by Steve | Jan 11, 1993 | Archive - 1993
Archive: Back to the Future with Thomas C. Oden
This eminent UM theologian exchanged the faddish illusions of modernity for the richness and power of the ancient apostolic traditions.
Thomas C. Oden teaches theology and ethics at the Theology School, Drew University. He is arguably the preeminent theologian in the United Methodist Church today, and certainly our most prolific writer.
In his After Modernity … What? (Zondervan, 1990), a revision and reworking of his Agenda For Theology, 1979, Oden cites the bankrupt state of modern liberalism and calls for a return to classical Christianity.
Oden insists, persuasively, that theologians in recent decades have assumed that in theology—as in corn poppers and automobile exhaust systems—newer is better and the newest is best. We have it just backward when it comes to theology and moral philosophy, Oden contends.
In November 1992, Oden’s Life in the Spirit was published by HarperCollins. This massive work (584 pp.) is the third in Oden’s three-volume systematic theology.
What follows is adapted from After Modernity … What? which will help the reader understand Oden’s own journey back to classical Christian orthodoxy. Having wandered in the byways of modernity for many years, Oden is well equipped to offer a devastating critique of today’s faddish theologies in which pastors and theologians run to “keep pace with each new ripple of the ideological river.” In the words of J.I. Packer, Oden sees “regress to orthodoxy as the true way forward.” Indeed, back to the future!
The final portion below comes from Oden’ s Preface to his Life in the Spirit The reader will find both the three-volume set and After Modernity … What? irreplaceable and lifetime resources. —the editors
If we are to understand Christianity’s original meaning or value, we must come once again to see it through the eyes of those who have had to struggle for it and maintain it. It is from the martyrs, saints and prophets of Christian history, more than from recent riskless interpreters, that we learn of the value of classical Christianity.
The sons and daughters of modernity are rediscovering the neglected beauty of classical Christian teaching. It is a moment of joy, of beholding anew what had been nearly forgotten, of hugging a lost child.
I have been astonished to discover that some of my best students are the ones most insistent on letting the ancient tradition speak for itself. They have had a bellyful of the hyped claims of modern therapies and political messianism to make all things right. They are fascinated—and often passionately moved—by the primitive language of the apostolic tradition and the ancient Christian writers, undiluted by our contemporary efforts to soften it or make it easier or package it for smaller challenge but greater acceptability.
Finally, my students got through to me. They do not want to hear a watered-down modern reinterpretation. They want nothing less than the substance of the faith of the apostles and martyrs without too much interference from modern pablum-peddlers who doubt that people are tough enough to take it straight.
The present mood of academic theology is boredom. Admittedly, theology has managed to gain a modest status in the harsh world—a chair here or there in a sprawling tax-supported university. For half-a-century, theologians have been earnestly longing and wishing and even praying (well, that might be an exaggeration) for a little more respectability in the eyes of modernity.
So teachers of religion have developed huge upwardly mobile professional societies that are carbon copies of other professional societies. The field has even managed to obtain a convenient name-change—from “theology” to “religious studies.” Even amid its apparent secular successes, the question lingers: How is theology to find true happiness in the modern world? What is theology now to do with its newfound freedom from Holy Writ, and revelation, and church, and antiquity?
The “Movement” Theologian
In order to sharpen my portrayal of theology’s amiable accommodation to modernity, I will describe a particular individual, an ordained theologian whom I have known for a long time, and whose career until recently can only be described as that of a “movement person.” In his pursuit of movements, his overall pattern was diligently to learn from them, to throw himself into them, and then eventually to baptize them insofar as they showed any remote kinship with Christianity, and then to turn to another movement.
Now well into middle age, our subject took his first plunge into “movement identity” at 16 when he joined the United World Federalists to promote world government through various educational and church groups. From 1954 to 1966 he was much involved in ecumenical debate, promotion and organization. His deepening involvement in the civil rights movement began at about 17 and four years later was intensified by his attendance at the national NAACP convention in 1953; and by subsequent participation in marches, demonstrations, pray-ins, sit-ins, letter campaigns and other forms of political activism.
More than a decade before the Vietnam War, our “movement theologian” was an active pacifist, struggling to motivate the anti-war movement during the difficult McCarthy days. The fact that he understood himself as a democratic socialist and theoretical Marxist during the McCarthy period did not make his task any easier. By the mid-1950s he was active in the American Civil Liberties Union; in the pre-NOW women’s rights movement as an advocate of liberalized abortion; and as a steady opponent of states’ rights, military spending, and bourgeois morality. His movement identity took a new turn in the late 1950s when he became enamored with the existentialist movement, immersing himself particularly in the demythologization movement, writing his doctoral dissertation on its chief theorist.
The early 1960s found him intimately engaged in the client-centered therapy movement. Later he became engrossed in Transactional Analysis and soon was actively participating in the Gestalt therapy movement. His involvement deepened in the “third force” movement in humanistic psychology. In the early 1970s, he joined a society for the study of paranormal phenomena, taught a class in parapsychology, and directed controlled research experiments with mung beans, Kirlian photography, biorhythm charts, pyramids, tarot cards, and the correlation of astrological predictions with the daily ups and downs of behavior.
My purpose in reciting this long litany is not to boast, for indeed I am that wandering theologian, less proud than amused by the territory I have covered. Rather, the purpose is to recite a straightforward description of what at least one mainline Protestant theologian conceived to be his task in successive phases of the last few decades.
So when I am speaking of a diarrhea of religious accommodation, I am not thinking of “the other guys” or speaking in the abstract, but out of my own personal history. I do not wish contritely to apologize for my 25 years as a movement person, because I learned so much and encountered so many bright and beautiful persons. But I now experience the afterburn of “movement” existence, of messianic pretensions, of self-congratulatory idealisms.
The shocker is not merely that I rode so many bandwagons, but that I thought I was doing Christian teaching a marvelous favor by it and at times considered this accommodation the very substance of the Christian teaching office.
