The Center Cannot Hold
The United Methodist Church is dividing. Amid a flurry of opinions and information of wildly varying quality, a group loosely identified as ‘traditionalist’ is making its way to the exit — most often into the Global Methodist Church — while those planning on remaining do their best to try to plug up the denominational leak.
Of course the headline issue is that of human sexuality: should the church maintain the classical understanding of Christianity (and before it, its Judaic mother) on same-gender sexual relationships, or is this traditional view now properly understood as retrograde, oppressive, and offensive?
Meanwhile, many traditionalists insist that matters of human sexuality are not their primary concern. Instead, they often suggest that orthodox Christian doctrine is what is at stake. The post-separation UMC, some claim, will not only be progressive in its sexual ethic, it will quickly abandon classical Christian teachings like the virgin birth, the atoning death of Christ, the Trinity, or the bodily resurrection of Christ. To illustrate this prediction, a parade of anecdotes is trotted out: United Methodist bishops, seminary presidents and professors, boards of ordained ministry, and pastors are quoted as saying some rather shocking things, denying if not outright decrying these doctrines and more.
On the other side there are a number of self-identified centrist pastors and leaders who advocate staying in The United Methodist Church and claim to be entirely orthodox. These women and men are skeptical of the danger of progressive theology, arguing that the post-separation UMC will not change one iota on its official doctrine. While many of them personally hope to be fully inclusive in their own churches and pastoral practices (and they all promote a big-tent, agree-to-disagree approach to human sexuality), otherwise they claim to be orthodox in their doctrine all the way down the line. And they claim to represent the mainstream of The United Methodist Church.
The most famous of these putatively orthodox centrist leaders is also perhaps the most famous — or at least most published — United Methodist pastor in the whole connection. I’m talking of course about Adam Hamilton, pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas.
In recent webinars, Hamilton argues carefully and forcefully for churches to remain in the UMC. A very gifted leader and an even better communicator, he does his best to cast a compelling vision for the denomination moving forward and offers a pessimistic account of the prospects of the Global Methodist Church. Hamilton claims to be a theological conservative; he doesn’t want to change the doctrines contained in our Articles of Religion and our Confession of Faith. But some years ago he changed his mind on homosexuality, and his vision of the future UMC is pluralist when it comes to human sexuality.
Christian teaching about same-sex intimacy is not a creedal doctrine, but it has remained stable for two thousand years. This led me to wonder: what would count as a sufficient rationale to change a long-held Christian doctrine for these centrist United Methodist leaders? Because of his stature, accessibility, and influence, Hamilton makes for an interesting test case of the broader phenomenon of theologically orthodox centrists — those who want to hold the UMC together and be more inclusive of same-sex relationships in the church, but still plausibly claim to hold to classical Christian orthodoxy.
Because of space I am not going to touch any of Hamilton’s arguments against leaving the denomination. My focus will be on two things only: What rationale does Hamilton offer for changing our doctrine of human sexuality? And what implications might that have for the future doctrinal life of the post-separation United Methodist Church?
In the main, Hamilton offers two broad reasons why he thinks the church should be more accepting of persons who engage in same-sex intimacy.
First, Hamilton thinks Scripture got it wrong on homosexuality. In his 2014 book, Making Sense of the Bible, and in a blog post from the same year, he describes three different “buckets” into which we might place different scripture passages. The first bucket is for the biblical passages that “reflect the timeless will of God for human beings,” the second bucket contains passages that “reflect God’s will in a particular time but not for all time,” and, finally, into the third bucket go all the passages that “reflect the culture and historical circumstances in which they were written but never reflected God’s timeless will” (Making Sense of the Bible, 273-274). He suggests that the handful of passages addressing same-sex intimacy are examples of passages he would place in the third bucket. In other words, according to Hamilton, what the Bible says about homosexuality is not what God says about homosexuality.
Space constraints prevent either a full response to this or an adequate counterproposal. Allow me to suggest two problems with this framework instead.
First, who gets to decide which bucket a given passage of Scripture goes into, and what criteria should they use to make that decision? We Methodists have no pope or magisterium to help us here, and what we do have — the clear conclusion of fifty years worth of General Conferences — is already rejected by Hamilton. Further, he has no recourse to church tradition, since taking the historical consensus of interpretation would, once again, block him from the conclusion he reaches. In the end, it seems it is merely up to the private judgment of the individual which passage ends up in which bucket. The only major datum Hamilton appeals to in making his judgment, both in his book and in his recent webinars, is hearing the stories of people who are homosexual. Of course many people might hear the same stories and lovingly pastor the same individuals and their families while reaching different conclusions.
If these buckets represent a faithful way to deal with Scripture, what is to prevent someone from applying the logic of this scheme to doctrinal questions beyond human sexuality? For instance, what is to prevent someone from consigning 1 Corinthians 15, the richest New Testament articulation of Jesus–and our–bodily resurrection, to bucket three? Hamilton’s three-bucket scheme opens the floodgates to all kinds of potential doctrinal change, and it seems to be powerless to stop such changes.
