Bible hand
The Global (i.e., Anti-Gay) Methodist Church launched this Sunday (May 1). The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Just as the old southern Methodist church claimed allegiance to the supreme authority of Scripture in its defense of slavery, so also the GMC professes allegiance to the supreme authority of Scripture in its opposition to same-sex marriage and to the ordination of same-sex married persons. The GMC would have the world believe that we mainstream and progressive United Methodists deny Scripture’s authority altogether. But that is just not so. We follow a different biblical hermeneutic.
In his book “The Civil War as a Theological Crisis” (which my men’s book group happened to be reading this week), Mark Noll contrasts two radically different hermeneutics. (1) Those who argued that the Bible prohibited slavery employed, as he puts it, a “nuanced” hermeneutic: “This [anti-slavery] position could not be read out of any one biblical text; it could not be lifted directly from the page. Rather, it needed patient reflection on the entirety of the Scriptures; it required expert knowledge of the historical circumstances of ancient Near Eastern and Roman slave systems as well as of the actually existing conditions in the slave states; and it demanded that sophisticated interpretative practice replace a commonsensically literal approach to the sacred text.” For these reasons, Noll argues, this “nuanced” anti-slavery hermeneutic was doomed to fail.
(2) In contrast to this “nuanced” hermeneutic, Noll describes the “uncomplicated” hermeneutic by which the legitimization of slavery was read out of the infallible text: “First, open the Scriptures and read, at say Leviticus 25:45, or, even better, at I Corinthians 7:20-21. Second, decide for yourself what these passages mean. Don’t wait for a bishop or a king or a president or a meddling Yankee to tell you what the passage means but decide for yourself. Third, if anyone tries to convince you that you are not interpreting such passages in the natural, commonsensical, ordinary meaning of the words, look hard at what such a one believes with respect to other biblical doctrines. If you find in what he or she says about such doctrines the least hint of unorthodoxy, as inevitably you will, then you must rest assured that you are being asked to give up not only the plain meaning of Scripture [in support of slavery], but also the entire trust in the Bible that made this country into such a great Christian civilization.” [pp. 49, 50]
Likewise, the GMC employs the same “uncomplicated,” a-historical, commonsensical hermeneutic. It never stops to ask how the historical context of Lev. 20:13 in which there was no concept of “sexual orientation” differs from today’s understanding of psycho-sexual genesis and development. It refuses to distinguish the ancient assumption that all same-sex acts constituted an exploitative violation of human ‘nature’ from the contemporary recognition that for gay and lesbian persons same-sex marriage constitutes the loving expression of their authentic sexual nature in a mutually committed covenantal relationship just as opposite-sex marriage does so for heterosexual persons. It reads the so-called “clobber” texts in isolation from, in Noll’s words above, the “patient reflection on the entirety of the Scriptures,” especially the love commandment of Jesus.
+ + +
Albert Outler tried to save us Methodists from such commonsensical literal biblicism with his “quadrilateral”: “Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason” (2016 Book of Discipline, p. 82).
But . . .the more things change, the more they remain the same.
+ + +
Over seventy years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr pointed out that fundamentalist culture warriors who perceive themselves as defending the gospel against accommodation to secular culture more often than not “show a greater concern for conserving the notions of [older cultural epochs] than for the Lordship of Jesus Christ. . .More significant is the fact that the mores they associate with Christ have at least as little relation to the New Testament and as much connection with social custom as have those of their opponents” [Christ and Culture, p. 102] In other words, they are as much an expression of cultural Christianity as are those they oppose.
But, as I have said, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Alas, when will we ever learn?
John alexander Wright
The Rev. John Alexander Wright
The Rev. John Alexander Wright is a retired clergy member of the Rio Texas Annual Conference. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact the author.