Wednesday, February 26, 2003

The Pressure to Believe

Many thoughtful Christians I know --- layfolks, pastors, and bishops alike --- are feeling increasing pressure to bring or to keep their beliefs in conformity with the church's normative teaching through the centuries --- in a word, with "the faith of the apostles" --- or else. Most resist the pressure well, and some even turn the tables on their pressurers. "Judge not, lest ye be judged…" still seems to level the playing field effectively in the game of serious theologizing.

Nevertheless, pressures continue, and not always from right field. From all the way beyond shortstop to the left field stands come "who cares???" shouts --- about anything from the past imposing itself upon present day Christian life, the apostolic tradition included. To muddy the metaphors still further: whether they are sitting on the right side or the left side of the pews, people engaging in these kind of pressure tactics should know better. Insisting that Christians must hold only the "right" beliefs, or that they must hold any and all traditional beliefs in suspension, is another form of works-righteousness: its unjustifiable premise is that we are saved by what we do and do not choose to believe.

To be sure, a little pressure to get right with our faith tradition is not all bad. What people are supposed to believe as Christians is not something that the church has just made up as it has gone along. Sorting out all of the implications of the apostolic tradition for Christian living in the present has always been arduous business, deserving of attention and respect. It matters a lot, though, who does the sorting and how open they are to letting the apostolic tradition speak to us on its own terms and not theirs. The single most important discovery I keep making in my own sorting is that figuring out what the tradition does and does not demand of us is more complicated than we would like it to be.

Recently, a respected colleague in ministry, George Ricker, published a book with the winsome title, What You Don't Have To Believe To Be A Christian. It's all about the beliefs from which God has liberated us, and the rich new possibilities of understanding that constantly dawn on the horizon of reasoned, prayerful inquiry into the truth. George is one of the best read, most effective pastors that I know. He is a more than reliable guide through the morass of over-belief that is now threatening the church's vitality everywhere.

One chapter of George's book, on the Trinity, especially interested me. What we don't have to believe about this doctrine, he writes, is that it is an accurate portrayal of the inner being of God. What we can believe, instead, and still be a Christian, is that the doctrine expresses well how human beings experience God.

This seems innocent enough, until we bring to mind the many theologians who come to this same conclusion in a way quite different from the way that George does. Their standard rejection of traditional trinitarian doctrine is that it is based upon an outmoded world-view. Since the world-view doesn't square with our own, the argument goes, then we must relieve people from having to defend it, and the doctrines that go with it, anymore. I think that this ploy carries about as much validity as the doesn't-fit-must-acquit argument does in the infamous "OJ" trial. As that trial's jurors showed the whole world, though, sometimes there's just no accounting for mental lapses.

No one has ever thought that George Ricker's mind was fried, though, and he proves his intellectual mettle again in the way that he opens up fresh new inquiry about very old beliefs, without having to reject the world-view behind the Christian tradition. With respect to the Trinity, George shows us what we don't have to believe about it simply by appealing to the great variety of opinion about the doctrine contained in the Christian tradition itself.

There is an important lesson to be learned here by people ready to bludgeon fellow Christians whose faith they deem at variance with the Christian tradition. It is that the weapon with which they would slay unbelievers is more often than not only a partial, and therefore partially wrong, understanding of the very tradition which they claim to defend. In the Christian tradition as a whole, there are far more understandings of the Christian gospel than any of us could possibly become informed spokespersons for. (Has anybody really straightened it out yet what Jesus did and did not say about his next coming?) Paradoxically, this also means that our traditions contain far less that we must believe than most traditionalists seem willing to concede.

In the fullest sense of the phrase, the more's the pity.

Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Methodist Inquisitors

It did not take long for our Protestant ancestors to drive the Roman Catholic hierarchy right up the wall. As we are so fond of saying these days, the RC's had "had it up to here," and proceeded forthwith --- on July 21,1542 to be exact --- to crank up the languishing machinery of the Inquisition in the interest of repressing deviate opinions once and for all. If the interests of doctrinal purity were not enough to fire up people to burn their neighbors at the stake, there was the additional happy prospect of confiscating all of the heretics' properties.

These days, nobody in our churches is making much of a living out of exterminating the unorthodox. The realization that this is so, however, does not diminish some peoples' unholy passion to make the rest of us believe exactly and only what they themselves believe. What gets to me is how many Protestants seem to want a piece of this inquisitorial action. The Reformation started out with a commitment to every believer's enjoying a direct relationship with God. It may end up promoting blind loyalty to barely comprehended doctrines as a substitute for joyous celebration of gladly received grace.

What gets to me even more is that there are increasing numbers of Methodist Protestants with the same kind of Torquemada-envy that is on the rampage among Fundamentalists and Traditionalists all over the place. Recently, for example, a rowdy bunch of United Methodist clergy and laity from the North Central Jurisdiction lodged a complaint against one of the Jurisdiction's bishops, allegedly for teaching what is contrary to our denomination's Doctrinal Standards. The group wants this bishop either to renounce his teaching or resign from the episcopal office. If he does neither, then the group will insist that he be removed from the ordained ministry. These folks are only the latest group of Methodists to weigh in on the matter; this particular "firestorm," as it has been called, has been raging over half a year and shows no signs of abating.

Think about it for a minute. One bishop puts forward his best effort at theologizing, in this case at a theological seminary --- just the place where we want such things to go on. Another bishop challenges him vigorously. So far, so good. Even better, the ensuing debate went just the way our Doctrinal Standards Statement originally envisioned theological conversation to proceed in our churches: scriptural passages were flying; tradition was being re-discovered; personal experiences of belief, doubt, and unbelief were respected and given fresh articulation; and reason was put in the service of seeking new meaning in old images.

Then the trouble began. Paranoid about the "apostolic faith" slipping away before their very eyes, self-appointed arbiters of every other Methodist's faith began hurling just the kind of anathemas that have polarized and paralyzed thoughtful people in the church ever since Paul permitted non-circumcised Gentiles to become followers of The Way. Contrary to their deformed, terror-stricken vision of a church mutating into godless liberalism, the last thing the United Methodist Church needs right now is an inquisition just when our leaders finally are getting bold enough to think some original thoughts.

As someone who has taught and written about the Doctrinal Standards of the United Methodist Church, I continue to find it irritating when Methodists confuse the "marrow of Christian truth" with doctrinal utterances the assent to which they arbitrarily deem necessary for acceptance into the Christian fellowship. (At least they haven't started telling us that the assent is necessary for our salvation.) If it were not proving so destructive to Christian fellowship, the confusion would be simply laughable. Construing the content of Christian belief as right doctrine is like construing the substance of the spinal cord with the vertebrae that surround it.

It is no accident that the Christian tradition as a whole constantly refers to the doctrines of the faith as symbols. The Apostles' Creed itself was once better known as "The Old Roman Symbol." As the greatest teachers of the church have reminded us, symbols operate at many different levels at once. And at every one, the way not to understand a symbol is the way of literalism. With legalism, literalism can only draw us ever downward, finally into the realm of death. Symbols, by contrast, offer us life, if we joyfully allow them to be what they are, instead of doggedly trying to make them into something that they are not.

Going on a tear about doctrinal impurity is a far cry from lifting one's heart and voice in gratitude to the One whose presence to us on this earth must always be shrouded in mystery. Blindly upholding unexamined doctrines is no way into the mystery. The better way is to work hard, together, to let the great symbols of our faith bring the mystery closer themselves.