Preface
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1. Wesley wasn't a heretic, but you might get that impression sometimes. I heard a story once about someone President Barnes of Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) brought in to evaluate where IWU was ideologically. Apparently, the person's greatest suspicions ended up being about Bud Bence, who is often considered a Wesleyan's Wesleyan. I am sometimes considered a heretic for believing in women in ministry.
The Wesleyan tradition often looks a little "off" when viewed from what I might call "high Protestantism." Here I chiefly mean the heirs of Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 1500s. Of course, they would no doubt have a similar perspective on any number of other groups like Pentecostals and charismatics as well. Today, America's theology is Baptist more than anything else -- historical Wesleyans can look pretty fishy to them too.
I would say that Wesley looks a little askew among high Protestants for two chief reasons. First, he was an Anglican, and Anglicanism was a "middle way" between Protestantism and Catholicism. In other words, Wesley can seem a little too Catholic. Second, he was an Arminian, In simple terms, he believed that God gives us some degree of free will. A good deal of Christianity considers that a heresy called "Pelagianism" or "semi-Pelagianism."
2. First, Wesley was an Anglican. The Church of England did not start the way Lutheranism did. In the beginning, Luther opposed the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) because they were taking people's money and promising them years off of purgatory. This flashpoint cascaded into Luther's other positions. So, he rejected the "Apocrypha" as part of the Bible because 2 Maccabees was thought to give support to the idea of purgatory. Similarly, salvation must purely be on the basis of faith not works because good works (like paying money to the church) couldn't help save your soul.
As is often the case, Luther's ideology directly followed a concrete, practical situation rather than being some purely biblical or theological discovery. Life led him to focus on certain passages and he almost certainly took them beyond what they actually said.
The Church of England started differently. King Henry VIII disagreed with Luther's theology. In fact, he wrote a treatise against Luther and his "Protestants." BUT Henry wanted a divorce, and the RCC wouldn't grant one because Spain was breathing down the Pope's neck -- and the wife Henry wanted to divorce was the daughter of the king of Spain.
So after England's separation from the RCC, the Anglican church still had more of a Catholic flavor than the Lutheran or Reformed churches did. Its original theologians would ironically burn at the stake at the hands of "bloody Mary" for being too Protestant (even though they still had a lot in common with Catholicism). Meanwhile, those who resisted the withdrawal would burn at the stake for being too Catholic (even though they were very sympathetic to some of the reforms it made to the RCC).
In the end, the Anglican church came to see itself as a kind of "via media" or "middle way" between Catholicism and high Protestantism. It adopted justification by faith, but in its sacraments and church structure it often still looked a bit Catholic. It continued to use the Apocrypha in worship, and it was more open to works in the life of a believer than Luther by far.
The fact that Wesley was a child of Anglicanism rather than of high Protestantism has probably contributed to some of the "otherness" of Methodism and Wesleyanism within Protestantism.
3. If you know your history, high Protestantism had four or five "solas" (the Latin word for "only").
- Luther's biggest one was 1) sola fide or "by faith alone." Luther taught that "works" play no role in being "justified" before God. We attain a right standing with God based on faith alone.
- Similarly, our salvation is purely a matter of 2) grace alone (sola gratia). No one can earn or merit salvation.
- Salvation is based on 3) "Christ alone" (solus Christus). There is no other path to God.
- Everything we must believe is a matter of 4) "Scripture alone" (sola scriptura), and Scripture is clear enough in itself for anyone to see the way (the "perspicuity" of Scripture). You don't need the church to explain it to you or a priest to intercede for you.
- Finally, a latecomer was the idea that everything is for 5) "God's glory alone" (soli dei gloria).
Of course, it is not enough to say that Wesley affirmed sola fide as Luther and Calvin did. We have to ask how Wesley used those words. For Luther and Calvin, "by faith alone" meant that any effort on our part ("works") plays no role in our salvation whatsoever. For them, this extended to the act of faith itself. For them, we have no part at all in the exercise of faith. God does it for us in us. We are his sock puppets, and he says through our mouths, "I believe" for us.
Works played a much larger role in the equation for Wesley and the Anglicans (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:10). Technically, Wesley believed that works are a result of our justification by grace through faith. They are not the cause of our justification or salvation. But, unlike Luther and Calvin, Wesley believed your works could disqualify you from the prize (1 Cor. 9:27; Wesley, "A Call to Backsliders"). Such a concept played no role in the high Protestantism of Luther or Calvin.
4. Wesley was thus a "synergist" rather than a "monergist." He believed that our wills worked together with God's will toward salvation. Luther and Calvin were monergists, believing that God alone did all the work. In short, Wesley was an "Arminian."
