The Wesleyan Quadrilateral

My earliest memory of my own Bible is one that was gifted to me as a small child—it was covered in tiles made of a material like white shells. It was, as you can imagine, fairly fragile, and so I learned early on to be very careful with it.

Though today I no longer have that Bible (I suspect it fell prey to the expected downside of giving a fragile Bible to a child) I continue to hold the Bible with care, though now more figuratively than literally. I believe, as we attest as Christians and in particular United Methodist, that the Bible is the foundation upon which our understanding of God and God’s work in the world rests.

I also know, however, that our earnest attempts to read and understand the Bible often lead not only to disagreements with each other, but also to questions and confusion ourselves. You may have heard someone say of the Bible, that it can be an acronym: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

Instructions, yes. Basic? I have not always found it to be so.

As United Methodists, who stand in the guidance of John Wesley, we have a tool to help us wade through the rich complexity of the Bible. Decades ago, scholars coined a tool called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. While not a structure explicitly explained by John Wesley, the Quadrilateral accurately describes how John Wesley approached the Bible and questions of theology and how we are called to live in the world. The Wesleyan Quadrilateral asserts there are four tools we are to use to discern God’s will and truth: Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience.

The four are not equally balanced. Indeed, Scripture is our primary tool for understanding God. As Christians, when we say “scripture,” we mean the Bible. Old and New Testament. When we have a question about God, or about understanding what is happening in our lives and world, it is to the Bible we should first turn. As I mentioned above, however, the Bible is not always as clear as we might like. There are passages which are troubling, challenging, and even downright in conflict with other parts of the Bible. Indeed, our first step when we are seeking to interpret the Bible is the Bible itself—to see what other passages have to say.

I think of it this way—scripture is like our eyes, the primary way we see the world. Scripture is the primary way we see God. But sometimes our eyes do not allow us to see clearly enough—maybe we can’t see things far away, maybe we can’t see things close up. So we need help focusing better. When that happens to me, the first thing I do is pause what I am doing and try to focus more intently with my eyes. That is how we are to use the Bible. When one portion is difficult to gain clarity on, we sit with scripture to seek that clarity.

But sometimes with our eyes, or with scripture, that is not enough. We need more clarity. With our eyesight, we can turn to corrective lenses. These help us focus more clearly. Reason, tradition and experience are like corrective lenses to help us focus more clearly.

But what are these three corrective lenses?

REASON: Scripture commands us to love the Lord with our heart, soul, mind and strength. God gave us common sense as well as scientific study and our reasoning to help us gain clarity in the world. When Joshua 10 describes a day of battle in which the sun stood still, our modern understanding of the earth orbiting around the sun challenges the ancients’ belief that the sun revolves around the earth but still allows us to understand in this passage the description of a day which seemed it would never end.

TRADITION: When we talk about tradition as a tool to help gain clarity here, we are not talking about casual traditions, like our tradition of doing potlucks! We are talking about the formal teachings of the Church, the body of Christ, over the years. Tradition is where our idea of the Trinity comes from—though an understanding of God which Christians from early on saw woven throughout the Bible, the word Trinity appears no where in the Bible. It is a theological teaching which the Church discerned to encapsulate the nature of God as God is revealed in scripture.

EXPERIENCE: Our experiences of God’s activity in the world, through God’s prevenient, justifying and sanctifying grace, also help clarify our understanding of God through scripture. I am reminded of the ways that God has made a way where their seemed to be no way, and so as I reflect on a challenge or new opportunity, my reading of scripture is shaped by these experiences. It is important here that we are reminded that we are called to not only reading scripture and reflect theologically on our won—we are called to do so in community. Indeed, some of my own reflections have been powerfully shaped not by my experiences but by the experiences of others.

As we continue to grow together in our understanding of God, our study of scripture, and our ability to reflect more fully on God’s truth and will, I invite you to consider the ways your faith is shaped by Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience. And I invite you to use these four tools in intentional ways to approach both questions of complexity and tension in our world, as well as in ways to help reinforce your daily scripture reading. May we each grow in our understanding of God and together, may our understanding on God shape our lives and actions so that we can be part of the coming of God’s kingdom even today.