The Problem with Doctrine

There is a longstanding concern of traditionalist United Methodists who believe that the church had lost its focus on the necessity of doctrine to maintain communion with the "church catholic" and provide the essential basis for church unity. Without doctrine the church supposedly succumbs to lawlessness, anarchy, emotionalism, activism, and even apostasy. 

But doctrine as a unifying and stabilizing force in Christian life is an artifact of a particular succession of cultural settings that dominate Christianity in the West, but it was not central to the earliest Christians nor is it necessarily to their successors in other cultures. 

The best way to see the extent to which doctrine is culturally located is to examine Christianity's close relative, Judaism. In Judaism we find a religion in which ethnic identity and conformity to Torah, and perhaps not even the latter, is all that is essential to unity across space and time. Reformed Judaism finds its unity with both tradition and other Jewish communities in ethical reflection and action. Conservative Judaism finds its unity in ritual and the mitzvot but doesn't even require belief in God. And secular Jews, the majority in Israel, find their unity in ethnicity and a shared historical experience. Jewish culture as it developed over millennia found forms of unity that didn't involve doctrine, and often instead focused on discourse instead.

And we can find cultures across the world in which agreement about doctrinal statements regarding religious beliefs are equally secondary or unimportant.  Unity can be found in participation in ritual worship even when the interpretation of the meaning of that worship is contested. It can be found in a common practice, such as meditation, when there is deep contestation about systems of belief. Unity can be found in agree ethical practices. If we ask what unifies Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and followers of primal religions doctrine is secondary or even absent. 

The Western Christian obsession with doctrine is a direct product of the shift of Christianity from being a Jewish religion to a Graeco-Roman religion and thus it adoption of a particular understanding of human nature and human unity emerging during the first centuries after Christ. It functioned, albeit not consistently, within that cultural realm and its emphasis on shared intellectualizations of the experience of being a person in the world as a key to both communal unity and oneness with reality itself. Mystics would always find it wanting, as would more common people who didn't think you had share the same metaphysics to share the same city, home, or table. 

The earliest Christians were unified by baptism, the Lord's supper, and belief in the resurrection of Jesus.  The last is the only essential doctrine we can find in the New Testament and it is a far cry from the kind plenitude that eventually emerged in the Creeds and the even more substantial lists of necessary unifying beliefs advocated by the Traditionalists. But even the "doctrine" of the resurrection doesn't function as doctrine in the early church, because it is simply a pointer to the shared experience of the power of the Risen Christ in the church. Shared experiences precede doctrine, and without them doctrine is meaningless. 

Do shared experiences require a common articulation in the form of propositional statements to unify and stabilize Christians? It seems a dubious assertion given the alternative forms of unity and stability found in Christian history as well as in different cultures and religions worldwide. And this is what is missing from a traditionalist discourse generally: a recognition that the Western Christian tradition isn't the norm for Christian self-understanding and expression, but is simply one of many possible inculturations of the Gospel. One can be Christian, and even think Christianly, without doctrine.

We have in the US today a large number of Christians who might believe what the creeds say but reject them in favor of the unifying power of God's Word in the Bible. We have an equally large and growing contingent that find their unity in experiences of the Holy Spirit in power even as their personal theologies tilt will outside the Trinitarian orbit. And what would they gain by getting their doctrine right? Quite possibly only the form but not the power of the Resurrected Christ. 

We could also note that every single time the Christian church has tried to turn an experience - whether baptism, the Lord's Supper, or the power of the Holy Spirit into doctrine the result isn't unity and concord.  It is division, hatred, mutual anathematizing, and schism. People who have worshipped together, prayed together, worked together, and loved one another for decades and centuries are most effectively divided from one another by an insistence on doctrinal correctness - which is what we see happening in the UMC today. 

In any case the promotion of unity through doctrine is going to face tough times in a global church. The cultures of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are not built on Graeco-Roman foundations, and have their own approaches to determining what unifies and what divides. Doctrine may be one unifying force, although it is equally reducible to lip-service in times when values other than intellectualization articulated in the languages of the West prevail. A prominent aspect of de-colonization is loosening the coercive ties of financial and other forms of dependence that too often lead to exactly the kind of shallow lip-service affirmations of that hide both real disagreements and different possibilities for unity. 

Doctrine must be recognized for what it is, the artifact of a particular culture, and even a moment in culture, that within the cultural milieu of the Christian West served as an important totem giving a sense of continuity and unity to Christians otherwise divided by ethnicity, language, politics, class, status, and history. But its importance in that context in no way suggests that it is or need be a universal feature of human relationships with God through Christ.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” It is also the only reliable sign by which we recognize one another and our ancestors in the faith.