We Believe Before We Read

Last updated on: June 9, 2016 at 8:45 am by Robert Hunt

We Believe Before We Read 2016-06-09T08:45:36-06:00 Robert Hunt

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“Ever since his own day Tyndall’s translation has been blamed for being tendentious. If we are thinking of his violent marginal glosses, this is fair enough; if of his peculiar renderings (congregation for ecclesia, senior or elder for presbyters, favor for charis and the like), a little explanation seems to be needed. The business of a translator is to write down what he thinks the original meant. And Tyndall sincerely believed that the mighty theocracy with its cardinals, abbeys, pardons, inquisition, and treasury of grace which the word Church would undoubtedly have suggested to his readers was in its very essence not only distinct from, but antagonistic to, the thing that S. Paul had in mind whenever he used the word ecclesia. You may of course disagree with his premises; but his conclusion (that Church is a false rendering of ecclesia) follows from it of necessity. Thomas More, on the other hand, believed with equal sincerity that the ‘Church’ of his own day was in essence the very same mystical body which St. Paul Addressed; from his promise it followed of course that Church was the only correct translation. Both renderings are equally tendentious in the sense that each presupposes a belief. In that sense all translations of scripture are tendentious; translation, by is very nature, is a continuous implicit commentary. (italics added) It can become less tendentious only by becoming less of a translation.” (C.S. Lewis)

“On further point: according to the model, Christian belief in the typical case is not the conclusion of an argument or accepted on the evidential basis of other beliefs, or accepted just because it constitute a good explanation of phenomena of one kind or another. Specific Christian belief may indeed constitute excellent explanations of one or another phenomenon (sin, for example), but they aren’t accepted because they provide such an explanation. Nor are they accepted as the result of historical research. Nor are they accepted as the conclusion of an argument from religious experience. According to the model, experience of a certain sort is intimately associated with the formation of warranted Christian belief, but the belief doesn’t get its warrant by way of an argument from that experience. It isn’t that the believer notes that she or someone else has a certain sort of experience, and somehow concludes the Christian belief must be true. It is rather than (as in the case of perception) the experience is the occasion for the formation of the beliefs in question.

“In the typical case, therefore, Christian belief is immediate, it is formed the basic way. it doesn’t proceed by way of an argument.” (Alvin Plantinga)

In the brutal debates within the United Methodist Church over LGBTQ marriage and ordination much of the fight has focused on the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Now in truth it isn’t all that Wesleyan, and as my colleague Billy Abraham has demonstrated, the United Methodist adoption of it borders on being completely incoherent as a standard for measuring doctrine. That incoherence alone virtually insures that all sides can appeal to it as justification for their beliefs.

Still, as the debate rages the Bible continues to take center stage. A good example is Adam Hamilton’s essay on the Bible and homosexuality found at http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/6876/the-bible-homosexuality-and-the-umc-part-one, and the rejoinder by Ben Witherington found at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2016/04/28/a-response-to-adam-hamiltons-recent-post-on-the-bible-and-homosexuality/. Both essays rightly place the Bible as the central authorizing authority of United Methodism. Experience, Reason, and Tradition may guide interpretation, but properly speaking they are not the sources of doctrine.

But then neither is the Bible. Before the Christian Church even had a Bible it believed. If Plantinga is correct, and I believe he is, the Church knew about God before it read about God. In its communal experience of the presence of the living Christ it didn’t learn, but simply had brought to consciousness what minds of believers were created to know all along. It’s recognition that Jesus is Lord wasn’t mediated by analysis. It was basic.

We are believers before we are readers, much less reasoners and researchers.

Recognizing that we believe before we interpret gives us a more realistic appraisal of what is happening in the United Methodist church, and indeed across Christianity. If you believe that LGBTQ people should be able to marry you probably didn’t learn it from a particular interpretation of the Bible. You know it at the same level that you know what it means for you to be a human being.