Abortion Brings Revulsion
It was the abortion-on-demand movement more than anything else that brought me to movement revulsiveness. The climbing abortion statistics made me movement-weary, movement-demoralized. I now suspect that a fair amount of my own idealistic history of political action was ill conceived by self-deceptive romanticisms in search of power in the form of prestige that were from the beginning willing to destroy human traditions in the name of humanity, and at the end willing to extinguish the futures of countless unborn children in the name of individual autonomy. So, reflected in the mirror of my own history, I see my own generation and my children’s generation of movement idealisms as naively proud and sadly misdirected, despite good intentions.
Meanwhile, in the period before the reversal, my intellectual dialogue remained embarrassingly constricted almost exclusively to university colleagues and liberal churchmen, the only club I knew. When I later discovered among brilliant Protestant evangelicals a superb quality of exegesis, I wondered why it took so long. And when I found in Roman Catholic friends a marvelous depth of historical and moral awareness, I wondered what it was in my academic and church tradition that had prevented my meeting them, or that had systematically cut me off from dialogue with them. All these questions arose out of a vague sense of grief over lost possibilities and out of confusion that a church tradition which spoke so often about tolerance and universality could be so intolerant and parochial.
The Illusions of Modernity
The philosophical center of modernity is no dark secret. It is a narcissistic hedonism which assumes that moral value is reducible to now feelings and sensory experience. It views human existence essentially as spiritless body, sex as orgasm, psychology as amoral data gathering, and politics as the manipulation of power. It systematically ignores the human capacity of self-transcendence moral reasoning, covenant commitment and self-sacrificial agape.
While the mainline religious leadership should have been giving what it distinctively has to give—namely, firm, critical resistance rooted in a historical perspective that modernity could find instructive—instead the religious leadership withheld its gift and whored after each successive stage of modernity’s profligacy. But it has not been until the last quarter century that there has been wholesale devaluation of the currency of Christian language, symbolism, teaching and witness—a total sellout and bankruptcy to support the fixed habits of modern addictions.
The faddism of theology in the past three decades was not accidental—it was necessary if you understand theology to be a constant catch-up process, trying to keep pace with each new ripple of the ideological river. What else could theology become but faddist, under such a definition?
The same addiction that has degenerated modern art has also infected theology. An inversion of value has occurred in which the highest value is placed not on aesthetic imagination, craft, meaning or beauty, but on novelty and compulsive uniqueness. The more outrageous it is, the more “creative” it is viewed by connoisseurs, and the more boring it is to most of us.
Exactly the same has happened in religious studies with its new theologies every spring season, a wide assortment of “new moralities,” “new hermeneutics,” and (note how the adjectives suddenly have to be pumped up) “revolutionary breakthroughs.”
We have blithely proceeded on the skewed assumption that in theology—just as in corn poppers, electric tooth-brushes and automobile exhaust systems—new is good, newer is better and newest is best. The correction of this distorted analogy will have a shocking effect on seminary campuses long habituated to instant theology. The irony is that these “most innovative” seminaries are regarded in certain circles as better just to that degree that they follow this debilitating assumption. So the “best” ones have by this logic cut themselves systematically off from sustained discourse with classical Christianity.
The fundamental eros of the leading contemporary theological traditions of Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Whitehead and Rahner is accommodation to modernity. This is the underlying motif that unites the seemingly vast differences between many forms of existential theology, process theology, liberation theology and demythologization—all are searching for some more compatible adjustment to modernity.
The agenda for theology at the end of the 20th century, following the steady deterioration of 100 years and the disaster of the last few decades, is to begin to prepare the post-modern Christian community for its third millennium by returning again to the careful study and respectful following of the central tradition of classical Christian exegesis.
Classical Christianity
Classical Christianity has never said that the believer cannot inquire into scientific understandings of reality or probe the edges of undiscovered truth or refine the methods of research to the tiniest caliber. Rather, it has celebrated the hope that all the varied dimensions of truth awaiting our discovery are more profoundly understandable, and make wiser sense, within the frame of reference of the meaning of universal history. This meaning Christians believe to be revealed in Jesus’ resurrection.
By classical Christianity (or ancient ecumenical orthodoxy), I mean the Christian consensus of the first millennium. What is orthodoxy? In brief, it is that faith to which Vincent of Lerins pointed in the concise phrase quad ubique, quad semper, quad ab omnibus creditum est (“that which has been everywhere and always and by everyone believed”). It is the faith generally shared by all Christians, especially as defined in the crucial early periods of Christian doctrinal definition.
These definitions were not written by individuals but were hammered out by synods, councils and consensual bodies. On at least seven notable occasions they met on a worldwide basis to express the universal consent of the believing church to the apostolic teaching as defined, and left as a legacy the seven ecumenical councils that have been accepted by the entire church as normative for almost two millennia.
Taken from the book, After Modernity … What? by Thomas C. Oden. Copyright© 1990 by Thomas C. Oden. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.
Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Buttz professor of theology and ethics at the Theological School, Drew University. He is an ordained United Methodist minister, author of numerous books and a contributing editor of Good News.
by Steve | Nov 14, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: The Benefits Of Waiting On God
By Margaret Therkelsen
Several benefits of waiting on God have already been mentioned throughout my last two articles. I would like to take this opportunity to point out several crucial aspects of the Holy Spirit’s ministry which become ours as we spend time in his presence.
In evangelical circles we tend to mention, almost exclusively, only one side of the Holy Spirit’s marvelous work—the miraculous and instantaneous—as in our rebirth and the subsequent infilling of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, these two supernatural landmark experiences radically change our perspective and inner attitudes. Though we may have sought God for days, months or years, the actual spiritual, transaction frequently happens in a matter of minutes—even seconds!
I believe a grave danger lurks here, a misconception that is foreboding in its consequences. We are apt to think it is God’s only way of handling important, life-changing events. We begin to rely too much on our big experiences, neglecting to give him time each day to perform miracles equally powerful and exciting. Let me share with you just a few of the benefits the Holy Spirit continues to provide as we learn to wait on God.
