Real Denomination 3: People of the Book

3. 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 (think "Wesley's Quadrilateral"). 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 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, singlehandedly convinced the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the 1950s to add the word inerrancy to its Discipline. And while the broader church may not have known much about the issues he was wrestling with, the Pilgrim Holiness Church agreed to include it in the Wesleyan Discipline in the 1968 merger as an affirmation of faith in the trustworthiness of the Bible.

But the Wesleyan Church has never defined exactly what the term inerrancy means, unlike the Southern Baptists. It is for us a strong affirmation of the truthfulness of the Bible in all its parts, that the Bible both in individual passages and as a whole is truthful in what it affirms. But inerrancy has never been a modernist straightjacket for us as it has been for some other churches of a more fundamentalist flavor. In contrast to them, our leaders and general conferences have consistently defined us as having more in common with evangelicals than with fundamentalists (although I would argue that our "spiritual" approach has more untapped potential than both!). This is a great advantage for us as a church, because it means our identity is not locked up with a passing phase of mid-twentieth century culture.

The dawning of the post-modern age has drawn our attention to a key issue that the Christians of our age must face. It is one thing to affirm the inspiration, authority, and inerrancy of the Bible. But two people can affirm all these things and yet have widely different understandings of what the Bible is saying or affirming (see David Koresh!). Perhaps even more important than affirming that the Bible is authoritative is determining what meaning is the authoritative meaning!

Whether we like it or not, this inevitably pushes us back to the Spirit and the church, for it is here that we are forced to join the meanings of individual biblical texts to other individual biblical texts. James does not tell us how to join its teaching to Paul or visa versa--this is a task we are forced to do. And 1 Peter does not tell us exactly how to translate instructions to a disempowered and oppressed minority to a world where we elect our leaders and can change our laws. We are forced to do this, even if we wish the Bible did not require us to wrestle with such issues.

So who decides how to hear the Spirit directly in the words when we are reading the words as a direct Word to us, and thus are reading the words out of their original contexts? And when we are reading the words in context, and thus recognize that these words were not written directly to us, who decides how to connect the individual meanings of individual books with each other and then indirectly with us? Who decides how to process the Word to us from this starting point?

Here we return to where we began. Our fathers and mothers combined their Spiritual common sense with an intimate knowledge of the biblical text. And the results were a number of beliefs that formed their identity. Every group does this--they read the Bible and find themselves gravitating toward the Scriptures that best express their understanding of what God is saying to them. While a group may claim to get their beliefs from the Scriptures alone, in reality the use of the Bible is always a combination of 1) the text, 2) Christian tradition (both throughout the ages and the specific tradition of the interpreter), 3) human experience (including experience of the Spirit), and, yes, ultimately 4) human minds are forced to process and synthesize all these things.

So our denominational identity is best revealed not by our statement of faith in the Bible, but by the specific passages and interpretations that God has led us to focus on throughout our history!

Here I mention just a few that seem particularly important:

1 Thessalonians 5:23: "And may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ."

This verse, along with passages like Romans 12:1-2, embodies our belief in "complete cleansing" from sin and "radical blamelessness."

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.

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. These passages remain strong embodiments of our particular understanding of Pentecostal power and our need for not just a little of the Spirit, but the "fullness" of the Spirit.

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 layleader 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."

I would say that for the last thirty years, this verse has more been our theme. In this period, we balanced out the personal piety of our earlier history with the importance of the church's mission to go to all the world.

What's next? I hear 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!"

So what should we take from our past into our future?

1. The Bible is the playing field where we "work out our salvation with fear and trembling." And that means we should strive for an intimate knowledge of the biblical text.

There are indeed Roman Catholics who believe the Bible is a "supreme and highest authority," but they are more likely to work out their final thoughts and practices on the playing field of church decrees and pronouncements. We work out our thoughts and practices on the playing field of the Bible, even if we bring later developments into the discussion.

On the one hand, we recognize that it doesn't simply end with the New Testament text--there's much more to it than that, including some very crucial issues that God worked out in the course of later church history. We wouldn't even have an authoritative collection of books called the New Testament if God had not worked through the church of the first, second, third, fourth and indeed, even fifth centuries to define its boundaries as they now stand. And the church fathers of the 300's and 400's had to look beyond the words of the New Testament to fend off false directions like that of Arius, who believed Jesus was the first thing God created. Arius argued his understandings from the biblical text.

So we should not point fingers at our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters with the belief that our disagreements are just some question of the Bible versus later Christian tradition. Whether they are willing to admit it or not, all Protestants are indebted on a fundamental level to Christian tradition beyond the Bible.

But the fact remains that we are a Protestant denomination, and while Christian tradition is always involved in our use of the Bible, we will by our very nature play out that tradition as we discuss the biblical text. Our disagreement with the Roman Catholics is how much they have built beyond the Bible, not with the fact that the Bible itself leaves us with many issues to work out (stem cell research, anyone?).

2. We affirm the basic principles of Wesley's Quadrilateral.

But if we distinguish ourselves from the flavor of the Roman Catholic Church on that side, we are more than just another Protestant or even evangelical denomination. The Wesley part of us bids us recognize the unavoidable role that Christian tradition plays in our use of Scripture. Even if we find someone who can argue powerfully from the Bible that a rebellious son should be stoned or that we can only baptize in Jesus' name (rather than the Trinity), the church of 2000 years has rejected these applications of the Bible. There is a "rule of faith" and a "law of love" that restrict any appropriation of Scripture, regardless of the original meaning of any one passage. And it is the church of the ages that has bequeathed us these boundaries.

And we are more pietist in our use of Scripture than fundamentalist and thus recognize the (even potentially "irrational") role of Spiritual experience in using the Bible. We should value the original meaning, for that is the first moment of God's revelation. But we do not use the word inerrancy the way the Baptists do. Was there one blind man or two, going in or coming out of Jericho... You're missing the point, "Jesus can heal, even today!"

And we are now in a position to realize that reason is not just another factor in the equation. The nature of the Fall makes it such that reason is always involved when we wrestle with the meaning and appropriation of the Bible. The Bible is not on our hard drive already--it's meaning has to be inputted into our system. And that can only happen through our human, fallible minds, even though we pray for the Spirit's guidance in the process.

This last observation leads us to a final caveat:

3. We should "work out our salvation with fear and trembling."

While we all have the privilege and should read the Bible as individuals, while God raises up individual prophets with correctives and redirection for His church, the Protestant history of the last 500 years has resulted in over 25,000 different Protestant churches who claim to get their beliefs and practices from "Scripture alone." Clearly this implies a certain failure in Luther's line of thought!

But we're not Lutherans, we're Wesleyan. The revivalist/pietist part of us is open to the Spirit. And the Wesley part of us is open to the church. If indeed "you (plural) are the temple of the Holy Spirit," then it is together, as the church of the ages, that we best hear the Spirit's voice speaking through the Scriptures. I believe we (and the rest of the church as well) will increasingly regain a sense that Scripture is meant to be read and appropriated corporately.

The task of appropriating the Bible for God's church is bigger than any one person.