In commenting upon the ever present theological and ethical conflict that United Methodist is embroiled within, Timothy Tennent, the President of Asbury Theology Seminary, makes the following observation in his most recent blog post in discussing why many people are leaving the United Methodist Church, particularly in America.

This observation needs to be heard by United Methodists across our land. We have a spiritual treasure that is in jeopardy. We have lost our connection to our own vibrant heritage. There has never been a movement which so powerfully united evangelical fervor rooted in historic orthodoxy with social engagement and societal witness. What is at stake is not merely a resolution of our struggles over human sexuality, though that has become the presenting issue before us. What is at stake is nothing less than the apostolic witness. What is at stake is our commitment to Scriptural Christianity. What is at stake is our own vibrant heritage of vibrant evangelism, church-planting, travailing prayer, ardent discipleship, and our identity with the poor.

At sake then is that many people are leaving the United Methodist church in search of what the Wesleyan heritage originally stood for. If such a vibrant way of life is absent from the halls of many of the churches, then the dissonance between faith and where one is involved in the practice of this faith will lead people to either shift/abandon their faith to conform to their context or, as in the case of this article, leave their context for something they feel to be more authentic to what they have come to believed and learned. Speaking of one such person who left precisely in that fashion, Tennent says:

He acknowledges, as I do, that there are thousands upon thousands of United Methodist pastors who still stand for all of these things and who faithfully minister the gospel week in and week out. He acknowledges that there are millions of current United Methodists who still stand in hope that this great heritage can be restored. I am among those. But, we should not be naïve. There are powerful forces aligned firmly against our own heritage of Scriptural Christianity. There are powerful forces who are determined to re-shape our heritage into something unrecognizable to the vision of our beloved founders. There are powerful forces who want us to normalize what the New Testament explicitly forbids. We must rise up and say “no” to anything which would trade our sacred history for the latest mess of cultural pottage.

Now, if I were to describe this as an amateur anthropologist, I would suggest that there is a clash of different cultures, whose practices, values, relationship to history, and overall worldviews are in clash and tension. Should United Methodist retain its continuity with its holy past, or must it unshackle the chains of the oppressive past? Is sex to be understood in the context of personal desire and fulfillment, or should it be considered a part of life that intimately affects our relationship with each other and God and brings forth something new? I might even move into a postmodern analysis, suggesting such claims are actually playing for the prominence of oneself and one’s cultures in a  struggle the establish the prominence of one’s own life-world. Tennent’s own appeal recognizes the power that is present in the opposition, although he does not characterize mass of faithful ministers in terms of power.

However, while the psychological, anthropological, and postmodernist perspectives certainly have some truth to their analysis, to stay there would frame the conflict in a relativistic frame where there is no real common/”universal” normative ground to unite the contrasting theological cultures. This does not fit the reality of the United Methodists; there is at one level a “common ground.” While there are certainly exceptions, most progressives and evangelicals do hold in common certain language. We all talk about God, Jesus, the Spirit, grace, forgiveness, love, etc. Almost all of us appeal to the language of the Scriptures, although some appeal more so than others. We can even go beyond language and suggest that amongst the intellectual representations amongst progressives and evangelicals, they even share a common respect for the historical study of Scriptures, the value of studying theological tradition, etc. We share a common store of practices, particularly amongst the clergy, in the process of ordination, the practice of conferencing, etc. With so much in common, how can we be so divided?

The answer: differences in epistemology. For those unfamiliar, epistemology is commonly referred to as the philosophy of knowledge: how is it that we know, what justifies our beliefs so that we can call it knowledge, etc. But I would refer to this as a reflective epistemology, where we have attempted to understand and think through the grounds for gaining knowledge and our confidence in this knowledge. But we all have the sources we trust for gaining knowledge and we all have our own reasons for trusting what we know; we are just not usually aware of this. While sustained reflection can help to form our own epistemic frameworks, it is predominately formed unaware to us by our relationships, practices, liturgies, experiences, etc. It gets ingrained in us in churches, schools, politics, etc. where we imitate the examples provides to us by our clergy, teachers, elected officials and learn it through feedback from our own attempts as learning, whether it be in the form of social feedback in grades, approval/disapproval, etc., or our own experimentation where we discover if our thoughts and actions lead to and predict the results we expected. Our pre-reflective epistemologies become engrained and sustained through this set of events occurring again and again and again over the course of the years, with us rarely being able to look back and see how it happened.

