Now some people will often argue that they don’t interpret scripture, they just read it and understand what it has to say, or as the simplistic saying is “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” Except it doesn’t really settle anything, because first of all the Bible is not like the Apple user’s agreement that we just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.” And second is it’s impossible to read scripture without interpreting it, and that’s not even to deal with the reality that an interpretation itself is already being given to us because it’s being translated, which involves and enormous amount of decisions that have to be made that can convey one idea over another. But, we do the same. I will read scripture differently than you. I read it differently as a married man with children, then I would if I was single without children. I read it differently as a middle-class white American, then if I was poor in the developing world. I also read it differently than I did 20 years ago, and know that in 20 years it will also be different. It’s just natural to do these things, and we have to be cognizant of that so that we can know our default understandings and where we might be blind to some things. And we can also see different things depending on what it is that we are thinking and doing., and let me give you just one example.
The 32nd chapter of Exodus, which is the story Aaron and the
Israelites making the golden calf is a really important story to me because
it’s part of the story of my call to the ministry. But, one week that was the
lectionary reading and I had to preach on it to three different groups. Did I
preach the same sermon? No, I preached three different sermons, three different
interpretations, because that’s what the situation demanded. There were three
different contexts to consider. Three different messages to exegete. Some of
you have also heard me say that there are times when I will hear the scripture
reading being read in worship just before I get up to preach and I’ll hear
something that I hadn’t heard before and will say “well, I wish I had heard
that before because I might have changed what I’m about to say.” That is the
richness and depth of scripture.
And so, all of us have a particular hermeneutic with which
we approach scripture. Now hermeneutic is one of those words that I have to use
in order to justify my seminary education, and the expense therein. It’s a
$60,000 word as I call it. But it’s one that we should know. A hermeneutic is
the model, or the lens, through which we read or approach scripture, and it’s
impossible not to have one. And part of the key to Biblical interpretation is
to know what it is and to name it, which can take some work. Part of my hermeneutic
is the idea that God is love. So as I read scripture, I read it through the lens
of love, or as Adam Hamilton describes it, love is the colander through which
scripture flows, and I use the love of God to interpret passages and help me to
understand what’s happening and it leads me to a deeper understanding of God.
And that’s all important. But the other hermeneutic I use is the ones that come
to us as Methodists that are typically referred to as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral,
which are scripture, tradition, experience and reason.
And with that out there we should start with the fact that
although it is called the Wesleyan quadrilateral, Wesley himself never used
that name or formulated it the way we talk about it. That came about from Rev. Dr.
Albert Outler, a Methodist historian and theologian, who was deeply involved in
20th century ecumenical work, including being the Methodist church’s
representative at Vatican II. He was the one who coined the phrase although I
want to be very clear that he was using Wesley’s own writings and understanding
to formulate it and talk about how Methodists are called to interpret
scripture. But the problem is that calling it a quadrilateral seems to say that
all sides are equal, that tradition and experience and reason hold the same
weight as does scripture, which is incorrect. Wesley said that scripture was
primary, and I should note that some of this is an anti-Roman Catholic
position, which is part of the tradition, as the Roman Catholic church holds
that the tradition of the church, or the church’s teachings and scripture, hold
equal weight with each other. And just as an aside, Wesley could be both
ecumenical in writings and also exclusionary depending on the time, what he was
writing about and to whom the writing was being addressed.
But, a better way to understand a Methodist approach, and
how I explain it, is as three-legged stool. Experience, tradition and reason
are the three legs of the stool that help support the seat, which is scripture,
which is primary. Wesley said that he was a man of one book, although like Paul
saying that he became all things to all people, it’s not really, or fully true,
because while scripture may be primary, it was not the only book that he read
or that influenced him. In fact, Wesley published a 50 volume Christian Library
that contained other works that he thought every Christian should read, that
would help not only in our faith but also in interpreting scripture. But,
scripture, Wesley said, and the Methodist church still maintains, shows us the
redeeming love of God and the possibility of salvation that God offers to all
people through faith, and scripture is all that is necessary and sufficient for
us to understand the path to salvation.
One of the reasons that Wesley rejected Calvinism, which we talked about in the
first message on grace, and I’d encourage you to go watch or listen to that
message if you missed it because of its importance, was that he believed that
predestination could not be reconciled with God’s love, as seen in many
passages, but in particular John 3:16.
While Wesley definitely accepted the idea that scripture was
inspired, he rejected the idea that all scripture was dictated and therefore
inerrant or infallible, although those are much more modern understandings for
us than Wesley would have known. Scripture was perfect when it came to the way
of salvation, but was not perfect in areas of science or history. He also
understood the importance on translation, and for his Explanatory Notes on the
Bible, would often make his own translation of the Greek or Hebrew that
differed from the Authorized Version of the Bible, better known as the King
James Bible. And so, Wesley, and we as Methodists, assert the primacy of
scripture and believe that God speaks to us through scripture, and that the
Holy Spirit assists us in that work, or as Wesley said that scripture needed
“to be received through the Holy Spirit.” For as Jesus said to the disciples,
the Holy Spirit would help communicate to them the ideas that they were not
ready for. And Wesley would actually chastise his preachers who used only the
Bible in their preaching and study, and that’s where the legs come in to
support scripture and our understand and use thereof.
And so, we’ll start with tradition, and some of the problems
that entails, because one of the issues with tradition is that we think we’re
standing in the ocean of the tradition when in fact we’re only standing in a
wading pool. That’s largely because we aren’t aware of the entire breadth or
depth of the tradition because we haven’t really been exposed to it. Or we
think we have because what we have been taught and we think it’s what’s always
been taught. I will often find that when someone says something and I say that
that’s a fairly new idea, like how we talk about the infallibility of
scripture, they will then say that it’s what they were always taught, but even
if something has been around as long as we have, or even 100 to 150 years,
that’s still really new in the history of the Christian church, which is 2000
years old, or 4000 years or so when we are talking about Judaism. People have
been studying and expounding on scripture for a long time. And then there is
the full spectrum of the tradition.
