God has led us to focus on throughout our
history, even more than our official statement of faith in the Bible. Here are
a few identity texts for Wesleyans:
1 Thessalonians 5:22-23 (KJV):
“Abstain from all appearance of evil. And the very God of peace sanctify you
wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved
blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
These two verses are perhaps the
best single embodiment of Wesleyan identity for its first hundred years. The
first embodies well the sense that God must be Lord of every nook and cranny of
our lives, that we are to “do all to the glory of God” (cf. 1 Cor. 10:31; Col.
3:17). The second is a classic text on entire sanctification. Along with other
passages like Romans 12:1-2, it embodies our belief in “complete cleansing”
from sin and “radical blamelessness.”
Acts 4:31: “And when
they had prayed, the place where they were gathered was shaken and they were
all filled with the Holy Spirit and they spoke the word of God with boldness.”
We used to formulate our belief in
radical victory over sin by way of the Spirit-fillings of Acts. I think these
passages, especially this particular verse in Acts 4, can continue as strong
launching pads for our particular understanding of Pentecostal power and our
need for not just a little of the Spirit, but the “fullness” of the Spirit.
1 Corinthians 10:13: “No
temptation has taken you that is not common to humanity. But God is faithful,
who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will make
along with the temptation also the way out so you are able to endure it.”
This verse is a good representation
of our belief that willful sin is not an essential part of a Christian’s life.
And I learned it as a child in Sunday School. I guarantee you that Baptist
children don’t learn it as one of their memory verses. Our focus on verses like
this one reveals one of the most distinctive elements in our identity.
Acts 2:17: “‘And it
will happen in the last days,’ God says, ‘I will pour out from my Spirit on all
flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy and your young men will see
dreams...”
We as a denomination are
historically and prophetically committed to the full salvation of women,
including from the sins of Eve. Women have the Spirit just as much as men, so a
woman can lead spiritually in any role to which God calls her—from lay leader
to General Superintendent.
Matthew 28:19-20: “As
you go, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all the
things I have commanded you.”
For the last thirty years, this
verse has been our primary theme. In this period, we balanced out the personal
piety of our earlier history with the importance of the church’s mission to
evangelize our communities and to plan for growth. We had always been involved
in missions, but we now focused on growing the local church.
What’s next? The Spirit “bubbling up” verses like the following:
Luke 4:18 (Isaiah 61): “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
who—because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor—has sent me to
preach release to the enslaved and restored sight to the blind, to send the
broken on with forgiveness, to proclaim the appointed year of the Lord!”
Wesleyan institutions of higher
learning will thus map the teaching of various disciplines to relevant biblical
material. As we will discuss subsequently, I mean in particular the Christian, “canonical” understanding of
the biblical material, which is a higher authority for the Christian than any
individual discipline. But in general the mapping of discipline to Bible should
be conducted in the manner of a dialog rather than a strictly one way
conversation in either direction. We can easily demonstrate that both the
biblical interpretations of biblical scholars and the scientific theories of
scientists can change over time. It is for this reason that I emphasize the
Christian, theological meaning of the Bible as what is most important in the
dialog, rather than the individual original meanings of various texts (see
below). Surely in the end we must affirm
the intent of the motto, “All truth is
God’s truth.”[6] We can always integrate real truths from
multiple disciplines with each other on some level (even if it is the level of
God’s unfathomable knowledge).
The Bible must always be in the
cognitive conversation when its content is pertinent. A Wesleyan model of
integration is not a “two kingdoms” model where theology does its thing and
history or economics or science does its thing. When the content of each
overlaps, both must be in the discussion. And the received meaning of Scripture
(the sensus receptus) by the church
holds the highest authority in the dialog.
3.3 Wesleyans are Wesley-an.
The merging General Conference wouldn’t have called us this
if it weren’t true. Wesley is one of the
best places to start discussing the “head” that’s guided by our heart. A number
of Wesley’s ideas stand out as essential ingredients in who Wesleyans are
today. One of his main teachings was that you can know in this life whether you
are bound for heaven—broader American Christianity has absorbed this idea too,
so it is no longer something that would distinguish the Methodist tradition
from others.
