There is turmoil throughout the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA) in the aftermath of its 2003 General Convention where, for the first time, the church ratified the election as bishop of a non-celibate homosexual and approved local-option choices on the blessing of same-sex unions. Editorials are flying fast and furious. The "A Place to Stand" conference held in Dallas in early October as a rallying point for conservative Episcopalians was reported to be the largest gathering of Episcopalians that has ever occurred. Obviously great passions have been stirred up.
The actions of the General Convention are forcing
the church to face up to the fact that there are two very different approaches
to religion that coexist uneasily within the Episcopal Church. (This is
not really unique to Episcopalians. It's the same in most of what used to
be called the "mainline" protestant denominations.) From what I know about
church history, I would estimate that this is the most divisive and significant
event in the history of ECUSA. Even the Civil War, which caused splits in
all the other major American protestant denominations, did not cause the
Episcopal Church to undergo division, but that fate seems very possible now.
The election of Gene Robinson and the approval
of "local option" on the blessing of same-sex unions have highlighted a lack
of agreement in the most basic and fundamental level of religious outlook
of Anglicans. This lack of agreement in the church is nothing new, but General
Convention's actions projected it to center stage and forced everyone to
take a position, whereas before we were content to live with the ambiguity.
At the root of the problem are two approaches to religious knowledge that are fundamentally at odds with each other. Both of them make use of human experience, but they do so very differently, and they assign it a very different weight in the structure of knowledge. One approach derives its religious outlook primarily from human experience, and Scripture and/or various fields of knowledge are employed in helping to interpret human experience. Religion is viewed as the accumulated understanding gleaned from millennia of human religious experience. It is a form of knowledge that has been developed or discovered by humans. The other approach derives its religious outlook very differently, viewing religious truth as something that is a "given" that is revealed to us by God, and looking primarily to Scripture to find that revelation, although it obviously interprets Scripture through the lens of human experience and knowledge and church tradition.
While I have been torn over the issue of homosexuality for decades because of personal friendships with homosexuals who are Christians, I feel compelled to adopt the "scripture-is-primary" approach to determining what is authentic and acceptable in Christianity. I'd like to tell you why.
On Saturday, October 4, Assistant
Bishop Scantlebury of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago visited St. Mark's Episcopal Church
of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, for an open forum on the current crisis. I mention
this because the bishop's remarks very much typified the first approach
mentioned above. (Having been around Presiding Bishop Griswold a good deal
when he was bishop of Chicago, I can tell you that his approach is pretty
much identical to that of Bishop Scantlebury.) Bishop Scantlebury described
his own approach as one of listening to the "life stories" and spiritual
experiences of various individuals and diverse groups of people, many of
whom consider themselves to be marginalized by the church. He finds their
stories moving, says he has learned much from them, and derives his religious
views, at least in part, from this sharing of experiences. In particular,
it determines his views about the current controversy over homosexuality.
The bishop himself confessed that he is confused and does not know how to
reconcile conflicting, divergent stories. He has no basis upon which to
say that any particular group's story or experience is more or less valid,
or any better or worse, than any other group's story, and because homosexuals
have testified to him that God is working in their lives and relationships,
he feels compelled to affirm that and include them, along with their lifestyle,
within the bounds of acceptable Christian practice. He would like the church
to accept and affirm the life stories and experiences of more traditional
Christians as well as a number of stories that traditionally were excluded
from Christianity, such as those of homosexuals, bisexuals, and others.
(Bishop Scantlebury did not refer to it, but there are others within ECUSA
who would want to broaden the church's inclusiveness even further to embrace
other life stories, such as those deriving from native American religions
and nature-based spirituality, Goddess worship, etc.)
A serious question for proponents
of the experience-is-primary view of religion is why the stories of some
groups are included while others are excluded. What reasonable basis is there
for excluding some groups, especially if they claim that God has blessed their
practices? For example, why are polygamists not acceptable? There are
still societies around the world where polygamy is practiced, and it was
very common before modern times. In Utah there are renegade Mormons who
feel so strongly that polygamy is the will of God that they incur excommunication
from their church and risk arrest by engaging in the practice. They claim to do this from religious motivation. If we
interviewed these men and women, some of them would no doubt talk about how
God has blessed their relationships. On what basis do proponents of the
experience-is-primary approach to religion reject the practice of polygamy,
as they do, while accepting the practice of homosexuality? (For that matter,
why do they insist that homosexuals be monogamous?) Why do they draw a line
of separation at all? Are they being arbitrary?