Occasionally, however, if we are open to seeing it, sometimes we discover whole new ways of acquiring knowledge. For instance, all through college, I was a rather analytical person, starting in computer science which entailed clear analytic, algorithmic thinking; even as I switched to psychology, I still thought of people in algorithmic fashions. Even my theology reflected this as I likened God to a big supercomputer, whose actions were always in accordance to a complex set of conditional rules, which we might refer to as God’s nature. I even studied the Bible in this fashion, thinking the words had a clear, specific, unchanging meaning as if they are technical terms, thus it was simply a matter of reading the Bible enough to pin down what every significant word such as forgiveness, salvation, grace, etc. meant. Knowledge was only in the form of clear, unchanging principles/rules that governed everything Then, during my first years in seminary, I happened upon readings that engaged in historical critiques of society. The idea that the practices of a society, both its virtues and its sins, could be connected to historical circumstances of ideology, economics, etc.¹ opened my mind to a whole new way of knowing. Knowledge was murkier, and the way to know was to study the context so deeply and fully so that what was true (or at least, what I thought to be true) would emerge from a mind that engages the whole of the situation. Without the reflective awareness that I now have today, I was excited by this new way of learning. It grappled my imagination and made me, as I look back, to think much more like the Continental philosophers do. As a result, my theology and study of the Bible shifted. I began to be open to seeing God more in terms open theistic terms; I even flirted with process theology in the end, although I ended up finding it untenable for Christian faith based upon the Scriptures. God was also a God who related to us like a person who was concerned about my feelings, my circumstances, etc., rather than simply a supercomputer who gave certain outputs based upon certain inputs. My reading of the Bible shifted to try to wrap my head around it in a new way, where it must be connected to the circumstances of history. In addition, the meaning of the words of the Bible was something that emerges from the usage of the words together in its historical context, and thus every pericope, text, genre, part of the canon, should be taken on its own terms. In the midst of this shift, I even considered the idea of “Spiritual exegesis” where we can only truly grasp the meaning of the text by inspiration of the Spirit.

If I may describe these events, it was as if I had an epistemic conversion.² To be clear, I am not stating this as some salvific conversion, but only as a recognition that our epistemic frameworks that influence our learning can be dramatically changed. However, this change occurs by something unfamiliar to us that grabs out attention and appeals to us in some fashion, evoking our desire and/or fears.

Now what does this have to do with the United Methodist theological conflict? At the core, it is this basic premise: most of us have not gone through an epistemic transformation. Whether it be the method of learning taught to us by our schools and politicians, or if it is what we learned in our churches and other religious settings, most of us have been taught to acquire knowledge through very particular practices. For evangelicals, one gains knowledge through reading and studying the Scriptures. One may also appeal to certain religious authorities, such as pastors, who we trust have read the Scriptures well and are qualified to teach from them. For wider society, one gains knowledge through accumulating observations of a wide sample of objects or persons, and thus this influences much of progressive Methodism, where theological truth is often times determined by the various experiences and perspectives of the persons. Rather, what happened to us is that we simply retained our epistemic frameworks that controlled how we understood and interpreted the Scriptures, the practices and liturgy of the church, our own experiences, etc. We may have a similarity of faith in a vague way, which shares common language, practices, etc.

But if we look at the apostle Paul’s description of his own practice of apostolic ministry amongst the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 2, he is specifically concerned not just that the Corinthians have “faith,” but that this faith is rightly directed. Instead of appearing as a knowledgeable philosopher that the Stoic’s lauded in the form of an ideal sage, Paul sought to place the emphasis on two sources of knowledge about God, the testimony of Jesus death and resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit. By these sources, one would perceive the nature of God’s power working in the context of weakness and foolishness in the eyes of the world. For Paul, it wasn’t simply that one had faith; it was how one has faith through looking to the specific ways God chooses to make himself known and not through Paul as a philosophical authority. In so doing, Paul was challenging the epistemic practices of the Corinthian culture, which would have been influenced by Roman Stoicism. The way of acquiring knowledge that the wider society had, whatever value it had for other forms of knowledge, was not the way one was to learn about God. However, that the Corinthians seems to still look towards the ministers of the Gospel like Peter, Paul, and Apollos, all in this light, the aligned themselves with certain teachers and thus placed their trust in theological authorities; hence they were a church sown with division and conflict as they may have some true beliefs about God, but it was not truly justified knowledge obtained by apprehending the power of God. They were not united in Jesus Christ because their epistemic frameworks made them focus on something else other than the powerful work of God.