When we think of Wesley today, we probably think more about
his contribution of entire sanctification to theology than the idea of the assurance of salvation, since the
latter is now widely held. Wesley taught that a person should be victorious over
willful sin from the moment they become a Christian. But he also
believed—sometimes more optimistically, sometimes less—that others would find
themselves set free in this life from the “bent to sinning” as well—the
tendency to sin, the sinful nature. He called this “Christian perfection.”
The belief in victory
over sin in this world is not a very common belief in the church today. Yet
it is the clear teaching of the entire Bible. I cannot think of a single verse
in the entirety of the Bible that in any way advocates intentional sin as a
normal or expected part of a Christian’s life. This remains one of the greatest
strengths of our tradition and one in which almost all other Christian
traditions remain in the dark.
Of course the Wesleyan version of entire sanctification came
more directly through Phoebe Palmer and the holiness movement of the 1800’s.
Palmer taught “the shorter way” and made it the expectation of all Christians
to experience it today. I grew up with sermons on how we needed to take hold of
the “angel” of entire sanctification and not let go until we received the
blessing. Further, from John Fletcher on, American Methodists increasingly
identified the Spirit-fillings of Acts as experiences of entire sanctification.
Ten years ago, Keith Drury famously proclaimed the death of
the holiness movement. By this he did not mean the death of the doctrine as
truth, only the death of the movement. But some have wondered if what we have
really witnessed is the ebb of Palmer type holiness, rather than a more
Wesley-an formulation of the truth. A conference last year on salvation at
Wesleyan Church HQ found strong interest by Wesleyan educators in John Wesley’s
understanding of Christian perfection, which some had never heard distinguished
from Palmer’s.
Wesleyans thus continue to believe in the necessity of
victory over sin and the power of God to free all Christians from the power of
sin. We are probably seeing a resurgence of interest in this doctrine among
many younger Wesleyans. It will likely remain of the distinct beliefs of The
Wesleyan Church.
Wesley is known for the saying, “There is no holiness but social holiness.” By it he implied that
any sense of Christian holiness that does not lead to positive social action is
no real holiness. It was this impulse that lead Wesley to preach to coal miners
in the north of
Our more specific roots were founded in the abolitionist
movement, as the Wesleyan Methodist Connection withdrew from the Methodist
Episcopal Church for its refusal to take a stand against slavery. The women’s
rights movement—something some modern Wesleyans are embarrassed about—is
usually dated from a meeting in a
And so we can question the right of individuals to call
themselves “Wesleyan” when they have questions about women in ministry or would
place Pharisaic restrictions on what a woman can do in the home. Such a person
has lost sight of the “head” of our tradition, and I don’t mean John Wesley.
This type person would have opposed women voting back when we were leading the
way of the Spirit in the cause of “full salvation” for women as well as men.
These were the Methodists whose Judaizing tendencies led you to keep quiet in
the days of slavery or even oppose their emancipation. They would fit better in
some other more impoverished tradition.
In the early 1900’s there was no stigma to a woman minister
in our churches. It was only after WW2, when men came home from the war to find
women empowered in the workplace and increasingly in society, that the numbers
of women in ministry began to decline in our churches. They had lots of children
in the baby boom, no doubt diverting many from ministry. Meanwhile, some men
felt intimidated by the increasing power of women in society, and the result
was a backlash among bigots and the insecure who hid behind the mask of the
Bible. But now the disease has infected even the well-intentioned, people like
Dobson who—with Nazarene roots—should know better.
This social dimension passed on into many of the Methodist
offshoots of the late 1800’s. The Salvation Army is a perfect example of the
spirit that was also a part of our forebears. It has survived at the grass
roots level of the
Wesley also saw one of his tasks as “the spreading of Scriptural holiness throughout the land.” This
man was not perfect. Indeed, one of his “sins” was that he did so much mission
that he did not give appropriate attention to his marriage. This man circled
These are some of the key beliefs, emphases, and practices
that the
4. Clarifying the
Quadrilateral
4.1 Reason and Experience
The phrase “Wesley’s Quadrilateral” was of course coined in
recent times by Albert Outler. But Outler claimed to be summarizing Wesley’s
operating hermeneutic as born out by his writings. The similarity between
Outler’s analysis and the categories of Martin Wells Knapp’s book Impressions (cofounder of the
The Quadrilateral consists of course of Scripture,
tradition, reason, and experience. But after modernism, we must come to grips
with some crucial points of clarification. The first is that human “knowing” is
overwhelmingly a matter of reason and experience. I am open to the theoretical
possibility that a person can have raw un-interpreted experiences of reality—including
internal religious experiences. But these immediately are processed through our
minds. Humans cannot discuss matters of
truth apart from the involvement of reason and experience.
