The Global Methodist Church and the Quadrilateral
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A colleague in the Global Methodist Church recently asked me about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Should we continue to use it in the GMC? My answer was a resolute no. A great deal is packed into that no, however, and in what follows I will explain my response. To do so I will begin with a bit of history. For true “Methodnerds” much of this historical account will be review. For others it will provide necessary context for understanding the opposition many have expressed toward the Quadrilateral.
The Swinging 70s
The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is a construct developed by Methodist theologian Albert Outler, though a form of it was originally proposed in 1960 by Colin Williams. The idea is that John Wesley used Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in theological deliberation. If you’re interested in the history of the development of the Quadrilateral, I highly recommend Ted Campbell’s excellent 1991 article “The ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’: The Story of a Modern Methodist Myth.” Campbell helpfully describes the Quadrilateral as “a fourfold locus of religious authority” that “has gained remarkable acceptance as a tool for theological analysis and as a starting point for the recovery of the Wesleyan theological tradition in a modern ecumenical context” (87).
In 1972 the Quadrilateral was added to the United Methodist Book of Discipline. In this iteration of the Discipline, doctrine takes it on the chin. As I have pointed out before, there is a section called “The Fading Force of Doctrinal Discipline.” The Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith are referred to as “Landmark Documents.” Under the section titled “Our Theological Task,” we find the stupefying claim that “‘our present existing and established standards of doctrine’ cited in the first two Restrictive Rules of the Constitution of The United Methodist Church are not to be construed literally and juridically.” In what sense they are standards if they are to be construed neither literally nor juridically is unclear. One gets the distinct sense of linguistic evasion, an attempt to maintain the language of “doctrinal standards” while removing from these standards any authority in the life of the church.
Rather than allowing the doctrinal standards to function as actual standards, the most “fruitful and fulfilling” way of pursuing “doctrinal reflection and construction” is to be found in “our free inquiry within the boundaries defined by four main sources and guidelines for Christian theology: Scripture, tradition, experience, reason. These four are interdependent; none can be defined unambiguously” (¶ 70, p. 75). We have, then, four resources, none of which is clearly defined, though all are somehow interdependent. We are to use these in our free inquiry of doctrinal reflection and construction. The church is one big theology seminar. For United Methodists, there is the never-ending task of “theologizing,” which involves both reflection and construction. The church itself, however, never constructs any normative doctrine for the body. It has no real teaching office to express constitutive doctrinal claims. There is the ongoing quest for truth, but truth itself is evasive. We forever push the rock up the hill only to have it roll down on top of us. Those doctrinal claims that have been constitutive of the church’s teaching in the past are merely “landmarks.” We observe them through the window as we drive on toward whatever is next.
Clearly the statement in the 1972 Discipline was intended to create space between the doctrines of the church and the people of the church. In the spirit of the age, the height of the ecumenical movement, it was an attempt to constitute a Christian denomination not on the basis of common beliefs, but on a theological method. While some United Methodists bucked at the idea of a church that lacked clear doctrinal teaching, for others this was a positive development, one they embraced as a defining characteristic of the denomination. It is what set the UMC apart from fundamentalists and other forms of rigid and dogmatic Protestantism. The old doctrines of yesteryear had their time, but the modern world called for new theological ideas, and the UMC would pursue them with elan.
By 1988, however, the denominational mood had shifted somewhat, and conservatives (or traditionalists, or evangelicals, or whatever you want to call them) had gained ground in the General Conference. The section titled “Our Theological Task” was changed, specifying, “Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason.” It goes on to state, “Scripture is primary, revealing the Word of God ‘so far as it is necessary for our salvation” (¶ 69, p. 80). I take this to be a positive development for a few reasons. First, it recovers the historic emphasis on the primacy of Scripture. Second, it provides functions for each of the four resources: Scripture reveals, tradition illuminates, experiences vivifies, and reason confirms. Third, the link between Scripture and divine revelation is crucial. As I will argue below, divine revelation is an indispensable category as we think about our faith claims. This iteration of the Quadrilateral is still in place today. While it is a marked improvement over the 1972 version, there are still reasons to resist denominational endorsement.
