A Methodist Theologian Not To Forget

This summer, a number of Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church are including in their meetings a celebration of the life and work of Albert C. Outler, one of the most influential Methodist theologians in the history of the denomination, on the fifteenth year of his death. They are bringing back fond memories.

When I joined the faculty of Perkins School of Theology in 1969, I brought with me an intimidating homework assignment. The previous Spring, my first letter of welcome to the faculty was from Dr. Outler, and it included both an invitation and a recommendation.
His invitation was to teach the course in Methodist Constitutional History which had been a favorite of his at Perkins for many years. His recommendation was to start boning up seriously on Methodist history --- right then. To get me started, he sent under separate cover his own copy of William Warren Sweet's Methodism in American History.

My second day at Perkins, I was unpacking books when Albert dropped by and asked me to lunch. Alas, I had to face this great man across fish and chips with a still too general knowledge of Methodist history and with the confession that though I was gaining on it, it was going to take a while. "I can help," he said. And help, he did. He encouraged me to work up a briefer overview of American Methodist history than he was himself accustomed to offering in the Methodist Constitutional History course. Then, he suggested that my students and I might spend the second half of the semester working with him directly on an interim report to General Conference about doctrinal standards for the new United Methodist Church. What a deal!

Albert Outler was at that time chair of the Theological Study Commission formed by the just merged Methodist and Evangelical and United Brethren churches, whose mandate was to work out a statement on basic doctrine that would represent both traditions faithfully. Few people knew how difficult his task was. His committee members were constantly firing off notes, recommendations, and position papers that they not so subtly suggested would provide just the perspective on United Methodist theology to last us until the second coming.

Albert's problem, as I came to see as a result of reading all this material, was that members of the Study Commission neither saw the history of the merged denominations the same way nor shared anything close to a common theological methodology. In spite of these obstacles, however, the "theological pluralism" that the Commission's final report celebrated was anything but "theological indifferentism," contrary to the viewpoint of many of the report's critics right down to the present.

More often than not, I was simply awestruck watching Albert steer this very diverse group of committed Christians toward a working agreement on difficult matters of normative doctrine. But I should not have been surprised. Albert was already working with the greatest and most ecumenically-minded theologians of our time on the most vexing issues threatening Christian unity, and his particular contributions to Protestant-Roman Catholic dialogue on the meaning of tradition were well known and appreciated. Further, he had spent three years as the Methodist Church's official observer at the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. The book he wrote about Vatican II's new vision of the church remains one of the finest produced by any of the theologians who attended, Protestant and Catholic alike.

While in Rome, Albert quickly won the trust of the movers and shakers at the Council, and in so doing, got us a hearing for our own doctrine and doctrinal standards statement. What he wanted the Vatican to know especially was that at least the United Methodist branch of Protestantism had moved beyond the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, attack and counter-attack, into an era of honest acknowledgement of mutual sin, by hearts warmed by grace, set ablaze by the one Spirit with a love to share with all humankind.

With the approval of the 1972 General Conference, Albert delivered what became Part Two of our Book of Discipline in person to the Roman curia. And Rome's response was historic. In it, for the first time since the Reformation, the Roman Church officially recognized a Protestant body --- ours --- as a church instead of as merely a group of "separated believers." I was in Albert's office when he opened the official communication from Rome, and shared with him a moment of pure, unbounded joy, a kind of joy that our current encirclement by the wagons of unthinking and unloving traditionalists and liberals alike threatens to snuff out altogether.