• The miracle of becoming like God, being transformed into his image. For us today this means a growing dependency upon the Father, even as Jesus experienced when he says in John 5:19 ” … the Son can do nothing by himself.” This means that we do not take the initiative to run ahead of him in any area of our life (Romans 8:29 and I John 3:2).
• The miracle of cultivating with God a friendship so real and so satisfying that, of all our friends, we know him best (John 15:14).
• The miracle of a growing helplessness and dependency on God so we live not out of the flesh, but by his power and strength. He flows out from us to others, yet we come more and more into who we are in him! As we wait on God He will reveal to us his direction for our lives. For each of us, the uniqueness of our individuality in him will begin to come forth (Galatians 2:20).
• The joy of learning to listen to God’s voice, to recognize when he is speaking to us. Because his voice is so real, we can truly converse with one another. God guides us and gives us his wisdom in all of our interactions (John 10:4-5,14,27).
• A growing humility as he reveals our true self to us. As we see how desperately we need God in all areas of our life, the experience of waiting on him helps us to face ourselves under the loving gaze of Jesus (Psalm 51:6).
• A daily conviction of our sin, bringing us to repentance and confession. This is important so there are no barriers of sinful pride before him. Sin is dealt with honestly each day (I John 4:9 and John 16:7-13).
• A marvelous peace as we allow God to take more and more dominion over our thoughts and our emotional life. The fruits and gifts of the Spirit begin to express themselves through us (Isaiah 26:2).
• A greater ability to pray in line with the Father’s will because, as we wait on him, the Holy Spirit searches out the deep things of God, and prays the will of God in life’s challenges. To find his will takes time, and waiting on God affords that leisurely relationship with the Holy Spirit from which he is able to manifest God’s will (I Corinthians 2:6-16).
• A glorious comprehension of just how real and eternally precious the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are to me. For many people, the Father God is detached and impersonal, but as we wait on him we begin to experientially know him as our heavenly Father (John 14:20-21,23). Our rebirth and indwelling by the Holy Spirit are more sweetly and fully realized and lived out in our daily life. God goes about changing and renewing our inner spirit as we submit to his day by day ministrations to us. While we draw nigh to him, he draws nigh to us.
If you have never experienced the joy of waiting on God, I pray you will be strongly impressed by the Holy Spirit to begin that great journey of deepening your receptivity to him. You may find it to be the hardest part of your quiet time, because it requires stillness and quietness, a collecting of every thought around Jesus as preparation for hearing his voice, but it will be the most rewarding of your prayer habits.
“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. How blessed are all those who wait for Him” (Isaiah 30:18).
by Steve | Nov 12, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: Methodists Split In Bolivia
by Roy Howard Beck
Editors’ note: In October, Good News sent Roy Howard Beck to La Paz to observe and report on the turmoil in the Bolivian Methodist Church. Beck, an award-winning journalist, accepted the assignment after he and Good News agreed to an arrangement that guaranteed his full journalistic integrity, regardless of his findings. A more extensive report is available on request. Send $3.00 for postage and handling to Good News.
LA PAZ, Bolivia—Overthrowing the government is common in this country, which has averaged one coup a year since independence in 1825. But when Marina Ramirez arrived for work at the Methodist office building on August 18, she quickly realized it was her church that was in the middle of a full-blown coup.
The 12-story building’s lobby was filled with 40-50 Methodists demonstrating before TV cameras. Ramirez, secretary to Bishop Carlos Huacani, soon discovered they were from a large faction of Bolivians backed by the New York-based UM Board of Global Ministries (BGM). They had occupied the building all night, attempting to claim it for their faction and to oust all supporters of Haucani (pronounced Waw-caw-nee).
Still holding them off that Tuesday morning were 11 employees of the church’s ICHTHUS Bookstore on the ground floor. Juan Javier, bookstore manager, said his faction (pro-Huacani) and the one in the lobby (BGM-backed) had clashed with shouted insults, shoving and some fisticuffs during the night, both sides successfully appealing for help from friends in the police force.
Ramirez quickly slipped into the store to avoid the lobby: “I was afraid one of them would try to get the keys to the bishop’s office from my purse.” Javier wanted to keep church financial records out of the hands of the BGM-backed faction. For almost a year Haucani and his deputies had talked of uncovering examples of past church leaders (now in the BGM faction) who had misused church funds to provide unethical perks for church officials. Javier insisted the overthrow of Bishop Huacani was being orchestrated to cover up those and other past misdeeds.
The pro-Huacani forces told me they were broken-hearted and angry that American Methodists had thrown their money, personnel and power behind the usurpers. For Marina Ramirez and many other members of the large and long-oppressed Aymara Indian minority in Bolivia, Huacani stands as an admired Aymara pioneer in breaking barriers. His position as leader of the autonomous Bolivian church has been a source of fierce pride among many Indians—one which they would not passively allow the New York mission board to help take away, they said. Huacaru, 57, has been married for 28 years, has two adult sons and has spent most of his career as an educational professional after being the first Aymara to graduate from the Methodist school.
Huacani and top church leaders suggested the attempt to depose them was related to their opposition to liberation theology, their resistance to paternalistic control from the New York mission agency and their recent, secondary relationships with the Atlanta- based Mission Society for United Methodists, an unofficial agency rejected by most U.S. bishops.
Dissidents’ View
Out in the lobby, however, all issues looked different. Leaders of the BGM-backed faction told me that they agreed with Javier that the financial records were very important. They wanted to seize them so they could prove Huacani had been mismanaging funds since being elected bishop in January of 1990. They were moving to prevent him and his supporters from a church coup.
According to them, Huacani had (1) abolished various boards of directors to give rum direct control over church institutions, (2) diverted money into a bishop’s discretionary fund which had questionable accountability, and (3) improperly engineered expulsion of more than a dozen lay and clergy leaders on grounds of disloyalty and disorderly conduct.
On June 29, 1992, the church’s five-member Judicial Council (created just five months earlier) had voted to suspend Huacani for three months on the basis of a sexual harassment charge lodged against him. Coming to no conclusion, the council ordered Huacani to go to civil court to prove his innocence.
