Thursday, July 14, 2005

Inerrancy, Wesleyan Style

I'am proud to be a Wesleyan for several reasons.

For example, Wesleyans have never fought over which way you should baptize. You can immerse, sprinkle, pour, do it to an infant, do it to an adult, or not be baptized at all. We were opposed to slavery when most other Christian groups were riding the fence and many preachers were members of the KKK. We were in favor of women voting and taking all roles in ministry a hundred years before secular feminism and long before it was the "in" thing to teach in American society.

I would put the Wesleyan stance on inerrancy in a similar camp. Now mind you, I am describing what I see--I'm not anything like an official voice of the Wesleyan Church. And, mind you, you usually can't really say that everyone in a denomination has a certain view on an issue. We've had a lot of growth from other conservative denominations who presume that because we look a lot like the churches they come from in so many ways, we are just the same. I want to make it clear that we actually are a little different in flavor from other churches that come close to us in some areas.

For example, it's true that most of our churches only practice adult baptism by immersion. Indeed, even some Wesleyans are surprised to find that you can baptize infants in our churches. Most Wesleyans do take standard fundamentalist positions on political issues, but our Methodist roots peek out here and there, leading some Wesleyans to emphasize social justice over the issues fundamentalists tend to focus on.

I would say that the difference between the Wesleyan Church and so many other conservative churches is our "flavor," our spirit. We have rankled over how to live in the past, things we used to call "standards"--should women wear jewelry, should you have a job on Sunday. But we have rarely rankled over the same ideas that some of the better known groups have.

In general, I would say that we are really neither fundamentalist nor evangelical in flavor, but pietist. I would describe pietism as an approach to Christianity that is far more interested in a person's spirit than their thinking. We did not fight the battles of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900's. Those were the battles from which the term inerrancy arose. Churches like the Southern Baptists or the Missionary Church have a very specific understanding of inerrancy. For them, the word evokes debates over whether the Bible contradicts itself on matters of history and science.

Wesleyans have never had these debates. When we were hashing out our current form, the two main groups from which we came discussed whether to put the word "inerrancy" into our official statements. One of these parent groups, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, didn't have this word in their statements. The other group, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, had only introduced the term into its statement in the 50's at the urging of a man named Stephen Paine. He was a scholar from Houghton College in New York who was tracking the fundamentalist-modernist issues.

Eyewitnesses have conveyed the process by which the term was introduced into our church statements. The Pilgrims had not been tracking the debate--they were more interested in putting statements on the end times (by the way, here is another issue where wisdom won out, the Wesleyan Church does not have a specific position on how the end times will happen. Most Wesleyans would be pre-millenial and would believe in a seven year tribulation, but all positions are possible for a Wesleyan, within the limits of basic orthodoxy). But who among us would want to say the Bible has errors? The statement was put into our Discipline as a vote of confidence in the inspiration, truthfulness, and authority of the Bible.

But we have never defined what inerrancy might specifically entail on the issues that gave the term birth. It is for us a very broad affirmation that God never makes mistakes and God inspired the whole Bible.

Why do I think this generality is a good thing? Because the whole fundamentalist-modernist controversy seems so confused in retrospect. While the fundamentalists opposed the modernist positions, they opposed them within the same modernist categories as their opponents. They defined errors in terms of modernist definitions of science and history when the Bible wasn't written for modernists. It was an anachronistic standard by which to define errors. Meanwhile, the Wesleyan tradition continued on its merry away, blissfully uninvolved in these controversies for the most part. It had a conservative confidence in the Bible without defining its meaning on modernist terms.

Take Harold Linsell, who wrote The Battle for the Bible. At one point he tries to harmonize the various gospel accounts of Peter's denial of Jesus. In the end, to get all the denials in the gospels in, he suggests that maybe Peter denied Jesus six times--three before the cock crowed once and three before it crowed the second time.

This is ingenious, but notice that Lindsell's suggestion doesn't actually match any of the gospels. Fundamentalists regularly end up making up their own, strange versions of the Bible's meaning in an attempt to fit things together. The problem is that Lindsell has created a fifth gospel that is actually none of the four that are actually inspired. His intentions are wonderful, but his effort and end product misguided. In the wrong hands, this approach can be dangerous because (like the Pharisees and the Judaizers) it pays more attention to the letter than to the spirit.

A Wesleyan would not usually worry about working out inerrancy in this kind of detail. Peter denied Jesus three times. Perhaps there is some way of fitting these things together, but the point of the incidence was not about the exact way in which the denials took place--it was the fact that he denied him (I suppose you could even debate whether this was even really a main point).

