Lecture 8: The Sources of Theology: Rebuilding the Stage of Truth

The lecture, section by section

1. From what truth is to where truth is found

   The course has argued the ontology of truth, that truth is, and what grounds it; now comes theological method, the question filling more recent theological writing than almost any other: where do we go for truth, and how? Christianity cannot live without transcendent truth, for as Paul says, if there is no resurrection our faith is worthless; the open question is not whether transcendent truth exists but how we reach it. Everyone in the room would name Scripture as the primary source, and then disagree at once about how Scripture is to be interpreted, which is exactly why the stage must be rebuilt with care.

2. The end of the objectivity myth

   The older ideal, nineteenth and twentieth century thinking, was to approach Scripture as an objective being: strip off experience, silence emotion, cut away tradition, and read alone. Current theological method abandons that ideal, not merely because it is impossible, only God is objective, but because many perspectives see better than one. Men and women, married and single, Texan and Romanian, each read with a differently arranged stage, and the goal is not to make every stage identical but to let the perspectives correct and complete one another.

3. Theology in community

   The theme returns with new depth. Before the fall, with nothing sinful hindering his walk with God, Adam alone was pronounced not good: even a perfect individual relationship with God was not the design. The New Testament's picture is the body, where the finger joins the hand and the hand the arm, member connected to member rather than each part wired separately to the head, and the world is to know the believers by their love for one another. That is why the course now adds discussion groups, and why the teachers freely admit trading answers in the office until a third, better one emerges: theology done alone is not just lonely but insufficient.

4. The six sources

   Wesley's quadrilateral named four sources: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The lecture expands to six, splitting emotions from experience and adding general revelation: tradition, religious information handed down; reason, the mind's capacity for logical and analytic thought; experience, what has happened to you; emotions, the feeling nature you were made with; general revelation, what creation tells; and special revelation, God's supernatural self-disclosure, recorded above all in Scripture. Sola scriptura, rightly held, never meant Scripture as the only occupant of the stage: the Reformers called Scripture the norming norm, the norm that norms all norms and cannot itself be normed.

5. The Roman Catholic stage

   Rome confesses dual revelation: tradition and Scripture together at the front, twin authoritative modes of God's speech, with reason and general revelation on stage and experience at the back. But practically, the lecture observes, tradition edges ahead, because tradition speaks with present-tense relevance to today's questions in a way an ancient text must be interpreted to do. The drift was honest: the apostles' disciples passed on the interpretations they had received, generations memorized the interpretations and lost the explanations, the text stayed in Latin the people no longer spoke, and eventually the interpretations stood where Scripture had stood.

6. The Eastern Orthodox stage

   The East confesses tradition and Scripture forward, but its tradition is fixed in the seven ecumenical councils, and in living fact experience moves to the front while reason leaves the stage altogether: evidence, in the East, demands no verdict. Worship is encounter; theology terminates in mystery; a priest, as one class member's story confirmed, may never have owned a Bible, for the fathers have already interpreted it. The teachers refuse to sneer: the Eastern stage exposes how thoroughly Western our questions are, and its pull on postmoderns is real, for reason has betrayed the West, like the dignitary who proclaimed man's triumph from the track of the first railway and was run over by the train, or the moon program that promised transcendence and brought back rocks.

7. Reformation, liberal, and charismatic stages

   The Reformation stage moves Scripture to the front with reason and tradition close behind: the Reformers used reason vigorously and cited the fathers constantly, never preaching the individualism later ages assigned them; emotion alone stayed off their Western stage. The liberal stage, child of the Enlightenment, dismisses Scripture, moves reason to the front, and, notably, seats emotions. The charismatic stage answers liberalism by moving everything forward, above all special revelation defined as more than Scripture: God speaking now, through prophecy, dreams, and tongues, and it restored emotions to the stage after fundamentalism had banished them. The teachers pause on the stakes: if God still speaks today, that changes everything on the stage, which is why the next session is devoted entirely to the question.

