Antinomianism

I’m writing from Newport R.I., where the story of Mary Dyer intersects my family’s history. My earliest known ancestor in the Americas, Jacob Hunt, was a “freethinker” booted out of the Massachusetts Bay colony to Pennsylvania. His children were subsequently raised by a Quaker aunt in Newport. The family moved westward for generations, pressed by an intolerance for pacifists and non-conformists endemic to American Protestant Christianity. 

What interests me about Mary Dyer is that she was executed in Boston along with other Quakers. The charges against her, in addition to what was essentially heresy, was antinomianism. 

What that meant, and the term was then relatively new in English usage, wasn’t merely that she broke the law. It asserted that in the realm of conscience and religion she advocated against having laws. This was, of course, fundamental to the teaching of Quakers and many other religious groups. They saw the teaching of Christ as fundamentally opposed to the imposition of “law” regarding belief and practice. It meant so much to Mary Dyer that she went to Boston to preach freedom of conscience three times. And the final time was hanged for it. 

Rhode Island, where she initially fled with her husband, was an experiment in whether people of diverse faiths could be united in a single political unit. Newport has the oldest synagogue in the US as well as the oldest Quaker meeting houses and Catholic churches. (They claim the oldest tavern, but the relationship to freedom of conscience is unclear.) The people who founded Rhode Island weren’t anarchists, they simply rejected religious law as a basis for political unity, or in most cases even the unity of the religious community.

Put in other words they had an essentially different ecclesiology from that of the Anglican Church. After all, the Church of England was quite happy to marry both the political and religious authorities in one structure and murder Catholics and non-conformists along with other traitors. It was in this respect non-different from the Catholic church in its own domains, where it was married to political power and inevitably oppressed religious minorities. And it was a different ecclesiology from the Puritans who disagreed with the Church of England on points of doctrine but not on crushing religious dissent. Whether in England or the colonies you had your pick of oppressors in those days if you thought for yourself. 

Eventually it would be the political theory of Rhode Island and the ecclesiology of its Christian communities that would lead the colonies into rebellion and the establishment of the United States. What had been fundamental at the founding of Rhode Island, the dis-establishment of religion from government and the freedom of speech and conscience, would become the first amendment to the US Constitution and the foundation stone of our democracy. And Americans would invent the denomination - a live and let live way of being Christian without conformity to a central ecclesial authority.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge between the time of Mary Dyer and Jacob Hunt in the early 1600’s, the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and today. Most of what is now the United States never had that old-world connection to inquisitions, witch burning, and hanging for antinomianism. Most American Christians are barely aware of endemic anti-semitism and racism, much less how close their own religious traditions are to those that would kill to avoid internal dissent.

I relate this quick subjective history because I think it helps us understand better the problem the UMC is facing in the US. 

We are heirs to at least two different sets of values related to religious unity. Our Anglican tradition, originating with John Wesley, placed great value on conformity in belief and discipline in the community. The Wesley brothers opposed the revolution and John Wesley never ran his movement like a democracy. And the value of the tightly disciplined community united in mission is part of our DNA.

Then in the US Methodist preachers breathed deep the American air and went out to convert people on the American frontier like my grandfather, whose Quaker family had fled conformity and discipline for 300 years. Winifred Hunt didn’t become a Methodist because he loved the Discipline. He became a Methodist because he met the love of Christ at a revival. Singing in the context of mixed gender worship may have played a role. 

By then Methodism was no longer equated with the Anglicanism that had run his first American ancestor out of England, or the Puritanism that ran him out of Massachusetts. It was disciplined, but it was the discipline of study rather than dogma. It was the discipline of riding horseback on the circuit to preach the gospel rather than managing a well-oiled ecclesial machine whose cogs all needed to fit just so. It was the discipline of mutual prayer and shared worship rather than conformity to standards of behavior and belief. 

It was the discipline of non-conformity that understood the deadly influence of the dominant Christian culture on living Christian faith, and that the frontier is where Christ leads his disciples. 

But in the last century the UMC in the US appears has become a church of the establishment. It is located firmly in the dominant culture and funded by the excesses of its enormous economic success. We are now uneasy at frontiers; whether inner city, inter-cultural, inter-religious, international, or intellectual. We embrace them in theory but avoid them in practice. And we have become a machine, albeit one whose vast hierarchy of interlocking gears is binding and groaning under the corrosive influence of power and ideological conflict.

Like England in Wesley's time we look to our colonies for fresh energy and new markets. And not surprisingly, we hate antinomianism.