The Quadralateral of Unknowing.

I was watching one of those pop-science shows and the breathless announcer said, “and look what we can see when we use the infra-red images.” Later it would be “and here is what X-rays reveal.” Exciting, but hopefully humbling. Because its a reminder that the best human eyes are blind to 99% of what is going on around them. We only see a pretty narrow range of light waves. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries have both scientific theories, discoveries, and instrutments mad the rest available to us. 

All the tools we humans have at our disposal to perceive and understand God and God’s revelation in Jesus Christ are as limited as our eyes are in perceiving the physical world. This is why the current back and forth about the so-called “Wesleyan Quadralateral” is so fruitless. Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experierence are both the windows through which we can understand the things of God, and the window frames that keep us from seeing more than a tiny fraction of what there is to know of God. 

Let’s take scripture, God’s Word. Within it we find both the assertion that it is reliable (at least the Old Testament) and the assertion that it is incomplete. "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”

And the boundedness of scripture isn't just found in its form, with a limited number of pages, but in its very linguisticality. It was written in only two of the myriad of languages that humans speak, and is therefore vastly limited in its capacity to communicate the richness of the events about which it speaks. Had someone who spoke Chinese, or Urdu, or Aztec been a follower of Jesus we would know so much more about him that could possibly be recorded by people who could communicate at best in only Aramaic and Greek. 

And Tradition? Well invariably we mean by this “the portion of tradition accessible to us.” Tradition is self-limiting, since tradition by definition is that which is passed down and remembered. Humans and human institutions are remarkable in their capacity to both edit out what they don’t want remembered and to ignore what they don’t want to hear. Tradition is as much an effort to obscure what really happened and what was really known as it is an effort to preserve the truth. 

Reason is equally limiting. Reason is nothing other than carrying on a particular type of conversation (internal or public) governed by the rules of language and leading to a conclusion. The key here is “rules of language.” Except in the most formal scientific settings, where a universal mathematical language is employed, reason follows rules determined by the cultural heritage(s) of the langauge being employed. What is reasonable in English may not be reasonable in Chinese, or Malay, or German, or for that matter Greek or Hebrew. Reason both gives us the capacity to know and strictly limits what we can possibly know. 

And finally Experience. Let me put it simply. Humans singly and corporately have strict limits on the extent of their experience, whether of God or of the mundane, and that is simply based on the physical limits of our ability to perceive what happens around us and share those experiences with others. Our culture, which teaches us not only the meaning of our experiences but which also directs our attention to certain experiences rather than others, limits our capacity to experience anything even more, as it limits the networks through which we can share or experiences. 

UM Traditionalists, Centrists, and Progressives may wish to argue about the Quadralateral, its meaning, and its value in discerning the truth of the Gospel. But however they interpret it and deploy this particular trope one thing is clear: it creates darkness along with light, and ignorance along with knowledge. 

It is natural for humans, standing in a room enclosed on all six sides, to be drawn to the light of the open window. Even more natural to believe that seeing the world beyond our room we have received a revelation, a Revelation, of reality so powerful and imperative that it must absorb all of our attention. We should not forget that there are other rooms, and other windows, and that they look out onto landscapes of the Divine framed out and hidden from us by the very room we live in built of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. 

We know all we need to know to be saved, but not all there is to know. Which may be the reason Jesus urged that we not judge others.