As I said earlier, while Wesley was thoroughly immersed in
the Church of England and it is formative for him, he did explore other
traditions including from the Orthodox church, which we don’t often think of or
talk about when it comes to tradition because they are outside of our purview,
for the most part. Wesley also strongly tried to look back to the early church,
or what could be known about it. And the truth is we know more about the early
church, practices and writings, than has been known since that time simply because
of the archaeological discoveries in the past 200 years or so, and we are still
lacking a lot. And so this is where Wesley’s desire to explore and read comes
into play. When we are looking at what the tradition has said, we have to look
far beyond just what we were taught, or simply what is our tradition, as
important as that might be, to get a broader idea of thought to help us
formulate a deeper understanding as well as understanding how an interpretation
might have changed over time, or where there simply has never been agreement in
the church, like around the idea of the atonement, or what the cross
accomplishes, as just one example. And so, looking at the whole tradition of
the church helps is to “transcend the story of a particular tradition” and
helps us move beyond just a particular personal understanding to a corporate
experience.
The second leg is that of experience, which is obviously
personal. The Discipline says that our personal experience is to the individual
as tradition is to the church. And as I said earlier, who we are definitely
impacts how we read scripture, and the experiences of our lives definitely
impact how we read scripture. Now part of this experience is that of religious
experience, which we already talked about having heart religion, a lived
experience of faith, as well as seeing how God in interacting and revealing
God’s self in our lives. And then there is the regular everyday experiences of
our lives that can impact how we read, interpret and understand scripture.
Wesley said that his experience of working with the poor significantly impacted
his understanding of scripture. It is in our experience that scripture can
become very practical as well, about where the rubber hits the road, and Wesley
was very open to that reality.
So, for example, a farmer wrote to him regarding the rule
not to work on the sabbath, which was also part of the general rules for
Methodism, but he said he needed to milk his cows on Sunday, so how could he do
that and not violate the sabbath. And secondly, if he milked the cows, did he
have to let the milk spoil as selling was also a violation. And this isn’t
trying to find loopholes, these are the genuine questions that arise when we
are trying to take scripture seriously. And so, Wesley’s response, very
practical, said that obviously he needed to milk the cows and letting the mile
spoil is not being a good steward of the resources God had provided, and so yes,
he could sell it, but he should find other ways to allow himself, and his
animals, to rest and refresh themselves. And to give that answer, Wesley not
only had to take that experience, he also had to use reason, which is the last
leg, and the one that Wesley talked about the most.
But, reason itself, could not lead us to truth. It had no
access by itself to divine truth. It had to be reasoning about something else.
As Immanuel Kant would later say, all experience is mediated experience,
because it is mediated through our preexisting intellectual concepts. Reason is
not a source of data, it is what helps us to understand and process our
experiences and other input, like tradition. And so, this is the part again,
where head and heart come together in a Methodist understanding. We don’t
expect people to check their brains at the door in order to worship God. Wesley
said that he saw no inconsistency between faith and reason, “I am for both” he
said. But he also recognized that reason had its limits, but when it hit those
limits, Wesley believed that led us to God, seeking greater revelation as well
as to see the mystery and the unknown of the world. Probably the best analogy
to summarize reason comes from Rev. Dr. Rebekah Miles who said that reason is
like a pix axe for a coal miner. Without the pick axe the coal mine just is, it
sits, it cannot generate coal to be used, but without the coal mine the pick
axe is also useless, it can’t make coal. The two have to be used together.
Probably the best example from Wesley’s own life of how
these things all go together surrounds the issue of slavery. If you read
scripture, there is an obvious place for slavery, and there were certainly
people who argued for slavery using scripture. Tradition had also upheld
slavery. But, Wesley’s experience of slavery in the American colonies in
particular, as well as what he saw in Europe, and his reasoning of that
experience did not match his understanding of God, or of God’s love or of how
we are called to relate to one another as beloved children of God, and so he
was the first theologian of any significance to come out in opposition to slavery,
and it was an early position of the Methodist movement. And Wesley’s arguments
were not economic, as many others had made, but theological and scriptural. He could
say that while scripture and tradition might have justified it in the past, the
way slavery was being practiced could not be reconciled with a vision of a
loving God and the love that God called for us to show to the world, and so the
tradition and understanding hade to be changed. We could say the same thing
about female clergy, although a study of tradition would add support to it as
well. And so while some people said that Wesley’s views were heretical, he
replies “If I am a heretic, it is because of the Bible.”
Now one of the problems with these pieces, and one of which Wesley was very aware is that it can make interpretation totally up the individual. But, the way that Wesley argued to correct this, and one we already talked about, was that we also do our interpretation within community. As I said when we talked about personal and communal religion, or personal and social holiness, is that when we try and do it by ourselves its easy to come up with whatever we want, we can be spiritual but not religious and therefore really create our own religion or own beliefs. But Wesley said there is no such thing as a solitary Christian, Christian life is life in community, and so it is with interpretation of scripture. We don’t do this work alone, we do it together, and so we can have differences of opinion, different areas of emphasis, but then you have to be able to defend it, and so perhaps we should add one more leg to our stool that being community. That it is through community that we explore tradition, and find tradition, it is through community that we talk about our experiences, religious and otherwise, and it is through community that we mine scripture using our reason, and it is in community that the movement of the Spirit allows God to continue to speak to us even now. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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