In this regard I like Asbury Theological Seminary's statement on inerrancy: "the Bible is inerrant in all that it affirms." The important question is thus, what was God affirming when He inspired this particular passage. Was the point of Philippians 2:10 that the earth is flat and that there are beings under and above the earth:

"So that at the name of Jesus every knee might bow--of those in the skies and on the earth and under the earth..."

No. The way of picturing the world is of course the way Jews in Paul's day pictured the world. The point God was making was not cosmology, but the fact that every living being that exists will bow before Christ. Am I surprised or disappointed in any way that God revealed this truth in terms that Paul and the Philippians readily understood? God forbid! How self-centered and narcissistic to assume He had to reveal on my terms when they were the original audience! No, I celebrate that God is a God who speaks, not above our heads, but in terms we can understand.

The fundamentalist understanding of inerrancy unfortunately is based on an incoherent understanding of language--one that the Wesleyan, "spiritual" sense of inerrancy thankfully by-passes. Because fundamentalism was a response to "liberal" challenges to the truth of the Bible, it had some basic sense of what it might mean to read the Bible for what it originally meant when it was first written. Meanwhile, my Wesleyan forebears were still reading the Bible in a "spiritual" way that, without really even realizing it, didn't pay much attention to the original meaning. They were interested in the spiritual message God intended the words to have.

But fundamentalists, since they were forced by the modernists to pay attention to the original context, tried incoherently to combine these two quite different ways of reading the Bible's words. They argued that the original meaning was the spiritual message for all time.

But these are two distinct meanings. There is the original meaning, the meaning these words had to their original audiences. Then there is any meaning God might have spoken to the later church or to individuals today through these words. The two are rarely exactly the same, for we don't view the world the way the original audiences did. If the words applied directly to us today, they would not have applied as directly to them. But since the Bible literally tells us these books were first written to them, they will not apply as directly to us today. The fundamentalist understanding of inerrancy is thus based on a fundamental confusion over how language works.

So as a Wesleyan, I think Asbury's very general statement of inerrancy captures our flavor well. If I am asked to bring my knowledge of the original context and meaning of the Bible to the word inerrancy, I have to get a little more complex.

If we are talking of the spiritual meanings God brings to the Bible, these meanings are of course immediately and directly without error. Anything that God has authentically revealed to the Church, to a specific church group or specific individuals, these meanings are of course without error.

In terms of the original meanings, we must look at all the books of the Bible as individual instances of inspired, inerrant revelation. The points that God was making in each case were without error for each particular context. The more we understand these moments of revelation in historical context, we realize that these moments are in a flow of revelation. God's message in Deuteronomy freely allowed for divorce and polygamy. There was no error made for that context. But Deuteronomy does not give us the final word on these subjects. We must thus understand inerrancy in terms of the place of each book in the flow of salvation history.

Further, much of the instruction of the Bible addressed specific situations and contexts. The passage of 1 Corinthians 11 on women's head coverings is so foreign to our culture that even scholars can scarcely agree on exactly what Paul meant. And greeting the brothers with a holy kiss just wouldn't come across the same way at my home church that it did in ancient Thessalonica. We must therefore understand inerrancy also in terms of the specific contexts and situations that each book originally addressed.

God is a God who takes on the flesh of those to whom He speaks. He did it as Jesus; he did it in the original meaning of the Bible. Each book of the Bible in its original meaning is an instance of God meeting a particular group of people with just what they needed, meeting them where they were at in their contexts and understandings, stooping to their weakness to move them in the right direction.

So I welcome those who feel a kindred spirit in our Wesleyan churches. But if from time to time you find some flavors that don't look Baptist, it's because we are really more pietist in our roots than fundamentalist. We may use some of the same words, but they don't always have the same exact connotations as they do in other traditions. The end result often looks similar, but it is a different spirit that is much more open than closed on matters like these. As John Wesley once said, "If your heart is as my heart, then give me your hand."

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ken,

Appreciated your thoughts. I was just talking yesterday with someone about how one might affirm an inerrancy article in principle but in practice approach the bible in a way that is not conditioned by the fundy-mod debates. Thanks for laying that out so clearly.

Ken Schenck said...

I know my discussion is really oversimplified. I wish I had a reason to be more precise. For example, I make it sound like what I call "spiritual meanings" are always completely different from original ones. I suspect more often they are actually related in varying degrees of continuity or discontinuity.

You could help a great deal with giving the discussion more precision...

By the way, how's Newman?

Kevin Wright said...

Dr. Schenck,

I liked what you wrote. Excellent as always. One thing, however:

You wrote: "We must thus understand inerrancy in terms of the place of each book in the flow of salvation history."

