There has been plenty of discussion in United Methodist circles about the authority of the Bible, with Adam Hamilton’s “Three buckets” explanation of how the Bible applies to the issue of marriage and ordination of LGBTQ persons grabbing center stage. (http://www.adamhamilton.org/blog/homosexuality-the-bible-and-the-united-methodist-church/#.Widl4LbMyEI)
While Hamilton is a gifted communicator and leader I think he’s got the wrong analogy for explaining how scripture functions as an authority for the church.
Adams’ problem, shared with his opponents, is they inderstand the Bible within a modern epistemological framework that sees truth emerging as humans analyze data and place it into theoretical frameworks that are constantly being revised from other data.
In short the Bible is understood, at least in terms of its authority for theology, as a source of information. And like all such sources it must be evaluated to determine its applicability to the problem being solved, it’s reliability, and the proper interpretive tools that allow its data to be understood.
Critical hermeneutics, which is to say objective scientific standards for evaluating literary sources of information, are thus applied to answer these questions before moving toward actually extracting the data made available in the Bible through exegesis.
And it is on that basis that Hamilton identifies his three buckets of data.
The critics of Hamilton work in the same framework, but they begin with the assumption that the Bible does not need to be evaluated with regard to reliability. It is inerrant in the matters of which it speaks. Still, as this idea of inerrancy implies, the Bible must still be evaluated with regard to applicability and appropriate interpretive methods before the actual work of interpretation begins.
The problem is that both Hamilton and his critics have misunderstood what kind of thing the Bible is. They have adopted a fundamentally flawed Enlightenment epistemology that regards everything outside the mind of human beings as an independent source of data requiring the application of scientific tools so that it yields reliable information that can help build rational intellectual models of reality that reside, or course, in the mind.
There are two problems: first the Bible is not a data source, it is a living partner in experiencing the truth. Nor can we consider it a “conversation partner” because even the enlightenment understanding of conversation is epistemologically flawed. It understands conversation as sharing the content of the mind; the data and the theoretical frameworks that organize it. It is the linear exchange of information rather than the mutual experiencing of reality.
When the Bible is treated as a source of information about God, creation, humanity and etc it is reduced to being the words of God rather than the Word of God - assuming that God is willing to become a purveyor of information for digestion by human minds.
The second problem is that this approach to the Bible tears the Bible away from the experience of the Church. Indeed it turns the Bible into and independent critic of the Church, or of some particular church with which an individual or group of individuals has a dispute. And this is a bizarre turn of events, given that the Bible emerges in history with the Church in a partnership with God’s Spirit as a single engaged witness to Jesus as the Christ.
To grasp this relationship of the Bible, the Church, and God’s Spirit we need a different epistemology. We need an understanding that truth isn’t experienced as a model of reality existing in the mind and articulated for other minds through language. Truth, or at least theological truth, is experienced as humans engage with God’s Spirit, with one another, and with the deposit of faith found in scripture to witness to Christ through direct interaction with other humans in their social and natural contexts. Truth is something we are constantly doing, not a set of ideas in our minds.
Put another way, the Bible read through the lens of the Enlightenment is a caricature of truth that may well miss its true character entirely. Liberation theologians were getting at something similar when they spoke of “orthopraxis” rather than “orthodoxy.” But even liberation theology falls prey to an enlightenment epistemology when it seeks to characterize God’s preferential option for the poor not through a reading of the Bible in the context of active witness but through critical analysis of the text following this or that ideological framing of socio-political realities.
Put yet another way, when we hear/read the Bible in the context of worship in the community of faith as it faithfully witnesses to Jesus Christ then we are far more likely to experience the truth than when we are reading (or writing!) a commentary on its meaning. When we read the Bible along with those to whom Jesus offers himself as Savior and Lord we are far more likely to experience the truth that we are carefully parsing a critical exegesis of a particular pericope under the tutelage of a highly qualified scholar.
This leaves us, I realize, the problem of how to judge which statements, which representations of the reality of God, should guide the Church in its mission. And the answer I think is those which have proven themselves over centuries to characterize rather that caricature the experience of the Church as it witnesses with the Bible and God’s Spirit to the world: The creeds.
Anything more than the creeds may, in some particular cultural context, provide necessary guidance in the judgment of some subset of Christian witnesses. But it is bound to be contentious and thus to mark the boundary of a sectarian division. Such engagements and enactments as are characterized by additions to the creeds can never have the quality of truth possessed by the witness to Christ by the Church with the scripture and the Holy Spirit as characterized by the creeds alone.
More specifically for United Methodists, neither the additions to the creeds proposed by the Wesleyan Covenant Association (ordination of women, upholding marriage only between a man and a woman) or pro-LGBGT progressives (affirmation of same-sex marriage and ordination of those engaged in same-sex sexual behaviors in the context of such marriages) represent a true experience of witness of the quality of such a witness characterized only by the creeds. Whatever the experience of truth of their proponents, that truth experience does not possess the universality and power of the witness of Church, Scripture, and Spirit as it has always and everywhere engaged the world with Jesus Christ.
Put another way, these additions to the creeds provide a basis for creating a sect, just as they are reflective of an essentially sectarian experience. But they do not provide a basis for building the Church.
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