Pragmatism and Faith-Filled Biblical Scholarship

The Seminary and School of Theology at IWU joint sponsor a Monday afternoon seminar where students and professors present research. I generally float something each semester, whether its something I'm working on or not. So I floated a topic this semester when I got the email this fall: a pragmatist's suggestion for how biblical scholarship and churchmanship might peacefully co-exist.

1. This is not something I'm working on, but I presented some armchair thoughts. Here is a paraphrase of my final slide, which suggested the following guidelines:

• Faith-filled scholarship needs to be cautious about the effect of scholarship on the faith of others. The primary issue is not precision in relation to truth. Insofar as it is about truth, biblical engagement is primarily about truth as it leads to forming Christian dispositions and life in the world.
• Thus, the primary "telos" of biblical engagement is not to arrive at a certain set of ideas. The function of the Bible as Scripture is not primarily about propositions but about God bringing a certain effect on God's people.
• Faith-filled scholarship appropriates Scripture with the law of love and the rule of faith as guiding principles.
• Pragmatism ultimately aims at "world adjusting success" rather than cultural success (Kitcher, 135). I would personally argue that this dynamic ultimately leads to a move away from fundamentalism as a biblical approach, even if many of its aims can coincide with what I consider a more "effective" understanding.  

2. Here is a brief sketch of a version of pragmatism as a philosophical approach. The Monday reading group is currently reading Philip Kitcher's, Preludes to Pragmatism.

• Pragmatism privileges questions that matter to many people, rather than questions of individual interest, such as matters of interest to an individual scholar.
• If there is a spectrum between knowledge of reality "as it is" and knowledge as it affects our dispositions and the way we live, pragmatism is primarily interested in the latter and considers many debates about the former as nonsensical.
• I hear a lot of rhetoric about our actions flowing from our ideas. In practice, our ideas are often disconnected from our actions and, also quite often, we modify our ideas to fit with our fundamental dispositions or to fit with the groups to which we belong. Our fundamental dispositions and drives shape our ideas far more than our ideas shape our actions. See Jamie Smith.
• Ideas are primarily our God-given way of processing the real world. Ideas are tools to process the world as well as expressions of our deep seated desires and dispositions. Idea systems become more and more irrelevant when they delve into the spaces in-between the ideas that actually do express realia. At this point, thinking has become unhinged from realia, and we begin to ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
• This actually fits with an incarnational approach to revelation, IMO. The Bible is God meeting his people in their language games and forms of life. It is about God finding language that is effective to form their dispositions and ways of living at a particular time and place, not about presenting them with truths about underlying reality on its own terms. God is the ultimate pragmatist.

3. So how might this framework provide a way for there to be peace between biblical scholarship and what I would consider less reflective readings of the Bible?

• First, my goal was not to endorse any particular scholarly hypothesis, but to show that even some eye-raising hypotheses could lead to the same telos as more traditional readings.
• My point was that the precision of one's understanding of truth need not have an effect on the telos in life. For example, one can derive the same implications from a story whether that story is historical or not. There are literary approaches that result in the same implications as the assumption that a narrative had no underlying sources.
• Here John Drury rightly noticed that I shifted into what he called "strategic pragmatism." Pastoral concerns might keep a pastor from ever mentioning certain ideas from the pulpit, even if they have some probability of being true. Abson Joseph mentioned that some classes might have no problem hearing about the Synoptic question, while the topic might best be passed over in the case of others. 
• So perhaps my presentation was working in two distinct pragmatic directions: 1) Biblical scholarship can go a very long way outside the stereotypical parameters of fundamentalism and classic neo-evangelicalism and still lead to the same telos. In general, "truthfulness" is not bound to twentieth-century preoccupations with history and literality.
• And 2) Since the telos ultimately is not a set of ideas, our presentation of ideas should not become an obstacle to reaching the telos. Something can be "true" to varying degrees of precision, and some degrees of precision will be more useful in some situations than others.