Another practice that definitely
is not under discussion at this time (at least, not in the church)
is pederasty, which involves grown men having sex with adolescent or younger
boys. The reason I mention pederasty is that, while it is almost universally
condemned in our society, this has not been the case in other societies.
It was an accepted practice in classical Greco-Roman civilization. Some
viewed it almost as a rite-of-passage, part of growing up. (This institution
is described by Robin Scroggs in his book "The New Testament and Homosexuality",
Fortress Press, 1983.) They did not view it as exploitative, but as an older
(and otherwise heterosexual) man guiding an adolescent into adulthood.
This may sound quite bizarre if you haven't been aware of this aspect of
classical civilization, but that demonstrates how much our culture influences
what we think is "normal" or acceptable. If we are going to reject this kind
of practice, as I think we should, we need to have more of a reason than
just a general cultural dislike for it. If anyone thinks this is an unrealistic
or extreme example, I would ask them to look at www.nambla1.de,
the web site for NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association.
This is a real group, a sub-culture within the larger homosexual
world, that advocates the "sexual liberation" of children and particularly
focuses on what they view as the positive aspects of sexual relations between
children and adults. As one might expect, they oppose "age of consent"
laws that criminalize the kinds of sexual activity that they advocate.
(It's interesting to note that although this is a U.S.-based group, its
web site is hosted in the German .de Internet domain.)
The point of mentioning polygamy
and pederasty is that they focus attention on the fact that while the experience-is-primary
approach to religious knowledge may, for the present, arrive at a position
that excludes practices that are foreign to or despised by the culture we
live in, it doesn't seem to have any objective, logical basis for doing so.
Being unable to appeal to a higher authority, what reason can it give for
not approving or at least tolerating polygamy and pederasty? Citing the
findings of medical or psychiatric studies might seem to provide support,
but such findings change over the years as new trends sweep through higher
education and the culture
at large. They do not establish truth. Witness the
1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality
from its official list of mental disorders. One wonders
if ECUSA’s new “official” view of homosexuality would change if tomorrow
the APA decided it was incorrect about that decision and that homosexuality
should be put back on the list. I don't believe anyone believes the church
would reverse last summer's decisions, which just highlights the subjective,
experiential basis of those decisions.
Bishop Scantlebury, by his own
admission, has no legitimate means of discriminating between any of these
types of human experience. He does not find any help from Scripture because
he feels that Scripture can be interpreted to say just about anything that
one wants. The best that he can do is to counsel us all to love and accept
one another and learn from each other's experiences.
The bishop's outlook is typical
of a large part of ECUSA membership. It takes as the basis of religious
belief what it can discover from the wide variety of human experience. It
also draws on various fields of knowledge (e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology,
biology, philosophy, etc.) when it is believed they have something to contribute
to the conversation. There is little or no appeal to anything that functions
as what we would think of as an "authority" in the sense of something to
be appealed to for resolving differences or evaluating the varieties of human
experience. The various fields of knowledge function more as heuristic devices
than as authoritative and definitive guides. There is no need in this approach
for any kind of revelation of God's will, given by God to us, except that
it is sometimes asserted that God works through evolution or the historical
process. Scripture is employed in this approach in a wide variety of ways.
I think the one common thread running through the variety would be that
Scripture, while it may be valued and respected to some degree, is
not viewed ultimately as constraining current religious views and practices
if we feel that we have other knowledge that contradicts the teaching of
Scripture. Adherents of the experience-is-primary approach to religion usually
do not have a problem with saying the Bible is just wrong about, say, homosexuality.