It is thus deceiving to speak of Scripture and tradition as
if they can be isolated from reason and experience. Scripture does not come on
our hard drives—it has to be inputted. The same goes for tradition. The Bible
is an object of knowledge just as anything else we “know” is. Reason is always involved in the appropriation of
Scripture and tradition. This is a point of massive
significance. We cannot speak of Scripture or tradition as independent sources
of truth. They, like all other knowing, must pass through the gate of reason
and experience just like all other truths.
Kant’s perspective remains, in my opinion, the best
expression of what we are talking about here. I will translate him into my
categories: 1) our human brains come
equipped with certain “knowing software.” There are categories
and filters in our minds into which our knowledge of reality is placed. We do
not experience “the law of cause and effect.” We experience one event after
another, but it is our minds that glue those experiences together as cause and
effect. I have not experienced my pencil falling as I let go of it. My mind has
cause-effect software that predicted it would fall.
If our minds come with “knowing software,” like Microsoft
Word, our experiences provide the
content of our knowledge, like the letters you type into Word.
In terms of the process of knowing, the Bible conforms to the same rules of
knowing as any other aspect of reality. The failure to recognize this is the
biggest blind spot in the use of the Bible throughout the history of the
church.
Secondly, since the Bible is an object of knowing just as
any other aspect of reality, we have to reckon with the fact that the meaning
of the Bible is not some fixed thing in its text. The meaning of words is
always a product of a mind contemplating those words. In theory, there are
almost as many different possible interpretations of the Bible as there are
interpreters, which is the major interpretive catalyst for over 20,000
denominations that get their interpretations from the Bible alone.
Here I would like to mention three important elements in the
Scripture equation that require serious examination. In my opinion, they
indicate a significant disparity between what people say they are doing when drawing on the
Bible and what they are actually doing.
Words take on meanings
in contexts. Read
them against a different context and you get a different meaning. There are of
course countless contexts against which Scripture can be read. The default
context against which any text is read is of course the context of the one reading
it. This is why there are so many different denominations. A Wesleyan may read,
“and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit,” and conclude that what we are
looking at is an instance of entire sanctification, a second, definite work of
grace whereby the heart is cleansed from inbred sin. This Wesleyan brings a
Wesleyan “dictionary” or context to the words and invests the words with this
meaning.
On the other hand, a Pentecostal reads this and places the
emphasis on the next line, “and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and
began to speak in tongues,” and concludes that we are looking at is a group of
people who have taken their relationship with God to the next level and has
experienced the gift of tongues. They bring a Pentecostal dictionary to the
text and find a Pentecostal meaning. All these dictionaries are to be
distinguished from the original
meaning, which—although a concept with its own ambiguities—was certainly a
function of how words were used when a particular text of the Bible originated.
The first concept that we must reckon with is thus the fact
that the biblical text can take on
countlessly different and even contradictory meanings depending on the context
against which its words are read. As Erasmus argued against
Luther in his own way (see Luther’s, “On the Bondage of the Will”), it is
simply and vastly insufficient to use the Bible alone as the authority for the
Christian. Because there is no Bible alone. Unless you specify the context
against which the Bible is to be read, you have just equipped anyone to invest his or her own meaning
into the text, thus lifting their thoughts to the level of divine authority!
This is a horrifyingly dangerous idea!!!
Next, because the books of the Bible themselves were written
over the course of centuries, their original meanings are quite diverse. They
present us with countless unique perspectives that we are forced as readers to integrate. The books of the
Bible do not tell us how to connect their teaching with each other. We do this
as we look in from the outside. In this sense “the Bible,” the concept of a
unified perspective, is a meaning construct.