Additional Problems
A significant problem with the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is that Wesley never articulated it. It is not at all clear that it represents his approach to theological questions. In fact, Wesley seems to have relied upon different resources at different times, though his reliance on Scripture far outpaced his appeal to all other authorities. At times he would rely on one of these, or some combination of them, to the exclusion of others. Additionally, he drew upon resources such as natural law and testimony. In Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, David Hempton identifies Wesley’s “eclecticism” as one of his preeminent characteristics as a theological thinker. He writes,
The attempt to boil Wesley’s theology down to a simple formula, such as the much-peddled quadrilateral of scripture, reason, tradition, and experience, spectacularly misses the point. A forensic appeal to geometrical precision, of all the approaches to Wesley's theology, is the one least likely to capture its essence. If Wesley’s theology must be reduced to a model, one that offers better explanatory power than the quadrilateral is to see it more as a moving vortex, fueled by scripture and divine love, shaped by experience, reason, and tradition, and moving dynamically toward holiness or Christian perfection. Any model that lacks dynamic movement toward holiness and its growth within individuals and its dissemination throughout the world is clearly inadequate (57).
To say that Wesley made use of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience to resolve theological problems is a vast oversimplification and thus historically inaccurate.
Whether or not Wesley would have signed on to the Quadrilateral, however, there are more substantive issues at stake. One is that the appeal to Scripture, without further clarification, will in most cases be unhelpful. We may say that our faith is revealed in Scripture, but what is the content of that revelation? Put more simply, what does God reveal to us through Scripture? While the Reformers affirmed the perspicuity of Scripture (the idea that its meaning is clear on its face), they quickly began to betray this principle by separating from one another over the content of biblical teaching. Likewise, as the disputes in the UMC over sex and gender have shown, it is possible to support entirely opposing positions by the appeal to Scripture. How we approach the Bible, our conceptions of inspiration and revelation, scriptural authority, and the Bible’s relationship to different elements of Christian tradition invariably come to bear on the conclusions we reach. Without shared hermeneutical principles, we cannot hope to reach consensus on the authoritative teaching of Scripture for the church. One of those hermeneutical principles would need to describe the relationship between Scripture and later Christian tradition, which leads to another problem with the Quadrilateral.
As Billy Abraham pointed out years ago in Waking from Doctrinal Amnesia, “tradition,” writ large, is too broad of a category to be helpful. What aspects of the tradition do we mean? For 2000 years Christians have written about the faith, conferred with one another, refined and revised their doctrines and practices, debated, pondered, and built on the ideas of other Christians. At times various elements of the record of Christian thought and practice we call “tradition” stand in tension with one another. At times they directly contradict one another. An appeal to “tradition,” without further clarification, is unhelpful because of its breadth. In his book John Wesley’s Conception and Use of Scripture, Scott Jones argues that Wesley relied upon Scripture, reason, Christian antiquity, experience, and the Church of England. For Wesley, Christian antiquity was basically the first three centuries. He was suspicious of the post-Constantinian church, though he did appeal to post-Constantinian writings as need arose. Further, he was profoundly shaped by the Church of England and was raised on the Book of Common Prayer. If we wish to appeal to “tradition” in the spirit of Wesley, it would be helpful to consider what aspects of Christian tradition were most formative and authoritative for him.
As with tradition, the appeal to reason is too vague to be helpful. What do we mean by reason? What are the criteria for establishing sound reasoning? If something seems reasonable to me, does this necessarily mean I have employed reason in my theological reflection? For Wesley, reason was the mechanism by which one took the insights from Scripture and the doctrines of the church and applied them to daily life. Today, however, we tend to mean by reason that we use our rational capacities to think through theological questions. Reason, then, becomes an authority like Scripture and tradition, though Wesley did not think of reason in this way. He felt our rational capacities to reach valid conclusions about God were less trustworthy than divine revelation given in Scripture.
Likewise, the term "experience" is hopelessly ambiguous. Today we refer to experience with regard to our feelings, desires, identity, etc. We talk about “lived experience.” Virtually anything that takes place in our lives can fall into the category of experience. In many cases experience, vague as this category is, becomes a criterion for judging the validity of the scriptural witness. Wesley, however, would not pit experience against Scripture. Rather, he felt the value of experience was in confirming what Scripture conveys about our salvation. When Wesley talked about experience as having some kind of role in securing theological claims, he meant the experience of assurance--the inner witness of the Holy Spirit that we are saved. He did not set up experience as an authority alongside Scripture and tradition. Experience can play an important role in the Christian life, but we also have to test our experience and exercise extreme care when deploying it to assess theological claims.
From Chaos to Consensus
Each of these four resources then, needs clarification if it is to contribute meaningfully to theological discourse. My point is not to reject Scripture, tradition, reason, or experience, but to suggest that without greater definition the appeal to these will leave us knee-deep in a hopeless swamp of confusion. I will suggest another way of approaching theological questions, not as pithy as the Quadrilateral, but one I think will be more fruitful and which honors the insights of our forebears in the faith. I will not suggest what could properly be called a theological method. My goal is more modest. I simply wish to offer three basic principles we might draw upon in our theological reflection.