Co-existing alongside the experience-is-primary
approach to religious knowledge described above, there is another group
within the church whose approach is quite different. It is an authority-based
approach predicated on the belief that God has revealed, at least in part,
his will to us, and that our task is to be about conforming our lives to his
revealed will. Christianity has always affirmed that
God has spoken to mankind. The writer to the Hebrews
begins his epistle asserting that “in many and various ways God spoke of
old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to
us by a son.” The Son of God is viewed as God’s crowning,
ultimate, supreme revelation to us, having been preceded by a long train
of prophetic witnesses. The record of that historical
revelation is found in Scripture, which itself has been viewed as not merely
a human record, but as a locus of divine revelation. The
first lines of the Psalter, the heart of Israel’s and the Church’s spirituality,
tell us that blessedness comes to the one “who delights in the law of the
Lord and meditates in it day and night.” In the same
vein, St. Paul writes that “all scripture is inspired by God and profitable
for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Tim. 3:16, 17.) These passages are commending a Word-based,
or Scripture-based, spirituality in which blessing comes to us by the Scriptures. They exhort believers to assimilate the Word of God by
constant attention to it (“day and night”).
When we speak of the primacy of
Scripture in determining the will of God, the most readily available representative
image that comes to most people's mind is the fundamentalist preacher waving
his Bible, pounding a pulpit, and proclaiming "Thus saith the Lord!" There
are very few people in ECUSA who fit that mental image, but the image does
highlight the essential thing about this approach to religious knowledge:
a conviction that God has actually taken the initiative to communicate to
humanity, and that the record of that communication is contained in Scripture
in a way that it is not found in any other source, and that Scripture therefore
rises above other forms of knowledge in determining what is true religion
and what is not. The typical Episcopalian proponent of this authority-based
approach to religion is not a fundamentalist, does not treat the Bible as
a handbook on every subject from astronomy to psychology, and believes that
one should employ every relevant field of human knowledge in helping to interpret
Scripture. But at the most basic level, he or she would insist that God
has "spoken" to us through the Scriptures, that they reliably report to
us the revelatory teaching and events whereby God’s kingdom broke into this
world, bringing salvation through his Son, and that Christians must be guided
by the will of God as found in Scripture. Historically, Anglicanism has
its authority triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason, wherein Scripture
functions as the ultimate authority for the church and is interpreted with
the assistance of the history of the church's teaching through the centuries
and with the tools that human reason can make profitable use of, such as
the various fields of human knowledge (same list as in the previous paragraph).
Ideally, in this approach human experience and behaviour are evaluated in
the light of the will of God as derived from Scripture (using all those interpretive
helps), and where our experience and behaviour are not aligned with God's
will, it is expected that they will be modified to conform to it. Those
who hold to the Scripture-is-primary approach have real difficulty with the
idea that Scripture can be wrong about a matter of faith or morals. While
they recognize that the cultural conditionedness and contingency of scripture
means that we do not have to adopt the pre-scientific worldview of the human
authors of Scripture, they believe that God did communicate truth through
those pre-modern authors that is just as valid for us today as it was for
believers in the time of Christ, Isaiah, David, or Moses.
Critics of this second approach
to religious knowledge raise a number of objections. Some would question
whether it is possible to view Scripture as containing a real word from God,
as opposed to being merely a respected record of the religious experience
of part of mankind. They point to the rise of the critical study of Scripture
since the Enlightenment (roughly the eighteenth century onward) and an increased
awareness of the humanness and contingent nature of Scripture. In addition,
there is the problem Bishop Scantlebury referred to, that of different interpretations
of Scripture. How can we treat the Bible as authoritative when we can't
agree on what it means? Finally, some have labeled this approach "bibliolatry,"
charging that it transforms the Bible into an idol that replaces God.
A more recent criticism grows out
of the movement known as "postmodernism" and has quite a diversity of expressions,
but it generally denies the possibility of establishing a foundation for
religion by reading Scripture because, for example, the meanings derived
from Scripture are so contingent on the reader. Scripture is viewed as meaning
different things to different readers because it actually does have
a different meaning for each reader; the reader is part of the totality that
results in meaning. Postmodern literary criticism is really outside my areas
of expertise, and I'm probably describing it poorly, so I will not attempt
to say more except that it does not usually support the authority-based, Scripture-is-primary
approach to religion. However, it does find some Christian exponents in
people like the Methodist theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas who emphasizes
communities of people who share the same story. That may sound a little
like the first approach, but Hauerwas is referring to the biblical story,
and sees authentic Christianity where people base their lives on the story
that comes from the Bible. I think he does have a problem, though, in finding
a way for the church to speak to others who do not share its story.