4. This is basically a very complicated way of saying that any interpretations that result in the same dispositions and manner of living, including the same relationship with God, are pragmatically equivalent. The ideological journey one takes to get there is relatively insignificant, although it is possible that some ideological constructs are more likely, over the long haul, to get you to the right outcome than others.

Are these useful thoughts? Probably not to the vast majority of Christians. But they might be very useful to someone doing graduate work in biblical studies or who is involved in teaching the Bible on a graduate level.

Monday Philosophy: The Importance of Dewey

Last week I began my way through Philip Kitcher's book, Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy. No one will ever analyze my thinking on a scholarly level, but if you did, you would need to understand some of the things in this book. (The same goes for Keith Drury.)

1. In this chapter, Kitcher turns to the most important voice for pragmatism in the early twentieth century, John Dewey.

(It might be helpful to say that the fact that Dewey was an atheist does not mean that he has nothing of value to say for a Christian thinker. There is obviously a Christian version of pragmatism that believes that God is a personal Being, or I wouldn't be interested.

The key for me is to realize that human language can only point to and provide pictures of God. It cannot rise to the level of God's "thinking." It is the principle of incarnation. In revelation, God speaks our language, not "his.")

This chapter has 7 sections. The first gives us a nice taste of what Dewey meant when he spoke of “reconstructing” philosophy. He had no time for what have often been considered the core areas of philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, and such. These areas tended to make philosophers into a “specialized class which uses a technical language” (2) that says little of anything useful to anyone but a philosopher. For Dewey, philosophy that was worth anything “must take effect in conduct” (2). It must have a meaningful impact on human lives.

2. In the second section, Kitcher backs up behind even Dewey to another of the pragmatist triumvirate, William James. Here is a famous quote from James that he actually claimed to draw from the third, C. S. Pierce: “The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me” (3). In other words, it ought to address important questions. Here’s another quote from James: philosophy should make sense of “that somewhat chaotic view which everyone by nature carries about with him under his hat” (4).

For James, however, the primary preoccupation was the rise of science. How can we as individuals consider our lives meaningful given the rise of Darwinism? By contrast, Dewey was more interested in the use of philosophy for society as a whole (rather than the individual) and he saw multiple areas of life that needed to be addressed (not just science and religion). And of course James was at times open to the supernatural, while Dewey saw no usefulness to that idea.

Kitcher goes on in this section to ask what might make a question significant to life and what some concrete examples might be.

3. The third section deals with the question of how we might tell whether a question philosophy wants to answer is significant. Dewey did not buy James’ individualistic response—that the question must make a psychological difference to someone. That pretty much leaves philosophy where it is because the “specialized class” find their irrelevant pursuits psychologically meaningful. Dewey suggested it should enhance our engagement with nature. Kitcher does not find this satisfactory either. There are some explanatory pursuits that pay off in the end. Work that seems irrelevant can sometimes prove to be very relevant and impactful.

Kitcher finds some promise in Dewey’s sense that philosophy look to matters that are helpful to the public and to democracy. In other words, it should pursue things that have a collective rather than a mere individualistic pay-off. For him, things that are useful will have wide application rather than have to be rationalized as “truth for its own sake” (8). I do not completely agree with Dewey but I agree with his priorities (cf. Wesley Seminary).

Kitcher then enumerates what “well-ordered inquiry” would look like, philosophy that aims to be useful. First, it would give priority to questions that touch on the lives of many people. Philosophy should not focus on “the whimsical interests of the few, at cost to the many” (8). Second, philosophy must be well-informed. Finally, it should utilize a combination of expertise, with all points of view represented.

He does not pretend that this formula is clean cut. “There is, of course, no easy algorithm for testing extant or proposed lines of research” (10). To think there is a clear delineation of investigations that are useful is to misunderstand the fundamental dynamic of pragmatism itself.