Huacani denied the harassment charge and refused the implication that he was guilty until proven innocent. His supporters said the council—filled with people who themselves had unanswered financial charges pending against them—had no authority under church rules to suspend.
But many other of the denomination’s leaders said the bishop had forfeited his right to head the church by not having the humility to accept the suspension and answer to another body in the church. This further confirmed their dissatisfaction with what they believed was a far more authoritarian style of leadership than any previous bishop had exercised. They began to organize to topple Huacani.
Within days of the suspension decision, ora Boots, head of BGM’s Latin American operations, flew to La Paz with an auditor (he found records of BGM fund use to be in order). Boots consulted with other U.S. leaders and made the determination that the dissidents represented the true line of authority in the autonomous church. The board cut all BGM funding to people associated with Huacani, providing its $30,000-a-year support to those associated with the effort to wrest control of the Bolivian church’s institutions. In addition, the much larger revenues of Advance Special giving were kept out of pro-Huacani hands. A key BGM missionary to Bolivia, who had been sent back to the United States in June by the Bolivian church’s executive council, was returned to take power of attorney away from Huacani and to exercise control over missionary-started institutions.
Faction Replaces Huacani
On August 15-16, with Huacani and another top church official in a remote Bolivian city, the BGM-backed faction held a meeting in La Paz. It chose a committee of five to replace Huacani until a church-wide election could be held, said Mario Oretea, an anti-Huacani lawyer and member of the Judicial Council. Sunday night the assembly asked the committee to lead efforts to take over all Methodist institutions, Oretea said. Large amounts of money, by Bolivian standards, were at stake. The downtown office building—with the bookstore on the ground floor and the bishop’s office on the 12th—may earn a profit of $80,000 a year, said Eugenio Poma, Bolivian bishop 1986-90. The public and private high schools run by the Methodists in La Paz probably earn just as much, as does the school in the city of Chochabamba, Poma said, suggesting that Huacani cares far more about the money-making institutions than the approximately 180 congregations with their 15,000 members.
On Sunday night the group determined that the church’s financial documents must be seized, Oretea said.
Monday morning a few dozen BGM-backed Methodists entered the central church offices (part of the La Paz schools compound) and ordered pro-Huacani officials to leave. The anti-Huacani faction soon had control of central offices, the schools and their records. That afternoon the faction lay siege on the downtown office building.
On Tuesday morning pro-Huacani forces still had control of the office building, bookstore and the bishop’s offices—and the records.
Marina Ramirez believed it was only a matter of time before the BGM-backed forces would obtain support from police and court to take over. She climbed to the 12th floor where anti-Huacani leaders and two policemen were arguing with the bishop’s security guard that BGM-backed forces now controlled the offices. Ramirez, (only 26, and standing no taller than 5 feet), unlocked the door, maneuvered the security guard into the bishop’s suite and quickly locked the door. For hours, the police pounded on the door, asking her to open up. Without the security guard knowing it, Ramirez hid the inside door key in a potted plant and told the police she had thrown the key out the window. She said she did that to prevent the guard from being tempted to open the door for a high-ranking police officer, and to protect him against police recriminations. Meanwhile, Ramirez copied all computer records onto disks and erased the computer memory. Late in the afternoon while police and opposing Methodists yelled from the hall, Ramirez tossed two boxes of disks and paper records out a back window. She said they landed 12 floors below without breaking and were picked up on cue by pro-Huacani Methodists whom she had called to drive by at that moment.
Responding to a lawsuit by the anti-Huacani faction, a Bolivian court soon ordered all Methodist offices sealed. “We had to close the hospital down for 24 days,” said Freddy Crespo, its director. “The loss to the hospital was about $200,000, and our image was greatly damaged.”
Huacani Calls Assembly
On August 22-23, Huacani called together an emergency session of his church’s General Assembly. It expelled from church membership some 75 members—clergy, teachers and laypersons—believed to have participated in the coup. And it unanimously voted to “withdraw permanently” from relations with the Americans’ Board of Global Ministries which “has interfered in totally internal matters … and sided … in supporting the dissidents that have divided the (church).” The Huacani General Assembly also voted to negotiate a 10-year agreement with the Mission Society, which had given $10,000 in October. When news reports began to surface in U.S. church communications, the battle over the institutions appeared to have been wonby the anti-Huacani faction.
Court Rules for Huacani
But early in September that switched dramatically. A civil court of the Supreme Court canceled all previous moves to seal the institutions from Huacani. Donald Reasoner, a BGM official who spent more than a month in Bolivia investigating the situation, claims the ruling did not technically name Huacani as the rightful authority over all institutions, but “symbolically, it recognizes Haucani’s leadership.”
In effect, squatters’ rights took over. Pro-Huacani forces resumed control of the office building, with its book store and bishop’s suite, the hospital and the school in Cochabamba. The BGM-backed faction continued to hold on to the central church offices and La Paz school complex.
Local newspaper and TV accounts have been full of BGM statements that the Americans hold deeds to all properties the missionaries established in Bolivia before the church became autonomous in the late 1960s. Ironically, Reasoner notes, Nora Boots had been in Bolivia earlier this year to help Huacani begin to transfer the properties to the Bolivian church. Some of the BGM money sent to accomplish that task was used for other purposes, apparently by some of the anti-Huacani faction.
After the courts ruled in favor of Huacani’s suit, BGM’s Reasoner toured a number of congregations across the country, urging them to send delegates to the October 2-4 General Assembly being organized by the anti-Huacani faction. Many members of those churches who refused to be a part of that faction hiked and rode trucks for days to come to La Paz to attend a pro-Huacani meeting. I talked to several of them who said that they were protesting what they saw as a hostile intrusion by New York in their local affairs. Some claimed they saw anti-Huacani leaders offer congregations and their leaders money to join the anti-Huacani faction. On close questioning, I found nobody charging that any BGM personnel were involved.