8. The fundamentalist stage and proof-texting

   Fundamentalism, the reaction that began well, confesses the barest stage: Scripture alone, reason gone, tradition disclaimed, give me the Bible and the Holy Spirit. In practice this becomes proof-text theology: find a verse for whatever is being defended and press it, out of context, not merely the surrounding verses but the context of genre, emotion, and the whole of systematic theology, reading Ecclesiastes' anguished pessimism like Romans' argument, missing James's sarcasm. Ironically the method was learned from the liberals, who read the human contexts well while denying inspiration. And the fundamentalist appeal to the past quietly repaints the past fundamentalist, a Luther who just read his Bible, Puritans who were simply first fundamentalists, so tradition can be used while being denied.

9. Weighing tradition

   Tradition includes far more than creeds, councils, and confessions: statements of faith, church government, the way your parents taught you, and every Sunday's sermon, tradition being handed to you still. Its benefits are great: stability, since Luther himself was terrified to stand seemingly alone against centuries; the recognition that the Spirit has worked through others and not only you; and freedom from reinventing the wheel each generation. Its deficiencies are as real: mindless parroting, tunnel vision, the folk theology of beliefs held without basis, and reluctance to change. The lecture cites a church historian's distinction: tradition is the living faith of those now dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of those now living.

10. Weighing reason

    Reason, the capacity for logical, rational, analytic thought, from mathematics to the law of non-contradiction, has the great benefit of universal access: everyone can reason, so its case can compel across every boundary. Its deficiencies: fallible beings wield it, so an impeccable method can still carry a mistake; and its reach is short, able to conclude that something greater than ourselves made us, never able to arrive at the death, burial, and resurrection. The lecture holds the balance with the tradition's own voices: Aquinas, that the truth of the faith surpasses the capacity of reason yet never contradicts it; Tertullian's wary question of what Jerusalem has to do with Athens; and Jonathan Edwards's insistence that all truth comes by revelation, general or special, and must be received by reason, for God reaches the heart without ever bypassing the mind. Postmoderns may declare foundationalism dead, but no one can kick the law of non-contradiction off the stage and live consistently with the claim.

11. Weighing experience and emotions

    Experience, information from direct encounter and participation, shapes every reader: answered prayer and unanswered, the healing that came and the one that did not. Patton speaks here of his sister Angie, of a year and a half of prayer through her depression, and of her suicide, and confesses openly that when he now sits with another suicidal young woman his own hope runs thin, and he needs others, including one who was herself delivered, to lend him the hope his experience has bruised. That is the point: we do not simply read the Bible, we read it through lenses, and the goal is not to shed the bags we carry, some of which are good and necessary presuppositions, but to know what we are carrying. Emotions, distinguished from experience as the feeling makeup we were created with, also belong on the stage: everyone who has made a decision from a God-given peace has used them, and Philippians 4 itself speaks of a peace beyond understanding guarding heart and mind. The church has even named the inward yearning for God, the sensus divinitatis, the God-shaped void only Christ fills. Men's and women's stages will differ here by design, and only together, as at creation, do they image God.

12. General and special revelation, and the final method

    General revelation, the created order, declares a Creator, powerful, creative, provident, and is available to every person in every place, but it can be misread: the same world holds sunsets and tornadoes. Special revelation, God's supernatural intervention in history, has its primary record in Scripture, whose benefits the class names: objective, outside ourselves, written, absolutely reliable if from God, the authority for faith and practice, sufficient for salvation, given, as it says, so the man of God may be equipped for every good work. Its limits are honest ones: it does not speak to every matter, and it must be interpreted. So the proposed stage, offered as one man's proposal, with the note that a woman's might rightly seat emotions and experience further forward, keeps one fixed point: sola scriptura, Scripture alone holding the front as final authority. The method then runs: the exegetical statement, what it meant then; the analogy of Scripture; then Scripture compared with tradition, emotions, experience, reason, and general revelation; the theological statement; and application. The objective word of God interprets the subjective everything else.

1. Draw your own stage of truth as it actually operates, not as you would confess it: which source really stands at the front when you make decisions, and what would it take for Scripture to hold that place?

2. Patton named the bag he carries from his sister's death and asked the community to lend him hope. What experience most colors how you read Scripture and how you pray, and who in your community could you name it to?

3. The lecture says a peace from God has guided most of us at some point, and that emotions belong on the stage without ruling it. Recall a decision you made from peace or from fear: how would you now test it against Scripture, reason, and counsel?