4. Sections 4 and 5 in this chapter then show how Dewey applied pragmatism to ethics, politics, and religion. He begins with a very insightful quote from Dewey. No moral code can foresee every situation to which it will eventually have to be applied. This is of course true of the Bible, which does not address issues like nuclear war, in vitro fertilization, or disconnecting someone who is brain dead from a ventilator. It is ill-conceived for the rabbis (or the Wesleyan Discipline) to think that it can give a concrete legal answer to every future ethical question.

Ethical work is never finished. This is something I’ve long realized about teaching inductive Bible study. We inevitably end up spending most of the class looking at tools for understanding the original meaning but can’t really give a formulaic sense of how to apply the Bible to every situation today.

Dewey warned about the assumption that there was an abstract ethical ideology that we are applying to particular circumstances. Kitcher shows that this is largely a construct, because those who ran the Nazi death camps could answer every such “moral principle” question correctly. Similarly, Dewey objected to the notion that we as human beings each have some singular “moral point of view.” We are rather a “hodgepodge of considerations” (12-13).

5. Section 5 gives concrete examples of pragmatism at work in politics and religion. Dewey was someone sympathetic to John Stuart Mill, although Mill is once again very individual focused. Mill suggested that the state should only intervene into the life of an individual when an individual’s actions affected the lives of others. Dewey is more society focused. “Democracy advances human freedom through its ability to provide individual people with the ability to act together…” (15). Dewey worried, though that America had become so large and fragmented that it was easy for ignorance to take over, which diminishes the potential for freedom. “The mere opportunity to register a vote… is inadequate to realize it [democratic freedom]” (16).

Then Kitcher addresses Dewey in relation to religion. For Dewey, it is not religion that brings meaning, but when we find meaning, we develop a religious outlook to life. Philosophy thus should aim to address those “social conditions under which individual lives gain purpose and meaning” (17). Kitcher suggests that Dewey would be concerned with the current negativity and attacks on religion. A universe without religion leaves “a vacuum into which even the crudest forms of supernaturalism could easily re-intrude” (18). And here I think of how attractive a raw spiritualism or new age type spirituality can find a foothold in former Christians.

6. The sixth section deals with two objections to this program of “well-ordered inquiry.” How does this enterprise connect with the “central problems” of philosophy? And these ventures seem to require immersion in other disciplines and especially the practice of them. As to the latter, Kitcher suggests that the best philosophers have always reached across many disciplines. “Philosophy is not a discipline for those who are proud to know nothing, but is for people who aspire to know something of everything, so that they can propose… a broader perspective (19). Practitioners in these disciplines usually do not know enough about the other disciplines to do the integrative work of a philosopher.

Secondly, Dewey would object to the notion that these other areas of philosophy actually are the “central disciplines.” “Ventures in epistemology and metaphysics, Dewey claims, are often guilty of a… form of self-absorbed blindness” (20), like a chemist who becomes infatuated with blowing stylistic glass rather than the experiments it is made for. Kitcher argues that even in the twenty-first century, “the glass-blowers have taken over the lab” (21).

7. Finally, Kitcher compares himself to Rorty. Rorty argued that philosophy wasn’t a special discipline, but wanted to bury it. Kitcher, like Dewey, wants to renew it.

8. I think it’s enough for me to summarize this chapter for now. I don't think I have done it justice. I do personally think that there can be a “pragmatic epistemology” and a “pragmatic realism” that is useful. So I would extend the usefulness of philosophy to the central areas that Dewey more or less scorned. But I’m sure those issues will emerge later in the book.

More to come...

Monday Philosophy: Preludes to Pragmatism

1. I have entered an interesting phase of my career as a thinker. There are of course endless details to learn, but I have more or less figured out what I think on many subjects. In philosophy in particular, I am sympathetic to Richard Rorty's sense that philosophy has run its course.

There is of course much to learn about the details of what many individual philosophers thought. There are discussions in progress, articles being published. One could no doubt participate in these. New issues arise in history that beg for the philosopher's keen eye (e.g., artificial intelligence). Old issues arise again that beg for reminders.

