The Wesleyan Quadrilateral: An Ambivalence
Though I was raised in a thoroughly Methodistic home, the Wesleyan quadrilateral wasn’t really a part of my mental furniture growing up. In fact, I remember the first time I heard it put to use — a youth camp where I was a college counselor. The camp preacher did a Q & A, which is always a brave move in a room of adolescents where there are always, let’s be honest, punks. But one kid at the morning worship session (a Tuesday, I think) was not a punk, and he asked a good, sincere question that had obviously been bothering him (though I don’t remember the specifics of it now). Whatever the topic of the question was, the premise was one that every Christian I know struggles with: how do we know whether x, y, or z is a part of God’s plan or not?
The preacher’s answer that day was, I thought, quite brilliant. He didn’t dodge the question, he didn’t qualify. He didn’t try to talk circles around this thirteen year old who, it seems to me now, had maybe come to this church camp reluctantly, yet still had real questions and doubts about the faith he was inheriting from his parents. I would bet that his search, to that point, had largely been unsatisfying (there was just something in the way he asked the question…again, I don’t remember the specifics, but the sincere tone of the thing made an impression, obviously, since I’m recalling it some-odd years later). And the preacher answered him honestly, directly, and forthrightly…using the quadrilateral.
The preacher explained what the quadrilateral was, that it was a tool that Methodists employed to answer the kinds of questions the kid was asking that day, and he then went through to succinctly explain how scripture, tradition, reason, and experience offered trustworthy explanations for the tough question the kid was asking. Though I had heard the term before somewhere along the way of my Methodist rearing, to that point I had simply put it aside as a bit of Methodist sophism–some smoke and magic that I figured I would have to deal with someday, but not right now (this is also the reason I’ve decided the quadrilateral is simply a horrid thing to teach in a confirmation class). But here, through that preacher, was theology being deployed not deceivingly or sentimentally. Here was an answer to someone’s troubling question that didn’t try to dodge things with platitudes (e.g., “Well, as Methodists, we are a people who emphasize grace”) or to simplify a complex matter with the simple-carbs of fundamentalisms (e.g., “Because the bible says!”). Although the preacher’s quadrilateral method would later come to seem a bit like theological bath toys compared the erector sets of Reformed systematics I would encounter over the next few years, on that day it seemed like the answer that kid needed to hear. And it was also exactly what I needed to hear that day as my own faith in the Wesleyan movement was teetering.
While Albert Outler might have invented the Wesleyan quadrilateral, the tool itself developed earlier. William Reed Huntington first came up with the framework in 1870 basing it off European precedents. Huntington was an Episcopal clergyman from Massachusetts who entered the ministry in the middle of the U.S. Civil War (talk about events dictating your sermons). He was, rightly, disturbed by the divisions in his own American Anglican communion at the time. Southern Episcopalians had formed The Protestant Episcopal Church of the Confederate States of America at the War’s outset, and although that denomination ceased to exist after 1865, the bitter divisions of slavery and the War threatened further schism during Reconstruction.
Using an Austrian military complex as his metaphor (the “Quadrilatero”), Huntington devised a “fortress” of theological commitments that, he argued, would protect the Anglican communion from schism: scripture as providing all that is necessary for salvation, the sufficiency of the historic creeds (Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian) for faith, the two ordained sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, and the historic episcopate.
The American Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops affirmed Huntington’s formulation at their 1886 meeting in Chicago. Two years later, the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference did the same and affirmed what became known in Anglican circles as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. It was to this document that Outler was alluding when he proposed the fourfold structure for Methodists to follow of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience; the so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral. It’s unclear (and personally doubtful) that many Methodists got the reference.
If Huntington’s quadrilateral was a medieval “fortress” (Anglicans will debate you on that, I’ve found), Outler’s quadrilateral was more of a frontier trading outpost. It was a marker of a Wesleyan presence in a particular theological territory — in this case, the doctrines and theology of Reformation Protestantism in the modern Western world. At this outpost, ecclesial wayfarers can come and go, depositing certain ideas and theologies here and picking up others there. If certain things have to be traded for others, that’s just part of the reality of a church making its way in the modern world. Outler was determined that the Methodists should remain a “pilgrim church,” and travelers need supplies. Not an impenetrable fortress, the Wesleyan quadrilateral was intentionally designed to be doctrinally permeable. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Though Outler was not an evangelical, he was conservative, and in fact most conservative Wesleyans tried to make peace with Outler’s quadrilateral in the decades after its debut at the 1970 special General Conference in St. Louis. The 1988 doctrinal revisions to “Our Theological Task” reframed the emphases, but the elements remain in the Discipline to this day. But the change took its toll on the quadrilateral’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, others were beginning to suss out the quadrilateral’s real flaws.