First, the primary theological category with which we should begin is divine revelation. God has revealed himself to us in general and special ways. Regarding general revelation, we may perceive God in creation, but even this is a gift. In other words, our ability to apprehend truths about God through creation depends upon God’s self-disclosure through creation. God has also revealed truth to us through special revelation. We know of God’s saving purposes because of his work in the world through Israel, Christ, and the church. We comprehend specific truths related to God’s saving work because God has told us through prophets, Christ, and the apostles. Scripture mediates this revelation to us. When we talk about God, then, we should begin with what God has revealed about himself and work from there.
Second, God did not cease to guide the church after the closing of the canon. In John 16:12-14, Jesus tells the disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” Jesus told his followers that the Holy Spirit would continue to guide them after he returned to the Father. It would be negligent, moreover, even cruel, for God to provide the church with divine revelation and leave her entirely to her own devices to comprehend its meaning. Hence God has inspired great teachers, including many bishops, to guide the church in her understanding of the truths that God has revealed. The church has produced councils, creeds, and canons to guide the faithful into truth and protect us from error.
The church is not infallible, of course, and her judgments are subject to critique and correction. Nevertheless,--and this is the third principle–we can recognize moments of clarity and the apprehension of truth in the church’s deliberations over time. In many cases, the body has come to general agreement about the nature of the triune God, the incarnation in Jesus Christ, the necessity of his atoning work on the cross, his bodily resurrection from the dead, Christ’s establishment of the church, the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, the return of Christ in glory and judgment, and other important theological topics. Though we apprehend none of these truths fully, we do see in part, as through a glass darkly. Thus we have what Billy Abraham called the canonical tradition, which is very close to what Thomas Oden called the consensual tradition. Having reflected prayerfully upon God’s self-revelation, the church has reached consensus on a number of matters over time. This is where we begin–not with the self, nor social location, nor our own halting attempts at reasoning our way to the divine, but with revelation mediated through Scripture and interpreted in the ongoing witness of the church.
A concrete example of this kind of theological reflection is available in The Faith Once Delivered: A Wesleyan Witness. This document, produced by scholars in the Wesleyan tradition, gives voice to the historic faith while highlighting particular Wesleyan emphases. I commend it to your reading.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
We acknowledge, then, divine revelation and subsequent divine guidance. From that point, we make use of those resources as they are appropriate and helpful. One thing that the long history of Christian theological reflection has taught us is that different theological questions require different theological approaches. Our reflection is always rooted in divine revelation, but how do we proceed beyond that? I believe it was a mistake for the UMC to canonize a theological method, in part because theological answers are not the kinds of things we work out on an assembly line. Sometimes a given theological approach will be helpful. Sometimes it will not. For example, we may wish to give considerable weight to testimony as a resource in our theological reasoning. Should we not do so because it does not fit neatly within the categories of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience? What about the gift of prophecy in the church as a resource for theological reflection? Prophecy does not fit neatly under any of the four rubrics of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Do we then ignore it? By officially endorsing (or canonizing, to use Abraham’s terminology) a single theological approach, we stunt our capacities for theological investigation and reflection. We may need more than what the Quadrilateral has to offer.
Conversely, there may be times when we need less than what the Quadrilateral has to offer. We can imagine scenarios in which one or more of these resources of the Quadrilateral would be simply unhelpful. For example, there could be cases in which our experience does not contribute very much. Perhaps we wish to reflect upon the account of St. Seraphim’s transfiguration. Does the fact that I have no experience of transfiguration come to bear in a significant way upon my reflection? May I validly reflect upon events with which I have no direct experience? To offer another example, in Christian theology we often refer to mysteries of the faith–truths that transcend our capacities of reason. In such cases we can only appeal to our reason in a limited sense. To overextend our reason in such cases would be to destroy the mystery, and hence to make ourselves ignorant of that which God has revealed.
The appeal to Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, then, is not in itself bad. We should understand what we mean by these terms and deploy each of these resources as appropriate. We may wish to draw upon other resources as well. We are better off if we do not endorse a single theological approach because one approach will not be helpful for all theological topics. It is, moreover, hard to look back on the history of Methodism over the last half-century and judge that the Quadrilateral has served us well. For the GMC it is an open question whether and to what extent we will learn from past mistakes as we shape our life together in the days ahead.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.