But it seems to me that all the basic options are there already to choose from. My articulations of a philosophy are crude, but I view them as mature. I do not see philosophy as an area that will ever blow my mind again. I feel that, with some work, I could enter any stream of contemporary philosophical discussion with a defensible position.

I am a pragmatist. I see pragmatism as the telos of philosophy. Pragmatism is the only form of philosophy that can encompass all the others and do so in a way that makes optimal sense of the world.

2. Accordingly, I'm excited that the Monday reading group this Fall has chosen to read Philip Kitcher's Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy. I'm excited about the book because it promises to get me up to speed with the discussion and fill me in on the particulars of its precedents.

For today's post, I read the introduction (by the way, I discovered that subtracting Roman numerals often can be as simple as crossing out the individual figures in common and seeing what's left). The introduction mostly sets out Kitcher's agenda for the book. He sees the book as a prelude to a more mature presentation of pragmatism, which leads us to think some sort of magnum opus may follow.

Kitcher already in the introduction engages heavily with John Dewey and William James, but he clearly has no plans to follow them slavishly. The term he uses to describe his program is "pragmatic naturalism." Since the introduction is getting us ready for chapters to come, I did not worry too much about getting the finer points of his thought at this stage. But I think these two words capture his agenda well.

On the one hand, he will present an approach that fits with pragmatism. Pragmatism focuses on what "works" for us to function in the world, and thus on ideas being useful. From this perspective, philosophy focuses on what matters to people (xii).

The second word is "naturalism." Here Kitcher does not mean logical positivism or a "stronger, scientistic position" (xvi). He also does not like Rorty's language of "nature's own language." He does, as we find out later in the chapter, mean an approach that brackets out supernaturalism (although he believes philosophy can carve a space for religion).

If he had a crisp definition of this naturalism, I missed it, but I think he largely means a pragmatism that stays close to the "real world," that doesn't posit ideas that are not grounded in what we observe and how we live. He wants, if I apprehend him correctly, to save some form of correspondence principle (that truth is what corresponds to the world), although not in a naive way.

3. The bulk of the introduction overviews the essays in the rest of the book. We can see that he aims in the long term to accomplish his subtitle: reconstructing all of philosophy. He is interested in knowledge as something that promotes the common good (xix). He will address ethics, and social/economic philosophy. He will address religion. He even addresses science and mathematics in the book.

He endorses a sort of pragmatic pluralism. There usually is not one unique right answer. There are multiple true ways to "explain" the world.

It promises to be a stimulating read, and I hope to blog my way through it while we read it in group.

Book Review: The Metaphysical Club

I am in Nashota, Wisconsin today... flew last night from Indianapolis to Milwaukee by way of Minneapolis (huh?). I spent some of the plane ride reading the first chapter of a book John Drury recommended called The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.  From what I gather so far, it is a tale of the most formative influence on American thinking in the second half of the 1800's, namely, pragmatism.

The reason why John and I find this subject so interesting is because it seems that a lot of the genius of the IWU Religion Division in the first decade of this century. as well as the founding genius of Wesley Seminary, can be summed up under the heading of pragmatism in the philosophical sense. The term has a negative connotation to some, but there is also a rather profound side to it.

In any case, I read the first chapter, "The Politics of Slavery."  It means to show what pre-Civil War Boston was like and what the father of the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes was like in that era. I'll confess that the chapter created some inner turmoil in me, because of my pragmatic sympathies.

We sometimes say things like, "If so and so were here today, he or she would..."  Likewise, we sometimes try to project ourselves into the past.  "If I had been born in 1830, I would have taken this position on slavery." But of course it is impossible to say who we would have been if we had grown up in a different time and place. Without our memories and formative experiences, we probably can say little other than what our fundamental personality might have been.

No, time travel of this sort only makes sense if we transport ourselves at a certain age and wipe our memory of the future clean, an age after our identities now were largely formed. We're probably talking at least our early twenties. For me, you would perhaps want to send me back in time at about the age of 30, maybe even 40.

