Reservation.

I want to invite you to this conversation about theological innovation: that we critique our hermeneutic, how we go about interpreting scripture…. How do we [Native Americans] collectively rescue our theology from the metaphorical cowboy, from the imperialization of the Great Commission?

~ Richard Twiss, native Christian

Maybe you’ve heard the offensive expression that someone is “off the reservation.” Based on our oppression of native Americans, this is a very dubious phrase to use now without conscious intent and disclaimer. Traditionally, the phrase represents someone who has moved geographically beyond their (unjust) constraints. Metaphorically, it represents someone who does or says something out of bounds. In a theological context, it could be applied to someone who questions God sending people to eternal torment who have never heard of Jesus… or questions the impossibility of being gay and Christian (as Andy Stanley did this week and stirred up a firestorm)—that person is definitely off the reservation! I’d like to explore today how we define the theological “reservation.”

Maybe another way to ask the question is, How do we know what is true? Or, Where do find our authority? Or, Who do we trust to tell us what is true?

And therein lies much of the problem for me: Everyone who is either born into a Christian family or makes a decision for Christ enters a faith community that provides many incredibly good and enriching experiences for us. Pretty much immediately we have a tribe, people who love us and care about us, who encourage us in the hard places of life and consistently point us toward God. What a gift! Along with that gift, however, comes an implicit (and sometimes explicit) message: You don’t know what is true, but we do. And we’re going to share this established body of knowledge with you so you can know what is true too. You can’t question it, you can’t challenge it, you can’t offer alternatives… and above all, you can’t trust your feelings about it.

Our Protestant tradition was grounded in five solas, the Latin word for “only.” Solus Christus (only Christ), Sola Gratia (only grace), Sola Fide (only faith), Soli Deo Gloria (only the glory of God), and above all, Sola Scriptura (only scripture). For Martin Luther, the only basis for trustworthy spiritual authority was scripture—and evangelicals have faithfully championed that central tenet for the last five hundred years. John Wesley, however, painted with a broader brush, and personally, I think he got closer to the mark. The “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” proposed that we draw from four sources of spiritual authority: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. I wonder if that put Wesley off the reservation for some purists?

I can appreciate the emotional appeal of sola scriptura. It provides a pervasive sense of security… and who doesn’t want that? We all want to know that, when it comes to God especially, we’re standing on solid rock, not shifting sand (as the famous hymn reminds us). And conveniently, every Christian community is dead certain that their interpretation of scripture is spot on; it’s all those other Christians who get it wrong. So if we’re going to be intellectually honest, the security we experience here is not in scripture itself, but in our faith leader and our faith tradition and their understanding of scripture. Again, this isn’t necessarily bad, but let’s be clear about what we’re saying.

Even good Methodists, though, would generally agree that, although we should draw upon tradition, reason, and experience in our faith journey, scripture has the last word. Scripture is the arbiter. And the rationale is understandable—tradition, reason, and experience are filtered by our humanity; only scripture comes directly from God, so it is the most trustworthy. Only scripture is unfiltered. Or is it?

As one who left that particular reservation a while ago, let me offer a few thoughts on this. Even if you don’t agree, I hope you’ll find it helpful to think through.

For starters, even the strictest doctrines of scripture do not hold that God actually penned the Bible. They acknowledge that inspiration from God was filtered through a human vessel—their education, their vocabulary, their worldview. Those doctrines also hold that all inerrancy and/or infallibility is tied only to the original manuscripts, which we no longer have. Thankfully, we have an exceptionally strong manuscript heritage, but we have to acknowledge that the Greek and Hebrew words we currently have are subject to potential errors of transmission and translation. Am I trying to cast doubt on the Bible? Not at all, I just think we need to understand that, when we call this the “word of God,” we are really calling it some highly credible words about God, not the infallible words from God’s own mouth. And that’s before we grapple to understand how these precious words should be applied in a time and culture far removed from its original time and culture.

Which is why I believe that the arbiter among Wesley’s inspired foursome is actually not scripture, but experience. I’m not saying that experience should be the arbiter; I’m saying that, no matter which of the four we declare to be the arbiter, every single one of us actually defaults to experience as the last word when it comes to laying out the perimeter of the reservation. Here’s why I think that’s true.

The sheer diversity of interpretation and application from scripture should help us understand that it is not scripture itself we trust; instead, we trust our experience of scripture—our experience of how we have been taught to read it and how we have read it ourselves. And when we change our interpretation and application of scripture, because we find a more credible way to understand it (which is supposed to happen), we prove that it is our experience—either firsthand or secondhand—that is the object of this spiritual authority. Scripture didn’t change; we changed. Our perspective changed.

Here’s a simple example. In the church I grew up in, all the women wore long hair with little croqueted doilies on their head as a way to honor the instruction of 1 Corinthians 11. They saw that passage as authoritative, yet when their understanding of that passage changed—their experience of scripture—the behavior also changed. Thankfully. And the same is true of Wesley’s other two bastions: “reason” is certainly filtered by our experience and so is “tradition.” It’s not all Christian tradition we trust; it’s the traditions that have made their way into our experience.

Am I saying that our experiences are fully trustworthy, that they circumscribe final truth? Definitely not. I’m just saying—and this is crucial—that what we decide to trust as truthful and authoritative in our lives is the result of what we have experienced of reason, tradition, scripture, and of course experience itself. But, because we know that experience cannot be universal, we shore up our confidence in what we believe by appealing to what feels more objective. Sola scriptura. Usually well-intentioned, but inevitably a power play. If we can establish that our interpretation of scripture is authoritative, then we have established that we are authoritative. And that always feels good.

Why am I spending so much time on this point? Because, when it comes to marking out the boundary lines of “the God reservation,” the purview of modern evangelicalism, we need to allow a lot more latitude and bring a lot more humility to the conversation.

growing the soul

What if spiritual authority was informed by all four of these but actually came from somewhere else entirely: your personal, first-hand relationship with Christ? How might that shape your journey?

serving the world

And how might it affect our world if we stopped trying to make everyone agree with our own particular “reservation” and simply started acting like Jesus?

takeaway

Security is relational.

Click below to listen to a podcast about Professor Peter Enns’ experience with the “reservation”…