So we join the teaching of the individual parts of the Bible
together to construct “the Bible.” Whenever I hear someone speak of a “Biblical
Christian” or a “Biblical worldview,” I immediately suspect that the person
reads the Bible on a pre-modern level. The determinative part of arriving at
these overarching perspectives is the paradigm or thought mechanism by which a
person prioritizes and selects certain parts of the Bible as controllers of
meaning over others. Does a person more emphasize 1 Timothy 2:12 on the woman
issue or Galatians 3:28? So all conclusions on the meaning of the Bible require a
selecting and prioritizing framework or paradigm by which the
individual parts of Scripture are combined to form a unity of meaning.
Finally, there is a significant gap in context between the
original worlds of the Bible and today. 1 Corinthians gives us God’s word to
the ancient Corinthians. Even then, this was not precisely God’s word to the
Galatians. But the Bible certainly does not tell us how to join those worlds to
ours. If we are taking into account what these words meant originally, we again are forced to determine the process of
selection and reformulation by which those words go from being God’s word to
them to God’s word to us.
4.2 Scripture and Tradition
Because words are capable of multiple interpretations, the
Biblical text itself is susceptible to many interpretations that are not
strictly Christian. For example, recent days have seen interpretations of Paul
arguing that Jews could be saved apart from Christ, that only Gentiles needed
Christ’s blood for atonement. Others interpret Paul in such a way that we
should not think of contemporary Judaism as a different religion from
Christianity, that we should speak of ecumenical discussion not just between
Protestants and Catholics, but between non-Christian Jews and Christians.
Without going into detail, let me suggest that Christians—without
even realizing it—have an intuitive and mostly subconscious system of
interpretation whereby the text takes on orthodox meanings. The extent to which
this process takes place would be clear to us if we were able to go back and
see the writings of the Bible in their full historical context. Take the book
of Hebrews. When we read the book of Hebrews, we are not surprised to find it
telling us that Christ’s death has put an end to the Old Testament sacrificial
system. We are further not surprised to find that Old Testament sacrifices did
not really take away sin. We intuitively declare this the “biblical” position
on atonement and Old Testament sacrifices. We intuitively know that this is the
Christian position as well.
But if we could see Hebrews in its original setting, we
might just find that this message was highly controversial—perhaps even in the
church. Acts 21 implies that James urges Paul to pay and participate in a vow
of several early Christians. In other words, James is urging Paul to participate
in temple sacrifices and Paul agrees. According to Hebrews, such sacrifices are
no longer necessary.
What this means is that the same text of Hebrews can not
only take on different meanings—its overall significance can very depending on
its context. It had a certain significance when it was first written, when many
Christians may have actually disagreed with it. And it has a “canonical”
significance, a significance it takes on in the light of Christian history,
Scripture-as-churched. The canonical significance of Hebrews is that Christ is
the final atonement, indeed the only atonement. It does not matter whether any
other New Testament author might have thought differently, for Hebrews is the
controlling text the church has “chosen.”
There are any number of other instances where we are prone
not to realize how little of the New Testament takes a position of great
importance to us as Christians. For example, only two chapters of the New
Testament mention the virgin birth—an essential belief for us as Christians.
Yet the virgin birth does not seem to play much of any theological role in the
rest of the New Testament—including the rest of Matthew and Luke. The canonical
importance of the event is disproportionate to its biblical importance.
Similarly, very little of the New Testament references
Christ’s pre-existence. For example, some notable scholars, such as James Dunn,
believe that the phrase “form of God” in Philippians 2:6 is a reference to
Christ being a second Adam, not a reference to Christ as pre-existent deity.
While he is in the minority with this position, he demonstrates that it is
possible that many biblical texts that we tend to see in a certain light
because of later orthodoxy, may not have had the same original connotations as
we intuitively see in them post-Nicaea.
Many New Testament scholars see the Gospel of John as
unusual in its “high Christology” of pre-existence and equation of Jesus with
Yahweh at the burning bush (cf. John 8:58). Many indeed would suggest that John’s
community was considered unorthodox among early Christians, that it was a sect
within Christianity itself. Whether these claims turn out to be true or not,
they demonstrate the possibility that we read and connect the biblical texts to
each other in ways that are quite distinct from the meanings and connotations
these books had originally. They suggest that without even realizing it,
Christians read the Bible with canonical glasses on.
It is thus my suggestion that the meaning of Scripture in
the Quadrilateral should, in the first place, be the canonical meanings,
meanings that fit with the way the mainstream church came to understand these
Scriptures. The meaning of Scripture in the Quadrilateral is thus
Scripture-as-traditioned or better Scripture-as-churched.