Would I have been an abolitionist?  Yes, I would have been strongly in favor of abolition. I would have been in favor of helping runaway slaves continue on their way to Canada or to some place of safety. I would have disobeyed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 if I could get away with it.

But I would also have been in favor of the union, a unionist.  And many abolitionists--according to Louis Menand--didn't give a rip about the union. I was reminded of the Stoics: "Let justice be done though the heavens fall." That is to say, most abolitionists were idealists who largely didn't care about the practical consequences of how they went about getting abolition. Many were "all or nothing" type people, a way of thinking I find absurd in most cases. It often does an equal or greater amount of harm for the good it accomplishes--that is, when it even wins out. I suspect it usually loses.

No, I can see what course I would have supported. I would have supported a course of gradual abolition, following a political path. I look at the Missouri Compromise and I see the masterful art of compromise, turning the trajectory of the nation away from slavery. As a matter of principle, no abolitionist would have voted for it (Menand indicates they didn't hardly vote at all so as not to taint themselves, let alone run for office). And yet I shudder to think what might have happened if the Missouri Compromise had not passed.

Of course many of those opposed to slavery in the North were just as racist as anyone else. Ulysses S. Grant even wrote later that, "The great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play the role of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution" (11).

The tension between the principle of abolition and the principle of union is fascinating. I would have opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 because I didn't believe in slavery. But I would have to support the authority of the federal government to prevail over the laws of individual states in such matters. So we have civil disobedience against a specific law but acceptance of federal authority in principle.

I have a hunch where the book might be headed. The "all or nothing," "do away with slavery or die" approach of some abolitionists was a path to war, a war that cost more American lives than any war since. And of course the post-Civil War South was a mess for both former slaves and former slave owners. The trajectory of the purist and the anarchist is not entirely dissimilar, the purist just doesn't know it.

I hope I can find the time to continue reading...

Pragmatism (IWU Coffee Talk)

Inspire me, oh muse, to tell of the secret to the (earthly) success of IWU these last twenty years, to the secret of the great things that came out of the IWU religion department in its Decade of Synergy (2000-2010), not least a seminary.  The answer is a goal-oriented pragmatism.  For the university at large, Jim Barnes was the primary catalyst.  For the religion department, it was no doubt Keith Drury.

With the right people around them at the right time, things happened.  Around Barnes, these were people like Mark Smith (now president of OCU), David Wright (now Provost), Todd Voss (now president of SWU), and Terry Munday.  In the religion division, you had people like Russ Gunsalus, Steve Lennox, Jim Lo, Bud Bence, and a cast of characters they could have made superteacher cards out of and sold them in the bookstore.

Mind you, most of it was intuitive.  I'll be so bold as to say that my post today is the most theoretical reflection on what the precise dynamic was.  People called it "entrepreneurial."  What it was was a penchant to see opportunities and not to let things like idealism, procedure, reputation, or academic mores distract from the goal.  Another way to put it is a penchant for lateral thinking.  It reminds me of the Cynics, who pointed out that an awful lot of society's rules are really rather made up.

Now mind you, Barnes had his own set of man-made rules.  But they didn't apply to opportunities to get more students or build satellite campuses.  As a result, IWU didn't have to lay off any faculty in the economic recession, even while more traditional schools were closing.  He really didn't care that people were saying online education was shallow.  He had the pragmatic foresight to start his entrepreneurial ventures in a new part of the university where academic purists couldn't touch it.  Criticize him if you want, but come visit the campus and see the beautiful buildings that came as a result.

At one point they were building a new dorm every year.  If a traditional academic had been in charge, IWU probably would have closed in the early 90s.  As it stands, it now has over 16,000 students, more than any other private college or university in the State of Indiana.  The next innovation was like cat-nip in those days.

This same spirit prevailed in the religion department.  There was always a friendly tension between the religion division and the history department in those years, with Glenn Martin at its helm.  Martin reminded me much of Plato.  His understanding of history was basically the story of the disintegration of ideas, from what he called a biblical worldview to the present.  He spent the first two weeks of his courses indoctrinating his disciples in his philosophy, and I understand it was fairly easy to get a good grade if you simply regurgitated his ideas and catchphrases.