To me it sounds as if Scripture's "inerrant messages" can change depending on when they were introduced into the salvific spectrum. It almost seems like a form of Wesleyan Inerrancy Dispensationalism in which God reveals different inerrant truths at certain times that can be negated when the next inerrancy dispensation comes. For instance where in Deuteronomy Yahweh allows divorce, in Malachi He seems to forbid it. Does this make any sense and if so, is that what you meant? I must admit that I become somewhat frightened when I smell anything that has the scent of fundamentalism. Please feel free to clarify and as always, feel free to disagree.

Ken Schenck said...

Sure, the more we get into details, the more complex the model has to become to remain coherent, which is usually the sign of an approaching paradigm change.

But to stay with the paradigm at hand, I suppose I would consider the relationship between Malachi and Deuteronomy more in terms of a dialectic and dialog than a change in dispensation. Malachi saw the abuse of the allowances of Deuteronomy (although he didn't formulate it on those terms) and spoke out against it. In the end, I don't see too much difference between the message of Malachi and those of Matthew, Mark [as presenters of Jesus], and Paul. However, the divorce issue is a very useful example for getting the point of changes within the biblical canon across, since Jesus himself contrasts himself with Deuteronomy in Matthew 19.

Perhaps a better (but more complicated and less immediately convincing) example of such change would be belief in resurrection and the possibility of a conscious afterlife. We see clear statements in Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes that deny any future existence for the dead. Only in Daniel 12 do we have finally an undisputed belief in resurrection. And of course this seems the unanimous position of the New Testament.

So my concept of a "flow of revelation" is really far from dispensational because 1) the shifts do not all occur at the same time, 2) they do not clearly occur uniformly--some are actually parallel streams that exist next to each other until one prevails with time, and 3) they do not necessarily occur at the time of Christ.

Anonymous said...

It seems that some kind of progressive flow in revelation is a necessity on account of the finality and centrality of Jesus Christ in the Christian canon. But progressive revelation is not an abstract concept (based in some myth of progress) but is concretely connected to Jesus Christ in terms of the "prophecy-fulfillment" relationship of the Old and New Testaments [a relation I consider necessary for the coherence of the canon, though one ought to be free in the construal of the details]. The dispensationalist error is not its sense of progression (which was its genius) but rather its lack of Christocentrism. Jesus is one epoch among others for them -- and that's bad Christology, my friends.

Ken Schenck said...

Is it possible to distinguish between event and conceptuality in terms of development? In other words, Christ must be the focal point of history. But the flow of understanding the significance of these events does not need to happen at the same time as the events themselves.

In my particular subjectivity, it is the events behind Scripture that are most important to me, especially since the meaning of the canon is potentially unstable. The coherence of the canon between Old and New Testaments for me is a matter of reading the Old Testament in a christological way, since I don't think the original meaning of the Old Testament books anticipated the events of the New Testament.

Would you argue further that the coherency of the whole canon is a matter of the church's reading of it?

Anonymous said...

If the coherency of the whole canon is a matter of the church's reading of it, then perhaps a univocal coherency, much like a unilateral view of innerrancy would be extremely hard to find. Moving cannonical coherancy towards the realm of hermenutics would seem to further complicate and convolute the matter. However, I have no problem distinguishing between an event and its conceptuality. Arguing that the events behind the OT accounts are but proleptic progressions towards the central Christological event fits rather well with my Christology. I also agree with John that the placement of the Christ event demands a progressive flow of revelation all the while realizing that what happened in Bethlehem is not simply another epoch to be appraised equally to the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai.

Ken Schenck said...

To me, this is why the label of inerrancy in the end is not really that helpful. It derives from a pre-modern idea of a univocal meaning to the Bible overlaid with a touch of modernist understanding of context. But because these are two conflicting ways of constructing meaning, the enterprise is fundamentally problematic.

As far as I can tell, the fundamental question with regard to inerrancy is this: "What meaning of the Bible is inerrant?" There are three legitimate answers, it seems to me: 1) the individual moments of inspiration in terms of what God's point was, 2) individual instances of revelation when God speaks at any time through the words to individuals and groups, and 3) the canonical meaning as understood by the universal church. The last meaning I believe comes closest to the meaning a "spiritual inerrantist" would refer to.

Ken Schenck said...

Actually, let me rename these three:

1. original meaning inerrancy=inerrancy relative the original contexts

2. ad hoc moments of direct inspiration=spiritual inerrancy

3. inerrancy as the church reads the Bible=canonical inerrancy

Just a suggestion