And honestly, this doesn't scare me or bother me. The UMC has put the mission and the vision in the trunk for decades and our bloated bureaucracy exists for the preservation of the institution and nothing more. So, a split that results in two or more new connections picking up the pieces and being forced to articulate a vision for being the church is the best thing that could happen to the Methodist movement.
My hope for the Methodist expressions of the future is that we will have the humility to recognize that we live in a slice of time, with a particular zeigeist, privileging evidence in a particular way, and that we are finite, fallible, and cannot be trusted to rewrite the doctrinal confessions of the church.
It is tempting to take six semesters of theological education and the tools one gains during that time and believe that these tools are all we need to properly interpret the Bible and properly execute the Christian life. But we could not be more mistaken. The Great Tradition is a gift and one that we leave unwrapped at our own peril. It may be that as we study a particular section of the Bible, we begin to believe that the church universal has gotten it wrong; and our proper response is to go back and read Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Wesley and Barth and Coakley to understand what is deficient from my study that is putting my understanding at odds with the giants of the tradition.
Richard Feldman and his posse at University of Rochester have been exploring belief justification, and they measure a person's capacity to know based on three criteria. The first is the quality of their evidence: Does a person have all the evidence that they could possibly have? The second is the sincerity of the inquirer: Does a person have competing commitments that will get in the way of evaluating the evidence fairly? And finally, the last measurement is intelligence: Does a person have the brain power to evaluate the evidence.
With this in mind, is possible that a single interpreter with their divinity degree might have better evidence, but it is unlikely. And it is possible that one is somehow more sincere than those who came before, but again, this is unlikely. And it is possible that this person is more intelligent, but I doubt it.
Intellectual virtue demands that when my belief is in conflict with the belief of someone who is informed, intelligent, and sincere that my level of confidence in said belief is diminished. Likewise, if informed, intelligent, and sincere people from around the globe and across time hold a belief that is different than mine, I should be far more concerned with understanding their arguments, recognizing the likelihood that I am wrong than in psychoanalyzing the saints that have come before in order to smear their sincerity.
The arrogance one must possess to say, "Huh, would you look at that. My 'indepedently concluded' belief differs from Augustine, Aquinas, Sarah Coakley, and my grandmother; I must be a genius!" is unfathomable.
The reality is that we all occupy an intellectually vulnerable place and into this intellectually vulnerable place comes the creeds and confessions that make up the great tradition. It is a gift to us, and one that we would be wise to embrace.
Now, it is important to point out that the Great Tradition doesn't deal with everything. When the church has talked about doctrine, it has dealt primarily with questions related to the "nature of" God and creation. Which means that it won't give us particular instruction for how to deal with every technological development and how these developments interact with humanity. However, it will give us a starting point and oftentimes guardrails.
So my hope is that whatever happens in the United Methodist Church, we all find ourselves more appreciative and responsive to the wisdom of the Saints who gather alongside us and the Saints who have come before. My hope is that we rediscover the humility to recognize that when we hold beliefs that are at odds with the doctrine of the church that it is us who are probably wrong.
