Do Unto Others?

by

April 27, 2022

 In a recent post I argued that disagreements over sex, gender, and sexuality were rooted in cultural differences, and thus inter-cultural dialogue and cultural intelligence might better resolve them. 

A reader who saw my posting in Facebook disagreed. He stated that these were actually disagreements rooted in theology and the authority of scripture, not culture. Although I disagree, I think it is a respectable position in the sense that it is as internally coherent as possible. 

But is his position true? Is my position true? To decide one would have to rise above both positions and place them against some transcendent measure of truth. And that is impossible.  Even the most optimistic Christian accounts of epistemology assert only that Christian language is warranted (Plantinga) and arises from a community of learning whose results over the longer term legitimate the claim that they represent genuine knowledge.(Newbiggen) It should be noted, of course, that these limited claims could also apply to the knowledge arising out of the scientific method. 

Christians walk by faith and not by sight, which allows them to walk in places that science will not tread, but it doesn't allow them, in fact it specifically disallows claims to a transcendent perspective. (See God's intervention in the book of Job.)

What we can do is test one another's claims for internal coherence with whatever sources of authoritative knowledge they accept. We can't judge if they are true, but we can judge if they are Christian in their own terms, and logically coherent.     

On this basis I think my Facebook respondent and I could have, in less fraught times and a different forum, a useful conversation. But in any case if we place my argument next to his we can see a more serious problem. 

We don't agree on the problem. I think we need to discuss inculturated theology. He thinks we need to discuss theology that rises above culture. So really we have nothing in common to talk about.

Except this: in classes in conflict resolution I learned that if people don't agree on the problem, they might at least agree to discuss what each wants to get out of the encounter. Instead of talking about who is right and who is wrong the conversation shifts to "what do you want to get out of this conversation." 

And really that is where the UMC has been since 2016. Our last gasp at achieving agreement failed, largely because of internal incoherence in the structure of our Discipline. Since then through various informal ways and means we been discussing a way that most people can get what they want in an inevitable divide.

Lacking a General Conference to formalize these processes we’ve fallen into uneasy ad hoc solutions. Not ideal.

And thus another problem inevitably arises. People and groups in conflict almost invariably want to justify their past and future actions to themselves, to their antagonists, and to any wider public that might care. Invariably even as they negotiate what they want out of the encounter they generate self-justifying narratives that they propagate internally and externally. 

Since these narratives conflict with each other a secondary conflict arises; not over the original disagreement, and not over the terms of separation, but over the public justifications offered by each side. In legal and diplomatic circles there is often an agreement to make no such public justifications, but in church matters there are no such constraints. Every church member and church leader can offer their self-justifying account of how we got to where we are  unconstrained by anything other than their internal sense of honesty and decency. 

And even that internal sense in the most decent and honest of people may not be trustworthy. Our competing United Methodist narratives of self-justification have been honed and passed on for so long (more than a century) that their axiomatic assumptions are not longer questioned by either side. To each side they appear self-evident, and thus remain unexamined. 

Nor is it easy to examine them. To do so is to cast doubt on the very reason each group exists. No one wants an external, objective analysis of the narrative fundamental to their identity. For most of us "When we know God even as we are known" (Paul) is soon enough for that. In the meantime we are so comfortable in our delusions that we can't even tell that they are both contrafactual and contradictory, and we reject out of hand that anyone from outside our group should dare correct our narrative.

Yet it seems to me that if there is nothing more central to the Wesleyan tradition than self-examination. And never a time more than now that we are called into the same. All of us, and I include myself, have been too busy examining others.

Failing that there is always "do unto others as you would have them do to you." Which isn't easy for any of us, but is certainly a mandate we should all get behind. It may not solve our problems; but at the very least it will improve our witness in a non-Christian world.

The Rev. Dr. Robert A. Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education and Director, Center for Evangelism at United Methodist-related Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. This post is republished from his blog, The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture.