Contemporizing the Quadrilateral

I'm piecing together parts of "What Does the Wesleyan Mean in Wesleyan University?" Just to let you know how the pieces go together:

1. The Nature of Wesleyan Colleges and Universities

2. A Little Genetics
a. The Broader Family
b. The Immediate Family

3. The Essence of the Wesleyan Church (these will largely be recaps of earlier pieces I've linked)
a. Wesleyans are people of Spirit
b. Wesleyans are people of the Bible
c. Wesleyans are Wesley-an

4. Clarifying the Quadrilateral (see below; it's this current post)

5. A Wesleyan Model of Integration
a. The Core: Personal Integration with Academic Disciplines
b. The Next Ring: Missional Integration (included in the previous entry)
c. Cognitive Integration
d. The Denominational Ring

6. Conclusion (to come)

If you wanted continuity, I'm sorry this piece is currently so scattered. I'll edit and "integrate" it all by the time it reaches my archive. Now for the business at hand.

Clarifying the Quadrilateral
The phrase "Wesley's Quadrilateral" was of course coined in recent times by Albert Outler. But Outler claimed to be summarizing Wesley's operating hermeneutic as born out by his writings. The similarity between Outler's analysis and the categories of Martin Wells Knapp's book Impressions (cofounder of the Pilgrim Holiness Church) to me is a testimony to the correctness of Outler's analysis--a multi-tiered approach to discerning God's will is in the Wesleyan blood. Since I am not a Wesley scholar, I will ride on the conclusions of those who are who seem to unanimously agree that Outler has accurately captured Wesley at this point (any experts out there?)

The Quadrilateral consists of course of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. But after modernism, we must come to grips with some crucial points of clarification.

1. The first is that human "knowing" is overwhelmingly a matter of reason and experience. I am open to the theoretical possibility that a person can have raw uninterpreted experiences of reality--including internal religious experiences. But these immediately are processed through our minds. Humans cannot discuss matters of truth apart from the involvement of reason and experience.

It is thus deceiving to speak of Scripture and tradition as if they can be isolated from reason and experience. Scripture does not come on our hard drives--it has to be inputted. The same goes for tradition. The Bible is an object of knowledge just as anything else we "know" is. Reason is always involved in the appropriation of Scripture and tradition.

This is a point of massive significance. We cannot speak of Scripture or tradition as independent sources of truth. They, like all other knowing, must pass through the gate of reason and experience just like all other truths.

Kant's perspective remains, in my opinion, the best expression of what we are talking about here. I will translate him into my categories: 1) our human brains come equipped with certain "knowing software." There are categories and filters in our minds into which our knowledge of reality is placed. We do not experience "the law of cause and effect." We experience one event after another, but it is our minds that glue those experiences together as cause and effect. I have not experienced my pencil falling as I let go of it right now. But it fell as I predicted it would (I really just dropped a pencil). My mind has cause-effect software that predicted it would fall.

If our minds come with "knowing software," like Microsoft Word, our experiences provide the content of our knowledge, like the letters you type into Word.

In terms of the process of knowing, the Bible conforms to the same rules of knowing as any other aspect of reality. The failure to recognize this is the biggest blindspot in the use of the Bible throughout the history of the church.

2) Since the Bible is an object of knowing just as any other aspect of reality, we have to reckon with the fact that the meaning of the Bible is not some fixed thing in its text. The meaning of words is always a product of a mind contemplating those words. In theory, there are almost as many different possible interpretations of the Bible as there are interpreters, which is the major interpretive catalyst for over 20,000 denominations that get their interpretations from the Bible alone.

Here I would like to mention three important elements in the Scripture equation that require serious examination. In my opinion, they indicate a significant disparity between what people say they are doing when drawing on the Bible and what they are actually doing.

a. Words take on meanings in contexts. Read them against a different context and you get a different meaning. There are of course countless contexts against which Scripture can be read. The default context against which any text is read is of course the context of the one reading it. This is why there are so many different denominations. A Wesleyan may read the following--

"And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit..."--

and conclude that what we are looking at is an instance of entire sanctification, a second, definite work of grace whereby the heart is cleansed from inbred sin. This Wesleyan brings a Wesleyan "dictionary" or context to the words and invests the words with this meaning.

On the other hand, a Pentecostal reads this and places the emphasis on the next line--

"And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues..."--

and conclude that what they are looking at is a group of people who have taken their relationship with God to the next level and has experienced the gift of tongues. They bring a Pentecostal dictionary to the text and find a Pentecostal meaning.

All these dictionaries are to be distinguished from the original meaning, which--although a concept with its own ambiguities--was certainly a function of how words were used when a particular text of the Bible originated.

The first concept that we must reckon with is thus the fact that the biblical text can take on countlessly different and even contradictory meanings depending on the context against which its words are read. As Erasmus argued against Luther in his own way (see Luther's, "On the Bondage of the Will"), it is simply and vastly insufficient to use the Bible alone as the authority for the Christian. Because there is no Bible alone. Unless you specify the context against which the Bible is to be read, you have just equipped anyone to invest his or her own meaning into the text, thus lifting their thoughts to the level of divine authority! This is a horrifyingly dangerous idea!!!

b. Because the books of the Bible themselves were written over the course of centuries, their original meanings are quite diverse. They present us with countless unique perspectives that we are forced as readers to integrate. The books of the Bible do not tell us how to connect their teaching with each other. We do this as we look in from the outside. In this sense "the Bible," the concept of a unified perspective, is a meaning construct.

So we join the teaching of the individual parts of the Bible together to construct "the Bible." Whenever I hear someone speak of a "Biblical Christian" or a "Biblical worldview," I immediately suspect that the person reads the Bible on a pre-modern level. The determinative part of arriving at these overarching perspectives is the paradigm or thought mechanism by which a person prioritizes and selects certain parts of the Bible as controllers of meaning over others. Does a person more emphasize 1 Timothy 2:12 on the woman issue or Galatians 3:28?

So all conclusions on the meaning of the Bible require a selecting and prioritizing framework or paradigm by which the individual parts of Scripture are combined to form a unity of meaning.

c. There is a significant gap in context between the original worlds of the Bible and today. 1 Corinthians gives us God's word to the ancient Corinthians. Even then, this was not precisely God's word to the Galatians. But the Bible certainly does not tell us how to join those worlds to ours. If we are taking into account what these words meant originally, we again are forced to determine the process of selection and reformulation by which those words go from being God's word to them to God's word to us.

In the next entry I will discuss how these principles play out with regard to clarifying the role of tradition in an appropriate Quadrilateral.