UM Beliefs: More on sin

My recent post from the new book Key United Methodist Beliefs raised a couple of questions about how the authors, William J. Abraham and David Watson, discuss the issue of sin. So, here is a follow-up that I hope does justice to their chapter in the book.

Each chapter in the book is broken down into five sections.

• A Wesleyan Faith – A presentation of John Wesley’s teaching and the roots of it in Christian tradition.
• A Living Faith – A engagement with how the particular issue might affect the way we live our faith.
• A Deeper Faith – A place to tackle tough questions or complicated issues raised by the topic of the chapter.
• Catechism – Questions and Answers with Scriptural support where possible.
• In Your Own Words – Questions designed to help the reader or small group formulate their own responses and understandings based on the chapter.

Chapter 5 “What Is Sin?” begins with the observation that John Wesley viewed all people as sinful. It then asks the obvious question: “What is sin?” The answer: “It is any violation of God’s will.”

From this definition, the chapter moves immediately to a discussion of original sin as understood by Wesley and based on the writing of Paul and interpretation of Augustine. The authors discuss original sin as a distortion of our desires and also as inherited guilt. (Wesley, to my reading, did not share this emphasis on inherited guilt, but the authors may have in mind Augustine here more than Wesley.)

They note the nature of sin as personal (which they term small scale) and social (which they term “on a grand scale”) and argue that sin is not simply something people do but is a spiritual agent. Their discussion on this topic, as much of the book, attempts to describe what many people believe without being entirely prescriptive.

The chapter moves on to discuss living faith by writing about situations in which we know what we should do but do not want to do it.

It is simply a part of the human condition that at times we will want to think, speak, and do things that God does not wish. We should expect this to happen, and when it does, God allows us to choose the right way or the wrong way to live. When we choose the wrong way, however, we should not expect to find lasting happiness. Only in God can we find lasting happiness and true fulfillment.

The rest of the “Living Faith” section of the chapter is a discussion of the last line above, including reference to Augustine’s famous observation that our heart is always restless until if finds rest in God. Our tendency to seek fulfillment in things other than God leads us to idolatry and misuse of things and people.

In the “Deeper Faith” section of the chapter, as I discussed in my earlier post, the authors explore the reasons behind the rules as an interpretation on Mark 2:27 where Jesus says the Sabbath was made for humankind.

The chapter closes with the catechism and the questions to answer. Both include focus on the person and work of Satan, which is highlighted in the “Living Faith” section of the chapter. The catechism quotes Psalm 51:5 as it discusses original sin, which highlights the idea of original guilt, which as I wrote above I do not think was an emphasis on John Wesley.

I’ll close with just a couple of general comments about the book. First, it is well done, although with a few typographical issues. It is well organized and written in a way that does not assume a seminary degree. I don’t think it would work well for a class of new Christians, but would be good for Christians who are trying to understand their faith more deeply. In many ways, the book tries to do the impossible — describe what United Methodists believe — but it does it well.

You will, however, notice some particular interests of the authors peaking through the curtains as you read. As part of what once was a theological construction project called Canonial Theism, they have particular views about Scripture and the other gifts of the Holy Spirit provided to the church to help form people in the way of Christ. So, for instance, their  chapter on Scripture is about the Bible and the creeds. In another place, the catechism over the Trinity uses Eastern Orthodox answers, which remove the filoque clause, although the authors do retain the clause in the version of the Nicene Creed reproduced from the United Methodist Hymnal.

These are minor, but to me interesting, observations. All in all, the book is well done, engaging, and certainly a useful one for any church wanting to delve more deeply into the meaning of the faith.

UM Beliefs: ‘What is Sin?’

In their book Key United Methodist Beliefs William J. Abraham and David Watson take a look at the question “What is Sin?” They discuss John Wesley’s definition of sin and the Western Christian tradition. They look at how we might live out these beliefs, and then they frame the issue in terms of why it matters. In this last section, they argue that God’s rules exist to foster human flourishing:

Rules are certainly important, but they are important because they lead us into a deeper relationship with God. Take a commonplace example like smoking. Christians are right to say that smoking is not consistent with Christian life, but why? Because cigarette smoke offends God? Of course not. Rather, the reason is that God wishes us to care for our bodies and to use our bodies in ways that honor the fact that they are gifts from God. … We humans are not made simply to obey rules. Rather God leads us to establish particular rules and guidelines for living within our communities so that we can flourish as God wishes.