4.3. The Clarification of the Quadrilateral
The healthy operation of Wesley’s Quadrilateral is thus not
to see Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience working in isolation from
each other. For example, it is not the rarified original meaning of the biblical
books that we should primarily have in view but the Bible as Scripture, the
Bible with the significance that the creeds and consensus of the church have
given it. The consensus of the church is the safest organizing and prioritizing
principle, the safest controlling element in determining its meaning and
significance for Christians.
Many traditions of interpretation of varying weight flow
smoothly from the words of Scripture. These range from ones that most churches
hold to others that seem the special emphases of smaller Christian groups. Some
of these may be God-ordained emphases of particular bodies of believers. Others
may be idiosyncratic and not ordained of God.
Reason and experience will always play a role in sorting out
all these things, for all human knowing passes through the human mind, the
content of which comes through our experiences. True Wesleyan integration will
accordingly involve the intermingling of all these components in an organic
fashion.
5. A Wesleyan Model of
Academic Integration
Evangelical academia has witnessed a good deal of discussion
on the integration of faith and learning over the last thirty years. The
integration gurus have suggested a number of different models: 1) the “Lutheran”
two kingdoms model that keeps faith and learning separate from each other, 2)
the “Pietist” model that focuses more on behavior and attitude, 3) the “Reformed”
model that emphasizes the proper cognitive presuppositions. Occasionally the
possibility of a “Wesleyan” model has been mentioned (Wesleyan here in the
broader sense of pan-Wesleyanism). The book in question usually will bring up
Outler’s idea of a Wesleyan Quadrilateral at this point (Scripture, tradition,
reason, and experience) and deem a Wesleyan model of integration the
incorporation of these elements. I believe that this summary is on the right
track. Let me develop it both as a pan-Wesleyan and as a member of The Wesleyan
Church, give it a little more sophistication, and bring it into the post-modern
era.
First of all, notice that a Wesleyan model of integration is
by its very nature more inclined to be multi-faceted and eclectic. While the
other models do this more by way of exception—”We emphasize heart but head is
not unimportant” “We emphasize head but heart is not unimportant”—a Wesleyan
model is by its very nature a
matter of integration itself. Frankly I smile after Duane Litfin, president of
Again, quite amusingly, Arthur Holmes’ different forms of
integration (attitudinal, ethical, foundational, and worldview—changed slightly
from the first edition of his book) are not far from the Wesleyan kingdom
themselves! I believe that all we need is give them a proper prioritization and
we have a fair model of Wesleyan integration. Let us draw a Wesleyan model of
integration as a number of concentric circles surrounding a core.
5.1
Personal Integration
I believe that a truly Wesleyan model will agree with the
Pietist model on the highest priority and core element in integration. No matter what your discipline, the heart of
integration is the integration of the heart. This includes what
Holmes refers to as “attitudinal” integration.
There may be little on a presuppositional level for a mathematician to
integrate with his or her discipline. Christian mathematics will mostly if not
completely be a matter of a Christian doing mathematics.
But we should extend personal integration to behavior and,
most importantly, to a “personal relationship” with God through Jesus Christ. I
place this phrase in quotations under the realization that much of what passes
for this phrase is distinctively Western, modern, and individualistic. I use
the phrase with room for collectivist personalities without well defined
individual identities. I do not imply any particular emotional content to the
phrase. But a person must affirm as an individual (however that individuality
is culturally parsed) that “Jesus is Lord” with their being.
Behavior and personal ethics are an essential part of
personal integration, especially for a Wesleyan. You will sooner get fired from
a Wesleyan college for moral failure than for strange beliefs. This is a part
of Wesleyan pietism that I suspect distinguishes it from a Calvin or
Church attendance should be an essential component of the
heart integration of a Wesleyan college. Professors who rarely attend church
should not be hired or promoted in rank. Prolonged absence from the body of
Christ should be grounds for dismissal. “There is no salvation outside the
church.”
5.2 Missional Integration
Holmes has a sense that for many disciplines, integration
will involve an ethical component. I do not mean the personal behavior of the
professor here but situations where the facts of the discipline may point in
directions that, as Christians, we simply cannot take. If all disciplines
require their professors to integrate with the heart, many will also require an
integration of discipline with the fundamental “love ethic” of Christianity. Whenever
relevant, no Christian teaching can be properly considered Christian if it does
not cohere with the dual commands to love God with all one’s being and one’s
neighbor as self.
