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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment