I think for a lot of Christians, especially those from creedal traditions, assume that the basis for unity should be theology or belief.  I don’t think this works for United Methodism, though, and I’m not sure how well it works for any non-creedal tradition (or creedal tradition, for that matter).  Before I explain, let me make a disclaimer: I’m not saying in this post that theology doesn’t matter or that people should be able to believe anything they want and still call themselves a Christian or a United Methodist.  I think theology does matter.  I personally believe a number of things quite fervently and hope others do, too.  I even think belief is something that’s worth arguing about at times.  So I’m not saying in this post that belief is unimportant.  I’m saying that theology can’t serve as a good basis for unity in The United Methodist Church.

The first reason why theology is an insufficient basis for unity is that, if we look at the church today, it is not a current source of unity.  In fact, it’s often a source of division within the church.  Liberals and conservatives fight like weasels (a phrase I once heard a United Methodist layperson use to describe General Conference) over theological issues.  In order to go from where we are now to a place where theology is the basis for United Methodist unity, either someone would have to persuade a whole lot of people or kick a whole lot of people out of the church.  The first seems unrealistic, the latter unacceptable.

Second, it’s not really clear what theological pieces we would set up as the basis for United Methodist unity, were we to try to go that route.  Most of what either evangelical or liberal United Methodists would like to get everyone to believe isn’t distinctively United Methodist but is tied into larger theological currents in the U.S. that cut across denominations, so in many cases, neither side is really presenting a distinctively Methodist vision of theological unity.

We could, then, turn to the Book of Discipline (the United Methodist constitution, if you will) to see what it has to say about the doctrinal basis for Methodist unity.  But it turns out the Book of Discipline is not very helpful in this regard.  It states that the 25 Articles (John Wesley’s condensation/reduction of the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Faith) and John Wesley’s sermons shall be the standards of Methodist theology.  But that’s such a large body of works that it’s not really useful in defining standards of United Methodist theology to serve as a basis for unity.  It’s certainly no five point creed.  There are many strands within the Sermons and Articles on which to draw.  Plus, how many people are you going to get to read even the 25 Articles, let alone all of Wesley’s sermons (which even most Methodist seminarians don’t read in their entirety)?

If we can’t use these textual resources for unity, perhaps we could identify a couple of historically distinctive doctrines as the theological basis for United Methodist unity.  Here, the two most distinctive Methodist doctrines have been an Arminian approach to salvation and the doctrine of sanctification.  Arminianism states that God offers God’s grace freely to all, and humans must respond by accepting that grace.  The doctrine of sanctification states that God is capable of making humans perfect in love while we are yet alive, and we should all be striving for that.

The problem with Arminianism, though, is that it’s been so widely successful as a theology in the United States that it’s no longer distinctively Methodist.  The emphasis within a lot of Arminianism has shifted from free grace to free will, and almost everyone wants to believe in free will in this country.  Even a lot of Calvinists or people from Calvinist traditions have become Arminians.  Hence, saying that United Methodists are going to be known as the people who believe in free grace and free will Arminianism is like saying Burger King is going to be known as the fast food place that serves burgers.  It’s true, but it’s not like there aren’t others making burgers, so it’s not really something that would set them apart.

Which leaves us with sanctification.  The problem with trying to make sanctification the theological basis for United Methodist unity is that so few United Methodist actually know what the doctrine is and know that it’s a traditional Methodist doctrine.  Of those who do, probably even a smaller number actually believe in the possibility of entire sanctification in this life.  I think it’s sad, but nonetheless true, that Methodists have lost touch with the doctrine of sanctification.  Given that that’s true, though, it seems like it would be a lot of work to try to reclaim sanctification as the basis of theological unity in the church.

Therefore, I don’t think theology works as the basis for unity in The United Methodist Church.  That may make some upset or uneasy, but I don’t think that means there aren’t other possible bases for unity.  Agreement on a set list of beliefs is not the basis of unity for families, the Army, knitting groups, or Phish fans, yet there is something which holds each of these groups together.  In the upcoming weeks, I’ll continue to look at some of these other possible grounds for Methodist unity.