Here the subject of economics comes to mind. It may be true
that market factors eventually work themselves out into a system that comes to
be best for the majority. But Christians are obligated by Christ to consider
individuals as ends in themselves rather than as means to other greater ends
(when being such a means conflicts with their existence as ends in themselves).
What these ethical concerns may mean is that Christian economics will be
obliged to chose different economic paths than a secular economist or an
economist following a Lutheran model of (non) integration might. The science of
economics is the same, but the implementation is likely different for a
Christian.
But a Wesleyan must broaden this element in the equation
beyond ethics to mission. Wesleyans
believe in full salvation of the whole person.
The need to see the world saved from its sins and saved from the power
of sin and oppression. Wesleyans thus
will integrate the evangelical mission into their teaching, as well as our
mission to the downtrodden and disempowered of the world on every level.
5.3 Cognitive Integration
Let me gather a couple additional forms of integration under
the general heading of “cognitive integration.” We might also call it
presuppositional integration. However, in a post-modern age it seems important
to draw very clear and tight lines around and within this domain of integration.
It is at this point that we might make a claim in comparing a Reformed model
with a Wesleyan one. In practice, I would claim that the Reformed model has
typically “drawn” presuppositional integration at the core of integration, with
matters like ethical and heart integration on the periphery in terms of
emphasis. This is an inappropriate priority in emphasis. Further, in the
twilight of modernism, it is a sign of the Reformed model’s eclipse. In
contrast, a Wesleyan model of integration such as I propose holds much more
promise at becoming the dominant model of the decades that follow.
It is at this point that I would like to incorporate our
earlier thoughts on the Quadrilateral at this point in history. It is my
contention that we are currently witnessing a collapse of the distinction between Scripture and tradition.
The events at
The professor claimed to be able to affirm that the Bible is
the “supreme and highest authority” for the Christian, since the Pope’s authority
is not understood to supersede the Bible but to function in terms of its
authoritative interpretation—and even then only when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, a very rare thing indeed (I
don’t think Pope John Paul ever invoked this authority). This is one of the big
issues facing evangelicalism in the near future, and I believe the Wesleyan
tradition is capable of an answer with greater depth than
With over 20,000 different Protestant denominations that
think they get their beliefs from the Bible alone, Erasmus seems without any
question the winner of the sola scriptura
debate between him and Luther. The post-modern question is not “Is the Bible
inspired or authoritative?” The question is “Which
interpretation of the Bible is inspired or authoritative?” It is
none too difficult to show that Christians—including evangelicals, Reformation
Protestants, and indeed, the Catholics of
the ages—have generally blurred the lines between Scripture and
tradition. Most groups prior to the post-modern era have seen Scripture as the
true authority behind what they say (including Catholics)— yet usually without
any real awareness of the glasses of tradition through which they have read the
Bible.
Postmodernism draws our attention to the fact that orthodox
interpretations of the Bible regularly invest meaning into the words that are
anachronistic to their original contexts. E.g., that the “we” of Genesis 1:27
is the Trinity when it took hundreds of years after the NT to refine this
belief (see Psalm 82 for a more likely hint at the original background).
Orthodox interpretations—whether they come by way of a translation like the NIV
or by intensively scholarly rationalization—use the traditional lenses of the
creeds and consensus of the church to provide the “rules” governing what
biblical texts can and cannot mean. It is just not really until now that we
have been self-aware enough to admit it to ourselves.
So to distinguish itself from Roman Catholicism,
Core Presuppositions
Someone might be thinking by now, “Where is the Scripture,
tradition, reason, and experience of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral?” For example,
are we only to introduce Scripture or tradition at the cognitive moment? Hasn’t
a good deal of the two inner circles been a matter of experience and will you
really be seen to give precedence to it over Scripture? Haven’t you been using
reasoning all along thus far? Indeed, I could see someone drawing the Wesleyan
model of integration as concentric circles with Scripture at the center,
tradition next, then reason and experience. Would that not be a good diagram of
Wesleyan integration?
