No – not the excellent book by CS Lewis – I just used that as a hook. What may be the necessary divorce between evangelical (or as they now style themselves “orthodox”) United Methodists and progressive United Methodists.
In the two previous blogs I tried to appreciatively highlight what these different movements within my denomination are seeking to accomplish. And they do both have something in common: they believe that humans can choose to live within a particular understanding of reality. In the case of evangelical/orthodox faction this conversion is a Spirit inaugurated but humanly confirmed alignment of worldview with divinely revealed natural and social order. For progressives the human choice is also a kind of conversion; a conversion to the diversity of human possibilities for self-realization and expression revealed by the coming of Christ and the revelation of God’s Reign.
The two choices are mutually exclusive to the extent that each claims that both the doctrinal and/or ethical imperatives entailed by its particular type of conversion are the only normative expressions of the Christian faith.
I believe that such claims are false. The absolute norm for the human expression of doctrinal truth and ethical action cannot be contained in human systems of thought, however comprehensive. Knowing this Truth is the sole prerogative of God.
Of course one can claim that guided by God’s Spirit humans can indeed know the Truth. The problem is that this epistemological claim cannot be demonstrated to those outside the faith. And in any case advancing it doesn’t resolve the problem of disputes within Christianity by groups that make equivalent claims to the leading of the Spirit.
Nor can these disputes be resolved by appeal to nearness to the Christian tradition (including scriptures,) because beneath all claims of fidelity to the tradition are claims about the proper method for interpreting that tradition. At best each group can try to show that its interpretations form a more coherent whole over time and space. But even this mode of theological dispute won’t work when the two sides don’t agree, and they do not agree, on what constitutes coherence.
Now at this point in my original blog I went on to suggest that a “divorce” was the only way to resolve the ongoing disputes between these groups in the United Methodist Church. I’ve reconsidered.
Because the real divorce that we need is between our witness to the gospel and its entanglements with political and ecclesial power. I’m not going to offer a robust political theology here. I’m simply going to assert what seems observably true: the closer those who witness to the gospel come to the possession of power the more distracted and corrupt their witness becomes. Convinced that the possession of power will allow them to more effectively witness, their attention is soon drawn to the possession of power and the integrity and relevance of their witness suffers. Indeed, eventually they are fully possessed by the spirit of power, until their actions are guided by that demonic spirit rather than Christ.
What this means at a practical level is that most effective witness to Christ, whether progressive or evangelical, happens in local congregations where there is little by way of power to be won or lost. And we can easily observe that evangelical and progressive Christians frequently worship, study, and work together in local church contexts.
In the United Methodist polity the Annual Conference is effectively the next step up in ecclesio-political power. But in every way that power is limited by the democratic nature of its governance. Our discipline identifies the Annual Conference as the basic unit of the church and this is probably good. It is the largest ecclesial body that can possibly avoid possession by the demon of power, and it is the largest context in which Christians of all sorts effectively work together in mission.
This isn’t so for the General Conference and the United Methodist Boards and Agencies. Neither is governed by anything approaching what could be called democratic structures and both are thus the locus of the most dangerous form of power – that which is free floating and well funded. And this is why both (granted that they do much good) witness frequently to the destructive effects of power on the witness of the Body of Christ.
It is in and through both that evangelicals and progressives find themselves locked in the most debilitating, time consuming, and ultimately futile struggles for power. It is in these forums that mutual affection, loving cooperation, and the up-building of the Body of Christ for the witness to the gospel become difficult if not impossible. It is in these forums that those walking in the unity of the Spirit turn aside too often onto paths of acrimony and mutual distrust.
And all that I have said about the structures of power that make up the church are true of government as well. The greater the concentration of power, and the deeper the entanglement of Christian witness with that power, the more inimical it is to the spiritual health of the Body of Christ. The purest and most effective witness in relation to the governance of our society happens when the individual Christian casts a prayerful vote. The witness most likely to be co-opted and corrupted occurs when Christians become lobbists in a state or federal capital.
These institutions have power, and that power can do good things for people. I’m not anti-government or governance. What governments cannot do and have never done is witness to the power of Christ in the Reign of God to change human lives. Indeed they are fundamentally competitors with Christ for the loyalty of Christians, and competitors with God’s Reign in creating human societies ruled by justice and peace.
While Christians may enter into temporary alliances with civil government it seems to me on the whole that such alliances should be regarded as dangerous, and thus short lived. Certainly they have been corrosive of Christian witness in the United States, where efforts by both progressives and evangelicals to establish a presence in the midst of power have gained little for God’s Reign but have led to vicious divisions as the members of the Body of Christ fight over the crumbs that fall from a banquet catered by the devil.
So we do need a divorce. We need to divorce ourselves as Christians from those political structures, ecclesial and governmental, in which the powers of the world reign, and in which there is little possibility for the call of Christ to be heard.
Practically, since we United Methodists actually have use for a General Conference and the national boards and agencies, it seems that the best thing to do is to divest them of as much coercive power as possible. Instead of forcing large minorities to support ethical and political positions with which they disagree, based on decisions that have no part in making, it would be best if we left such decision making to grass roots organizing beginning with preachers and congregations.
I’ll add that we really have nothing to lose. No one possessing actual political power cares what the UMC General Conference declares about social and political issues because no United Methodist is bound to support those decisions. (This is nothing new, Methodists back in the 1930’s were pointing out how little either the US government or Japan cared about bold General Conference statements regarding oppression of religious minorities and the re-arming of imperial Japan.) We delude ourselves and destroy our unity by imagining that we are players in the power-games of the world. We are not.
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