From this section of the book, I take the following interpretative rule: We should be able to explain sin in terms of how following God’s rules sustains and supports the flourishing of people and communities.

That is an appealing interpretative rule, but I wonder if it might prove too malleable in our hands. We are pretty good at coming up with reasons to explain why we should do what we want to do, regardless of rules.

Perhaps this is why we need the community of faith and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Six equal parts or one central focus?

I’ve been carrying around in my head for about a year now the six-fold description of the reign of God that William J. Abraham sketched out in his book The Art of Evangelism. The six dimensions are the moral, the experiential, the theological, the horizontal (community life), the operational (hands and feet of Christ), and the disciplined (practicing spiritual disciplines).

Abraham argues that Christians live into the reign of God as they mature into each of these six dimensions, but he conceives of them as more or less independent. You can enter the reign of God through any of these dimensions and you can progress along them somewhat independently of the others. So, for instance, a person might begin his or her journey into the reign of God with social activism (operational dimension) or by being born into a church family and being raised among Christians (horizontal) or by undergoing conversion (experiential). At some point, Abraham argues, mature Christians must grow into all six dimensions, but there is not one pattern for that.

When I read the works of John and Charles Wesley, I can track all six of these dimensions in their work. They touch on them all, but is a significantly different way than Abraham does.

For the Wesleys, the experiential dimension is the central movement around which all the other dimensions are arranged. The experiential dimension is the experience of conviction, pardon, new birth, and sanctification that the Holy Spirit works in a believer. For the Wesley’s the kingdom of God was primarily about these experiences worked out in the life of the Christian.

Other dimensions mentioned by Abraham could be understood in relation to this central thrust. So, the operational dimension (being agents of Christ in the world) was understood as works of mercy, which were both fruits of the spirit and disciplines to mold the temperament and bring the Christian into closer communion with Christ. The moral dimension served to show a sinner his sin and to provide the pardoned sinner a guide to Christian life. The theological dimension gave the Christian knowledge of God, which helped her to better know the object of her love and to better see the life to which she was called in Christ.

For the Wesleys the experiential dimension was the keystone of the entire kingdom. A Christian could be moral, could practice spiritual disciplines, could know the Bible back to front, but without an inner experience of conviction and repentance, forgiveness and new birth, and finally perfect love, the rest was mere outward religion.

I’m sure I am being too fast and loose with both Abraham and the Wesleys, but I do think the basic contours of this comparison are at least close to helpful.

So the question I am left with is whether the Wesleys gave us one possible way of understanding the relationship of these six dimensions of the reign of God or whether their articulation of the kingdom is incompatible with Abraham’s articulation of six independent dimensions. John Wesley certainly did not articulate a rigid set of things that must happen in only one order. He was too subtle an observer of the spiritual life for that. But he also consistently understood the key element of the life of the spirit the experiential dimension. Perhaps he was merely highlighting the one of the six that he felt was most misunderstood and neglected in his context. I am not certain. But my sense is that Wesley would not arrange these six as equals. For him the experiential stood at the heart of the matter.

And, so, I wonder, should it for us?

I fear that my writing in this post has been more muddled than usual. My apologies for that to my kind readers. If my fog is not too dense, I welcome your thoughts.

Related articles

• Six dimensions of the rule of God (johnmeunier.wordpress.com)

The sermon as travel writing

William J. Abraham has been arguing for more than a decade that we have gotten Scripture — and other canons of the church — all wrong. Scripture does not exist, he argues, to settle our debates and disputes about truth and doctrine. It exists to help usher us into the kingdom of God. It is, in other words, a means of grace.

Now, one paragraph by me does not do justice to the complexity of his argument or his project. But it does represent the thought that has been knocking around in my cluttered attic of a brain for the last year or so. Today, I am asking myself how I should conceive of the sermon if Abraham is correct that the Scripture is primarily a means of initiating people into the kingdom of God? What then does the sermon do?

I think one implication of this is that Scripture is not — contrary to much preaching advice — a repository of principles or truths that the sermon exists to apply to contemporary life. And yet, the sermon is still closely concerned with how we live.

