Three Minute Theology 2.4: Getting the Bible All Squared Away

Is it okay for Christians to do yoga?  Is there a right or wrong way to pray?  What about drinking alcohol?  Or getting tattoos?

While these questions may seem somewhat random, they are the kind of down-to-earth questions that Christians face all the time as they try to follow Jesus in the real world.

Now: any Christian worth his or her salt would agree that the answers to questions like these must be found in the Bible, which is the final authority on what we must believe and how we must live.

The only problem is, it’s seldom so easy as simply saying, “For the Bible tells me so.”  Sometimes the Bible may not address the question directly.  It was written 2000 years ago, after all, so it doesn’t directly address modern ethical questions like invetro-fertilization, let’s say, or the place an ipod ought to have in our lives.

Even when the Bible does directly address an issue, its teaching still needs to be interpreted by flesh-and-blood humans like us.  And, as the 2000 year history of the Church has demonstrated, often very well-meaning Christians can arrive at very different interpretations of the same passages.

An eighteenth century theologian named John Wesley recognized this challenge.  In his writings, he tended to emphasize three things alongside the Bible—tradition, experience, and reason—which help us interpret the Word of God and apply it to our lives.

Wesley was the founder of a Christian movement called “Methodism.”  Following his example, Methodists often refer to the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” as a framework for tackling the tough Faith Questions.

As the name suggests, the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” has four corners, four “sources of knowing” that we use in arriving at answers for how we should live and what we should believe.  Again, these are:  The Bible—what does God’s Word say on the matter; Christian tradition—how have Bible-believing Christians consistently answered this question?  Reason—what answer does logic and evidence point to? And experience—what “rings true” for us based on our experience in the real world?

Most Christians intuitively use tradition, reason and experience together when interpreting the Bible without even realizing they’re doing it.  The Wesleyan Quadrilateral just tries to make this more consistent and transparent as an approach to the Bible.  If we come across a teaching that looks good on the surface but radically re-writes 2000 years of Christian tradition, let’s say, or is jarringly out of synch with our experience of God or the world, or is just plain irrational, then it doesn’t pass the smell test.

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is a helpful concept, but it’s important to remember that this is not a simple symmetrical square.  The Bible is always the first and ultimate authority, and tradition, experience and reason are always secondary sources.  This quadrilateral, in other words, is decidedly lopsided.

Think about it like a three-legged stool.  The seat, obviously, is the most important part, but it needs legs if you’re gonna sit on it.  At the same time, the stool’s only stable if all three legs are in place.  None of the legs, on its own, can hold up the seat.  In this analogy, the Bible is the seat on which we rest, and the legs are tradition, reason and experience, which all need to be in place for us to arrive at a solid interpretation.

Perhaps an even better metaphor is found in a pair of glasses.  For a Christian, the Bible is the lens through which we view the world; but we can’t wear the lenses unless they’re set in frames, resting securely on our noses and held in place by our ears.  In this analogy, the lenses are the Scriptures, the frames that hold them in place is tradition, the nose represents our reason and the ears represent our experience. 

And when the lenses we’re looking through are fitted to their frames, held in place by our reason and supported by our experience, that’s when we’ll really see what we mean when we say, “for the Bible tells me so.”