Of course his entire system deconstructed on the fact that what he called a biblical worldview was really an ideological imposition on the biblical texts.  I want to applaud the fact that he inspired a lot of students over the years, many of whom came to him with no sense of direction at all.  A lot of them have gone on to do very significant things (despite the fact that I continue to irritate them, just as they often annoy me ;-).

Nevertheless, he illustrates an idealism that is generally the opposite of what made the university and the religion division such a success these past decades.  Ideas in themselves rarely have any power at all.  It is only when ideas focus the energies that are already present, much more a matter of feeling than thinking, that they have real power.

It's like the failure of the great man theory of history.  There are no doubt individuals all around us who, given the proper set of circumstances, might do great things.  But if those circumstances never arise, they will live and die without anyone ever remembering.  In the same way, ideas only have power at the right time in the right place.  Martin treated ideas like they not only had power in themselves, but as if they set the agenda.  It just doesn't work that way.

We are far more feeling creatures than thinking ones.  This is one reason why the IWU religion department has shied away from apologetics.  Very few are the people who will believe in God because of rational argument.  In that sense, the religion department intuitively got what the postmodern wave was saying without ever reading Derrida, Foucault, or Rorty.

The best theories are the ones that are built from the ground up, from practice.  The more a theory becomes self-referencing, the more the theorist starts trying to plug holes in the theory without reference to concrete reality, the less and less meaningful and effective the theory is.  It becomes a work of art, beautiful to look at and for that reason legitimate, but of no particular practical value other than the jollies it gives those who are interested.

And we learn best by doing, not by lecture.  The old academic approach that spends a hundred hours talking about the runway is less effective than ten minutes in a plane on the runway.  Don't give me three hours about Word, Excel, or Blackboard.  Give me an assignment and stand there to answer my questions as they arise.  Then I'll remember it.  It's called problem based learning and it was a core idea behind the seminary.

Erasmus the pragmatist wins, while the purists are still working on the details.  Sure, his first edition of the Greek New Testament in the late 1400s had some glaring errors, but the King James Version isn't based on the Bible the academics were slowly and meticulously working on in Spain.  You obviously have to have enough of the plane built to take off safely.  And you need a plan to finish building it.  But you don't need the landing gear until it's time to land.  And you'll get to your destination a lot faster if you work on the paint while you're in the air.  Structures should develop organically around what you're trying to do.  It doesn't matter if they're pretty.  The goal is not beauty but effectiveness.

The idealist tends to be an all or nothing person, and in this day and age they will more often than not get nothing.  The pragmatist knows that something is better than nothing.  Rules for their own sake are goal-defeating.  Meetings should only be run by people who don't like meetings.  Policies should only be written by people who don't like policies.

What's the opportunity and what's the most effective way to take advantage of it, ignoring artificial convention, reputable propriety, and goal-defeating neuroses?  That's the motto of the goal-oriented pragmatist.

Of course these are only proverbs.  If there aren't detailers to follow the entrepreneurs, eventually it all falls apart.  The key is for the detailers to come second, rather than first.  In academics, it's usually the detailers first, and the entrepreneurs are run out of town.

God Looks on the Heart 2

This is the second post (see the first here) of the second section (see the last of it here) of a little project that is  meant to capture my vision for the Wesleyan tradition in the early twenty-first century.
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Christianity does have two great absolutes of action: love God and love neighbor.  The rest is complicated.  These principles play themselves out in different ways in different times and places, and they play themselves out differently in different situations even within a particular context.  This is the approach that Jesus and Paul modeled in Scripture, and it is only our penchant for systematizing and easy answers that would lead us in a different direction.