I don’t think it would. Once we have drawn it, the picture
does not really tell us much. Why? Because Scripture does not have a fixed
meaning until you identity the context against which you are reading it. If you
choose the original contexts as the context, we have not yet found the meaning
for the church today, only the meanings for the people of God at a different
point in time. My contention is that the context against to read Scripture is
the church. It is thus Scripture-as-churched that is the central authority for
the Christian. Nor can you divorce reason informed by experience from the
process—especially experience of the Holy Spirit. We have hopefully clarified
these issues in our previous discussion.
It is thus the presupposition of our entire “diagram” of
concentric circles that reason informed by experience has been informed by
Scripture-as-churched. As authoritative, Scripture, tradition, reason, and
experience cannot be neatly separated from one another—they are like joints and
marrow, soul and spirit, thought and intention, logically distinct in theory,
but nearly impossible to separate in practice.
So we have personal integration at the core of the integration
of faith and learning at a Wesleyan academic community. Since it presupposes
reason informed by experience as informed by Scripture-as-churched, this is no
blind existentialist leap of the heart. It is a Christian heart with a specific
content.
Then we have missional integration for many disciplines
beyond the heart. This is no secular ethic based on some utilitarian calculus
or rational categorical imperative. This is the love ethic that stands as the
basis for all Christian ethic, as dictated by Scripture-as-churched. And for a Wesleyan context it involves both
the mission to save the souls, bodies, minds, and entire beings of the world.
Let me suggest two rings within the larger ring of cognitive
integration, beginning with core presuppositions. At the heart of cognitive integration, in the
third broader ring from the center, is integration with the core dogma of the
Christian faith. These dogma are found in the creeds of the church catholic:
matters such as God as creator, the divinity of Christ, his virgin birth, and
bodily resurrection.
It seems unfathomable that a Wesleyan college would hire a
faculty member who could not subscribe to this core. As things currently stand,
it is inconceivable that a person committed to Mormon beliefs would teach at
one—even in mathematics. A person committed to the beliefs of the United
Pentecostal Church could not in good conscience teach at one, for he or she
would have to view it as a secular campus, since most of the faculty will not
speak in tongues and none will have been baptized in the name of Jesus only. In
good conscience, such a professor would need to evangelize students and faculty
to help them become Christians.
Integration of core presuppositions is of course a matter of
many disciplines. While the manner of God’s creation is not in the creeds, the
fact that He is creator is core. A Wesleyan faculty member thus could not teach
that God was not involved in creation or that after creation He ceased to be
involved with the creation. These are matters of core Christian integration.
Doctrines of the consensus
ecclesiae
Beyond the creeds there are many other beliefs that are held
in common by all orthodox Christian groups. These beliefs are the consensus ecclesiae, the “consensus of
the church.” Creation of the universe ex
nihilo or out of nothing has been the common belief of Christians
since the 200s. The existence of a detachable soul that continues to exist at
death in the time before the yet to come resurrection of the dead. These are
views that are not clearly enumerated in Scripture nor are they explicitly
stated in the core creeds of the faith. Yet they are things that mainstream
Christianity has believed from its earliest days.
These views are perhaps slightly—though not much more in
flux than the dogmas of Christendom. For example, in the year 1300 the entire
church pretty much agreed that the ideal was for a priest to be celibate. Yet
this is not the consensus of the church today. Similarly, two hundred years ago
it was pretty much the consensus of the church that women could not be
ministers. Yet this is not at all the consensus of the church today. In my
opinion, perhaps the most important next step in the rapproachment of the church universal is
to work out the dynamics and rules of the consensus
ecclesiae. Clearly I am not Roman Catholic, so their answer is not
my answer.
We now face some of the thornier issues of integration of
faith and learning. Matters of consensus like creation ex nihilo, the inception of death because
of the sin of Adam, the existence of a detachable soul. These interpretations
of Scripture-as-churched were forged under vastly different circumstances than
the academic contexts in which such things are discussed today. As science has
looked beyond the “expressions” of reality to “explain” their nature and
causes, science and Christianity have come to battle on any number of
occasions. Let’s be honest about these conflicts. Christianity has more than
once come away looking to be a religion of the ignorant and of the losers. This
is highly unfortunate. It has created a climate in which we have shamed God by
insisting that the sun goes around the earth or that technology was evil.
I think some insights from the post-modern era provide us with some helpful paths forward.