Three caveats: 1. All of my answers for “what comes next” are just guesses.  Since it comes next, it’s only partially here now and thus hard to discern.  2. I’m using the definition of postmodernity from last week that sees it as a transitional period between modernity and what comes next (though the answers also draw on postmodernity as critique).  In many cases, there will be a lot of overlap between the answers for postmodernity and one of those other two periods.  3. The answers below are brief and therefore simplistic.  If you’d like to see me elaborate on a question, indicate that in the comments.

What are the important sources of authority?

Christendom: “Traditional”, hierarchical authorities such as kings, bishops, etc. along with tradition.  You do and believe what tradition or the authorities tell you to do and believe.

Modernity: Individual reason.  You do and believe what your own individual reason tells you to do and belief.

Postmodernity: Calls into question the universality of reason, but keeps the influence on the individual as the arbiter of authority.  You do and believe what you want to do and believe.

What comes next: I think the answer here is going to be communal norms.  You do and believe what those in your social reference group do and believe.

What are people like?

Christendom: People are part of a great hierarchy of being.  People are inherently sinful.  Individuals are less important than humanity as a whole.

Modernity: People share in universal human reason.  People are either good or perfectable.  Individuals have increasing worth.

Postmodernity: People are limited by their own context.  Individuals have ultimate worth and, to some extent, define their own realities.

What comes next: People are social beings and part of social networks.  Individuals have freedom to choose their networks, but are then shaped by those networks.

What is truth, and how do you know it?

Christendom: Truth is knowledge of the eternal and unchanging known through tradition and revelation.

Modernity: Truth is logical propositions about the laws of the universe known through reason and the senses (interpreted by reason).

Postmodernity: Truth is relative and known through cultural background and personal experience.

What comes next: Truth is understanding contexts correctly, known through individual selection of communities of reference and subsequent communal consensus (think Wikipedia or the birthers as instances of truth defined by communal consensus).

Who are theology’s important dialogue partners?

Christendom: Philosophy, to help recover truths that have already been known

Modernity: Physical sciences, to determine the true nature of the world through experience and reasoned reflection

Postmodernity: Cultural studies, to help identify cultural contexts shaping worldviews

What comes next: Social sciences, to make sense of human diversity and human connectivity

How should we read the Bible?

Christendom: Literally (to get the basic sense of the words), allegorically (to see what they have to say about the salvation narrative), tropologically (to derive moral lessons), and anagogically (to find what they say about the ultimate ends of life).

Modernity: As a collection of logical propositions that can be selected apart from context and arranged to create logical arguments on any topic, or as a collection of myths not literally true because they contradict experience, though imparting some deeper truth (depending on where you shake out theologically)

Postmodernity: As a collection of stories that we give meaning to based on the personal experiences and beliefs that we bring to the texts as readers

What comes next: It will be interesting to see – perhaps as a source for a shared set of languages and stories that help shape and define the Christian community

I have to admit since becoming disillusioned with a lot of modernity’s narratives of progress, I’ve been a bit agnostic about my theology of history.  I would affirm that God is involved in history somehow, but when asked how I thought God might be involved, I would say something like, “Well, we’re just limited humans, and it’s really hard to say what God might be doing in history.  I’m sure God’s up to good things, though, even if I have no idea what those might be.”

Listening to Allie’s sermon convicted me that this is an inadequate position for me as a Christian and especially as a Christian who is also a professional historian.  Amazingly, I have not found all of the answers in the month and a half I have been thinking about this (hah!), but I have identified four positions I would like to reject and four that I think require further investigation.

Positions to I would like to reject:
1. God is uninvolved with history (what might be called a Deist view)

I find this position unappealing for several reasons.  First, I think it presents a weak view of God.  A God who is not involved in history is not involved in human affairs and thus is not very useful to humans.  Granted, the point of God isn’t to be useful to humans, but I really think such a view leads to a God that can be ignored.  Sure, some believe that God created inherent moral laws in the universe before he stepped away from the clockwork, but the evidence for such laws is sketchy, and I don’t think it makes this position any more appealing.

Second, I think this position devalues history.  If God is uninvolved with history, then God can’t care about history that much.  And since God is the ultimate source of value, if God doesn’t care about history, then history’s not worth much.

Finally, such a view seems to go against the Biblical witness.  I like the Bible, and if the Bible presents to me a God that’s involved in history, then that’s the type of God I’m going to believe in.

2. God controls everything in history (what might be called a Panglossian view)

This position also fails for several reasons, mainly related to an insufficient view of evil.  First, it seems to make God the author of evil.  We could radically revise our notions of evil and say the things that seem evil to us are really part of a broader, overall good, probably one that we’re unable to see.  But this seems to do away with any significance to the terms good and evil and go against how humans actually experience life.

Second, this view baptizes unjust structures by making them part of God’s will for the world.  This deprives Christians of a basis to work against economic, racial, gender, political, environmental, and other forms of injustice.  God must be outside of history and not fully identified with history so that the word of God can break into history to critique history.

Finally, this view also seems to go against the Biblical record, where although God is sometimes in control, there are also plenty of people doing things against God’s will.

3. History is just a place for individuals to have their souls saved (what might be called a fundamentalist view)

I will agree that history is the arena in which individuals experience salvation, but I reject the notion that history is only a place for individual souls to be saved.  Such a view, while in many ways at the opposite side of the theological spectrum from the Deist view, also seems to devalue history.  In this view, what happens in history per se doesn’t matter.  All that matters is what happens between individuals and Jesus.

Such a position is unappealing to me for two reasons.  First, I like to think about salvation in more wholistic terms that includes forgiveness of sins, but also restoration of right relationship with God, other humans, and the world around us.  Other humans and the world around us are part of history.  Second, history is part of the world and thus part of God’s creation, which God has termed good.  Thus, history must have some positive value.

4. History is building toward the actual coming of the Kingdom of God on earth (what might be called a modern/social gospel view)

I ragged on modern notions of progress in last week’s post, so I’m not going to completely rehash those arguments.  Suffice it to say that the Kingdom of God has not yet completely come on earth and the amount of sin and suffering left in the world suggest that if the Kingdom of God is to arrive by any gradual process of amelioration of the world, it’s not going to get here any time soon.  This view, then, also seems not to take evil seriously enough.

What’s left, then?  How can we talk about God’s relationship to history that affirms that God is involved with history, affirms the value of history, and takes evil seriously?

Positions that I think require further thought:
1. History is progressing in some way, just not in the ways modernity talked about so far

It seems like it might be possible to tell a story about history as progress that avoids some of the pitfalls of the sorts of progress stories that modernity tells.  One example of such a story comes from the field of missiology, where people talk about history as the progressive spread of Christianity to all nations and races (not that everyone will become Christian, but that some people from all racial and ethnic groups will become Christian).  Such a pattern does actually seem to be happening.  It might also be possible to tell a story of the progress of the interconnectedness of human society, if you thought God was into that sort of thing.

2. History is a process of growth and decay (perhaps repeated many times) before eventually new birth

It is also possible to believe that history has an ultimate telos or goal but that it won’t be a process of continued progress toward that goal.  Instead, history may be a process of decay, or growth and then decay, or cycles of growth and decay before ultimately reaching the end of history.  I think Christians can be optimistic that this eventual telos is a good destination (God’s new creation), but I don’t think we must be optimistic about the path to get there.

3. History is open, but influenced by a loving God in certain directions

This is a process theology view of history.  God doesn’t know where history is going, but God is influencing history in certain directions – toward love and justice, for instance.  I’m not a huge fan of process theology, but such a position would allow one to talk about God’s involvement in history without having to come to any conclusions about the telos of history.  It may, however, still suppose notions of progress that may be problematic.

