Several years ago, I was asked to write up a brief theology of disagreement, which was later published in the Wesleyan Theological Journal. Here is a lengthy excerpt from what I take to be the heart of the paper. All I would add now to what I wrote then is an argument along these lines: God is a happy happening, a giddy thing, “the laughter at the ground of being.” He is happy because who he is for himself and who he is for us is the same.
Why Does It Matter If/How We Disagree?
Life as the Church is possible only as we become convinced down to our bones that God is at work in our disagreements, that conflict, rightly engaged, can be good for us. But, of course, not all theological disagreements are good. We must not glamorize our struggles or romanticize disunity. And we have to resist settling for bad disagreements just as fiercely as we insist on the need for good ones. Peace, not conflict, is what we are made for.[1] And many, perhaps almost all, of our disagreements develop from and are carried along by our ignorance, poor character, or bad faith. Lonergan suggests that real theological disagreements arise either from poor work on the theologian’s part—that is, by the failure to observe what he identifies as the “transcendental precepts”—or from a lack of true conversion.[2] I have no doubt that his account tells part of the story. But it certainly does not capture the whole of it. Truth be told, what seem to be theological disagreements very often arise from and are borne along by other conflicts rooted deeply in hidden personal and interpersonal anxieties and ambitions.[3] But at least some of our theological disagreements, I want to insist, are in fact the upshot of the Spirit’s transforming work taking shape in our as-yet unperfected lives, moving us toward the “fullness of Christ” (Eph. 1.23) in which we find shalom. And I want to say more: good theological disagreements not only free us for fuller, more faithful agreement; they just so also become a form of our witness to the world.[4] Chad Pecknold observes that so much modern theological disagreement, in contrast with medieval scholastic debates, only deepen the wounds of the Church, “enforcing the habits of ecclesial division.”[5] But it need not be so. In fact, good theological conflict is precisely what is needed if we are going to move toward the genuine and sanctifying unity promised to us as Christ’s Body and the Spirit’s Temple.
The problem is, such thinking often cuts against our grain. Wesleyans and Pentecostals, by and large, are pietistic evangelicals,[6] and pietism, in its diseased forms, trains us to apprehend the world through the lens of a hyper-individualist, institutional, consumerist, and utilitarian frame of reference that “undermines the ontological truth of the Church,” separating “practical piety” from the truth of dogma and the mystery of the sacraments.[7] As Christos Yannaras explains,
When piety ceases to be an ecclesial event and turns into an individual moral attainment, then a heretic or even a non-Christian can be just as virtuous as a “Christian.” Piety loses its connection with truth and its ontological content; it ceases to be related to man’s full, bodily participation in the life of God—to the resurrection of the body, the change of matter into “word,” and the transfiguration of time and space into the immediacy of communion. Piety is transformed into an entirely uniform manner of being religious which inevitably makes differences of “confession” or tradition relative, or even assimilates the different traditions, since they all end in the same result—the moral “improvement” of human life.[8]
We obviously should not accept Yannaras’ account uncritically. But he is right, I think, as it relates to our movements and traditions at their weakest. Diseased forms of pietism not only generate bad theological disagreement (thus widening the Church’s divisions) but also make good theological disagreement (for the sake of the healing and strengthening of Christ’s body) incredibly difficult, if not impossible.[9]
How Can we Disagree Faithfully?
So, what are we to do? How can our communities develop the character necessary to sustain good theological disagreement? First, our understanding of what it means to be the Church has to undergo a conversion. We have to recognize and submit to the primacy of the Church’s communal share in the divine life, rediscovering an understanding of “full gospel” salvation as corporate intercessory participation in God’s mission for the sake of the world.
