Keeping Our Clergy Covenant: Doubt, Discovery, and Intellectual Virtue
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Every United Methodist elder entered into a covenant at his or her ordination. As part of this covenant, in addition to a handful of disciplined practices for living, each of us agreed to keep the General Rules, to preach and maintain the doctrines of the church, and to support and maintain the polity of the church. This seems simple enough, until we remember that the human mind is malleable. A particular claim that I believe today may be one I have sincere doubts about tomorrow and may reject outright in a month.
Four Virtuous Habits of Mind
This malleability of the human mind is a good thing. The ability and willingness to change one’s mind under the right circumstances is a sign of intellectual virtue. In what follows I want to talk about four habits of mind related to intellectual virtue. The first two habits deal most directly with how one evaluates and conveys one’s own ideas and the second two habits are more concerned with how one evaluates and interacts with competing ideas. The four habits together create a framework for operating with intellectual virtue.
The first habit is sincerity. Sincerity is the commitment to evaluating evidence honestly and presenting that evidence with maximal clarity and precision. Sincerity allows one to avoid the temptation to spin the evidence unfairly or to present a dishonest version of one’s position in the attempt to persuade one’s conversation partners.
The ability to state firmly and clearly what one actually believes leads us to the second habit, courage. Courage is the commitment boldly to embrace relevant evidence and present one’s evaluation of the evidence accurately. Courage allows one to avoid the temptation to ignore evidence that weakens one’s current position and, like sincerity, to avoid the temptation to present a weakened version of a position.
The third habit, humility, serves as the bridge between one’s belief and the other possible options that may be presented by a dialogue partner. Humility is the recognition that one may not have all the necessary evidence or that a mistake was made in the reasoned evaluation of the evidence that has led to an unjustified, untrue belief. Humility allows one to avoid the temptation to dismiss opposing views without carefully evaluating their merits.
The final habit is charity. Charity is the commitment to assuming the best about an opposing position and the person who is presenting it. Charity allows one to avoid the temptation of creating a straw man out of positions put forward by opponents, dismissing ideas purely on account of the person presenting them, or assuming that one’s opponents are necessarily operating with malice.
These four habits of mind work together to create a framework for thinking and dialoguing in an intellectually virtuous way.
Intellectual Virtue and the Clergy Covenant
In light of this description of intellectual virtue, what happens when clergy who have covenanted to preach and maintain the church’s doctrine and discipline find that they no longer assent to its doctrinal and ethical standards?
As Wesleyans, we often answer this question with the words that Peter Böhler shared with John Wesley. In a season of disappointment, Wesley found himself doubting the doctrine of justification by faith. In response, Bohler encouraged Wesley, “Preach faith until you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” This quote tends to get a lot of traction in our tradition, but is this actually an intellectually virtuous response? Is it an intellectually virtuous response for pastors to teach and preach what they do not personally believe? Is it intellectually virtuous for bishops to “uphold the faith” if it is a faith they do not possess?
What should one do when one’s sincerely held beliefs are at odds with one’s ordination covenant?
As best as I can tell, the poor soul in this difficult scenario has three options:
Teach in conflict with the church, breaking the covenant to teach and maintain the doctrines of the church.
Find a new vocation where one is no longer bound by the covenant to teach and maintain the doctrines of the church.
Teach and maintain the doctrines of the church, even the doctrines one doesn’t believe.
All three options demonstrate some type of virtue. Option one is an example of sincerity as an orienting virtue. I would argue that this option best reflects the dominant intellectual virtue in the United States after the postmodern turn. Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives, which is just to say that the normative perspective is not the only perspective and that minority perspectives can have a powerful corrective function in coming to a fuller, more nuanced view of the world. In the case of our poor pastor who has lost faith in sound doctrine, the teachings of the church would serve as the normative perspective, but the very existence of minority perspectives may introduce uncertainty of the truth of these doctrines. If, ultimately, the self is the final arbiter of truth, then option one is intellectually virtuous, because the covenant was entered into from a place of ignorance.
Option two is an example of the intellectual virtue of courage. There is real nobility in walking away from a guaranteed appointment in the pursuit of truth. The self-awareness to recognize that a different role or a different tradition would be a better fit and the courage to make the change is praiseworthy, but may be very costly.
Option three prioritizes the intellectual virtue of humility. I remember sitting in a theology class taught by Jason Vickers. He slid his glasses to the tip of his nose so that he could look over the frame, eye to eye without the lens in the way, and he made the claim that the faith we inherit has been affirmed by the smartest, sincerest, most saintly persons in the history of the church. He then rattled off the heavyweights through history and said, if you are in disagreement with them, it may be you who are wrong. Teaching and maintaining doctrines one does not believe has shifted the arbitration of truth from the person to the community in recognition of the likelihood that when pastors stray intellectually from the historic faith, it is because of a deficiency in their own evidence or reasoning.
