So, I was thinking if I'm going to do this whole "positive statement" thing, it might be a good idea to start. A good place to start is to anticipate a couple questions that usually come to the forefront when addressing the whole questions, "What do you believe? Why do you believe it?"
According to Albert Outler, John Wesley added to the traditional Anglican triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason. With experience comes a way of reflecting upon how these other three impact our lives as individuals, and individuals who are answerable to one another in and for the faith. I like this so-called "Wesleyan Quadrilateral" precisely because, potentially, it encompasses the Bible, Church history, theology, and our own growth in the faith. In fact, I have thought for a while a great, 40-week course (like the Disciple Bible Study and Christian Believers series the United Methodist General Board of Discipleship has developed, both of which are successful) using the Quadrilateral as a model: ten weeks on the Bible; ten weeks on church history; ten weeks on theological thought; and ten weeks on the spiritual disciplines. Then, if one is interested, turn to the Disciple series of Bible studies, the Christian Believer class, and perhaps develop other curricula as well, centered on the history of the Church and the spiritual life.
In any event, at its heart, those are what are often referred to as the "norms" of my reflections. Scripture. Tradition. Reason. Experience. If you want to push me, "scripture" refers to the canonical texts of the Protestant Bible; tradition is the whole broad, deep, and wide history of the faith and its expressions; reason is the multitude of ways people throughout time have wrestled with this whole thing they call "faith", and expressed it, sometimes well, sometime poorly; experience encompasses not just mundane "experience", the everyday living of life, but also and more specifically prayer and worship, the place of the sacraments in one's life, and how this is pursued, with or without a certain discipline, but always answerable to our brothers and sisters in the faith.
I have spent the better part of 20 years of my life reading, studying, discussing, thinking, arguing, and trying to understand theology. I have done so not as a disinterested observer, as if it were an interesting intellectual exercise, but rather as a deeply personal desire to understand others' attempts to come to terms with their faith. Even if I don't always agree with them; even if I find their conclusions questionable, their methods narrow, and their sources in need of some serious reconsidering, I still benefit from their struggle.
A friend said that his own theological inquiry was rooted in the question, "What do the Cappadocians have to say to Bedford-Stuyvesant?" My initial response to that was, "Probably not much." I think I would change that ever so slightly and say that I am searching for my own perspective, and while I can see where the Cappadocians - or St. Thomas, or William Ockham, or Zwingli, or Tillich - might come in handy, it would only be as deep background. They spoke to their time and place, and spoke well, to be sure. For that reason alone they have an authority to be respected. Yet, their dialect and idiom, their world and time are all strange to us. We can only use them so much before their words cease to have meaning.
Even a more recent Christian thinker - Reinhold Niebuhr, say, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer - might offer insights that seem, at first blush, to be right on the mark. After carefully considering them, however, we might come to see a word or phrase, or even whole works, as being answers to questions we do not understand. Part of respecting one's sources is respecting the distance in time and space, the very real milieu in which this or that person wrote and taught, lived and died.
Even a passing familiarity with the history of the Church* should humble anyone who thinks that his or her voice has anything significant, let alone original, to the conversation we continue to have on belief. Very often, all we have is a reshuffling of the deck, a change in emphasis at most. I offer no belief either in my own originality or even persuasiveness. All I offer is what I have, and since I am offering it, not to you, but to God, well, I know it won't be good enough on any merits. Because I understand grace to be both prodigious and prodigal, however, I don't worry.
*When you see "Church" capitalized, I am referring to all the various expressions of communal faith we call "churches" - Orthodox and Roman, Evangelical and Reformed, Pentecostal and Anabaptist. Some might disagree and think writing in this way is too abstract; I think it's a lot easier than writing all that out time and again.