In October, the Board of Global Ministries sent a former school administrator to assume leadership of the large Methodist school in Cochabamba. But the pro-Huacani faction has repelled all efforts for takeover. The former administrator has returned to the United States, a BGM official said.
Many court challenges are sure to come. The outcome is unpredictable.
Entrenched Sides
When I arrived in La Paz in early October, the coups and counter-coups had settled into a kind of trench civil war. Both camps had succeeded in finding police to help patrol entrances to the institutions they controlled.
At the pro-Haucani-held office building and the anti-Huacani-held central offices, large numbers of Indians packed the hallways and rooms. Many had left their primitive farms on the 13,000-foot-high Altiplano plateau and traveled long hours down into the volcano crater that holds La Paz.
The indians and a few mestizos (from the mixed European-Indian class that controls much of Bolivia) were encamped in the offices—cooking, bathing, sleeping and acting as defensive warriors against potential raids by the other Methodist faction. Both camps had stories about the other engaging in property vandalism and physical violence. Both sides had photos—some of them bloody—to back up their assertions.
Most people with whom I talked on both sides referred to their fellow Methodists in the opposite faction as corrupt, greedy liars. Virtually every charge leveled by one side—vote-buying, bullying—could be heard from the other side. There was little sign of middle ground or hope for reconciliation. The church was imbued with the tragic schism of a civil war.
Key Issues
Where does that leave American United Methodists? Key questions arise over whether Americans acted wisely in siding with one faction or the other. Has the American presence moderated tensions or enflamed them into this public spectacle of intractable church warfare?
Following are some of the key issues in assessing the situation:
• Validity of Huacani’s Suspension. United Methodists who respect foreign denominations’ autonomy do not take sides in a local conflict without clear understanding that one side is the true, lawful and sole representative of that church, and without an urgent need to take sides.
BGM officials saw that clarity coming primarily from one pivotal event—the Judicial Council’s June 29 vote to suspend the bishop. Once the bishop refused the suspension, he was outside the recognized processes of the church, BGM officials say. Thus, they accepted as fully valid later gatherings of Methodists that systematically excluded Huacani and his supporters from deliberations. The urgency was in the fear that Huacani was consolidating power so that soon he would be untouchable.
But if, as pro-Huacani officials claim, the Judicial Council did not have the power to suspend the bishop, it would appear the true line of authority in the church runs through the gatherings in August, September and October, presided over by Huacani and the church’s leadership.
Both factions have had several church-wide gatherings claiming hundreds of representatives from the majority of the Methodist congregations. Emotional, sincere and gripping testimonials from common Bolivian Methodists filled the gatherings on both sides.
My perusal of information on the gatherings suggests that the anti-Huacani faction has had at least an edge in drawing the more impressive representation from throughout the country, and certainly from international colleagues. But I do wonder how many Bolivians decided which faction to support based on the public pronouncements that one side was being backed by the full power and resources of the Americans’ mission board, which had planted the denomination and still lay claim to most of its institutions. “The question here is, ‘What is autonomy and what role do these outside agencies have?’” said the Rev. Luis Palomo, director of the Methodist Seminary in Costa Rica, who met with both Bolivian factions in October, but was a guest speaker at a large pro-Huacani women’s federation assembly.
• Charges Against the Bishop. Most of the accusations against Huacani are that he is dictatorial and improperly has consolidated power over institutions and funds. Almost nobody who looks carefully disagrees that the psychology-professor-turned bishop has a domineering, authoritative—if not authoritarian—management style. But his allies say the style is understandable considering his crusade to clean up operations and make them run more like a business. Reasoner said BGM officials recognize that some of the accusations made by Huacani against people on the BGM-backed side are valid and will need to be handled once the newly constituted church stabilizes some.
The Judicial Council took no action against Huacani on the basis of any charge of financial mismanagement.
Mario Oretea, the Judicial Council member, explained to me that the suspension was recommended only in relation to a charge made last January by a former woman district superintendent that the bishop had sexually harassed her. “If she (the superintendent) had a charge, she should have proved it in court,” Huacani told me. But she never filed the charge of harassment which “I reject completely; it is a big lie,” Huacani said. The Judicial Council found the charge beyond its competence to make a determination, Oretea said. But it still suspended Huacani for the purpose of his clearing his name in civil court by successfully suing the superintendent for slander, and proving his innocence.
• Unresolved Old Issues. BGM’s Reasoner spent several weeks looking at documentation and listening to both sides in numerous interviews. His recommendation was that the anti-Huacani faction’s charges were stronger than the pro-Huacani faction’s. He acknowledges, however, that “these problems did not originate with Carlos Huacani.” Deep problems and unresolved conflicts within the church, going back decades, are behind a lot of the fighting. Huacani’s aggressive style in dealing with some of those problems, as well as other issues, were a catalyst for the unfortunate divisions of the last few months, Reasoner concluded.
When I talked to Reasoner a week after I returned from Bolivia, he named two major underlying “fault lines” exacerbating tensions. I already had written down the same ones on the basis of my interviews.
1. Continuation of a lay-clergy fight. A lay movement has dominated the church almost since its autonomy. In the anti-Huacani faction, clergy power has reasserted itself. Bolivia only had 26 ordained clergy before the schism. All but one of those—and all 11 district superintendents—are allied with the anti-Huacani group which is upgrading the status of clergy. Bishop Huacani, like Poma before him, is a layman.
2. Long-standing ethnic tensions. The Aymara Indians constitute the majority of Methodists in a church that was mestizo-dominated before church autonomy. Since then, the Aymara unity has preserved almost total control of the church in the hands of the Indians. But the Aymara have been split in this year’s struggle. The Aymara are highly visible in both factions, although mestizos are disproportionately influential in the anti-Huacani group.
And then there is the question of culture. Bishop Lloyd Knox, outgoing president of BGM’s world missions sections, complains that people in the Bolivian church have picked up the worst aspects of the culture, in terms of accumulating perks with positions and propensity to bribe and misuse police connections. A former U.S. State Department official spoke of the same problem. And Jorge Panteliz, pastor and seminary professor with the BGM-backed faction, complains that everything in Bolivia is tinged with corruption, especially the courts, which he charges were bribed by pro-Huacani forces (which vehemently deny the charge).
