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. [↩]

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. [↩]

Continuing the conversation about UU cultural identity, I want to suggest that what’s hurting us the most isn’t white privilege but what I call “white collarism.”

What does white collarism look like?  Here are two of it’s unspoken assumptions:

• The assumption that others would share my cultural or political views and interests if only they were as educated as I am.  (Read as: if they weren’t so “ignorant,” a favorite white collarist insult.  “Consciousness raising” talk falls under this assumption too.)
• The assumption that there are people put here on earth to do the shit work I don’t want to do, and that I have a right to expect them to make my life easier so that I can focus on what is worthy of me.

It’s a fundamental belief of this barber’s son that no one has a right to expect anyone else to be your support staff.  They may do support work, but you don’t get to insist they define their life around that role.

How does this play out?  I read a history of Unitarianism in the South recently where UU powers-that-be concluded that Unitarianism wouldn’t grow much in the South until Southerners were more educated.  That was said over a century ago, so this has deep roots.

It’s not just existing UUs who are white collarists, it’s also who we attract.  I think about the first time visitor who got to the front of the coffee line in coffee hour, saw the volunteer frantically filling two dozen cups with coffee, and asked for a cappuccino.

You may have other examples.

Because of the realities of socio-economics, white collarism is practiced predominantly by white people, but anyone, of any identity, who makes it in the white collar world can practice white collarism all the same.

Vessel has already posted a great response to John Katz’ recent UU World article defending UU culture, so I’ll just focus on one sentence:

If non-whites can meld so easily into our snob-culture that it becomes invisible even to them, then someone please tell me what we’re doing wrong.

Really, you don’t see any barriers to entry, race or otherwise, into a culture of members who are predominantly white, well above the US median income, and where graduate degrees are often the norm?  Next you’ll tell me that Token Black proves that South Park, Colorado is a diverse, multi-cultural, multi-class town.

As long as Stuff White People Like reads like a detailed sociological study of UU culture—at least the younger end of it, where there is a younger end—we’ll continue to have a problem living out the diversity we’d like to embody.

I don’t think anyone has asked yet who might take our place in Phoenix if we do decide to boycott. Just for the sake of argument, what if the Tea Party or some nativist organization took our spot and showed up with 4,000 conventioneers, 500 of whom turned out for a demonstration at the state capitol in favor of SB 1070 on a hot weekday afternoon?

Not that we have any control over who takes our place, but will the boycott have been worth it if something awful like this happened in our absence?  The thing about unintended consequences is they don’t care if your heart was in the right place.

I say all this not to put a boogey man in the room but to point out that there will be a cost to our not being in Phoenix advocating in person for our values.  Even if we’re replaced by some harmless trade show, their conventioneers won’t be out demonstrating against SB 1070.  We know part of the cost of our absence now, but a lot of the cost we won’t know until well after the fact.

Even if only a small fraction of GA attendees show up for a demonstration—which is the norm, as many have gone to pains to point out—it’s still better than nobody showing up to demonstrate.  It’s not the only cost to account for, but it should be added into the mix with all the others.

The rhetoric is starting to get a little heated, and one blogger has already apologized for stepping over the line.  There’s going to be more and more temptation to bring out weapons of rhetorical mass destruction as we get closer and closer to GA.

I’m not a delegate, but if I were, I would be sorely tempted to vote against whoever pulled any of the following, regardless of their position:

• Saying that UUs on the other side are paying mere “lip service” to our ideals.
• Saying that our ideals, or especially any of the P&Ps, “clearly” indicate we must take one course or another.
• Saying, or even implying, that UUs on the other side are racist, deluded, ignorant, or any other insult favored by liberals.

The toughest ethical problems aren’t a choice between a good alternative and a bad alternative.  The tough ones are when you have to figure out which is the better of several goods, or even the better of several bads.

The hard reality is that GA in Phoenix in 2012 is exactly one of those tough ethical problems.  All the rhetoric needs to start with the assumption that this is a tough one, and that there isn’t a clear cut answer.  We’re a pretty bright and a pretty well intentioned bunch, and if this was an easy one, we’d have reached consensus about it from the get go.