On the other hand if you believe that God approves of marriage only be between a male and a female you didn’t learn it from an interpretation of the Bible. You know it at the same level that you know what it means for you to be a human being.

And regardless of which belief you hold you go to scripture not so much to learn as to to authorize and justify the truth of your already existing belief.

Of course in theory if you are also convicted that the Bible is God’s word you might go to the Bible and be persuaded, finding no justification for your already existing belief, that your belief is wrong. This happens so rarely that it seems unlikely. Certainly with regard to LGBTQ marriage both sides have both read the Bible and marshaled their scriptural arguments for several decades and there is no evidence that either has been persuaded. And for either side to accuse the other of being willfully blind to Biblical evidence is obviously fruitless.

The evidence that the beliefs of the church precede Biblical authorization is clear in the history of the United Methodist Church, and indeed most Protestant churches. This year we celebrate the 60th year of the ordination of women in the UMC. Which reminds us that until 60 years ago Methodists did not ordain women, despite the fact that those Methodists (many of whom are still alive) had access to the same Bible as any modern interpreter. Because we didn’t believe in ordaining women we found no Biblical authorization for ordaining women. We weren’t even looking for it and frankly a 19th century Methodist could read Paul’s letters and study them in depth a thousand times and never learn from them that women should be ordained. But by the middle of the 20th century, when we had come to different beliefs about women and their capacities, and thus decided that they could be ordained, we were able to read in Paul’s letters a justification for overthrowing our previous doctrine.

The same thing was true of allowing remarriage after divorce, which would have been unheard of the 19th century but which by the mid 20th century was allowed through a carefully constructed theological rationalization in the Social Principles Creed. And of course the same thing was true of slavery a century earlier – although it took Methodists in the US much longer than it took their founder John Wesley to get on board and find the Biblical justification for opposing slavery. In each case it wasn’t scripture that changed, must less reason or tradition. It appears that beliefs changed out of an emerging experience of faith in Christ within a society and church.

Now this leads us to a deep problem. If our minds were created by God to know not only that God exists, but the doctrines of the church, how is it that we can know things now that Christians didn’t know in the past? There are it seems, three possibilities. The first is that in the matters mentioned above (LGBTQ marriage, ordination of women, slavery) our minds were not created to immediately grasp the truth, but were created to rationally seek the truth that they may finally find it. In other words knowledge about these things is not properly basic to Christian belief. The second is that God in God’s good time and purpose actually changes minds so that they can immediately grasp what was previously obscure. Our minds really are being transformed and renewed over time by our dwelling as a church in Christ. The third possibility is to assert that those who disagree with us, both past and present, had minds distorted by sin in ways that ours are not.

I would suggest that arguing the third of these points is futile, since either side can made the argument and there is no available court of appeal for the dead. Similarly even if both sides accepted that over time God changes the structure of the human mind so as to become more cognizant of God’s will it is impossible for either side to prove itself favored by God in this regard. The first option simply throws us back to the seemingly endless inconclusive arguments over Biblical hermeneutics.

So we are back to the precedence of belief before scriptural authorization that makes the dispute over LGBTQ marriage so intractable. Neither group is going to accept that either its primal experience of being human, or its experience of Christ in the community of faith, or its fidelity to God’s Word is somehow defective, no matter what Biblical arguments are brought forward. Neither side is going to accept that its understanding is the result of sin while the other side is moved by the Holy Spirit.

Does this make the unity of the church impossible? Not entirely, although a history of divisions and divisiveness suggests that unity is at least very difficult. It does require that both sides give up the idea that their beliefs somehow arise out the reading of scripture under the proper influence of reason, tradition, and experience while the beliefs of the other are based on some obviously malformed but correctable reading. We must face that fact that in a basic way (using Plantinga’s meaning for “basic”) we have different minds, and that this difference is somehow part of God’s plan for the outworking on earth of God’s mission.

And this, to close but not conclude, is why I offer these reflections in a blog about inter-religious relations. Because it appears that this is the realm in which we find ourselves today.

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