Trapped in a Secular Age

United Methodist discourse and disagreement is trapped in secularity. Indeed it is proof of Charles Taylor’s thesis that our secular age is one in which the conditions of belief have perceptibly and irrevocably changed. This does not mean that United Methodists don’t constantly refer to God. But all of those references are mediated by scripture, and scripture as it lies entirely within what Taylor calls the immanent frame. Once we deploy scripture to prove our point it is no longer God’s word but a human tool; a tool shaped by our immediate needs, whether rational or polemical. 

A good example of this are arguments related to the ordination of. . . . women. There are few United Methodists, none I know of, that oppose the ordination of women. But there are plenty of Evangelicals, Catholic, and Orthodox who do. We’ll let John Piper represent the first if you are interested. https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/is-there-a-place-for-female-professors-at-seminary. Noteworthy here is Piper's literalism. It is essentially a post-enlightenment form of rational interpretation of scripture based on certain assumptions about the mechanisms by which human authors serve a divine intent. Like all enlightenment rationality, it insures authority through adherence to a particular rational procedure.

So how do you argue against a well-known scholar who deploys Biblical arguments against the ordination of women and having women teach future ordinands? 

Well, a well know evangelical/conservative voice in United Methodism is Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary. You’ll find his arguments here: http://thebiblicalworld.blogspot.com/2012/04/ben-witherington-on-women-in-ministry.html

Dr. Witherington is no literalist. His arguments depend on the set of procedures typically called critical hermeneutics. These are based on an expert knowledge of cultural locations within and beyond the text, appropriate translation in relation to original cultural context, historical situation, and etc. His arguments would have been unimaginable prior to the Enlightenment.

What Piper and Witherington have in common is bringing scripture down to earth, as a human book that can be interpreted with the tools of the immanent frame, to reach a conclusion. For Witherington the authority of scripture comes from God, but its meaning is clearly mediated through the earthly tools. And it is deployed here with those tools fully in view. 

For an official commentary on United Methodist ordination of women you can go here: http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/commentary-the-ordination-of-women. I think you’ll find that its deploying of critical tools is non-different from that of Ben Witherington. Indeed, I was hard pressed to find any UM voice, or indeed any voice in support of the ordination of women, that didn’t deploy some form of critical exegesis along these lines. (It is interesting, probably telling, that of the official UM articles on this only one is written by a woman.) 

So, to repeat my initial point, it seems that we United Methodists are stuck in the immanent frame, unable to refer to our most basic source of authority without bringing it within the realm of culturally determined procedures for interpretation and deploying it as a human tool. 

Now if this seems natural, and the word itself as we use it is a product of modernity, then consider that it wasn’t always so. In pre-modern Western culture the scripture had a plenitude of meanings, none of which was discovered by rational operations on actual words and sentences to discover authorial intent. For the pre-modern Church the methods of allegory, typology, tropology, and anagogy were equally legitimate paths to both understanding and thus exposition and potentially argument. And they all depended on the assumption that scripture was bound together not by historicity, culture and cultural change, and authorial intention, but by the same gold chain, the eternal chain of Being, that bound all things on earth to heaven. 

The door back to those days is closed to us now. The Wardrobe in Lewis’s novels does not allow grown-ups a path to Narnia, and neither can we, by any act of will, recover our naiveté. On this Charles Taylor is correct.

Still, we might consider looking for another way forward that isn’t trapped in secularity and (as it happens) endless, irresolvable, and utterly fruitless disputes of the meaning of God’s Word dragged to earth by the all-too-base-metal chains of human reason. 

I will suggest, and perhaps explore further in future posts, that the path forward will be to recover God’s Word as the primary resource in a shared spiritual quest to hear God’s intent for our common life. To do this we will not instrumentalize scripture by deploying rational arguments in this or that dispute over church discipline. 

Instead we will read aloud to each other its words, all its words, and then dwell and listen in silence for God’s voice. And when we think we have heard, we will share what we have heard. And listen to what others have heard. And then we will dwell in those voices, possibly asking for clarification but never disputing or denying what others have heard. 

It may be that we will eventually come to a common mind, hearing synchronously what God is saying through scripture. It has happened before in the UMC, with regard to the ordination of women for example, or the ending of slavery. 

It may also be that we will have no common mind, that the fruit of the spirit called unity will not yet be ripe in our hearts. And we’ll either carve out space for disagreement in our common polity or decide we must for a time separate. 

Either way we will have returned to the respect for God’s Word that was lost when it became imprisoned in a secular age. And the sword of God’s word will not be deployed by us to make our enemies bleed, but by God to open up our own hearts.