Theological Drift

by

January 17, 2023

 In response to my last post, someone suggested that in the United Methodist Church there has been "theological drift;" specifically drift in a progressive or liberal direction. 

The reality is that in the midst of rapid cultural change United Methodist theology has stayed true to the mission of preaching Jesus Christ. United Methodist seminaries have stayed true to preparing men and women to engage the world with the gospel.

The key is remaining true to the mission in the midst of cultural change. Because remaining true to the mission will require using new language and new conceptualizations of what has been revealed in Jesus Christ.

Aside from mystical experience all that we know and understand is what we can say to ourselves. And that depends on language, which in turn is determined by our culture. 

Consider the word "I" and the concept of self. What does it mean for me to say "I" as in "I believe. . .?" 

Beginning in the late 19th century the meaning of the word "I" in the West began a dramatic change. Older ideas that the human self can be described in terms of body, soul, and spirit, or in terms of the passions, intellect, and will, gave way to new ideas. Freud offered us the ego, the id, and the superego to make up the "I." Medical science offered us an understanding of our "self" as a brain (an organ) in a body (a collection of organs) that is essentially an organic machine consisting of electrical interactions mediated by chemicals. 

Older ideas of the "I" consisting of certain persistent characteristics (determined by the balance of the four humors) gave way to the narrated or narrative self. (A couple of books can help here: The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self, by Raymond Martin, and The Self after Post Modernity by Calvin Schrag.)

Moreover, our concept of self, that thing we refer to with "I," exists only in relation to the reality, social and physical, around us. So our concept of "self" is also tied to our understanding of other people and the physical world. Concepts of gender are entirely determined by our socio-cultural constructions of gender, including gender fluidity. Concepts of our relationships to animals, plants and supposed inanimate objects are equally determined by our culture. And these concepts have changed dramatically over time and vary substantially from culture to culture. 

So it really isn't extreme to note that when someone 300 years ago said, "I believe. . . " they didn't mean the same thing as when you or I say "I believe.. . ." Language is more conservative than culture. They used the same words, but those words conveyed a different understanding of the self than they convey to us; as they conveyed different understandings of belief.

And what applies to the simple word "I" and the concept of self is true across the entire range of our theological vocabulary and concepts.  The reality we live in and experience through our culture and language is different from past generations. Theological formulations that were perfectly satisfactory in the past for helping people understand their faith are rapidly becoming misleading or reduced to gibberish. 

And here the challenge of our shared faith arises. If our theology locates itself within a contemporary worldview, using contemporary words to express ancient truths, how do we articulate our faith along with Christians from the past and across other cultures? We can't just parrot their words, because those words offer no understanding for us, and actually may mislead us. But neither can we articulate our personal understanding without reference to Christians from other times and cultures, lest our understanding of our faith be cut off from theirs.

The only solution is a process of continual dialogue between contemporary culture and traditional cultures. In that conversation we must seek the truth which lies beneath all language, the fundamental experience where the human is touched by and responds to God's love in Christ. And we must then find an emerging language through which we can understand our faith in continuity with Christians across time and space but also within our own place and time.

The result of this dialogue will inevitably be articulations, and thus understandings of faith, different from older ways of understanding Christian faith. Language previous suited for understanding faith may no longer serve if our understanding of reality is significantly different from that of our forebears. Even the critical words in Christian theology: life, death, body, flesh, heart, soul, mind, spirit, no longer mean to us what they meant to earlier generations of Christians. 

And this leaves us a hard choice. Do our churches become a museum in which we preserve the language and worldview of the past, maintaining that it is somehow truer than that of the 21st century? To use the common language of evangelicals, do we "maintain a Biblical worldview," or a "supernatural worldview," against the supposedly corrosive "naturalist" or "materialist" worldview?

It's harder to do than we might imagine. The emerging worldview of the 21st century isn't the naturalist, materialist, or immanentist worldview of 20th century modernity. Concepts such as space and time are changing and even disappearing. Words whose meaning seemed obvious, like "life," and "death," "consciousness," and "immortality," "immanent" and "transcendent" are changing beyond recognition. We live, as Charles Taylor points out, in an unprecedented condition for both belief and non-belief. 

What does it mean to say, "my child died," when the heart of the child still beats in another child, and their eyes still see in yet another child, and their kidneys still clean the blood of another child? What will it mean to say "my friend died" when her mind was transferred to a complex silicone based neural network and through robotic means she speaks, listens, and continues all her old relationships? What will it mean to say "that man died" when his brain and spinal cord are transferred into another body? What does it mean to say, "he lives." Who lives? 

Can we explain how these resurrections are different from that of Jesus from the dead, and different from our own hope for resurrection from the dead? Because if all we do is parrot the words, "and on the third day he rose from the dead" then we understand nothing and witness to nothing and our faith is worthless to the world. 

These are hard questions, the kind of questions that theologians must contemplate, and which pastors must be taught to address. They require critical thinking, a deep study of the history of both humankind and theology, a love of dialogue with different life experiences and worldviews, and a willingness to experiment with fresh expressions that more nearly allow Christians to articulate their faith to themselves and others. These are the questions, and fresh expressions, found in UM seminaries and UM pulpits. 

United Methodist theology hasn't drifted. In the midst of rapid cultural change it has stayed true to the mission of preaching Jesus Christ even when that means challenging older articulations of faith. The real drift is among those repeat the same words and archaic formulations while culture carries them further and further from having any meaning at all.