What's the Wesleyan in IWU? 3

Cognitive Integration Continued
Someone might be thinking by now, "Where is the Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience of the Wesleyan Quadrilaterl?" For example, are we only to introduce Scripture or tradition at the cognitive moment? Hasn't a good deal of the two inner circles been a matter of experience and will you really be seen to give precedence to it over Scripture? Haven't you been using reasoning all along thus far?

Indeed, I could see someone drawing the Wesleyan model of integration as concentric circles with Scripture at the center, tradition next, then reason and experience. Would that not be a good diagram of Wesleyan integration?

I don't think it would. Once we have drawn it, the picture does not really give us a good picture of Wesleyan integration. Why? Because Scripture does not have a fixed meaning until you identity the context against which you are reading it. If you choose the original contexts as the context, we have not yet found the meaning for the church today, only the meanings for the people of God at a different point in time. My contention is that the context against to read Scripture is the church. It is thus Scripture-as-churched that is the central authority for the Christian. Nor can you divorce reason informed by experience from the process--especially experience of the Holy Spirit.

In short, it is the presupposition of our diagram that it has been created as reason informed by experience has been informed by Scripture-as-churched. As authoritative, Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience cannot be neatly separated from one another--they are like joints and marrow, soul and spirit, thought and intention, logically distinct in theory, but nearly impossible to separate in practice.

So we have heart integration at the core of the integration of faith and learning at a Wesleyan academic community. Since it presupposes reason informed by experience as informed by Scripture-as-churched, this is no blind existentialist leap of the heart. It is a Christian heart with a specific content.

Then we have ethical integration for many disciplines beyond the heart. This is no secular ethic based on some utilitarian calculus or rational categorical imperative. This is the love ethic that stands as the basis for all Christian ethic, as dictated by Scripture-as-churched.

Let me suggest three levels or rings of concentric circles relating to the cognitive integration of a Wesleyan college or university.

a. Core presuppositions
At the heart of cognitive integration, in the third circle from the center, is integration with the core dogma of the Christian faith. These dogma are found in the creeds of the church catholic. The creation of God, the divinity of Christ, his virgin birth, and bodily resurrection.

To my knowledge, IWU has never hired a faculty member who could not subscribe to this core. As things currently stand, it is inconceivable that a person committed to Mormon beliefs would teach here--even in mathematics. A person committed to the beliefs of the United Pentecostal Church could not in good conscience teach here, for he or she would have to view us as a secular campus, since few of us have spoken in tongues and none have been baptized in the name of Jesus only. In good conscience, they would need to evangelize students and faculty to help them become Christians.

Could we let a "bad" UPCer or Mormon teach here, someone who did not really subscribe to all the beliefs of their church? That's hard question for me. There are systemic issues and "line crossing" issues that make such decisions bigger than individuals and their personal situations.

Integration of core presuppositions is of course a matter of many disciplines. While the manner of God's creation is not in the creeds, the fact that He is creator is core. A Wesleyan faculty member thus could not teach that God was not involved in creation or that after creation He ceased to be involved with the creation. These are matters of core Christian integration.

b. Doctrines of the consensus ecclesiae
Beyond the creeds there are many other beliefs that are held in common by all orthodox Christian groups. These beliefs are the consensus ecclesiae, the "consensus of the church." Creation of the universe ex nihilo or out of nothing has been the common belief of Christians since the 200s. The existence of a detachable soul that continues to exist at death in the time before the yet to come resurrection of the dead. These are views that are not clearly enumerated in Scripture nor are they explicitly stated in the core creeds of the faith. Yet they are things that mainstream Christianity has believed from its earliest days.

These views are perhaps slightly--though not much more in flux than the dogmas of Christendom. For example, in the year 1300 the entire church pretty much agreed that the ideal was for a priest to be celibate. Yet this is not the consensus of the church today. Similarly, two hundred years ago it was pretty much the consensus of the church that women could not be ministers. Yet this is not at all the consensus of the church today. In my opinion, perhaps the most important next step in the rapproachment of the church universal is to work out the dynamics and rules of the consensus ecclesiae. Clearly I am not Roman Catholic, so their answer is not my answer.

We now face some of the thornier issues of integration of faith and learning. Matters of consensus like creation ex nihilo, the inception of death because of the sin of Adam, the existence of a detachable soul. These interpretations of Scripture-as-churched were forged under vastly different circumstances than the academic contexts in which such things are discussed today. As science has looked beyond the "expressions" of reality to "explain" their nature and causes, science and Christianity have come to battle on any number of occasions. Let's be honest about these conflicts. Christianity has more than once come away looking to be a religion of the ignorant and of the losers. This is highly unfortunate. It has created a climate in which we have shamed God by insisting that the sun goes around the earth or that technology was evil.

I think some insights from the post-modern era provide us with some helpful paths forward. I hope you will read my next words carefully. I believe that as historic Christians, we must believe that reality exists. God is not just a construct of our minds--there is a sentient Being who actually exists distinctly from this universe. But post-modernism indicates that our formulations of reality, our apprehensions and understandings of that reality, are a function of the cognitive frameworks within which we function. The universe outside us exists, but our apprehensions of that world are a function of our position relative to that reality.

We might think of it as if three people from three different cities were to draw a map to some landmark. The landmark truly exists as do the three people and their locations. But their maps will all differ because of their location in relation to the landmark. God could draw an overarching map that incorporated all three and the landmark relative to Himself as absolute.

What this means is that our categories and language--including the language of science--is really much more expressive of reality than explanatory. Scientific equations are like very, very precise myths that express the way things work on a particular scientific playing field. But no one should mistake Schroedinger's equation for reality itself. It is only an expression of a very small part of reality.

Let me return to the integration of learning with the consensus ecclesiae. We of course believe that these affirmations are expressions of truths. However, they were not forged in the categories or in the face of the data with which specialists today confront. The important task of integration, it seems to me, is to successfully "map" the modern intellectual landscape to these doctrines. It seems to me that the lessons of history are that we simply shame Christ when we deny the evidentiary landscape to keep from confronting contemporary data.

I want to give one example of what I am thinking here. I see the existence of a detachable soul as a matter of Christian consensus. However, this belief was not forged in dialog with modern psychology or physiology. I might add just to keep things in perspective that the idea of the soul's immortality is not a dominating concern of Scripture either nor does the idea appear in the creeds. In the New Testament and in the creeds, it is the resurrection of the body that is dogma.

So what does the doctrine of the soul really affirm--under what circumstances was this idea formed? Well it clearly reflects Platonic influence on early Christianity. But I suspect that the idea largely is meant to attest to the fact that individuals continue to exist personally and consciously after death even before the resurrection. This idea is clearly attested in the NT in Luke, Philippians, and Revelation.

What if a psychology professor at a Wesleyan institution were to conclude that there are no elements of human personality, memory, or cognition that are not explained by the biological functioning of the human brain? What if they began to wonder if there really is a detachable soul? In my opinion, we should give them some leeway to pursue the evidence of their discipline. Otherwise we make the idea of a Christian university an oxymoron and a farse.

What is important, in my opinion, is that they are able to map whatever conclusions they might have reached to the doctrine of the soul. They must believe in the future resurrection of the dead, for this is not doctrine--it is dogma, essential core belief. But beyond resurrection, I believe there is more than one way that they might strategize with regard to the doctrine of the soul.

For example, I know a professor at a Wesleyan university who has pondered whether God might create a temporary embodiment for the dead in the time between death and resurrection. His discipline (psychology) has pushed him increasingly toward the conclusion that embodiment of some sort is necessary for consciousness.

I once strategized with another psychology professor at a Wesleyan institution who was a little more resistant to the idea of an intermediate state (he's no longer there). I suggested that perhaps if he viewed eternity as an eternal now, then the dead are immediately conscious at death because in eternity, the resurrection has already happened.

Of course Scripture nor the early church fathers had any such things in mind when they were forging the doctrine of the soul. I suggest these things merely to show that it should always be possible to map developments in understanding in a discipline to the consensus of the church, recognizing that both the formulation of these items of consensus--and indeed, the conclusions of any contemporary discipline--remain somewhat in flux.

In my final post on cognitive integration, I will suggest that the outermost circle is the denominational one...