Freddy Crespo, the pro-Huacani hospital director, suggested that an international auditing firm agreeable to both factions be brought in to review all records—those seized by the BGM-backed group and those thrown out the back window by Marina Ramirez. Then let everybody who owes the church money, regardless of their faction, pay up, Crespo said.
It’s a challenge worth considering by any church group interested in being a channel of peace in this crater of distrust, fear and brokenness.
Roy Howard Beck is former associate editor of the United Methodist Reporter and was the first recipient of the UM Communicator of the Year award (1983). He is the Washington editor of the Social Contract, a quarterly journal.
by Steve | Nov 11, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: In Pursuit of Truth
By Richard John Neugaus
Every four years the people called Methodist gather at General Conference to discern where God may be leading the movement launched by John and Charles Wesley in 1729.
Retrospectives from the 1992 conference held in Louisville suggest that the Methodists are sharply divided but not hopelessly split. For the most part, the lines of division track the conservative/liberal divide within the general culture. On the votes deemed to be the most telling, the one thousand elected delegates decided disputes by minuscule majorities sometimes going one way, sometimes another. On key votes regarding homosexuality and the national bureaucracy, some conservatives claimed victory, while liberals more or less graciously interpreted the same votes as representing little more than a delay of the inevitable. The dynamics of change, they confidently believe, are on their side.
Diversity Within Limits
Tex Sample, professor of ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, explained the Methodist situation: “This is a centrist church. The delegates want diversity, as much inclusion of people as they can possibly get, as long as they don’t have to buy into a position they think is divisive.” That rather neatly summarizes the circumstance in which other mainline/old-line churches find themselves. And of course the description applies beyond the boundaries of oldline Protestantism. The goal is to be as inclusive and diverse as possible, but that is not the highest goal. Institutional stability, which requires the avoidance of “divisiveness,” is trump. Methodism, like other oldline groups, has been in an institutional free fall for many years now. Those on all sides of disputed questions are concerned, if not alarmed, by that reality, and are therefore reluctant to push their causes to the point where they might further debilitate the institution they wish to win over to their side.
Sample’s formula of “diversity just short of divisiveness” works in favor of the liberal faction that also dominates the national bureaucracies. Whether the issue is homosexuality, feminism, or multiculturalism, the assumption is that the “progressive” causes are on the offensive. The church may not be “ready” to embrace them now, but through a sustained process of “education” popular resistance can be overcome. The rubric of inclusiveness mean that all viewpoints must be represented, and those minority viewpoints that have been least heard in the past must be more than equally represented.
The loser in this process, of course, is the question of truth. When inclusiveness reigns, those who appeal to the Bible or to the classical Christian tradition or to the Wesleyan heritage are representing simply one viewpoint among others. To the traditionalists this is intolerable, since it means that truth and falsehood are equally represented in the church’s decision making. But their unhappiness with this situation, indeed their insistence that there is a distinction between truth and falsehood, registers in the process as no more than one more opinion to be included in an outcome that aims at accommodating maximum diversity short of institutional divisiveness. The entire process becomes one of accommodating opinions and passions rather than of weighing arguments. Thus, the procedural triumph over the deliberative in an approach that is always pressing the envelope to be more inclusive. Thus does the “middle” get moved inexorably toward that which had previously been inadmissible.
There are some understandable, and in many ways attractive, human dimensions that accelerate this process. For instance, William D. Lux, an Iowa farmer who sat on the homosexuality committee, described his feelings when a colleague on the panel told him she was a lesbian “in a committed couple relationship.” Mr. Lux told the delegates that he continued to believe that the Bible prohibited homosexual activity, “But, at the same time, within this committee we have built a level of trust and understanding where we can speak to each other under the umbrella of Jesus Christ.” The image of Jesus Christ as an umbrella is reminiscent of the late Lee Atwater’s description of the Republican Party as a “big tent” that can accommodate pro-choice and pro-life viewpoints. It is an image that well serves the mandate to be inclusive. Whatever the Bible and the Wesleyan tradition may say about sexual ethics, Mr. Lux and many like him have decided to be understanding, compassionate, and just plain nice people who are not about to pass severe judgement on the practices or views of others whom they have come to like. The Christian imperative, after all, is to be “accepting.” Isn’t that what the New Testament means by love? (It isn’t, of course, but the equation of love and niceness is far advanced in our culture and in our churches.)
Ensuring Apostasy
Some of the dynamics at work here were well understood by Alexander Pope more than two centuries ago.
“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace,”
Three steps: to endure, to pity, to embrace. To endure is not to judge and certainly not to exclude. To pity is to be understanding and compassionate. To embrace is to officially approve, perhaps at the 1996 General Conference after the constituency has been sufficiently “educated.”
“Diversity just short of divisiveness” is a formula tailor-made to ensure apostasy. At its heart is the ascendancy of sociological and institutional principles of representation over theological principles of deliberation. At its heart is the relativizing and eviscerating of the question of the truth. Again, the problem is in no way limited to Methodism. There is hardly a religious community in America that has not succumbed to the imperative of inclusiveness, sometimes employing elaborate quota systems to ensure that the enemies of the tradition have at least equal representation with its defenders. But all such communities were originally constituted by a claim to truth, and cannot long survive the abandonment of the claim.
The defenders of the constituting truth claims are regularly, and successfully, portrayed as reactionaries resisting the inevitable course of progress. In the struggle between liberals and conservatives, each accuses the other of cultural accommodationism. Conservatives, it is said, are uncritically captive to the church culture of the past, while they accuse liberals of joining the Gadarene rush to accommodate the church to the secular culture of the present. But this again is a sociological rather than a theological dispute. It is doubtful that most of our churches are still capable of theological argument. Such an argument assumes that there is indeed a word from God, that there is normative truth by which the life of the Christian community is to be ordered if it is to be a Christian community. That very assumption is deemed to represent a conservative bias. Under the rubric of inclusiveness, it will be admitted to the debate, but it will be counted as one viewpoint among others. When the appeal to normative truth is registered as a viewpoint to be taken into account, the appeal to normative truth is denied.
