United Methodist Divides as a Site for Interreligious Dialogue

A Response to Don Manning-Miller from Robert A. Hunt

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While continued conversation is welcome, Don Manning-Miller’s recent response to David Scott’s piece misses the point a bit – primarily because he’s driving toward a standard of his own, and one long embedded in the conversation of progressives in this regard.

As I read this post, Manning-Miller begins with what seems unassailable: an assertion that love is the fundamental “ethic” that forms Christian ethics. Yet, despite his mischaracterization of Lambrecht’s work, Manning-Miller knows, I think, that the claim of love as an ethic is problematic when everyone claims it.

So, as he ends his post, he acknowledges that making ethical judgments, in particular judgments about those with whom to fellowship is possible, is indeed necessary. Then he offers what seems to an airtight basis for such judgments: Do the ethics of a group cause harm? And of course, he asserts that the ethics of Good News do indeed cause harm.

The problem is that the definition of harm is no more obvious and shared among United Methodists than the meaning of love. And this gets us to the real problem. Good News and the WCA operate out of a classical ethic based on attaining the teleos for which each creature, including humans, was created. In this view, that which causes harm is that which prevents a person from reaching the end God has designated for their personhood as a human and as an individual.

The progressive ethic, which Manning-Miller expresses, is not teleological, in my view. It is a process ethic in which the name of the process is love and in which there is no particular teleos to be seen. The Reign of God is less an end than a set of values that guide the process. As long as all those engaged in the process of love manifest those values, their behavior is ethical. At best, any discussion of an end or purpose for humankind would be couched in terms of ever-changing forms of human fulfillment. But this fulfillment can’t refer to a true teleos, because it isn’t linked to a genesis.

So, Lambrecht could say in perfect sincerity that the ethics of the Good News/WCA/Traditionalist United Methodists doesn’t cause harm, even if it does cause pain. In fact, he could claim their ethic prevents harm by keeping individuals and the church moving toward their divinely appointed teleos, when all those who either refuse their divinely appointed end or hinder others, that is (to quote scripture) “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.” (Rev. 21:8)

But for Manning-Miller, this approach certainly causes harm because harm is anything that interferes with the discernment and realization of human fulfillment. Put another way, the concept of harm is embedded in the concept of fulfillment, and a classical and a process understanding of fulfillment are fundamentally different, as are their understandings of the Reign of God.

This fundamental difference between these two perspectives demands the hard kind of dialogue, the kind that is met in real inter-religious dialogue, the dialogue between groups that do not begin at the same place in understanding the nature of reality. Schubert Ogden and Mark Heim recognized this back in the 80’s.

The question remains whether those holding the classical view of reality and those holding a process view of reality can find a way within their distinct worldviews to accommodate some kind of cooperation with the very much other. A fair amount of work has been done on this in the world of inter-religious dialogue, but I see no evidence that either the WCA or UM Progressives have thought of one another clearly in these terms.

Thus, neither group has formulated a sensible and internally coherent approach to dialogue with the other, and as a result, both engage in polemic primarily intended to shore up the support of their own faithful while wondering why they keep talking past rather than to each other.

The Rev. Dr. Robert A. Hunt. Hunt is responding to “Love and the Christian Way of Being in the World,” a piece by Don Manning-Miller, which is itself a response to “Lifestyle Evangelism and Moral Convictions” by David W. Scott, which draws on essays by Hunt and by Thomas Lambrecht. This post is republished with permission from UM & Global, the collaborative blog of United Methodist Professors of Mission.