Second, we must reimagine the nature and purpose of orthodoxy. Instead of conceiving of it as a wholly-realized, already-perfected system of thought, we need to recognize it as a fullness of meaning toward which we strive, knowing full well we cannot master it even when in the End we know as we are known.[10] Because the Church’s integrity is gift, not achievement, we can never know in advance “what will be drawn out of us by the pressure of Christ’s reality, what the full shape of a future orthodoxy might be.”[11] Williams has it right, I believe:
Orthodoxy is not a system first and foremost of things you’ve got to believe, things you’ve got to tick off, but is a fullness, a richness of understanding. Orthodox is less an attempt just to make sure everybody thinks the same, and more like an attempt to keep Christian language as rich, as comprehensive as possible. Not comprehensive in the sense of getting everything in somehow, but comprehensive in the sense of keeping a vision of the whole universe in God’s purpose and action together.[12]
To be sure, “not every spirit is of Christ, [and] not every way of speaking and acting is capable of being transparent to Christ.”[13] And so our traditions bear the responsibility to hold us accountable for our claims about God and the gospel. But instead of using doctrine ideologically—that is, as a gatekeeping device—we need to use it formatively, expecting and allowing for the confession, proclamation, and teaching of Christian doctrine over time to sanctify our imaginations.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, we need to ground our thinking of agreement and disagreement in the character of God’s own life. Of course, some are sure to say that such a grounding is impossible. If, as the dogmatic tradition has said, there is one divine will, then God does not and cannot disagree with God. God is not in any way in conflict with God. There are no intra-Trinitarian controversies. But if God cannot disagree with God, then how can our disagreements conflicts, and controversies be godly? We can, I think, start to develop an answer by building on Jenson’s ground-breaking insight: while it is true that God does not disagree with God, God can and does surprise God.[14] I am convinced that this hope of divine surprise promises to cast our disagreements in a better light, making it possible for us to imagine how we might disagree savingly.
Simply put, a living, loving God is necessarily a God capable of surprising—not only us, but himself as well.[15] And therein lies our hope: because we have been filled with the Spirit of the living God whose delighted and delighting love has been “shed abroad in our hearts,” we can and should engage passionately in our disagreements, confident that God is at work in and through them for God’s own delight and for our good, always in ways we cannot anticipate, gauge, or control. In fact, that may prove to be the best way for us to discern the Spirit’s leading in any given situation. Mid-argument, we can and should stop to ask ourselves how God is using our disagreement to work in and through us a wonder not otherwise possible.
[1] On this point, I am in cautious agreement with John Webster (Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason [London: T&T Clark, 2012, p. 151), who holds that in “[i]n order to speak about conflict… theology must first speak about peace, because peace, not conflict, is the condition of creatures in both their original and their final states.” But this line of thought, because it starts with Adam and not with Christ, risks idealizing a peace that is made without conflict, and in the process fails to do justice not only to the glories of the End, which are “exceeding abundantly beyond” the glories of the Beginning, but also the possibilities of redemptive, sanctifying conflict in the present.
[2] In this scheme, merely superficial disagreements emerge due to differences in language and/or conceptual frameworks; see Elizabeth Maclaren, “Theological Disagreement and Functional Specialties” in Patrick Corcoran (ed.), Looking at Lonergan’s Method (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), pp. 73-87 (75).
[3] It is crucial for us always to be discerning whether or not our disagreements really are about theology. And, as a rule, how we are engaging those with whom we disagree probably tells the tale: if we cannot engage peaceably, in good spirits, then the disagreement is not about theology, but about our personal needs and interests.
[4] But only if, as Webster says (Domain of the Word, p. 169), we engage in theological controversy “in a way which displays and magnifies the truth of the gospel whose author and content is peace.”
[5] Chad Pecknold, “Ecclesial Theology in the University” in Tom Greggs, Rachel Muers, and Simeon Zahl (eds.) The Vocation of Theology Today: A Festschrift for David Ford (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), pp. 314-329 (315).
[6] See Donald Dayton, “The Use of Scripture in the Wesleyan Tradition” in Robert K. Johnston, The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1997), pp. 121-136.
[7] Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), p. 127.
[8] Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, p. 126.
[9] Perhaps this because these forms of pietism cannot separate differences of opinion from differences of will, to use Webster’s idiom (see Webster, Domain of the Word, p. 169).
[10] As Herbert McCabe (God Still Matters, p. 211) has it, we cannot identify for certain the “central trends of tradition” until the Last Judgment makes them clear to us.
[11] Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past, p. 58.
[12] Rowan Williams, “What is Heresy Today?” n.p. available online: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/568/archbishops-lecture-what-is-heresy-today; accessed: 17 January 2015.
[13] Williams, “What Is Heresy Today?” n.p.
[14] See Robert W. Jenson, “The Hidden and Triune God” in Steven J. Wright (ed.), Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), pp. 69-77 (76).
[15] Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol. 1, p. 198.
To borrow a phrase I picked up from Wesley, I’ve recently begun to scruple at the claim God is outside of time. It seems it may be more fitting to say time exists within God (at least in some sense, i.e. “in him we live and move and have our being”). Is this relevant to Jenson’s ideas about surprise?