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The Ill-Fated Impasse of United Methodist Theology

A Constructive Proposal beyond the Middle Road

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

Like many other Methodists, I’ve been following the countless debates in The United Methodist Church among conservatives, liberals, and progressives for a long time. As a theologian, I’ve added my responses in several books.

As the impasse of the current situation has registered again in a recent exchange between Adam Hamilton and Thomas Lambrecht, I feel compelled to present the outline of another approach to the broader church. This is not about some middle road (which leads to death, as Friedrich von Logau noted in the sixteenth century, figuratively and literally), but about a genuine alternative that may turn out to be more Wesleyan.  

I will limit my reflections to two points that are generally misconstrued. While these widely held misconceptions frustrate me as a theologian who has published on these topics for 25 years, they have proven disastrous for the United Methodist Church and its future. A more focused assessment is long overdue.

Another Take on the Authority of the Bible

Adam Hamilton says most Methodists accept the United Methodist commitment to the primacy of Scripture, Thomas Lambrecht references a survey that supports his concern that this is not the case. I can see both sides, having taught thousands of Methodists in theological education settings in the United States and around the world: not many of my students, even in the most liberal institutions, have questioned the primacy of Scripture. I’ve had conservative Methodist colleagues question it implicitly, though, when they argued for the primacy of the creeds.

Let me suggest a different approach. What if the real question is not what people think they think about the authority of the Bible but how the Bible actually shapes people’s lives? This is certainly the Wesleyan concern and the concern of subsequent holiness traditions. How is the Bible shaping the lives of Methodists, and where are they actually distinguishing themselves from the prevalent status quo? If conservative Methodists think sexuality is the place of distinction, why is there so little conversation about the nature of committed relationships, including heterosexual ones, where the bulk of sexual abuse happens in the United States? What are other key areas where conservative Methodists distinguish themselves from the status quo?

What about concerns for poverty and justice, uniquely central to testing the primacy of Scripture since almost 3,000 passages in the Bible are dedicated to them (compared to a handful of passages that talk mostly about same-sex relationships in abusive settings)? What about the incredible inequality that will go down in history as marker of our age (29.5 percent of American families don’t have enough food to eat), and what about ever more extreme forms of extracting wealth from people and the earth? When it comes to these questions, which broadly define life on planet Earth today, progressive Methodists seem to be taking the Bible more seriously, whether they explicitly say so or not.

To be sure, these brief observations are merely the beginning of a conversation. If we would engage in serious and deeper exchanges about what difference the Bible makes in our lives—this is the point of the question of the primacy of Scripture—we could then hold each other accountable and move forward together in figuring out where the real theological work needs to be done in Methodism. And we might develop a better sense of what the Wesleyan notion of “spreading scriptural holiness” might mean today, that is to say, what difference Methodism is called to make in the world.

“Making Disciples for Jesus Christ” vs. the “Social Justice Agenda”

While Lambrecht draws a sharp distinction between the two, Hamilton wants to keep them together as “both and.” First, and without a doubt, if the criterion is the primacy of Scripture, the two concerns can never be separated. Jesus never “makes disciples” (as the Book of Discipline puts it, following Matthew 28:19, or “saves souls,” as Lambrecht puts it) without healing people. And healing is never just about the physical well-being of individuals but also about resistance to what makes them sick and about restoring the well-being of the community as a whole. Community, in both testaments of the Bible, is always social and political as well. The separation of private and public, where religion relates more to one than to the other, is a modern invention that would have been incomprehensible to Jesus and Paul. Moreover, the wholistic view of the Bible is not about “both and” but about a mutual and deep interaction between “making disciples” and “social justice agenda” that needs to be developed in the process of sanctification. The official mission statement of the United Methodist Church, “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world” (Book of Discipline, Paragraph 120), can be read as pointing in similar directions.