Arminius was a Dutch theologian who died in 1609. Before he died, he suggested a few tweaks to Calvin's theology.
- For example, he suggested that God's choosing of us -- our election -- was conditional upon our response. By contrast, "election" was unconditional for Calvin.
- Arminius believed that Christ died for everyone, while some Calvinists had concluded that Christ only died for the elect ("limited atonement").
- While Arminius believed in the "total depravity" of humanity (as did Wesley)...
- ... he taught that the grace of God went before us ("prevenient grace") to make it possible for us to open ourselves to his saving grace and thus cooperate with God's grace. For Calvin, God's grace was "irresistible."
- And for Arminius, it was similarly possible to "fall" from God's grace (Jude 24). Calvinists saw God's grace as irresistible, and if God had chosen you, you would definitely make it to the end.
After Arminius died, the Synod of Dort codified orthodox Calvinism in the TULIP that we have alluded to above, which Arminius (and Wesley) mostly rejected:
- Total depravity -- We can do no good in our own power.
- Unconditional election -- God alone decides who will be saved. We play no real role.
- Limited atonement -- Christ only died for the elect.
- Irresistible grace -- If God has chosen you, you will receive his grace.
- Perseverance of the saints -- If you are chosen, you will make it to the kingdom no matter what.
It is no surprise that Wesley modified the 39 Articles of the Church of England in keeping with his "Arminianism." For example, Wesley removed Article 17 on predestination. Most of his other edits had to do with church structure and toning down the "let's burn them at the stake" feel of others. He passed on 25 of the 39 Articles to the Methodists.
5. In the twenty-five doctrines that Wesley retained, several were in direct continuity with the high Reformation. For example, Article 5 retained Luther's sense of sola scriptura, "Scripture only." Nothing was to be required of a believer that could not be demonstrated in Scripture. Wesley famously aspired to be a "man of one book" (homo unius libri).
Again, if we look to his actual practice, however, Wesley regularly brought into conversation tradition, reason, and experience with Scripture. Scripture was primary, but it was clarified by these other sources of truth, an approach sometimes called prima scriptura. Although the Wesleyan quadrilateral is not a term that Wesley himself coined (it comes from Albert Outler in the twentieth century), it is a fair reflection of his actual practice. The four sides of the quadrilateral are Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.
I am not aware of a place where Wesley directly engaged Luther on the concept of the "perspicuity" of Scripture. The idea of perspicuity is the sense that Scripture is clear and plainly understandable on matters pertaining to salvation. Wesley may have. Here's how Luther put it in his Bondage of the Will in 1525: "The perspicuity of Scripture means that everything necessary for salvation and regarding faith and life is taught in clear language in Scripture."
The Westminster Confession of 1647 put it this way: "All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them."
Wesley did not pass these sorts of statements into Methodism, and there is no statement of this sort in the Wesleyan Discipline today. However, I think Wesley agreed with them (Arminius did), and I welcome input from those who might know "chapter and verse" in Wesley's works.
Notice the focus of perspicuity. It does not consider every passage in Scripture to be clear to us. Rather, the path of salvation is clear. The driving force for Luther was again his reaction to Roman Catholicism. His doctrine of Scripture's clarity was meant to indicate that we do not need a priest or the church in order to be saved. Scripture alone is a sufficient enough guide to lead us to salvation.
6. In the Preface, I suggested that Luther's understanding of Scripture was two-dimensional -- primarily literary without historical depth. Unreflectively, he thought the words could be separated from the historical contexts that gave them their first meaning. Like Melanchthon after him, he largely treated meaning as inherent and fixed in words rather than as functions of how they are used at a particular time and place.
He also underestimated the fact that I as a reader ultimately construct the meaning I see in a text. A text can come to have almost as many meanings as the minds that read it. "Meaning is in the eye of the beholder." Paul Tillich in the twentieth century would speak of the Protestant Principle -- the fact that each individual reader is free to interpret the biblical texts suggests that the interpretations of the Bible will multiply endlessly as reader after reader interprets them.
Martin Marty once suggested that there were 20-30,000 different Protestant denominations, almost of all of which think they get their beliefs from the Bible alone. A little reflection suggests that sola scriptura has not resulted in anything like a common understanding of the meaning of most of the Bible. There are three reasons for this multiplicity of interpretations:
- There is the "polyvalence" of individual words and sentences -- words are capable of taking on more than one meaning.
- There is the need to integrate the thought of multiple books together. The Bible does not tell us how to connect James and Paul or Mark and John. Hebrews may tell us what to do with Leviticus, but we may end up overriding Leviticus in the process of listening to Hebrews. The process of integrating the books of the Bible together of necessity takes place outside the biblical texts themselves. In other words, it requires a scaffolding that is outside the Bible alone.