The most stinging criticism of the quadrilateral came from SMU theologian Billy Abraham beginning in the late 1990s. Abraham began as a reluctant defender of the tool, but through his work in theological epistemology (a discipline of which he literally wrote the book), he came to see the permeability of it as a liability for the life of the church. Abraham’s critique was sophisticated, but in “folks talkin’ to each other” parlance, it might be summed up like this: at some point, people are going to disagree over the interpretation of scripture, and when that happens the backstop won’t be church tradition, and probably not even “reason,” but experience. And experience, which is tied up with “affections” and religious feeling, happens to be the weakest leg of the quadrilateral stool if you’re trying to make important decisions about something.
Abraham could clearly see this happening in United Methodism in the controversies over human sexuality. A plain reading of scripture doesn’t give much help to those who would like to see gay and lesbian persons married or ordained in the United Methodist Church, so generally more abstract (though often quite sophisticated) interpretations of scripture have to be used, interpretations that offer more qualified explanations of, for example, the sexual mores of the ancient Greek world at play in Romans 1 or a guiding hermeneutic of love operative in 1 Corinthians 13 (those are just two examples I’ve personally heard and considered, though there are many others). Conservatives can, of course, offer their own nuanced interpretations.
So, if appeals to scripture aren’t settling the dispute, where does one turn? Well, if you’re Roman Catholic, the answer is clear: you turn to the church’s teachings on the matter. Alas, this doesn’t work for Protestants because our “tradition” is full of: “Oh, you don’t agree with me…I’m taking my supporters and starting a new church across town” (which is, of course, exactly what Methodists did in the nineteenth century and what is happening in the UMC right now).
But, that kind of thing is usually a last resort, so before an appeal to tradition takes place, usually appeals to reason and experience come first. This is an appeal I have heard countless times, and one I confessedly used myself for a time. For many (though not all) moderately liberal clergy, it might be a variation of something like: “I used to just blindly follow the teachings of the church on sexual ethics, but then I got to know real gay people/discovered that my aunt was a lesbian, etc. etc., and that’s when I started to change my mind.” This is then followed by appeals to reason (“but epigenetics!!!”) to build the case. But if the specifics of the argument vary, the move is often quite consistent: plain readings of scripture and tradition were put in tension with experience and reason, and experience and reason won.
And this is not only a move that moderate or liberal Methodists make. It infuses conservative Methodism as well, though just in different ways. How else do you justify abandoning official Methodist liturgical forms? Scripture is a bit vague on the specifics of carrying out a Sunday service (High Church Anglicans and the Church of Christ churches both appeal to the Bible at some point), so it would seem an appeal to tradition would be an appropriate move. Yet again, that’s not what happens in most evangelically minded churches. Instead, the appeal is either to some form of experience (how the worship ‘feels’) or to a liturgical pragmatism, i.e., ‘reason’ (‘people won’t come unless it’s seeker friendly!’). No doubt I’m simplifying a complex set of circumstances, but I still think the point holds.
And that point is not to cast dispersion on either ‘side’ of the current schism. I genuinely care for those who have felt excluded from churches for whatever reason, AND I happen to think a few Hillsong anthems are genuinely brilliant pieces of pop-art (note: future post on the Hillsong documentary coming soon!). The point is that it began to dawn on me that Abraham was exactly right about the quadrilateral. While its intended uses should be considered apart from its practical deployment in churches, there is a sense in which the quadrilateral must now be judged on the Methodist world it has wrought. And that world–with well over 2000 congregations leaving for the exits as of the time I’m writing this–is not ideal.
Which is not to say that the quadrilateral cannot be used helpfully in the search for answers to perplexing questions of the faith. Indeed, the thirteen year old (and myself) found it quite helpful with whatever existential problem was being faced that day at the summer camp a long time ago. The problem is, those types of questions were not really the types of concerns the quadrilateral was made to address.
From my own research, I think Outler was more concerned with showing Roman Catholics that the Methodists could be good dialogue partners for a future “Vatican III” than in whether or not evangelical United Methodists would feel at home in the new big tent church that was crafted out of the 1968 General Conference, but that’s just my suspicion. What couldn’t be predicted was that the ecumenical movement would begin to fracture in the 1970s and that American evangelicalism would begin a resurgence in the 1970s and 80s. That’s another post for another day. But I also remain hopeful for some kind of renewal of an evangelical ecumenical resurgence at some point (though I think I might be an old man by the time that comes around again). If it were to happen, however, Methodists would need some kind of bridge to other communions; a rubric for re-beginning some of the doctrinal conversations that got put aside in the triumphalism of union in the early 1970s. The quadrilateral as currently conceived might not be it, but it could at least be a starting point.
So, I remain ambivalent on the question of the quadrilateral. In United Methodism the quadrilateral won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Candidates seeking ordination in the Church literally have to frame their understanding of Methodist doctrine in its terms. But that doesn’t mean it has to stay. As critics rightly point out, Wesley never used the term in his writings (though most scholars have agreed that he used its elements in some configuration). Were it to go, what we would really be turning our backs on is 1968, not 1768. And that 1968 dream will be a very, very hard one for United Methodists to give up any time soon.