Paul’s language about being citizens of heaven comes to my mind as I try to work through this. We are citizens of heaven. And yet, we are also still citizens of this world. We are invited through the means of grace to live more and more into our heavenly citizenship. The sermon is one means the Holy Spirit uses to draw us into that.

My mind turns to travel journalism — perhaps because of my past as a journalist. The sermon serves to introduce the citizen of Earth to the strange world of heaven. I see several moves. We learn about this place and life, even perhaps before we learn that we have citizenship papers waiting for us at the consulate. We might learn about it. We might visit as a tourist, hitting the hot spots and major attractions. We might take a deeper step and move in. We live among a community of ex-patriots in this new land, where we gain a deeper immersion than the tourists ever do. And we may eventually go native, becoming foreigners in our former home land.

The sermon is at turns a publicist, a travel guide, a real estate agent, and a mentor into this life in the kingdom of heaven.

All this is too muddled to be very useful or practical. I am not terribly good when it comes to how-to lists. (Hey, I’m an English major.) But these are some of my thoughts today thanks to Abraham, a former life in journalism, and too much time spent in a room with the travel channel on TV.

The death and life of Wesley in the church

A few years ago I read an essay by William J. Abraham that struck me as solid, but soon passed from memory. Today, I picked back up “The End of Wesleyan Theology,” which was printed in the Wesleyan Theology Journal.

In the essay, Abraham declares both Methodism and Wesleyan theology dead. They have melted away into a swamp of religious and church practices and theological ideas that have little or no connection to Wesley or Methodism.

Much as Wesley may not have wanted it, he created and let loose a tradition that from the beginning was unstable. Like it or not, he inspired a network of ecclesial communities that fostered a latitudinarianism that he himself vehemently rejected. The continued use and abuse of his sermon, “Catholic Spirit,” is ample testimony to his inability to prevent the development of incoherent forms of ecclesial pluralism. His followers have scattered like sheep to a thousand hills to find pasture. They have migrated to Evangelicalism, to Feminism, to Narrative theology, to Liberation theology, to Process theology, to Paul Tillich, to Karl Barth, to John Howard Yoder, to Michael Foucault, to Rosemary Ruether, to Ellen Charry, to anything and everyone under the theological sun.

As I read Abraham’s words, I can think of specific people who represent many of the various migrations of which he writes. The effect of these inevitable migrations, Abraham writes, is the death of Wesleyan theology as a viable enterprise.

What we have are bits and pieces of the tradition grafted into theological visions that have their roots elsewhere. As a serious experiment in theology, Wesleyanism is over. The wake may have been a long one, but the funeral is now upon us. To be sure, some are in denial and others are wrangling over the reading of the will and the ownership of the last legacy, but the reality is that Wesleyans have moved on and found new lives and lovers.

Abraham argues that an attempt, which I have sympathy with, to bring coherence to our tribe by appeal to Wesley himself is doomed. First because our appeals to Wesley almost always end up making Wesley look like us, and second because it ignores the fact that for Wesley the only source of authority was the Bible. To appeal to Wesley is to ignore the very source of Wesley’s own theology.

Rather than argue that we pitch Wesley over the rail, however, Abraham ends his essay by  commending him to us and the church catholic as an evangelist, saint, and spiritual father.

It means that Wesley, as an agent of the Holy Spirit, had operated in his day first and foremost as a spiritual midwife who brought thousands of people to birth in the womb of the gospel of Christ. In an inimitable and wonderful way he helped people find God in conversion, became a model for them in spiritual life, and provided a network of resources to nourish genuine holiness. …

It is here, with Wesley as our spiritual Father in God, that we can still find solace. John Wesley is not some norm of truth; nor is he a folk theologian waiting to be organized into a systematic theologian; nor is he merely our brother in the faith; nor is he a Doctor of the church; nor is he a prince of the church. He was and continues to be for many a spiritual Father in God. He was and is a minister of the gospel who has birthed us indirectly in the faith. He is a thinker and spiritual guide who has gone to Glory and whose work, with all its shortsightedness and shortcomings, can still bring us to God and foster holiness of life and thought. In short, he belongs in the canon of spiritual Fathers and saints.

