Let Me UnConfound You.

In a recent editorial in Good News Magazine Rob Renfroe  confesses that he is confounded by the fact that the majority of  UM bishops favor the “One Church Plan.” (https://goodnewsmag.org/2018/09/september-editorial/)  

He professes to comprehend progressives who want same-sex marriage and ordination of LBGTQ persons to be universally allowed in the UMC. After all, they are simply insisting, like traditionalists, that their interpretation of scripture be worked out in the governing of the church. What confounds him is bishops who could accept both a traditional and a progressive position in the same denomination. 

And he suspects that this is because the bishops don’t take seriously enough how committed the traditionalists are to their understanding of God’s order for human sexual relations. He feels misunderstood, which is the way we all feel when someone disagrees with us. 

Renfroe is not alone in being confounded. Progressives are often equally confounded that anyone could contemplate allowing room for the traditional position within the UMC, given that in their view it is antithetical to the teaching of Christ. They also feel misunderstood, so much so that the most radical of them believe the only possible way to act is through resistance. 

It is a basic assumption of cultural intelligence that if someone’s behavior confounds you it is probably not because they are irrational or have bad intentions. It is probably because they are operating out of a fundamentally different set of cultural assumptions than you. And if you find that you and someone with whom you disagree both find the same thing confounding then its almost a law that you and your opponent share a common set of cultural understandings that are different from those who confound you.

In this case traditionalists and progressives in the UMC, both fully embedded in modern culture, share two things in common. The first is that there is a clear and compelling meaning to scripture, in this case in relation to human sexuality. The second is that there is or should be a direct line of cause and effect between the meaning of scripture and church law. 

They disagree on the meaning of scripture, but not on whether it has a clear teaching, and not on whether it should be worked out in the life of the community. 

There is another rational position available; the position that appears to be shared by both the bishops and many other supporters of the One Church plan. 

That position is that scripture does not have a clear teaching on human sexuality. Or at least its meaning isn’t clear enough at this time to warrant dividing the church. It follows that there is thus no clear path to implementing scriptural teaching in church law, which necessarily must be changeable and flexible. And as a result the bishops and many others can logically support a position that is essentially agnostic at an institutional level, leaving it to individuals and congregations to decide according to what light is available to them.

So the One Church plan isn’t confounding at all. It is simply based on a fundamentally different understanding of the role scripture has to play in the church on this issue at this time. Really it arises out of a different culture, one that no longer shares the certainties found in a modern understanding of authoritative texts. One can disagree with the bishops on this, but their position isn’t irrational or incomprehensible. 

The problem it seems to me is that United Methodists on both sides of this divide find the possibility of ambiguity in the teaching of scripture, and thus agnosticism with regard to its meaning, profoundly troubling. We have built our faith for more than two centuries on the notion that scripture is an utterly reliable guide to both belief and behavior and thus to salvation. We cannot imagine faith in Christ apart from trust in the Bible, and so the idea that it gives no clear instruction on something as fundamentally human as sexual relations is a direct threat to our hope of salvation.

We see this in seminary settings such as mine, that spend vast amounts of time teaching students how to reliably exegete scripture and construct dogmatic systems that will give the church the kind of unambiguous guidance necessary to feel confident of being saved, or at least righteous. 

But again there is another comprehensible possibility. True faith, the hope in the unseen known only to God, has the courage to not know God’s full intention for humans as sexual beings. True faith has the courage to doubt itself and trust in God. True faith has the courage to embrace the possibility of being wrong, and therefore to build relationships on something other than being united in orthodoxy or orthopraxi. 

But there are other positions on what constitutes true faith than mine, and although I disagree with them, I am not confounded by them. They belong within the span of human reason deployed by limited humans like myself, reason which can thus bind us together in reasoning even if we ultimately choose to live apart.