In defense of the authority-based,
Scripture-is-primary approach to religion, I would claim that while it is
true that using Scripture as one's authority is not the simple process that
some people imagine, due to the historical contingency of scripture and
the variation in its interpretations, it is still the case that one can
find a central message in the Scripture that transcends the limitations of
its human authors, that there are many matters of scriptural interpretation
to which all Christians have agreed, and that the problems with this approach
have been overly magnified by its critics.
To my knowledge, the charge of
bibliolatry is a modern one that was never used before the fundamentalist-modernist
struggle in early twentieth century Protestantism. Throughout its entire
history the church has viewed Scripture as one of the means God uses to convey
his will to us. It has been viewed as inspired by God in some sense, and
there has been a lot of debate about just what that means. There have been
cases where the Bible was misused by the church. But it has always been
viewed as a channel for God's voice, and not as an object of worship.
There are two extremes that we
must guard against in seeking religious understanding. One
extreme assigns human experience the supreme role in religion, and the other
denies any legitimate place to experience. In the
survey above, we looked at the problems attending the former position. Where human experience is made primary, the human will
and human behaviour no longer stand under the judgment of God. They are no longer restrained by notions of the will of
God, because the only possible objective source of God’s will is Scripture,
and Scripture is not allowed to dictate their experience.
In such a context, all talk of being “prophetic” and “led by the
Spirit” is merely euphemistic double-talk obscuring the truth that theology
is at float on a sea of subjectivism by cloaking it in pious language.
While I have written about the
Scripture-is-primary approach as though it were merely an intellectual exercise,
it is in fact rooted in two millennia of the church's experience of God,
as well as in the personal experience of today's believers. Two thousand
years of Christian experience of God, and before that over a millennium of
Israel's experience of God, have taught us that God has indeed spoken through
Scripture. You don't have to believe that the earth is flat, or that it
is only six thousand years old, in order to believe passionately that God's
Word is contained in Scripture, and that his Spirit works through Scripture
to bring us his message, and that we should adapt our experience to conform
to that which we discern to be his will as revealed in Scripture.
In the debate raging in the Episcopal
Church about homosexuality, theological liberals have claimed that Scripture
is important to them too, and that this is simply another example of the
differences in interpretation of Scripture that have always marked the church. That this is not accurate is demonstrated by what
happens when beliefs and agendas come into conflict
with Scripture. For the theological liberal, it is
simply another in a long series of evolving, progressive realizations on
the road of religious experience. He or she can adjust
personal beliefs without much of a problem, even if a permanent gap or discrepancy
is created between the person’s beliefs and the teaching of Scripture. For the Scripture-is-Primary person, however, the
situation is much different. He does not have the
luxury of simply discounting the teaching of, for example, St. Paul. If he cannot find a plausible, intelligent, and convincing
interpretation of Scripture that is in harmony with his new view, he is
left with only two alternatives: Either he must change
his view to conform with the teaching of Scripture, or he must abandon Scripture
as an authority for his religious life. The consequences
of the latter are dire, since for him it means no longer having any Word
from God, and ultimately ceasing to be a Christian. This
is vividly portrayed in 1 Cor. 15 by the Apostle Paul. Writing
about why it is important that Jesus really rose from the dead, St.
Paul tells us:
Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that
there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there
is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ
has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we
testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true
that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are
not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ
has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are
of all men most to be pitied.
Unlike some modern types, such
as Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, who would discard the Christian belief
in resurrection of the body while continuing to claim to be Christians,
St. Paul tells us that it’s quite simple: Either Jesus
rose from the dead, or he didn’t. And if he didn’t,
the entire Christian enterprise is futile, and those who placed their hope
in Christ are pitiful fools! St. Paul is staking his
religion, his entire hope of salvation, of life with God, on the historical
trustworthiness of the Gospel traditions about what God did in Jesus, specifically
on the belief that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead.
That is, St. Paul is basing his faith on the history of salvation
that, for us, is mediated through Scripture. Unlike
Bishop Spong, St. Paul tells us that Christian hope in Christ is a fraud
if the story about him isn’t true. That is the character
of the faith that characterized the apostles and should characterize Christians
today.
© 2003 by
Stephen E. Westfall
Why Not Those Stories?
The Question of Revelation
Scripture and Anglicanism
Experience is Important
Nothing More than Differing Interpretations?