Abraham’s essay bears further reading, if for no other reason than he is fun to read if you have enough background knowledge to understand what he is writing. And while I am aware that Abraham’s assertions are not accepted by everyone even within his own academic tribe, I find myself nodding in agreement with his conclusion about Wesley’s role in our church and my life. He is a spiritual guide and gift of the Holy Spirit to the church.

Six dimensions of the rule of God

William J. Abraham argues that the point of evangelism is to incorporate people into the rule of God. In older language, we would say “kingdom of God.” This rule, Abraham writes, has six dimensions. In brief, the are:

• The moral dimension, which is summed up in the two Great Commandments of Christ.
• The experiential dimension, which is marked by conversion or new birth.
• The theological dimension, which is summed up in the great ecumenical creeds of the church.
• The horizontal dimension, which is marked by entrance into the church by baptism and life within the community of believers.
• The operational dimension, which prompts us to work as agents of the kingdom in the world.
• The disciplinary dimension, which leads us into practice of the classic disciplines of Christianity.

Abraham argues that incorporation into the rule of God involves all six dimensions, but that we do not have to progress along all six or experience all six at the same time or at the same rate. For different people, different dimensions of the rule of God serve as entry points.

These dimensions help me think about the ministry of John and Charles Wesley. The Wesleys saw places in their church and nation where aspects of the rule of God were not growing and blossoming, and they set out to deepen that dimension of the kingdom in the lives of English Christians. (I’m not arguing that they were aware of their ministry in Abraham’s terms, but I do think we can interpret it that way.)

John Wesley’s sermons hammered away at the importance of the experiential dimensions of the rule of God, but we can see as well deep engagement with the moral and disciplinary dimensions. The operational dimension for the Wesleys was often discussed almost as a disciplinary dimension. The purpose of action in the kingdom was as a means of grace. Much of the tension in the church today about “social justice” can be seen as an conversation about the relationship between the operational and disciplinary dimensions of the rule of God.

The Wesleys also had their own take on the theological and horizontal dimensions, shaped in part by the movement’s position alongside or outside the Church of England.

These six dimensions help us think as well about the places where the church today has put its emphasis and where we may need renewed attention. They also help us locate our disagreements and the places where our witness and teaching do not align with each other.

I’m curious what observations you have about these dimensions? Are they useful to you as we do church together?

Decisions and Discipleship

Craig Adams has been tweeting bits and pieces of books he has been reading on his Kindle. One of his recent tweets from Scot McKnight‘s book The King Jesus Gospel reminded me of something William J. Abraham writes about in his works on evangelism:

Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples. Those two words — decision and disciples — are behind this entire book. Evangelism that focuses on decisions short circuits and — yes, the word is appropriate — aborts the design of the gospel, while evangelism that aims at disciples slows down to offer the full gospel of Jesus and the apostles.

Enough people I respect have written this — and it rings true with my reading of the Bible — that I try to keep such thoughts in mind any time the idea of evangelism comes up in my own thoughts or conversations.

And yet, I want to be cautious here. We should not fall into the trap of setting decisions and discipleship against each other. (I am not arguing McKnight does that. I have not read his book.) Discipleship — at some point — requires a decision to follow Jesus. Throughout the Bible, God puts people to a decision.

What is true, though, is decision is not the end of discipleship. As Taylor Burton-Edwards wrote a while back, taking decision as the end-point leaves a lot of new born Christians trapped in infancy or leaves them abandoned to the elements of the world where they die of exposure.

Discipleship is much more than a decision, but each of us must decide whether we will receive the grace and follow the lead of the one who calls us.

The Art of Evangelism

I’ve been reading the last two days a wonderful little book by William J. Abraham called The Art of Evangelism. As the title may suggest, this is not a “how to” book of techniques, but a brief yet thorough overview of evangelism as a practice of the church.

Anyone who has read Abraham’s The Logic of Evangelism will recognize the ideas in this book, which centers itself around the notion that evangelism is about initiation of people into the reign of God. The Art of Evangelism is a slim volume designed to be useful as a study book by a small group and focused on helping a congregation begin to incorporate practices and understandings that are necessary for evangelism.

I must confess, one of the features I like about the book is the way Abraham provides brief overviews of some fundamental parts of the evangelism puzzle. His six-point overview of the Christian gospel, for instance, is a wonderful tool for both the preacher and lay Christian as they seek to articulate exactly what the “good news” of Jesus Christ means.

Also quite helpful is his outline of six “dimensions to entry” into the rule of God.  In brief, the six are the:

• Moral
• Experiential
• Theological
• Horizontal
• Operational
• Disciplinary

A couple of the word choices are awkward because Abraham is going for an acrostic on METHOD. The “horitzonal” dimension we might call social or community. The “operational” dimension we might call mission or active or works of mercy.

In addition to describing these six dimensions into the rule of God, Abraham helpfully points out that different people may enter through different doors. For some, exposure to the theological content of Christianity may be a first step. For others it is an experience of conviction and conversion. For others is may be the activity of Christian mission. For others it is the social life of a community.

But whichever dimension we enter, full initiation into the reign of God involves all six dimensions or doors. The full life in the kingdom involves the moral, the experiential, the theological, the social, the active, and the disciplined life of faith.

And evangelism is about bringing people into full participation in the reign of God in all its dimensions, not merely getting people in the pews or to the altar rail — although both those may be part of the overall art.

One last word on the book. It includes valuable appendices providing outlines for a workshop a congregation might host to develop faith sharing abilities, guides to leading a person to Christ, and other very helpful suggestions for a congregation seeking to — as the book’s subtitle says — carefully craft evangelism into the life of the local church.

I recommend the book highly.

God’s medical bag

Canonical theism is a proposal by William J. Abraham and a collection of other United Methodist theologians that offers us a powerful set of tools for the work of the church. We already have these tools. We just often use them the wrong way.

These tools include Scripture, the great doctrinal creeds of the church, the sacraments, the great teachings of the great men and women of the church, the saints, and others.

In an article earlier this year in the Wesleyan Theological Journal, David Watson described these tools this way:

The key point is that the primary function of these resources is soteriological. It is to lead people into the life of the Trinity so that we might enjoy the sanctifying work of God in the present, and life everlasting with God in the future. These resources are here to lead us into salvation. They are the instruments in the medical bag that God uses to heal us of our spiritual sickness. They are ports of entry into the life of God. To the extent that we have divested ourselves of them or misunderstood their function within our various traditions, we have impoverished ourselves spiritually.

The argument that canonical theism puts forward is that all these resources of the Christian church are means of grace. In particular, the Bible’s proper purpose in our life together is not as a final arbiter of truth claims, but as a means of channeling God’s grace into our lives and thereby transforming, teaching, healing, and guiding us into the life of God. As we say that, we also can honor the historical truth that the Bible was set into its canonical form by the church guided by the ancient rule of faith.

The chief value I see in such a stance — and it may not be what Abraham, Watson, and others value in it — is that it greatly enriches the Christian life. It puts us back in touch with much that we have ceded to Catholicism and Orthodoxy because we are still fighting out the Diet of Worms.

Watson makes a convincing case that Wesleyan and Anglican evangelicals are likely the only Protestant audiences that might strongly embrace canonical theism. Reformed evangelicals cannot cope with canonical theism’s dialing back of sola scriptura and the lingering whiff of Catholicism that comes with it. (It is probably a check in canonical theism’s favor as a Wesleyan theology that he was always getting accused of being a Catholic secret agent.)

What I have still not worked out is the best way to introduce this approach to the Bible and the church’s other means of grace in the context of the local church. I suppose introducing some of these means that are often neglected would be a good place to start.

Abraham: Wesley no pope

Wesley at his core was a staunch Protestant biblicist. Drawing on a medieval vision of divine revelation,
he was convinced that all proper theology had to be grounded in Scripture. Whatever bells and whistles we want to add either epistemologically or hermeneutically to this thesis, the ultimate test of truth in theology for Wesley was Scripture. This immediately undercuts any idea of appeal to Wesley as a warrant in theology; on pain of inconsistency the warrant simply has to be Scripture, not Wesley. Thus, from the beginning, the idea of accepting anything because it is Wesleyan involves introducing a warrant that is not available to a Wesleyan. At best, appeal to Wesley can operate as a criterion of identity; it cannot operate as a criterion of credibility or truth.

— William J. Abraham, “The End of Wesleyan Theology“