FAITH IN PRACTICE: Practical Theology (20th Sunday after Pentecost; James 2:14-26; October 2, 2016)

Practical Theology

20th Sunday after Pentecost
James 2:14-26
October 2, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I went to a Presbyterian Seminary. The Presbyterian Church is a part of the Reformed tradition of the Protestant movement in the Western or Latin or Catholic wing of the Christian Church and traces its roots to the Swiss Reformation under John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli.

The Reformed tradition has many virtues. One is its idea of local ordination, that is, that baptized persons are ordained in the local church for leadership that includes worship, administration, and acts of justice and mercy. That's a strong idea.

The great Scottish tradition of sung Psalms owes its existence to John Knox's rejection of hymn singing.

Another strength of the Reformed tradition is its love of order, especially when it comes to theological thinking. John Calvin was a systematic theologian, that is, a theological thinker who was concerned to give a logical and complete explanation of Christian Faith. Several versions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion are still in print. A one-volume edition weighs in at just over 1000 pages.

Movements tend to mimic their founders and the Reformed tradition has produced a number of systematic theologians. Perhaps the most notable in the last century or so was Karl Barth, a Swiss pastor and then professor whose 14-volume Church Dogmatics is stunning in its density.

Methodists by contrast can't really boast of any influential systematic theologians at all. Charles Wesley was a thinker who did his thinking in the form of hymns. Some of them are theological jewels. Take a close look, for example at "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" or "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today" and you can see what I mean. But the hymns don’t add up to a system.

John Wesley, who did most of the publishing and organizing in their branch of Methodism, was a capable thinker. His master's degree from Oxford was in logic. But he used that logic, not to decide how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but to solve the problems of his growing movement.

Let me share just one example. In the 1760's and early 1770's the Methodist movement grew quickly in the lower thirteen of the United Kingdom's colonies in North America. At this time Methodism was a renewal movement inside the Church of England. Methodists were members of classes and they listened to Methodist preachers when they had the chance, but for their ordinary Christian life, and especially for the sacraments, they depended on the Church of England, the Anglican church.

Like Wesley, most Anglican priests were Tories, that is, they favored continued union with the crown and believed that rebellion against the king was deeply sinful. As you can imagine, this opinion became quite unpopular in many places in the newly self-proclaimed independent states. Anglican priests all fled their posts back to England, there to wait for the rebellion to be put down and order restored so that they could resume their ministries.

It didn't work out that way. By what Wesley called "a strange providence" the colonies were free. But the priests did not come back and Wesley couldn't spare any of the priests that were at work in his movement in England.

By the early 1780's the sacramental situation had become desperate for Wesley's Methodists in the New World. There had been neither baptisms nor communion for nearly eight years. This situation could not continue. Wesley himself was only a priest and under the law of the Church of England was not qualified to ordain priests. Wesley begged several bishops to send priests to serve the Methodist societies, but he was refused. (Wesley did not have a great number of fans in the Church of England hierarchy.) He even tried to convince a Greek bishop to ordain him as a bishop, but to no avail.

So Wesley convinced himself--from reading early Christian writings--that bishops and priests were essentially one order of clergy and that the work of the bishop was really only a matter of a specialized ministry of a priest. On that reasoning, John Wesley, as a priest, was already qualified in the practice of the early church, to ordain both priests and bishops.

However much he was convinced of this in his own mind, he knew that this would not look good in public. So instead of ordaining a bishop to go to the former colonies and ordain priests, he "set apart" Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury as "superintendents" who would "set apart" "elders". Of course, to ordain means "to set apart", bishop means "superintendent", and priest is the worn-down pronunciation of presbyter which means "elder".

Methodists in the New World now had their own clergy, access to the baptismal font and the communion table, and their own rules, a book of services and, yes, a hymnal. Crisis solved. And the way it was solved was part of a pattern that we follow to this day: solve the problem, figure out how the solution was merely an application of ancient tradition, and then stick to our story.

I sound flippant, but this is the territory we have staked out: we adapt and adopt for the sake of increasing the love of God and neighbor. We do not start with first principles and then systematically work our way down to practice, especially if our principles seem to point us away from love.

There was a split in the early Methodist movement between the followers of the Wesley's and those who, like their college friend George Whitefield, were Calvinists in their theology. And the reason why the split happened was because John Wesley saw that Calvinism, however logical it might be, stood in the way of people experiencing God's love and of their increasingly loving God and neighbor. When theology gets in the way of love, love wins. Period.

That's why we Methodists don't have catechisms. We don't use creeds as a way of deciding who is in and who is out. That's why, when people ask us, "What do Methodists believe?" we get a puzzled look on our faces and don't know how to answer. If you're in that position, here's what you can say: For us, how we have been loved and how we love in turn are more important than what we believe. That's why we like to look for common ground. That's why we leave a lot of room for differing opinions.

When the focus is on love, on how we have been loved, and on how we love God, each other, and our near and distant neighbors, what each of us believes becomes part of our shared story. Different experiences lead to differing perspectives. When we share those perspectives in the context of love, the result may be simple agreement, but more often it is increased appreciation. This value of ours, then, that "As a congregation we value a theology that focuses on common ground, leaves room for differing opinions, and leads to increased love of God and neighbor" is at the heart of the ethos of our movement.

Sometimes, though, I think that we're not really sure we trust that. Sometimes, I think we're afraid that if we say what we believe or share how we have come to believe it, we'll run into a judgmental wall. 

Sometimes we look at the state of our national political conversation or we look at the level of rancor in the struggle to determine the future of United Methodism and we, rightly I think, don't want anything to do with that. So we stifle opinions, ours and others', and hope that we won't come up against anything that will cause each other to be angry or upset.

But I don't think that's the way to live out this value. If for any reason, we fail to create a space where we can love in the midst of disagreement or even misunderstanding, then we need to step back and attend to guarding that space. This value is not simply a description of the way we do things; it's also a call to model what love looks like in theological conversation. Sometimes, it's even a call to repentance when we put theological conformity ahead of the unity of love.

After all, we see now only distorted images through bad optics, to paraphrase Paul. One day we will see clearly. But until then let us above all see lovingly.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.