Methodist Orthodoxy and Coherentism

It has always been the necessity of speaking to those “foolish" gentiles that has broken the coherence of orthodoxy with the command of Christ to go to the ends of the earth with the gospel. 

I’ve been reading the work, seriously theological and also more political, of the presently United Methodists who claim to represent what Dr. Billy Abraham calls a "robustly conservative or orthodox version of Methodism” (See https://peopleneedjesus.net/2020/02/05/a-happy-death-and-a-hopeful-future/.) 

Four themes emerge. 

The first is the idea of orthodoxy as “what the church has always and everywhere believed.” Because this reaches into the deep past of the church, particularly to the creeds which fix the canon, it is both conservative and claims to be part of a coherent theological and ethical tradition stretching back to the apostles. 

The second is the idea of coherence per se. Dr. Abraham’s article claims that the UMC was incoherent from the beginning, and that this incoherence is in fact a feature of progressive or inclusivist theology and ethics. The claim is that orthodox Methodism has an internal coherence missing in the UMC and distinct but related to its coherence with classical Christian teaching. 

Which brings us to a third theme: boundaries. Methodists who identify as orthodox such as Dr. Abraham frequently link coherence with boundedness. A church without boundaries soon becomes (a frequent accusation against progressives) indistinguishable from the larger society and its beliefs and mores. It loses its coherence as it becomes frayed into the larger culture. Orthodoxy claims to have boundaries that insure coherence.

A fourth theme, unavoidable in a movement for whom Dr. Abraham is the leading theologian, is epistemology or truth. Orthodox Methodism has come to set great store, as have other evangelicals groups, on the work of Lesslie Newbigin (The Foolishness of the Greeks) and Alving Plantinga (Knowledge and Christian Belief) as defenders of the coherence of the truth claims of orthodox Christian belief; a defense bound up in the theory of knowledge rooted in the work of Polyani on how communities are the source of knowledge and linguistic analysis as the guarantor that Christian statements of belief are warranted. 

The problem with this fourth theme is that at a popular level there is a confusion between a theory of knowledge and claims to know the truth. Newbigin and Plantinga aptly demonstrate that orthodox Christianity rests upon and within a coherent theory of knowledge. But neither actually claims do have demonstrated the truth of orthodox Christian claims. Indeed Plantinga specifically disavows claims to truth. And this is critical, since it allows them to break from fundamentalist claims that excluded science. By maintaining coherence within a domain of knowledge rather than making exclusive universal truth claims evangelicals can lay claim to both orthodoxy and science. 

Put in other words, and this is the key, truth claims in orthodox Christianity, and perhaps in all forms of Christianity, collapse into coherence. Lacking a universally, or even widely accepted epistemology internal coherence becomes the only test of credibility. And this is why it is so critical for orthodox Christians to claim theological coherence as their unique possession. Vis-a-vis the truth orthodox Christianity stands in the same place as Christians whom it regards as heterodox, or for that matter even non-Christian religions and ideologies. Its only unique claim to credibility lies in the claim to be coherent versus the supposed incoherence of its ecclesial rivals. 

But is it coherent? I’ll offer in closing that it is coherent within the worldview of a particular set of cultures, some found inside and some outside the West. Within these cultures its claims will be found credible and will be confused with the truth. But to the extent that it appears incoherent with and within other cultures and worldviews it will have the greatest possible difficulty in witnessing to what it knows of Christ while still maintaining its internal coherence. It has always been the necessity of speaking to those “foolish" nations of the earth that has broken the coherence of orthodoxy with command of Christ. And all the emperor’s councils, and all the emperor’s men have never put it back together again.