Love That Rejoices in the Truth: Theological Explorations

Love that Rejoices in the Truth

Theological Explorations

Charles M. Wood

LOVE THAT REJOICES IN THE TRUTH

Theological Explorations

Copyright © 2009 Charles M. Wood. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-55635-953-8

isbn 13: 978-1-4982-7016-8

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Wood, Charles Monroe.

Love that rejoices in the truth : theological explorations / Charles M. Wood.

x + 156 p. ; 20 cm. — Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978-1-55635-953-8

1. Theology—Study and teaching. 2.United Methodist Church (U.S.)—Doctrines. 3. Bible Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title

BT28 .W66 2009

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Preface

Love, says the apostle Paul, does not rejoice over injus- tice, but rejoices in the truth ( 1 Cor 13 : 6; my translation). Regrettably, rejoicing in the truth does not seem to come naturally to human beings in our present state. It might come naturally, were we not so thoroughly entangled in deceit and self-deception as to have become enemies of the truth rather than its friends. For us to become capable of welcoming truth, actively seeking it and rejoicing in it, requires a deep change. To undergo that change is to receive a life-transforming gift.

Like Paul and his contemporaries, generations of Chris-tians have understood a new capacity for and disposition toward truth as something that belongs to the renewed human identity that is fashioned when God’s love has been poured into our hearts though the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Rom 5:5 NRSV). Of course, those same generations of Christians, up to and including our own, have given ample evidence that this renewal is at best fitful and incomplete, and that, generally speaking, the perfect love that casts out fear (1 John 4:18) does not yet govern our individual or corporate lives. Consequently, we remain conflicted about the truth; we have issues with it.

The theological explorations undertaken here all deal in one way or another with the liberating promise and the perplexing problem of truth in Christian life and witness, and with the ways that Christian theology and theological education in their various modes struggle both to seek the truth and to foster the aptitude to honor it. Several of these chapters were composed for specific occasions. Some are concerned to explicate insights and resources from the Wesleyan heritage or to address matters that have arisen more immediately in the United Methodist version of that tradition. Others have broader contexts and issues in view. My hope is that all of them might be of use to readers from a variety of Christian traditions and theological standpoints. Some of the chapters have been slightly revised for this collection, mainly in the interest of consistency in style.

Charles M. Wood

Acknowledgments

Methodist Doctrine: An Understanding was presented to the Systematic Theology Working Group at the Tenth Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies in 1997, and was subsequently published in Quarterly Review 18:2 (Summer 1998) 167–82. Used with permission.

Wesleyan Constructive Theology was presented to a workgroup on Wesleyan Constructive Theology at the bicentennial theological consultation, Wesleyan Theology in the Next Century, at Emory University in Atlanta in 1983. It was first published in the Perkins Journal 37 (Spring 1984) 12–17, and reprinted in the proceedings of the consultation, Wesleyan Theology Today: A Bicentennial Theological Consultation, edited by Theodore Runyon (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1985).

The Primacy of Scripture was delivered at a gathering of ministers of the North Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in 2000 to consider that theme, and was first published in the Perkins School of Theology Perspective (Spring 2006) 16–17.

Word of God and Truth first appeared in Encounter 41 (1980) 219–27. Reprinted here, with slight revisions, with permission.

Scripture, Authenticity, and Truth was presented at a conference on the Bible and Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in May 1995, and was first published in the Journal of Religion 76 (1996) 189–205.

Theological Education: Confessional and Public originated as two lectures for a consultation of the Associação de Seminários Teológicos Evangélicos in Brazil in December 1999. A Portuguese translation was published in the ASTE journal, Simpósio (São Paulo) 9:42 (2000) 5–22. The present English version was published online at Resources for American Christianity (http://www.resourcingchristianity.org) in 2001. Used here with permission.

Not Every School was delivered as the Colwell-Cranston Lecture at the Fall opening convocation of the School of Theology at Claremont in September 1994, and was subsequently published as the School of Theology at Claremont Occasional Paper 18 (September 1995).

Paying Attention was prepared in 1993 as a brief report on a consultation of church leaders on theological education funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc., and held under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Theological Education at Auburn Theological Seminary. It was published in Quarterly Review 13:3 (Fall 1993): 39–44. Used with permission.

Rejoicing in the Truth was published in Quarterly Review 24:2 (Summer 2004) 131–41. Used with permission.

1

Methodist Doctrine: An Understanding

So me time ag o , a theological colleague who is not a Metho-dist asked me what courses I was then teaching. When I told him I was teaching United Methodist Doctrine, his quiet response was, That must be a short course. Methodists have a reputation among some other Christians for being short on doctrine, or doctrinally thin. It is widely believed that a walk through the Methodist doctrinal pond would hardly get one’s feet wet. It is not only other Christians who have this impression of us, of course; many Methodists share it, and take it either as a point of pride (the dominant view, so far as I can see) or as a reason for self-reproach (a minority view, whose influence waxes and wanes periodically).