Conservatives and moderates came away from Louisville feeling that they had gained some ground. If, however, “diversity just short of divisiveness” is the controlling dynamic, they have only slowed the loss of ground. Their resistance demonstrated to their opponents, who do not want to destroy the institution, that the institution of United Methodism is more fragile than the party of progress had hoped. The progressives will have to go more slowly in educating the constituency to embrace their agenda of change. In Methodism and in all the churches, those who are loyal to constituting traditions will have to do much better than what apparently happened in Louisville. They will have to demonstrate how traditions that brought communities into being can faithfully develop in response to new challenges. They will have to make a persuasive case that truth is not the enemy but the indispensable support of other great goods, such as compassion and understanding. Absent the capacity to deliberate about theological truth, religious communities are defenseless before the ravages of sociological transformation disguised as progress. It is not easy to make the case for truth in a culture whose intellectual elites (very active also in churches) have come to believe that Pilate’s question to Jesus—What is truth?—represents philosophical sophistication.
Richard John Neuhaus is editor in chief of First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 400, New York, NY 10010), and the author of several books including The Naked Public Square and Freedom for Ministry. Reprinted with permission from the October 1992 First Things.
by Steve | Nov 9, 1992 | Archive - 1992
Archive: Under One Roof
How Charismatics and Traditionalists Can Live in the Same Church
By Joe Harris
One of the ongoing struggles in the UM Church is between those who have experienced the “gifts of the Spirit” often identified as the “charismatic” experience and those who have been life-long traditional United Methodists, but have not had this experience as a part of their faith journey. The struggle can affect both clergy and laity, and in its extreme it has caused deep division and hurt in many UM congregations, even within families. Sometimes this is simply a power struggle that is disguised in theological or experiential terms. Sometimes it’s a personality struggle caught up in “religious” dogma. At times it is a struggle of “hidden agendas” that may have little to do with the charismatic experience.
The 1976 session of the General Conference of the United Methodist Church concluded that the charismatic experience was a genuine experience for the people called Methodist, compatible with our doctrine and polity within certain parameters and guidelines. Therefore, those UM churches which have historically focused on charismatic expressions with integrity and within the established guidelines have little conflict between a traditionally UM experience and a charismatic one.
The struggle often comes when charismatic United Methodists (pastor or laity) move to a more traditional church that is not quite like the one they left, often feeling abandoned because they are unable to find a church that will even be open to their experience. Also, charismatic pastors are too often appointed to churches to whom that experience is foreign. Unfortunately, when something is not familiar, human nature tends to fear it, and many pastors either feel they must “hide” their experience or change their church until they can be open. This often causes tensions, struggles, fights and in some cases, church splits.
A charismatic pastor was once appointed to a traditional church. He concluded that there were other priorities that his new church needed to focus on, so he planned to keep his experience to himself. Unknown to him, there was a small but vocal Sunday school class which had experienced the “charismatic renewal.”
When the members got wind that their new pastor also had occasionally participated in renewal activities, they rejoiced that now, finally, God had answered their prayers and sent someone who understood them and their needs. It turns out that their needs included “converting” the rest of the church to the charismatic experience. They were convinced that if the rest of the church went through this experience the church would be much more “spiritual” and do more for the kingdom of God. Feeling alienated, a “charismatic corner” developed in the church that became isolated, resentful and even disruptive.
How can we deal with this potentially disruptive scenario which, unfortunately, happens more than we want to admit?
Clarify The Language
Understanding the difference between a “charismatic” and a “Pentecostal” experience might very well be at the heart of much of our struggles. The Pentecostal experience with its emphasis on the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit,” and its inference that one must speak in tongues, offers a different direction from traditional charismatic understandings. As Dr. Robert Tuttle reminded us in his article, The Charismatic Movement, Its Historical Base and Wesleyan Framework, “Classical Pentecostalism organizes its converts into separate churches, charismatics do not. Charismatics encourage their numbers to remain with their local churches. Although charismatics are open to all spiritual gifts and experiences subsequent to conversion, they try not to isolate those gifts and experiences as marks of spirituality. They chose to interpret them in the light of their own traditions.”
Too often there is confusion over how to express the charismatic experience in a mainline, traditional church, and how it differs from Pentecostal experience and theology. It is clear to this writer that classical Pentecostalism is incompatible with contemporary United Methodism. On the other hand, charismatic experiences interpreted through a Wesleyan framework certainly have a place in contemporary United Methodism. It is the lack of understanding of terms and their theological development that has caused so many problems.
Conversely those who have not experienced the charismatic movement get confused. They often derive their definitions from generalizations, television caricatures, extremists or mythologies. They, too, lack an understanding of the terms. They might believe that all who are open to the “gifts of the spirit” are Pentecostal and, therefore, would be better off in another church. Instead of seeking understanding about the charismatic experience, some seem to immediately condemn and reject. Even if they disagree with what they see, traditionalists should understand the terms and disagree with proper understanding.
Sensitivity To Needs
The dilemma for charismatics and non-charismatics is whether or not they can co-exist. Because we United Methodists pride ourselves in claiming our theological diversity, often it becomes a source of friction and ill will among church members. We not only must raise the level of tolerance, but find ways to meet the spiritual needs of the entire congregation with integrity.
Unity is an important part of church life. We must not settle for a unity that compromises principles, but a unity that is based on serenity, love and service to one another. Inclusiveness is not just a term we United Methodists use when referring to race or gender, but also in a theological reference.
Accountability
Laity and clergy of UM churches must understand that without accountability, diversity cannot work. Ultimately we are all accountable to Christ, but he has also given the church other resources of accountability.