So, with these three options on the table, recognizing that each option contains a kernel of intellectual virtue, which option should we consider the most virtuous?
Imagine that 10 years after ordination, a particular UM elder is at lunch with the Baptist minister in town and over the course of the conversation, this particular UM elder is convinced that the practice of baptism in the Bible is reserved for believers and that the UM doctrine around the sacrament, particularly regarding the baptism of infants, is in error. What should this elder do? Should she refuse to baptize the infants of committed members of her congregation? Should she look into transferring her credentials to a tradition that only practices believer’s baptism? Or should she continue serving in her ordained role as priest responsible for the sacrament, baptizing infants in her congregation?
There is virtue in each path, but which is the most virtuous?
I submit that, for Christians, and particularly for the ordained, the answer is option three, though many who don’t hold our faith would disagree.
For the first two options, the self is the final arbitrator of what is true., but this is not how Christians properly reason. There is a particularly Christian way of being intellectually virtuous, and humble deference to the wisdom of the tradition is a crucial component of it. Of course we value each of the intellectual virtues, but intellectual humility is particularly important for us. We recognize that the faith we proclaim is not something we invent, but something we inherit. We recognize that we can only understand God through divine revelation, and that the proper locus of interpretation for special revelation is in the body to which it is given. And we realize that, in the act of ordination, we have given ourselves over to the church, and she has claimed us as her own in a way that redefines our intellectual freedom. Even if the change of opinion is couched in the language of special revelation, for an ordained minister to operate in contradiction to the teaching of the community of saints reeks of hubris. The church may revise her teaching, but this process of revision must always occur within the community.
When we find ourselves doubting the truth of Christian doctrine, we are wise to read the words of those who came before and developed that doctrine, with the goal of discovering the necessary evidence and reasons confidently to believe the teaching of the church. This pursuit will require intellectual virtue: the cultivating of sincerity, courage, humility, and charity as habits of mind, for we should not expect to find easy and palatable answers without deep self-reflection and even deeper inquiry into the epistemic framework of the church.
Doubt and Discovery
The true art of intellectual virtue in this kind of scenario is teaching the doubted doctrines of the church with integrity, while on the journey of discovery. One may be tempted to adopt a posture where one avoids topics where one’s sincerely held beliefs contradict the teaching and doctrine of the church. This was the unwritten rule at the Baptist university where I received my undergraduate degree. There was a twelve-point doctrinal statement, and to teach at the school, one was expected to affirm half of it and promise not to teach in contradiction to the other half.
This strategy can work, but it is unsustainable. Eventually someone is going to want to baptize an infant. Eventually someone will ask about hell or homosexuality or the hypostatic union. So avoidance is not a long-term solution. There are, however, additional benefits to teaching through doubt because teaching requires deep learning, and the very process of preparing to teach opens up neural pathways that are unused in more general learning. In the pursuit of the level of understanding necessary to invite others to know and care about a particular doctrine, one is well-situated to gather the particular pieces of evidence and argumentation that may very well restore one’s confidence in the truth of a particular doctrine.
Unfortunately, at times it is the case that an ordained pastor simply cannot resolve his or her positions with those of the church, and may even consider it a moral wrong to do so. In these cases, one must consider what ordination is and whether one can assent to its demands any longer. Ordained and order are from the same root. Ordination is an action of the church to designate individuals to perform specific functions on behalf of the church. It does not give one special powers, but bestows special responsibility. Those who are ordained necessarily function within the church’s order, and when they do not, they step out of their role as one who is ordained. Put differently, an ordained person cannot defy the church in his or her capacity as an ordained person any more than green can be blue or one plus one can equal three. The very idea is incoherent. Both sincerity and humility require one to request to be released from the ordination covenant.
In most cases, however, this will not be necessary. Our traditions form us, and as we enter more deeply into them through study, prayer, and contemplation, in most cases we will begin to see why our stated beliefs play out the way they do. We can be confident in the truth of Christian doctrine. So embrace intellectual virtue. Do not be afraid to lean into your doubts. With tenacity pursue the truth, and with humility learn from the saints. Men and women much smarter than you and I have wrestled with these questions, and in some cases with each other, for centuries, and the gift they have left us is the faith once for all handed down to the saints. This gift makes us wise to salvation. The doctrine we inherit shapes our understanding of divinity, humanity, and the grace that affords us wretched sinners an audience with the holy and righteous God of the universe.
Caleb Speicher is an ordained elder in the West Ohio Conference of The United Methodist Church. He serves as Senior Pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Grove City, Ohio.