Second, this approach reflects a hermeneutic of suspicion rather than trust. Approaching these difficult passages, Hamilton throws them in the bin (er, bucket) rather than engage them. He rightly acknowledges the humanity of Scripture, but he effectively ends up losing — or at least heavily qualifying — the ability of the whole of Scripture to function as a divine means of grace. I, too, am sometimes puzzled by the statements of Scripture, including some of the passages he cites as problematic. But I can’t shake the conviction that something like the classical approach is more faithful: rather than dismissing these passages, the church would be better served by remaining open to the possibility of some divine wisdom here. There is even some spiritual benefit in taking a deep breath and reminding ourselves that we don’t have to understand everything in the Bible. The Bible is not a science or history textbook, but a means of grace, a place to encounter the living God. A little mystery, approached with the right mindset, should be more helpful than harmful. A suspicious approach to the Bible, on the other hand, can lead us just about anywhere.
Hamilton’s second reason the church should change its position on human sexuality is that it will help us reach more people with the gospel of Jesus Christ. In a webinar from earlier this year, Hamilton suggested that the post-separation UMC, with its more inclusive and affirming approach to human sexuality, will be better positioned to reach twenty-first century people than either the current UMC or the Global Methodist Church. Hamilton insists that the traditional Christian understanding of same-sex intimacy will be seen as increasingly bigoted in contemporary Western culture. A more sexually open-minded church will appeal more to non-religious and nominally religious people in cultures like ours.
This approach avoids the question of what is true in the name of what is pragmatic, but let’s set that aside. The immediate question that emerges is similar to what we already said with regard to Scripture: Where do we draw the line? Our culture has strong views on questions of sexual identity. If we must change to reach this culture, what might be next? The doctrine of the Trinity is confusing, and the arithmetic just doesn’t add up. Why not remove that stumbling block, too? How about Jesus’ bloody death on the cross for our sins? Or what about the virgin birth or the hypostatic union? If we are editing doctrinal commitments for the sake of attracting our neighbors to Christ, it seems once again entirely arbitrary to think that this kind of move is permissible in the case of human sexuality and nowhere else. Once again we are opening up the floodgates to all manner of innovations of the classical teachings of the church.
In addition, there is a powerful confound to this pragmatic argument: early Christianity. The Christian church’s first three centuries saw incredible growth. People flooded into the churches at an exponential rate. But the churches they flooded into were profoundly different from the surrounding culture, including on matters of sexual ethics. The Roman world in late antiquity was probably not quite as sex-obsessed as our culture, but in many communities it was at least as sexually libertine. If early Christians could evangelize a whole empire with a very different ethic, why can’t we? To do this will require a huge paradigm shift in the ways we engage in Christian formation, but with the power of the Holy Spirit all things are possible. My hope is that the current split will free us up — on both sides of the divide! — to attack this task with gusto. We need not change our ethic to be more like the culture’s. In the end, I can’t help but think doing so would be counterproductive to our true task.
Hamilton’s arguments don’t just lead to a change in our church’s doctrines about same-sex intimacy. Rather, they seem to blaze a trail down which any number of different effective changes in our doctrine might follow. Hamilton is right to insist that The United Methodist Church’s Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith won’t change on paper, at least not in this generation. But he is wrong to think that this means the doctrines described there are by any means safe. This is because, for starters, they are sandwiched in The Book of Discipline between a historical statement and the more open and pluralist vision of “Our Theological Task.” Add to that a lack of accountability and, post-separation, an increasingly theologically progressive clergy base, and I don’t see how centrists with otherwise theologically orthodox views will be able to hold the line when it comes to which doctrines are actually taught from a typical United Methodist pulpit.
Whichever side we end up on, we all will be in a denomination with people who think and practice differently from us. But will that diversity of thought and practice cohere in some discernible shared tradition, or will it break apart, like Yeats’ falcon that lost touch with its falconer?
I have to confess, I like Hamilton’s conclusion. I know many sincere Christians, people I love, who happen to be gay or lesbian. I would love to be able to theologize my way to a more affirming position here. Perhaps one day we can. The problem is that the arguments on hand, at least in Hamilton’s case, claim to make one minor doctrinal tweak while introducing rot into our doctrinal foundations. I am not suggesting Hamilton is insincere in his theological conservatism. I have no reason to doubt either his sincerity or his personal orthodoxy. I don’t know him personally, but he seems to be a thoughtful and caring pastor. But if we all reasoned about all our doctrine the same way that Adam Hamilton reasons about human sexuality, the result would be absolute chaos.
Centrists tend to be United Methodists with a more progressive sexual ethic who can talk about biblical authority and say the creed with a straight face. I haven’t seen many of them publicly try to resolve the tensions here. Hamilton, greatly to his credit, is an exception; he has the courage not to dodge the hard questions. But are his answers satisfactory? If this approach to Scripture and cultural relevance is typical among United Methodist centrists, will they, over time, be able to hold fast to the core of the faith?
Being a church where we don’t all think alike sounds like a very nice thing, but it is clear that we need to hold some beliefs in common, and we need some non-arbitrary criteria for discerning what they are.
In these trying times, may we all seek the mind of Christ. And may we have the humility to look for it not in our own private judgment, but in the faith once delivered to the saints.
Cabe Matthews is an ordained elder in the Texas Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, where he serves as an associate pastor at Montgomery United Methodist Church in Montgomery, Texas. You can find him on the web at www.cabematthews.com.