Although not a perfect document, our Book of Discipline gives us specific accountability guidelines for both lay and clergy that we can find the key to peaceful co-existence between charismatics and non-charismatics. As for clergy, they are accountable to the bishops and cabinets of their annual conferences as pastors. Appointments should be made on the basis of gifts and graces as they match a particular church. Because of the accountability outlined in the Book of Discipline, extremists (be they charismatic or not) are not welcome. If one cannot live within the UM system of accountability, then one has the option of helping to change that system or of finding a more compatible denomination. It is a breaking of our covenant as clergy to ignore our system of accountability.
Likewise, for laity, the Book of Discipline and their pastor compose some of their accountability structures. We appoint pastors to lead congregations. Hebrews 13:17 identifies the general obligations of a congregation to: “Obey [be accountable to] your leaders and submit to their authority. ” It doesn’t say that those pastors or leaders are perfect, but that in God’s accountability structure the “buck” stops at the pastor’s desk. If laity are unable to live with the appointed leadership, they may wait until another leader is appointed or attend a more compatible church.
All this may seem too cut and dried, but without accountability there will only be chaos. Yet I am convinced that accountability for both charismatics and non-charismatics does not have to be seen as threatening, if we are all open to the following:
- Discipleship. Disciples of Christ realize that accountability to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to Scripture and to one another marks the life of a true disciple. Disciples are concerned first with the well being of the church and others, and respond appropriately before any personal agendas are met.
- Faith. Even if I disagree with those who are in authority over me, if my faith in God is such that even though I may not understand why things are happening as they are, I can keep my confidence in God that all things will turn out according to his will.
- Prayer. We underestimate the power of prayer to change things. To pray unceasingly is to live life as if you were looking through the mind and heart of God. If we took this seriously, accountability would not be an issue and we would better learn to love on another.
Practical Guidelines
These are some practical things that all charismatic and non-charismatic should remember if we are to become part of the solution to these issues rather than part of the problem.
1. Servant Ministry. The biblical witness is one of service to humanity in the name of Christ, esteeming others over ourselves. The answers to our problems are rarely reached by packing up our bags and moving on. We must bloom where we are planted. The rule cannot be my way or the highway! Remember that John Wesley encouraged his people to attend the dead Anglican Churches regularly, realizing that they could get spiritual nourishment through other avenues—class meetings, love feasts, Bible studies, etc.—and knowing their presence would be a positive light in the church of his birth, and that their ability to serve hurting humanity was critical to Anglican ministry.
Pastors with charismatic views must also learn how to bloom where they are planted. Demonstrate servanthood love for those you have been assigned to shepherd over. Remember, Joseph had some rotten assignments too. He was sent to Egypt with a caravan of Ishmaelites. But later he told his brothers, “you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).
If every UM minister were to see every appointment as an opportunity from God to serve his people, it really would not matter the circumstances of the appointment.
2. Ask yourself, “What is God trying to teach me?” Though one may feel the necessity to go elsewhere to be fed spiritually, don’t neglect the fact that God may be trying to teach you new things. Perhaps the spiritual fruits of patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22) are in need of further expression in your life (perhaps even more so than the ecstatic gifts).
If you are a charismatic in a conservative, evangelical church, maybe God is trying to teach you more about being systematic in your faith, and more careful about your doctrinal beliefs. Too many have relied on teachings that have come from someone’s personal experience rather than the Word of God. Some charismatics turn into “charismaniacs” with every new wind of doctrine that comes from their favorite charismatic teacher. Their experience with God has tended to be shallow, with a lot of flash, noise and energy.
If you are a traditional Methodist, maybe God is wanting you to become open to the fact that his Spirit is moving in different ways upon different people. Maybe God wants you to learn to take the best of the traditional church and be open to the new and different styles of worship, singing and praising. It can be an inspiration for creativity in the future. The traditional church can help bring a balance to the “new teachings” of some movements which too often have amounted to warmed-over, old heresies the church dealt with years ago.
3. Be aware of the instant gratification syndrome that affects our country and our churches. That syndrome usually manifests itself in the kind of thinking that says, “if I don’t find what I want at this church or if this church won’t change into what I want it to be, I will just move to another church that is more to my liking.” What’s wrong with that kind of thinking? The preponderance of “I’s.” If we have really given our life to Christ we need to replace the “I’s” with “what would Christ have me to do?”
In many parts of the world today there is still only one church in an area. People are forced to be a part of that church or go unchurched. What do they do when they get upset or don’t like what’s going on? What many do is live with that church and the imperfections born out of its humanness, and struggle with it through its problems, praying it into maturity.
In this country however, the tendency is to move to an independent, charismatic church down the street. The New Testament puts a particular emphasis on preserving the unity of the church. Are you helping to do that? John Wesley decided to stay within the Anglican Church and let them throw him out if they wanted to.
4. Don’t play the blame game. Charismatics sometimes complain that they just don’t feel comfortable raising their hands or saying amen in traditional worship. That is not the congregation’s problem, it’s yours! If you are worried about what the people around you think, it may be the excuse you’ re looking for to start church hopping. On the other hand, raising one’s hand or saying amen may be different in many settings, but it is rarely disruptive, and has rarely resulted in a person’s being asked to leave. People may stare and murmur, but if that worries you then it is a problem you have to work out and not blame others because things aren’t more comfortable.
5. Avoid pushing, manipulating or pressuring your own view about worship on the congregation. You may really like the style of worship used at charismatic churches and desire that for your church. Do not assume that it is God’s will however, for your church to move into that direction. These forms of worship may or may not bring renewal to your church. It also may be that their imposition will split the church. Seek God’s will within the context he has given you for your church service, not your own personal like and dislikes.
6. Be patient. It is sometimes easier to start a church than to renew an existing one. God is concerned about the renewal of every church. Yet, he is in it for the long haul and if renewal is really going to take hold, those who are advocating it (charismatic and non-charismatic) must also be in it for the long haul.
Joe Harris is the district superintendent of the Ardmore district in Ardmore, Oklahoma. This article is adapted from a seminar he presented at the 1992 Aldersgate meeting in Oklahoma City. He is on the boards of both the United Methodist Renewal Services Fellowship and Good News.