However, the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and the powerful works of the Spirit would have presented for people an critical point where they could come to learn about God in a way entirely different from what they were accustomed to. To grow into the maturity that Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16, one must first come to a trust in the power of God. This trust didn’t come by rational argumentation. It didn’t come through Paul saying “the Scriptures so so you should believe” as if the words themselves were evidence themselves.³ While Paul nowhere rejects other epistemic frameworks as bearing no truth value, all other epistemic frameworks mislead and misdirect people, and thus one must come to shift the way one learns to be in accordance to how God chooses to make Himself known.

I would suggest the problems rests in the end with how people came into faith. We have been focused upon the generation of right belief, that is what we might refer to as orthodoxy, although different people and traditions may construe orthodoxy differently. However, there has not been the self-conscious attention that the Apostle Paul had in how is it we come to this right belief. For Paul, it wasn’t simply about orthodoxy, but epistemic orthodoxy: coming to the right belief in the right way, through attention to what God selects and uses to make Himself known. The end result is that while we might accept and common set of ideas, languages, practices, etc., our understanding of them as a whole is dramatically different because we arrive at the common language, belief, and practices in different ways that dramatically diverge in other language, beliefs, and practices. The problem rests then in our evangelism and discipleship, where we focus on transmitting right beliefs and not also transmitting the appropriate way we come to know this right belief; we are either mired in the doctrine of Protestant⁴ sola scriptura or Enlightenment rationalist and empiricist ways of learning, which all have their uses, and not first and foremost the engagement with the ways God chooses to make Himself known in Scripture and in the course of our lives.

So, at the core, our United Methodist divide is, I would suggest, not at it’s foundation a divide in theology, ethics, culture, etc. It is an epistemic divide that impacts how we understand the aspects of our faith that we might share on the surface. And it is a blame that I would suggest is largely shared by both progressive and evangelicals, although, to avoid the appearance of false impartiality, I do think in general evangelicals are closer to Paul’s and the New Testament’s epistemic understanding of faith.

Ever since Albert Outler developed and propagated the idea of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, the idea that John Wesley used Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, United Methodist theology has existed in a state of perpetual disagreement in terms of how to value and relate these four sources together. On the more traditionally evangelical end, it is said that Scripture is the highest value and the norming norm that determines how tradition, reason, and experience are understood and appropriated. However, it is often times the case that these four sources are treated on the same level, allowing for more progressive theologies that value human feeling and perspective. In a large part, the source of the divide over sexuality and marriage in the United Methodist church relates to precisely this division: what role do the other sources, particularly experience, play in theology. To that end, I am going to agree more with the sentiment of my more progressive United Methodists; experience is important; really important. In fact, I would suggest all theology is based on experience.

By that notion, I mean this: every act of thinking about God and life is based on our experience; what determines the thoughts I have and hold are the experiences I had. For instance, the very act of reading Scripture is an experience; my thoughts about God and life does not arrive in some way independent of the very experience of reading. Or, if I am reading reciting the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, the very recitation of it influences how it is I think about theology. When I am weighing different proposals for how God can be both one and yet three, the act of reasoning itself impacts the very neural networks of my brain that “store” the metaphysical ideas I hold to. There is no getting around; experience is the only source of theology we have…..

However, not all experiences are of equivalent value. Certainly, all but the most skeptical of us would agree that the knowledge that a physicist gains from the experience of hypothesis, observation, theorizing, collaborating with colleagues, etc. is more reliable than the ideas that a person has in a state of hallucination. Even if one wanting to shy away from the word “truth,” I am sure almost everyone would be much more willing to place more trust in what the scientist says over what the person who is hallucinating is saying. Almost all of us intuitively recognize that certain ideas are more reliable because of the state of mind we attribute to the persons who produced and disseminated those ideas.

However, for some reason, when it comes to religion and theology, we operate as if one person’s experience is of equivalent reliability as another person’s experience. It partly roots in the way Western society has treated God and religion as a personal thing that no one can really know anything about; it is simply a matter of personal opinion and thus all opinions are of equal levels of validity. It is perhaps also rooted in what is a very humane idea, that we should not deny the experience that a person is having. However, a person describing their experience is different from a person making claims about something that goes beyond their own experience. If I am speaking of God as result of my experience, then I am not only talking about myself but I am talking about someone who is different from myself, that is unless I hold to some pan(en)theistic or have some delusion of grandeur about my own self.