The conflict in Mark 2 over the Sabbath is illuminating.  In this story, the Pharisees question why Jesus' disciples are violating the Sabbath by plucking grain on Saturday (2:24).  Jesus does not say, as the impulse of many today would be, that the Pharisees do not understand the Sabbath law.  He does not say, for example, that the Sabbath is about rest or worship.  Jesus accepts the accusation and argues instead that there is a time to make exceptions to the rule.  Did not David and the high priest make an exception to the rule against eating the bread of presentation because his fighting men were hungry?  In short, Jesus does not treat the Sabbath law as an absolute.

Indeed, Paul treats it as a matter of personal conviction in Romans 14:5.  Again, the impulse of some might say that it is only a legalistic keeping of the Sabbath that Paul rejects.  But where is there any evidence for such a position in the biblical text?  The Sabbath law in the Old Testament is a purely concrete law, not some abstract principle.  It is about not working from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.  It is not about worshiping on Saturday.  It is not about taking some time off some day each week.  You will not get such abstractions from what the biblical texts actually say, only from an impulse to find some principle behind every specific command.

So we might be shocked to find Paul telling the Romans that keeping the Sabbath law is a matter of personal conviction (Rom. 14:5).  We might be shocked to hear Colossians telling its Gentile audience not to let anyone judge them for their observance of Sabbaths (Col. 2:16), connecting such observance to the "elemental spirits" (2:20, NRSV) that are limited to an earthly realm they have left behind as believers.  We will find no text in the New Testament that reduces the Sabbath law to a principle of rest or that transfers it to Sunday.  Instead, Paul relativizes this Ten Commandment, reducing it to a matter of personal conviction.

The point is that we should certainly start as Christians with the specific ethical commands of Scripture, but it is really the two great commands that are the absolutes: love God and love neighbor.  Because history and culture change, these principles must always be contextualized when it comes to specifics.  An insistence on keeping the letter of Scripture sometimes only results in peculiarity--we confuse women's hairstyles in the forties and fifties for keeping 1 Corinthians 11. At other times it can work against the main principles.

For example, it was the American "letteralists," the fundamentalists if you would, of the early 1800s that argued in favor of slavery as an institution.  Do not Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter accept slavery as an institution, and tell slaves to submit to their masters even when their masters are unjust?  A careful reading of Philemon as well confirms that Paul even there does not tell this slave owner to free his slave Onesimus.  Following the letter and the specifics of Scripture did not lead to abolition but merely to reform within the institution.

It was thus groups like the Wesleyan Methodists and the Quakers who saw beyond the letter to the true absolute principles and worked for abolition.  The trajectory of the kingdom was clear enough--in Christ there is neither slave nor free (Gal. 3:28).  So why would we not abolish slavery now if we have the chance?  If we really viewed the slave as our neighbor, if we really treated them as we would have others treat us, would we not grant them their freedom?  Would we not rather make all humans our equal and abolish the very institution, the very earthly structure that facilitated "hate" of neighbor?

The heart of the Wesleyan tradition is thus not "letteralist" or fundamentalist.  It is principled, but on the two great ethical principles that appear consistently throughout the New Testament and that were anticipated in key Scriptures of the Old: love God and love neighbor.  The working out of the specifics may start with the specifics of Scripture, but it must end with the complex, corporate wrestling of the body of Christ with the specifics of any time and place, with a view to the trajectory of God's kingdom to come.

In the implementation of these two great principles, the Wesleyan tradition clearly has a tendency toward what is called "pragmatism," a focus on what works or what seems useful rather than on uncompromising principles.  Here we once again see a difference in flavor from other traditions.  The very word "compromise" is a dirty word in many Christian circles.  Some might stereotype a pragmatist as someone who either does not understand theory or who does not have the courage of will to stick to his or her principles.  What we are suggesting here instead is that the theory of the person who condemns us is in fact incorrect, as are some key principles.  The nature of love, the key principle, is to compromise on everything but the most central principles when it is appropriate.  For God, people trump rules.

This line of thought leads us to the question of absolute truth.  Does the pragmatic, Wesleyan tradition believe in absolute truth? ...