One of my first moves away from orthodox Christianity as a Methodist seminary student was when I realized I disagreed with John Wesley about the primacy of scripture.

Wesley taught that religious understanding comes to us in four ways:

1. Revealed in Scripture
2. Illimined by Tradition
3. Vivified in Experience, and
4. Confirmed by Reason

Scripture, though, is home base. The other three are extras. A 20th century theologian came to call this the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral,” and the name stuck in Methodist circles. It’s usually drawn as two rows of two boxes, one source to each.  (Scroll down a few screens here.)

What got to me all those years ago was the realization that there is no direct access to scripture. Sure, you can pick it up and read it yourself, but you’re always bringing your own biases—your own traditions, experiences, and reasons—to it. There’s no God’s eye view of Scripture this side of God.  Any Christian who believes otherwise is lying to themselves and doesn’t take Original Sin as seriously as they’d like to think they do.

Really, the home base for religious understanding should be experience. It all comes down to our experience of scripture, experience of tradition, experience of reasons—and when we’re being especially reflective, our experience of experience itself.

And when we look at our experience of these four sources, we notice that they’re not singular but plural.  There are a multitude of reasons, traditions, experiences, and scriptures that we can bring to bear in trying to understand religious life.  Sometimes they agree with each other and sometimes they don’t.

Even the Bible itself is plural.  It certainly doesn’t speak with one voice, which is a large part of why it has endured through centuries of change.  66+ books gets you a lot of variety to draw upon.

I also realized that if Jesus was supposed to be the central message of the Bible, then the Bible had to take a back seat to Jesus, his life experience, and the experience of those who knew him.  Scripture was one collection of those experiences, a compelling one and the earliest one written down.  But if Christians mean to make the life of Jesus primary, making the Bible the primary source of religious knowledge is idolatry of the highest order.

Either Jesus is primary and the Bible a helpful secondary source—even if it’s the most important secondary source—or else the Bible is what saves Christians and Jesus is merely incidental to it.1

Next time: I redraw the Wesleyan Quadrilateral in a way that makes sense for Unitarian Universalists.

1. If you’ve ever endured a Bible Study with someone who uses the Scofield Reference Bible, you know first hand that there are plenty of Christians who put the Bible above the person of Jesus, and everything else, whether they acknowledge it or not. I knew one woman who for the life of her would not believe that the study notes at the bottom of the page were not just as much the Bible as the, well, Bible on the top of the page. [↩]