H. Richard Niebuhr once observed that debates about the authority of the Bible are unproductive when it is assumed that the question is a quantitative one (How much authority does the Bible have?) rather than a qualitative one (What kind of authority does it have?).¹ I believe that estimates of Methodist doctrine often go astray for much the same reason. We readily fall into the quantitative way of thinking, and have earnest discussions about how much doctrine Methodists have, or should have. We would be helped by a clearer apprehension of what kind of doctrine Methodist doctrine is. My aim here is to work toward this clearer apprehension.

I believe that the standards of Methodist witness and practice, and particularly John Wesley’s doctrinal sermons, convey an important insight into the character of Christian doctrine. By this, I do not mean to call attention to purportedly distinctive Methodist doctrines; on the whole, when it comes to the content of what Methodists believe and teach (or should believe and teach), I agree with those who find it more accurate to speak of distinctive Methodist doctrinal emphases, rather than distinctive doctrines.² But in any case, my main concern here is not with any distinctive content. Instead, I want to pursue a Wesleyan or Methodist understanding of the fundamental character of Christian doctrine as such, and a way of holding and deploying doctrine—you might say, a characteristic way of being doctrinal—that follows from that understanding. I believe that those of us who find ourselves within this particular stream of Christian tradition should explicate this insight and become more deliberate in our appropriation and representation of it, both for the sake of clarity as to what we are about doctrinally as Methodists and for the sake of the contribution this might make to the wider Christian community.

In his classic The Meaning of Revelation, written nearly sixty years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr writes:

A critical historical theology cannot, to be sure, prescribe what form religious life must take in all places and all times beyond the limits of its own historical system. But it can seek within the history of which it is a part for an intelligible pattern; it can undertake to analyze the reason which is in that history and to assist those who participate in this historical life to disregard in their thinking and practice all that is secondary and not in conformity with the central ideas and patterns of the historical movement. Such theology can attempt to state the grammar, not of a universal religious language, but of a particular language, in order that those who use it may be kept in true communication with each other and with the realities to which the language refers. It may try to develop a method applicable not to all religions but to the particular faith to which its historical point of view is relevant. Such theology in the Christian church cannot, it is evident, be an offensive or defensive enterprise which undertakes to prove the superiority of Christian faith to all other faiths; but it can be a confessional theology which carries on the work of self-criticism and self-knowledge of the church.³

What Niebuhr was advocating here, under the alternate names of a critical historical theology and a confessional theology, was an approach to theological work that took very seriously the local knowledge of a particular religious tradition and community, its own ways of knowing what it knows, its own access to reality, the reason informing its own life. Theology appropriately begins, not with an arrogant effort to make sense of a religious tradition by subjecting it to supposedly universal standards of intelligibility, but rather with a patient attempt to learn and explicate the sense already present in it. That may not be all that theology has to do, but it is an indispensable beginning.

The notion that a religious tradition has something like a grammar has been around for quite some time. It was a familiar metaphor in medieval theology. Martin Luther is said (by J. A. Bengel and, following him, John Wesley) to have remarked that divinity is nothing but a grammar of the language of the Holy Ghost.⁴ The metaphor was given new life in certain strands of twentieth-century Anglo-American theology and philosophy of religion under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comparison of philosophical analysis to grammatical investigation,⁵ and it gained wider currency with the publication of and reception of George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine. It is now fairly common to hear doctrinal formulations compared to grammatical principles, catechesis compared to grammatical instruction, and theology described as an investigation of the grammar of the language and life of a religious community.

Some of the values of the metaphor are readily apparent. Just as doctrine can refer either to the technical principles formally stated in doctrinal pronouncements and handbooks, or to the embodiment of those principles in the teaching activity of the church and in the lives of its members, so grammar can designate either the formulated conventions of linguistic use, or the features of the language and of linguistic ability that those formulations codify. Grammatical formulations both describe and, in some circumstances, regulate the use of the language, but a competent speaker need not be able to formulate correctly the conventions he or she observes in exercising that competence. Conversely, a knowledge of the grammatical formulations does not insure competence in the language. Mastery of the language and conscious knowledge of the rules describing such mastery are two different things, and they do not always coincide. (Similarly, understanding Christian doctrinal formulations and understanding things Christianly are two different things.)

Learning grammar can mean either learning the grammatical formulations or acquiring competence in the language. If the aim is the latter, the former may have a quite limited role to play. Traditional approaches to second-language teaching overestimated their importance, emphasizing a mastery of the formulations and giving little attention to practice in listening and speaking the language itself. They appear to have been less effective in fostering actual linguistic ability than more recent approaches stressing exposure to the living language—hearing and imitating competent speakers, and having one’s mistakes corrected, with only an occasional explicit invocation of grammatical principles.⁶ (Similarly, teaching someone doctrinal formulations and teaching someone to understand things Christianly are two different things, and the role of the first in the second needs some careful pedagogical attention.)

Several contemporary theologians, utilizing this grammatical metaphor, have made a strong claim concerning the unique role of the doctrine of the Trinity in the language and life of the Christian community: namely, that it is the key element in Christian grammar, or (as one of them, Walter Kasper, puts it) the doctrine of the Trinity is the grammar and summation of the entire Christian mystery of salvation.⁷ According to these theologians, if we are to seek what Niebuhr calls an intelligible pattern in Christian faith and practice, it is to (or with the help of)