- There is the need to appropriate the ancient meanings of these texts to today. The books do not tell us how to do this. 1 Peter doesn't say, "Here's how to apply these instructions to persecuted believers in the first century to twentieth century America." We have to connect the dots outside the biblical texts. In other words, appropriation requires work that is beyond Scripture alone, work that we have to do ourselves.
And, living before Descartes' epistemological turn in the 1600s, Luther was largely unaware of the fact that when I read a text, it is inevitably my mind that constructs the meaning of that text for me. He saw the meaning as "out there" with little appreciation for the chaos that is our minds inferring meaning.
We can thus see some important clarifications that need to be made to Luther's sense of sola scriptura and the perspicuity of Scripture. For one, the fact that there are tens of thousands of denominations with varying beliefs and interpretations of the Bible suggests that, for us (in contrast to the original audiences), Scripture is far more unclear than we probably realize or acknowledge. Given the lay of the denominational land, this conclusion hardly seems debatable, although many groups insist they are right and everyone else is wrong. Even scholars regularly disagree on the meaning of passage after passage.
7. Here's where we should recognize the essential role of the Holy Spirit. There is a tendency to detach our interpretation of the Bible from the illuminating and inspiring work of the Holy Spirit. This is a serious mistake. After all, it is the prevenient grace of the Spirit that leads us to salvation. The biblical text without the Spirit will not lead me to salvation. It is not "Scripture alone" that leads me to salvation. It is the Spirit working with my spirit.
In the hands of the Spirit, the original meaning of the Bible does not need to be clear to lead me to salvation because the journey to salvation is not primarily an intellectual or cognitive journey. My mind is certainly involved, but the essential features have to do with my "heart" and will. The Spirit can use a stop sign to bring me to salvation assuming that I have the barest knowledge of God and Christ!
I might add that this is a frequent blind spot of apologetics as well. Coming to Christ is not a matter of intellectual argument. We can help remove intellectual obstacles. We can lay the groundwork for the path. But it is the Spirit that always leads the way. It is the Spirit that empowers the will. It is the heart that believes unto salvation (Rom. 10:10).
These refinements of our understanding of the perspicuity of Scripture and these clarifications to the limits of sola scriptura go beyond the hermeneutical understandings of Wesley and the Reformers. They are contemporary insights, as undeniable as they seem to be once they are pointed out and understood.
The original purpose of sola scriptura was to say that the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was not needed for salvation, which of course is true. Luther asserted that the RCC and its priesthood were not needed to interpret the Bible for any believer. The doctrine was an instrument of separation from the Roman Catholic Church.
Recent years have suggested that the community of faith is more important in the appropriation of Scripture than the Reformers recognized. For one thing, it was through Old Testament priests, Jewish rabbis, and the Church that God collected these writings into a canon and brought to recognition which books were authoritative as a collection. Without communities of faith searching these texts and worshiping with these texts, we would only have had individual believers with whatever individual scrolls they might have had access to.
Still, Luther and Zwingli got together in 1529 to see if they could agree on what "Scripture alone" taught about communion. They couldn't agree, not even the first two Protestant interpreters of the Bible. Twelve years after Luther's 95 Theses, sola scriptura in a sense fell apart.
And thus the infinite proliferation of Christian groups all pretending they are just reading "the Bible alone" began. Zwingli would later watch his people drown Anabaptists in the river because the Anabaptists did not think the Bible alone supported infant baptism. "You want to be rebaptized as an adult? I'll rebaptize you!" Apparently, Zwingli could interpret the Bible alone, but no one else could. The statements of faith that are ubiquitous in Christendom are basically churches and Christian organizations trying to nail down what we should take away from the Bible (and to compel their communities to agree).
I always smile when I think of the various churches of Christ and churches of God that were founded on the idea that they are not denominations. They were founded on the idea that they simply follow the Bible alone. Yet it is clear that they have made decisions about what their group thinks the Bible means. They have made decisions on what structures they think the Bible implies. And, sometimes, their people go full on heretical because that's just their interpretation of the Bible.
Your non-denominational church on the corner isn't fooling anyone. A few questions and we will quickly be able to identify which traditions of American Christianity their leaders and people draw from. They are mostly Baptist without the name, and some of them throw some charismatic movement on top. They are hermeneutically unreflective, more examples of the Protestant Principle at work.
To put a more positive perspective on it, our communities of faith are spaces where we "work out our salvation with fear and trembling" together (Phil. 2:12). Given the multiplicity of such workings, we should probably be pretty humble about our group being right. And we should quite probably be more generous toward the groups and individuals whose interpretations are different from ours.
In the end, God will sort us all out.
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