Last week I talked about my problems with the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. This week I propose a revision that I hope Unitarian Universalists (and others) will find more helpful.  Super cool graphic toward the end (I promise).

To review, the main problem with the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is that experience is always primary—there is no direct access to scripture, or to reason or tradition for that matter.  A revision of the WQ that makes sense will need to place experience in the central spot that it actually holds.

Another problem for making sense of religious life and where it draws authority from is that pure experience is damn near useless.  Unless you’re a bonafide Zen Buddhist, pure experience will be pretty useless to you—you’re going to need to talk about it some way in order to make sense of it and use it.  For religious purposes, talk about experience is going to take three shapes: reason, tradition, and scripture.

Now, Ogre is right in his comments to the last post.  Technically, scripture is always a part of tradition, along with liturgy, art, music, church polity, and so much more.  The Catholics got that part right in the Reformation.

Still, I’m attached enough to Wesley’s take that I’m going to stick with a division between scripture and tradition.  Besides my Methodist nostalgia, I think it’s important to recognize that certain texts of sacred literature have risen to the top and earned a special status.

Sure, everyone has their own individual canon of texts that have played a special role in their own journey. But there are some texts that deserve special recognition for the role they’ve played over centuries of human religious experience.  Yes, T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” has a special place in my heart, but I’m not going to pretend that it deserves the same recognition as the Quran; even if I found the Quran overbearing personally, I won’t deny that importance it plays, and deserves to play.  In time, “The Hollow Men” might rise to the status of scripture, and I’ll be rooting for it, but until then, it’s no Quran (or Genesis or Tao te Ching).1

Okay, enough tangents.  I promised you a super cool graphic of a redrawn Wesleyan Quadrilateral, and here’s the best I can do.  I present (drum roll please) the Wesleyan Triangle:

The Wesleyan Triangle. Click to enlarge.

The first thing to point out is that experience has been given the place it deserves: the center. Religious life starts with experience and ultimately returns to experience.

The second thing to point out is that there’s no direct access to experience: you have to go through reason, scripture, and tradition to be able to articulate experience and make use of it.  You can stick with pure experience if you want to, but you’re not going to be able to talk to anyone about it.

No, I’m not saying that you have to stick to only established scriptures, traditions, and reasons to talk about your religious experience.  All three of those sources are always growing, and we should do what we can to contribute to that growth.2  The more scriptures, traditions, and reasons, the better, but there’s no reason to start from scratch.  A lot of wise people have collected their wisdom over millennia into these sources, and we would be wise to draw upon their wisdom as much as we’re able.

Finally, if you think you’re not relying on scriptures and traditions, think again.  We stand on the shoulders of giants, and even our most independent thoughts rely on the work of those who have gone before us.  Let’s be grateful for the head start they’ve given us and give credit where credit is due.  Even Christopher Hitchens’ atheism relies on a long tradition of Christian humanism and Western skepticism.3

1. I long for a copy of the Orange Catholic Bible from Dune so I can have all these scriptures together! [↩]
2. Remember, I’m rooting for “The Hollow Men.” [↩]
3. And, yes, Western philosophy  and skepticism are traditions worthy of religion. [↩]