| Bishop's CornerDebating Doctrine
By Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker
 Last year I
participated in a theological debate with Bishop Joseph Sprague of the
Northern Illinois Conference by writing a response to his discussion of
the person and work of Jesus Christ published in his new book, “Affirmations
of a Dissenter.” Our two papers were widely distributed across The
United Methodist Church and also published in a more simplified form in
“The United Methodist Review.”
Bishop Sprague is attempting to reinterpret the
language of the ecumenical church in ways that are meaningful to
people in our culture today. While affirming the validity of such a
project, I have raised questions about some of the conclusions of
Bishop Sprague’s work in light of Scripture and the living Christian
tradition. Since public disagreement of bishops is unusual, the
Council of Bishops addressed this debate in its Standing Committee on
Teaching (of which I am a member) in Puerto Rico last November. The
Committee affirmed the value of theological debate in the Council, and
it will seek to encourage more of it in the future.
What has surprised many is the desire of people
in The United Methodist Church to talk about the fundamental issues of
Christian belief, especially the central issue of the meaning of the
person and work of Jesus Christ. While realizing that the church must
continue to organize itself to fulfill its mission and address public
issues from the perspective of the gospel of Jesus Christ, many also
want the church to be a community that is engaged in serious
discussion about our beliefs, how they should be expressed today and
why they matter.
I believe that because the church in America in
the 21st century is being called by the living God to be a missionary
church in a missionary context, our most important tasks are to teach
people what Christians believe and how Christians behave in
contradistinction to other ways of believing and behaving. My
conviction is that we should teach people the witness of the apostles
of Jesus Christ as it has been understood in the universal tradition
of the church according to the distinctive emphasis of the Wesleyan
heritage.
I also believe that we need to learn how to
discuss and even debate with one another without disparaging one
another as persons and as Christians. Name-calling and personal
attacks upon one another are contrary to the will of God; they are
what John Wesley forbid as “evil speaking.” The church has not
always been successful in clarifying its teaching without denouncing
those who have taught a personal theology that is different from that
of the church as a whole. For example, it is one of the ironies of
church history that the religious order in the Catholic Church known
as the Dominicans was begun by St. Dominic to protect the persecution
of heretics and to establish formal public debates between church
leaders and heretics, but the Dominicans became the ones who operated
the Inquisition which persecuted heretics!
The church needs to be a community in which
there is freedom to seek the truth of God in respectful conversation.
Without this freedom none of us can grow in understanding. All of us
change our views over time: there are things I believe at age 54 I
could not believe at age 24. At the same time, we should test our
opinions against the doctrine of the universal church of all ages,
cultures and places, knowing that the Spirit of God has illumined the
mind of the transcultural churches as it has developed over the
centuries.
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