But if we questioned the presuppositions that all experiences that lead us to think about God are of equal reliability, which is simply an a priori assumption that is not clearly true but is only believed because culture ridicules any challenge to this methodological agnosticism, then we are left with quite a different view of the relationship of theology and experience: some experiences are more reliable for theology than others. All things being equal,¹, we who are more evangelical leaning can say that the experience of reading Scripture is more reliable than the experience of reasoning, for instance. Or, that my experience of working in my tradition is going to be more likely to give me something true and valuable than my own experience of sexual desire. In saying this, there is no denying the reality of my own sexuality and its desires; it is only a recognition that my sexual experience may not be something I can use to say something reliable about God as saying what I may get from the experience of reading Scripture. In other words, this suggests that claims about God that are warranted are determined not be an experience itself, but by what it is that determines the form and shape of my experiences in the first place. Or, to put it in Pauline terms, reliable knowledge about God is derived from experiences that are influenced by the Spirit, whereas faulty ideas about God is derived from my own fleshly experience.

In other words, the experience is only theologically reliable when the causal conditions of that experience are somehow the work or inspiration of God. Many Christians believe Scripture is inspired by God, so one can say that God via the reading of Scripture is a cause of our experience. Or, one could say that the Spirit influenced the formation of the Nicene tradition. However, we need not analyze things simply in terms of direct inspiration; I am not trying to derive a strong theology of revelation that excludes any and all possibilities of theology from below.² My only point is to demonstrate the proposition that it is the nature of experience that makes it reliable. Thus, theological reflection entails contextualizing our own experiences, recognizing the causes and sources of the experience before determining its reliability and usefulness for the task of theology.

I would suggest at least four different, overlapping factors that impinge upon experience: attentional focus, cognitive patterns of processing, the wider context of experience, and the desires and purpose of the knowledge we derive. The attentional focus is essentially are epistemic sources; what is is we are paying attention. Is it reading a letter of Paul? Is it study of the patristics? Is it a meta-cognitive introspection, sensing my own thoughts, feelings, etc.? Pattern of processing relates to how it is our minds make sense of the sources. Our worldviews, the types of reasoning we have learned to use instinctively, etc. all impact how it is we make understand what is it we are paying attention to. Context relates to all the other things that are impacting and influencing my thoughts and feelings but my attention and focus in not on that. Hearing the Scripture read in the context of a community of believers who I share life with may alter the way I understand God through the text. Then, the desires and purposes of knowledge is, for the lack of a better term, the agendas that determine what type of results I am looking for. Commonly right now, people read the Bible on sexuality because they are trying to get knowledge on what it does or does not say on the topic, but someone reading the same passage who is not focused on that agenda may make sense of what is said differently.

Now certainly, this is not feasible for giving quick and easy instruction on theological method. It has a high level of complexity that could never hope to be exhausted in an easily understandable and digestible form. However, my point is to suggest that instead of labeling “experience” a source of theology, we should instead pay attention to the very nature of the experience and explain the conditions upon which experience provides reliable theological knowledge. In so doing, something important is done: it will unmask the arrogance of theologies that equate one’s own religious experience as somehow telling us something about God. While not exclusive to progressive theology, there are plenty of conservative/traditionalist minded people who think their thoughts exactly resemble God’s, many versions of progressive theology has that veiled arrogance about oneself: that my own experience is sufficient grounds to speak about God in a way that other people must respect and include. This arrogance goes beyond simply accepting what a person experiences, but that one is allowed to teach whatever one feels about anyone or anything else, including God, because of their own experience and it should not be challenged but instead should be allowed the same level credibility as anything else, regardless of the nature of my experiences in the first place. By moving towards recognizing the different types and sources of experience, including prominent Scripture reading, engaging with tradition, reasoning, and introspection, we would be more equipped to call certain experiences that are used for the basis of theology as self-centered navel-gazing, whether it be our own personality, our own culture, our own nation, etc. Beyond simply recognizing the reality of their own experience, culture, and nation, they find their attentional focus is on their own self, on the ideas of their own culture, on the values of their own nation, and it is this we would call the flesh and as having nothing reliable to say about the God who we believe to be revealed in Christ and the Spirit.