I’ve recently been engaged in reading about a movement within United Methodism to promote Christian Orthodoxy. Part of their statement of purpose is found on their website, written by Dr. Steve Rankin. It appears to me to suggest that United Methodist theology as such cannot learn anything new about God.
“The mission of UMSCO, therefore, is to take the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian statement regarding Christology as our givens, our starting points. They provide our dogmatic boundaries. Any theological construction that does not fit within the broad tradition governed by these assumptions—a variety of which has been tried many times, especially in the modern period of western history—is not worthy to be called United Methodist theology. We start with a means by which to assess our United Methodist doctrinal convictions.“https://umorthodoxy.org/2014/09/19/why-united-methodist-scholars-for-christian-orthodoxy/
This opening statement goes on to make three assertions, two of which are highly relevant to inter-religious dialogue and relations, and the third of which needs at the least further consideration. They are: 1. That United Methodists need to examine their metaphysics. 2. United Methodists need to examine their sources and methods for arriving at theological conclusions. 3. “Because sound doctrine evokes and promotes life, the very kind of life to which Christ calls us and through grace we are privileged to live.” I’ll take these up in later blogs, because each is relevant to UM engagement in inter-religious dialogue.
The text above appears to suggest that our knowledge of God is bounded by a tradition that reached is definitive articulation about 1400 years ago. After Chalcedon Christians have nothing substantively new to learn about God. This is, I might add, the classical position of all the self-identified “orthodox” religions. For each (Christian, Jewish, Islamic) there was a period in human history in which God disclosed God’s nature to the fullest extent comprehensible by human intelligence. Now that this period is over.
Put another way, God’s self-revelation is limited historically and sets the boundaries within which all subsequent knowledge of God must remain. This doesn’t mean that things don’t change, or that religion remains static. The orthodox of all religions recognize that human societies change and evolve and require ever new articulations of the knowledge of God disclosed in revelation. And the orthodox recognize that through the depth of God’s self-disclosure finite humans will continue to learn about God within the boundaries of revelation. This combination; of changing cultures and societies, and the depth of God’s self-disclosure in revelation, means that religious people may discover things they didn’t know. They just won’t learn anything new, or outside orthodoxy. Their work will always be archaeological, so to speak.
What this means for inter-religious dialogue is clear: The orthodox have nothing to learn about God from other human religions. Their own tradition, their own orthodoxy, is not merely sufficient but complete. While engaging in dialogue might send them back to their own religious tradition with interesting questions or viewpoints, and thus lead them to recognize truths about God they hadn’t previously recognized, it will not actually teach them anything they didn’t already in principle know.
This doesn’t mean that the orthodox aren’t interested in inter-religious dialogue, although as a practical matter most are not. In a multi-faith society there are a host of practical concerns related to mutual understanding and cooperation that can be fruitfully addressed in inter-religious dialogue. And as mentioned above, some may find it theologically or even spiritually stimulating. The three traditions mentioned above have a long history of engagement in just these ways, without any of them conceding that they were actually learning something about God from beyond the boundaries set by their revelation.
Yet there is an internal problem in Christian orthodoxy (which I observe emerges in the other orthodoxies as well). Christian orthodoxy has never claimed that its revelation and subsequent articulation in the creeds represents the sole self-disclosure of God’s self. God also reveals God’s self in God’s creation. From Romans 1:19-20 “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”
Paul’s appeal to what is usually called “natural theology” supposes that his readers will concur that no thoughtful person can fail to see that the world she lives in is a creation, and that there is thus a Creator. And that logically this Creator has some moral claim on creatures that justifies judgment against their sinful refusal to acknowledge their Maker. And this has been the consensus in Christianity, and indeed Western culture up until today with regard to the purpose and limits of natural theology. But it is a fading consensus.
One reason that it is fading is that our knowledge of nature, of creation, is growing at an exponential rate. As we know more and more about God’s creation it becomes difficult to believe that we are not learning anything new about God. And this is even more the case when the natural sciences begin to pose questions about the nature of reality and the human person that challenge our philosophical and epistemological assumptions. Can it really be that a natural theology emerging from a rapidly deepening understanding of nature and human nature tells the orthodox nothing they didn’t already know about the Creator? Or put another way, that special revelation, when it is fully developed into orthodoxy, completely subsumes natural theology within it, so that its sole purpose is to justify to non-believers the assertions about God made out of orthodoxy?
As importantly a new kind of orthodoxy has arisen around the scientific exploration of the natural world. And that orthodoxy excludes appeals to the transcendent for an understanding of either nature or human nature. It maintains that all knowledge is found in what Charles Taylor calls “the immanent frame.” (See http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/08/10/western-secularity/)
So we have two positions. The apparent religious orthodoxy is that with regard to God science can teach us only what we already know. The apparent scientific orthodoxy says that with regard to nature (and human nature) an appeal to the transcendent can’t teach us anything that isn’t already present in the immanent. Neither of these positions seems appealing to contemporary persons in the West, who absent some less exclusive and more expansive understanding of how humans can know God are beginning to create their own religions or new religious sects to accommodate both revelation and an ever evolving natural theology based on an an ever expanding understanding of nature.
The other challenge to the exclusive claims of Christian orthodoxy to know God is the growing awareness of non-Christian religions and their teachings. And with this growing awareness an understanding of their commonalities. Because these religions have at least some knowledge of God it becomes difficult to believe that they don’t possess at least some unique knowledge of God. Or put another way, the presence of religious truth across a variety of religions strongly suggests that God has made the knowledge of God’s self available outside Christianity and not merely through nature, but through revelation.
So we see that both the explosive growth in knowledge of the natural world suggests that natural theology might reveal new truths about God, and how growing knowledge of other religions suggests that there might be revelation beyond our orthodoxies. And both can lead us to believe that the full truth about God isn’t bounded by orthodoxy, but is emergent in a continual dialogue between those who study nature and all those who study different revelations.
And there is a final point to be made here, more practical than theological when it comes to inter-religious dialogue or the dialogue between science and religion. It is difficult for two parties to sustain a conversation predicated on the idea that with regard to the matter at hand neither actually needs the knowledge of the other. It is hard to sustain a conversation in which one party or both parties merely to act as a mirror in which the other sees itself more clearly. Yet this appears to be the position of the new UM Orthodoxy movement.
But of course there may be an alternative. Perhaps what Dr. Rankin has in mind is that orthodoxy isn’t a comprehensive knowledge of God, but rather a knowledge of God sufficient to a United Methodist, or even Christian identity. Perhaps it is a firm standpoint from which to fruitfully engage many sources of knowledge about God rather than the sum of all such knowledge. But at least in my reading of the website this is not yet clear.
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