The Extirpation of Non-biblical Thinking in the People Called Methodists
“Extirpation.” Isn’t that a great word? For most of my life, it was an unknown bit of vocabulary. I knew the Spanish extirpar, but had no idea there was an English equivalent, until a graduate-level church history class led to writing 7,000 words on “the extirpation of idolatry in colonial Peru.” (Yes, that was a very long semester!) To extirpate means to weed out, destroy, eradicate, stamp out, or eliminate something. In the medical field, extirpation is the complete and radical excision of something from the body, like a cancerous tumor or a non-functioning gallbladder. In sixteenth-century colonial Peru, la extirpación was a coordinated effort by the Spanish crown and church to remove and destroy the sacred stones and high places of the Incas and other pre-Columbian peoples in the Andean region.
But here’s the thing—while indigenous worship spaces were ruthlessly destroyed, marred, or repurposed in the Andean highlands, by and large the mindset and worldview of the people who cherished those sites were not transformed. Rather, a layer of Roman Catholic Christianity was superimposed on their existing thought forms and beliefs, leading to the development and enduring presence of what anthropologists call “folk Christianity” in the region. Pagan symbols were eliminated (or retreated to the shadowy margins far from the centers of official civic and religious power), but the traditions and belief systems persisted; old ways of thinking were simply clothed with new trappings and given a new vocabulary. La extirpación ended up being less like a radical excision and more like a “no demo reno” (to borrow the title of an HGTV home makeover show). A new set of religious trappings provided a cosmetic façade to cover the fact that nothing much had really changed in the way Andean peoples understood the world.
In this season when the pan-Methodist world is experiencing the stirrings of a new movement of God, and when new forms of Methodism are gestating and moving toward birth, it seems to me that we must do all we can to assure that our “new thing” is not a ¨no demo reno” that merely plasters over mold spots in the walls or lays a new carpet on top of rotted subflooring. The diseased and crumbling materials must be excised. One of the most urgent conditions that merits radical extirpation is the presence of non-biblical thinking among the people called Methodists.
Let me illustrate. In a recent undergraduate class, students were reading about the historical-cultural background of the New Testament. For that week’s discussion forum, they had to choose one of several aspects of that background and discuss how the irruption of Christianity into the first-century Greco-Roman context would have intersected with that particular piece of the prevailing worldview. As I began to engage with their initial posts in that forum, I was stunned. One hundred percent of the class had chosen Gnosticism as the focus element, and 100% of them had the same thing to say, in eerily similar words: “Christianity and Gnosticism would have been very compatible.” Wait—what!!?? Reading on, the subtext and logic of their claim became clear: “Gnosticism believed that the body (the material world) was evil and the spirit (the spiritual world) was good. Christianity also teaches that.” Wow—these students seemed to be functional gnostics in terms of their understanding of a Christian perspective on the material world. As I pressed them in my follow-up posts to draw out the logical and theological implications of this, it quickly became clear that their commitment to the underlying premise (“body bad, spirit good”) impeded their capacity to consider its ramifications. For example, not one of them demonstrated the critical thinking or the theological and biblical awareness that would have allowed them to evaluate their claim in light of the scriptural portrait of the Incarnation, one of the central affirmations of Christian orthodoxy. They had no idea of the dangerous terrain they were treading, a frighteningly slippery slope into the very heresies that the early church worked so hard to combat.
Every single one of those students is a committed follower of Jesus, some of them from the pan-Wesleyan tradition. Each of them has some kind of “devotional” relationship with Scripture. And yet each of them has also absorbed into his or her fundamental and unquestioned understanding of Christianity patterns of non-biblical thinking—paradigms of reality that do not reflect Scripture’s own teaching and perspectives. They are not alone, nor is their functional Gnosticism the only way such non-biblical thinking has invaded the church. Ideologies from left to right have so shaped Christians’ minds that we have been rendered incapable of evaluating critically either set of incomplete and distorted worldviews. We have allowed these ideological perspectives to become fixed lenses through which we read Scripture and the litmus test of our hermeneutics, rather than allowing the biblical perspectives to shape our understanding and assessment of the ideology.
Wesleyans are not immune to non-biblical thinking! And so as we stand on the cusp of God’s “new thing” in our tribe, I feel a deep sense of urgency that we must commit ourselves as a movement to three things: (1) a posture of prayerful humility that will allow the Spirit to illumine where and how non-biblical perspectives have invaded our individual and collective lives; (2) radical submission to the Spirit’s extirpating knife or laser as it excises those cancerous corruptions, however painful the process may be; and (3) robust, intentional training of all members to think biblically about the challenges of our moment in history—not by applying narrow litmus tests from our pet passages, but with renewed minds informed by the whole counsel of Scripture. The “new Wesleyanism” is going to need teachers and preachers committed to the vigorous and rigorous proclamation of the Word, in all its grand and glorious panoply—and a membership that is committed to drinking deeply and regularly from the well of Scripture, not satisfied with being passive receivers of “light” preaching and teaching.
Our Wesleyan heritage has a peculiar potential to help us in this, first through its emphasis on “Spirit and truth.” It is the Spirit of truth who guides us into all truth (John 16:13)—even into the painful truth about blind spots and distortions in our thinking. The more we willingly submit to the sanctifying work of the Spirit, the more clearly we will understand biblical perspectives; the more intentionally we submit to the discipline of Scripture study, the more opportunity the Spirit will have to do transformative work in our lives.
A second and intimately related element of our tradition is banded discipleship. Wesley understood so clearly that our growth in Christlikeness and in the capacity to think biblically (“with the mind of Christ”) does not happen in a vacuum or in isolation from other believers (perhaps “rugged individualism” is another of those distortions awaiting the Spirit’s illumination and extirpation?). He insisted that the early Methodists band together weekly in groups of three to five people for intentional examination of how Spirit and Scripture were speaking into their lives, for honest expression of obedient response to the voice of Spirit and truth, and for mutual support in their growth toward maturity in Christ. Wesley’s insights remain valid, and if our “new Methodism” is to have the power and world-changing influence of those early Methodists, we must recapture the ethos of banded discipleship. As Mark Benjamin and J.D. Walt write,
“The awakening we long for will not come from gathering larger crowds at bigger conferences. It will not come as more and more people salute the big thing we hope God will do among us. Awakening will come as more and more people do the small thing. As thousands and then hundreds of thousands begin banding together and doing the big work of awakening at the smallest level of disciple-making relationships, the scales will one day tip and not only will a great awakening be upon us, but the Holy Spirit will have organized us into the kind of fellowship wherein awakening can grow, sustain, and multiply itself” (Discipleship Bands: A Practical Field Guide, Seedbed 2019, p. 45).
La extirpación of idolatry in colonial Peru was essentially a misnamed campaign, more like a “no demo reno” that hid the old behind a façade of newness, without truly changing the existing structures. Non-biblical worldviews were not excised and replaced with biblical paradigms, and their continued presence resulted in a syncretism that persists to the present in many parts of the Andean region. A critical moment of Great Commission significance was lost in the 16th century—let it not happen again in the 21st! Let the new Methodism movement recognize that our submission to the extirpation of non-biblical thinking is not for our sake alone—but for the world that so desperately needs the witness of a people who have the mind of Christ.
Dr. Rachel Coleman lives in Elida, Ohio. She is an adjunct instructor and course writer (Biblical Studies) for Indiana Wesleyan University, Bethel University, and Asbury Theological Seminary, and serves as the regional theological education consultant (Latin America) for One Mission Society. Rachel blogs at writepraylove660813036.wordpress.com.