4. History matters to God because it contains (and is) God’s creation, not because history is heading any particular place, even if God does eventually intend an end to history and a new creation

In such a view, God cares about history and is involved with history because God cares about humans and the rest of God’s creation, which exist within history.  A useful analogy here would be an individual life.  We wouldn’t necessarily say the point of life is to die.  (Even if you think the point of life is to go to heaven after you die, that’s different than saying the point of life is to die.)  I would affirm that God cares about us and is present with us throughout our life.  The value of a human life is not determined by death, but by God’s valuation of life.  Perhaps in a similar way, the value of history is not determined by its end, but because God values creation.  God is involved with history because God loves God’s creation.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that history won’t come to an end or God won’t make a new creation, but the value of history derives not from God’s establishment of the new creation, but from God’s establishment of this creation.

I’m not yet ready to hang my hat on any of these four positions, but I’d be interested to hear others’ assessments of these positions or others I may not have thought of yet.

Postmodernity instead emphasizes human limitations and particularity.  Humans are, according to postmodernity, imperfectly reasonable and imperfectly good.  Their understanding of reason and the good is limited by their particularity: their culture, gender, class, life experience, etc.  Thus, universal standards of reason or morality take a big hit with postmodernity.  Furthermore, any student of history must at least admit that postmodernity is right in naming human variation.  Humans have and do believe greatly different things and act with greatly different standards of what constitutes right.

Such a postmodern anthropology has serious implications for a doctrine of righteousness.  The question of how it is that we can be considered righteous (conforming to the standards of the good and acceptable in the eyes of God) is one at the heart of Christianity.  Questions about justification often revolve around humans’ ability to do good, but postmodernity raises even more fundamental questions.  If humans can only ever imperfectly know the good, how could we do that good, even if we were capable?  In a limited and particular world, how can we undertake the quest for righteousness?

There are several responses to this problem, it seems.  The first is accept that the relativist thrust of postmodernity makes the pursuit of righteousness impossible and abandon the quest, focusing instead on some other aspect of religion.  This approach, however, seems to me to be letting go of one of the traditional pillars of Christian theology, something I am unwilling to do.

Another approach is to reassert universality and attach the pursuit of righteousness to that universality.  This approach can come in a strong form of rejection of postmodern critiques of universality.  I find such an approach undervalues not only the intellectual weight of these postmodern critiques but also the real existence of human variety, both across contemporary cultures and historical periods.

This approach can also come in a weaker form in which postmodern emphasis of particularity is acknowledged, but it is asserted that despite such human variation, we can still identify some moral precepts that the vast majority of humans agree upon.  For instance, everyone agrees that murder is bad.  This approach, however, seems to me to lead to a lowest common denominator version of morality and the good.  Is everyone who doesn’t murder really righteous?  Is righteousness just being nice?  Christianity has often answered “no”, drawing on (among other things) Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard it said [such and such a commandment], but I say to you [some more stringent requirement]“.  Furthermore, such an approach undermines a quest not just for righteousness, but for justice.  Justice is rarely a universally agreed upon quality, yet it is a critical one for Christianity.

A third approach is to take the attitude of “to your own self be true”.  We may be unable to determine universal standards of righteousness, but in absence of those universal standards, we should be as true as we can to whatever particular standards we have inherited or fashioned for ourselves.  This may be viewed as a reassertion of the classic medieval doctrine of “facere quod in se est (do what is in you)”.  Do the best you can with the knowledge and ability you have, and God will accept the result.  I find a lot to recommend about this approach, and I think it may be the best grounding for postmodern ethics, as long as some provision is made for critiquing one’s understanding of the good through interaction with others.

Yet, as a Protestant, I don’t find this approach (with is frequently the Catholic approach) fully satisfying.  Instead, I would suggest that postmodern anthropology and the challenges it poses for the question of righteousness is a chance for Protestants to reassert the doctrine of justification by faith.  We are righteous, not because we are able to discern what God’s standards of righteousness are and are able to follow them, but because God has, through God’s grace, regarded us as righteous.  This reassertion of justification by faith must define faith not in the confessional sense of assent to right propositions (for, as I’ve been saying, postmodernity poses too great a challenge to epistemology for us to be totally secure that we’ve got the propositions right).  Instead, it must define faith (as Luther did) in terms of relational trust (a securer move, since postmodernity is less critical of our ability to be in relationship with each other than it is of our ability to have correct knowledge).  We must trust God; we must have faith that God is loving enough to accept us despite our limited and particular nature.