Second, if the criterion of the conversation is Wesleyan theology, John and Charles Wesley had this to say: “The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness” (“List of Poetical Works,” Wesley Works [Jackson], 14:321). John adds elsewhere that “Christianity is essentially a social religion, and that to turn it into a solitary one is to destroy it." By this the Wesleys did not just mean that people need to practice religion in community with others in a church, but that the true location of religion is in the engagement of the world: “Some intercourse even with ungodly and ungodly men is absolutely needful.” In John Wesley’s mind, this kind of social religion is indispensable, as it contributes “to the renewal of your soul in righteousness and true holiness.” These short references are from one of his 13 sermons on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which are part of the official United Methodist Doctrinal Standards but rarely referenced.

There is a lot more in Wesleyan theology that would be relevant to this debate. A central point, mostly forgotten, is that the later Wesley was explicit that what he called “works of mercy” were real means of grace, not merely another entry on the longer list of the “prudential” means. This implies that works of mercy are inextricably related to Holy Communion, reading the Bible, and praying, which are the traditional means of grace that Wesley adopted from his Anglican tradition. This is not a matter of addition or of maintaining the rather harmless “both-and” balance of centrism; this is about how we encounter God in the works of mercy, and how this encounter shapes how we read the Bible (or pray and celebrate Holy Communion), and it is about how reading the Bible (or prayer and Holy Communion) shapes our engagement in works of mercy. Note that this is reflected also in the three-part form of the United Methodist General Rules (also part of the official UM Doctrinal Standards!) of “doing no harm, doing good, and attending upon all the ordinances of God,” three parts that are inextricably interconnected and thrive only when they are allowed to reshape each other.

For good reason, Wesley was worried that many good Methodists had lost “the grace which they had received,” not because they were not orthodox enough or because they failed to do some good, but because they were not aware of the central theological place of works of mercy. Note, too, that it would be more appropriate to talk about “works of justice” or even “works of solidarity” than works of mercy, as Wesley engaged many of the justice concerns of his day in his quest for sanctification and salvation, including slavery, land-grab by wealthy landowners, and the systematic exploitation of working people in early industrial England (even his advice about abstinence from hard liquors had some of its roots here).

A More Constructive Approach

It should not be surprising that United Methodism has been pulled into the U. S. culture wars that have picked up steam again in recent years, with Republicans and Democrats marking the supposed extremes, defining the “right” and the “left” (while moving both sides ever further into the arms of the status quo). Both Lambrecht and Hamilton take this view for granted in their contributions, and even to many Methodists—conservatives, centrists, and progressives—this seems to be the total range of the spectrum. In the thick of the culture wars, it may seem that there is no way out but to pick one of these camps—determined by the current American imagination—or to stay somewhere near the center as it is gradually pulled to the right in the current climate.  

Yet neither Jesus nor Wesley were centrists—they did not believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle—and neither can they be pressed into the categories of the American imagination. Coincidentally, many people around the world, more and more young people even in the United States, and particularly many minorities, do not fit these categories either. It is not surprising that many have already lost interest and more will be losing it.

What is needed, instead of the tunnel vision of the culture wars that U. S. United Methodism has regrettably exported to so many other Methodists around the world, is a more constructive approach that is grounded in the lives of the people called Methodist, as they encounter the work of God in the midst of the life-and-death struggles of our time. In the ministry of Jesus and in the ministry of Wesley and the early Methodists, it all begins with the “least of these” and the pressures they are forced to endure as they encounter the liberating grace of God: this is where Jesus continues to be found at work today, and this is where the Wesleyan spirit and The United Methodist Church might eventually find revitalization as well.

The Rev. Dr. Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies, and the Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, Tenn. Author and editor of 24 books and over 160 academic articles, his most recent books include Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (2018), No Religion but Social Religion: Liberating Wesleyan Theology (2018). He is also the co-editor (with Upolu Luma Vaai) of the forthcoming volume Methodist Revolutions: Evangelical Engagements of Church and World, where the two articles linked above from the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies in 2018 will be published in revised form. Dr. Rieger is a fifth-generation Methodist from Germany who has lived and taught in theological education in the United States for more than three decades, and an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, North Texas Conference.