Good News Jan/Feb 2009 Page 5

"Four Building Blocks of Faith"
By John Tindal, UUCF member, Sumter, South Carolina
 

Richard Hooker (1554-1600), an Anglican priest, sought a middle way between the extremes of radical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. He argued for a middle path “between the conflicting claims of infallibility, whether of the bible or of the pope….Our relationship to God, Hooker argued, is multifaceted, and no one way can exclude all others.” According to Hooker, we need to balance scripture, tradition and reason.[1]

To these three, Albert Outler (1908-1989), a Methodist scholar, would include a fourth source of faith: experience. Today, these four “legs” are called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.

Growing up in the Episcopal Church, I became familiar with Richard Hooker and his three legged stool – one leg each for scripture, tradition and reason. I was taught that we needed to maintain a balance among these three legs or our Anglican faith would be unbalanced.

As a youth, I was fascinated by science and the scientific method. By the time I reached my twelfth birthday, I no longer believed everything that I was being taught in Sunday school. I remember this clearly, because, in our church, children were confirmed when they reached their twelfth year. And I remember setting aside my disbeliefs in order to fit in with the group and be confirmed along with all of the others in my class.

About this time, our family visited the Unitarian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where my father pointed out the grave of one of my ancestors. This was my introduction to Unitarianism. Fourteen years later, in 1966, I joined the Unitarian Fellowship in Columbia, South Carolina, and the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF). 

After a few years, I realized that I had to make a choice. I could either be an isolated Christian in an increasingly humanistic UU community or I could be a religious liberal in a traditional Episcopal church.

I threw myself into working within a small Episcopal Church where I became a lay-reader and an adult Sunday school teacher. Prior to this, the bible had been a closed book to me. I had never been able to get past the begats and the dietary rules in the Old Testament. Our minister wanted me to teach the adult class using the lectionary readings each Sunday. About this time, I had an opportunity to attend a weekend retreat at St. Christopher Conference Center on Seabrook Island. Verna J. Dozier was the retreat speaker. She presented a method of self-directed Bible study that has literally changed my life. I’ve been teaching the lectionary since that time.

As a bible teacher, I was more and more confronted with questions about the source of the bible and about the early traditions of the church. I began to see the need for a balanced approach using scripture, tradition and reason.

I also saw the importance of experience. Each person in a class comes with his or her own life experiences. As a teacher, it’s important to reach students where they are in their spiritual journey.

As a UU Christian, I feel a need to supplement our present UU principles with a set of Christian principles. For our consideration, I'm suggesting the adoption of scripture, tradition, reason and experience as four building blocks of our UU Christian faith.

Scripture – “We interpret scripture rightly when we do not try to interpret it by ourselves as if we were the first ever to ask what it means. Seeking the guidance of God’s Spirit, faithful Christians before us and other faithful Christians in the church around us have also struggled to understand and be led by it, and we are to listen to them ‘with respect.’ In our time we have learned the importance of listening also to fellow Christians, past and present, who are different from us in gender, race, class, cultural background, and national origin. They help us avoid confusing biblical truth with our own limited perspective on it.”[2]

According to Hooker, “the Bible is a fundamental source of our knowledge of God, but we also learn about God through human experience and rational reflection.”[3]

Tradition – “Christians usually distinguish ‘scripture’ from ‘tradition’ in order to emphasize the stronger authority we give to the Bible as the word of God. Yet the bible itself is the selection of writings chose and revered by the faithful community. In the Second through fourth centuries, oral teaching or ‘tradition’ was a critical test in this process of forming the ‘rule’ or ‘canon’ of scripture. Christians chose their canon from those books of scripture that were in accordance with beliefs and practices, such as baptism and Eucharist, received from the apostolic generation. Scripture and tradition are thus deeply intertwined.”[4]

Reason – “If we are to appeal to Scripture and to the interpretation given by the Fathers of the Church during the first four centuries of Christian faith, we must use our mind. We dare not claim that our minds can give us any infallible truth, but we must give thoughtful study and careful reasoning to the religious as to every other realm of experience.”[5]

Experience - “Firsthand faith is the result of the experience of the holy within the life of the believer. It requires an internal and personal opening of the self to acceptance of and integration with the Divine. John Calvin declared that ‘as long as Christ remains outside us, we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us.’”[6]

[1] The Anglican Vision, by James E. Griffiss, pages 26, 27.

[2] Christian Doctrine, Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr., page 13

[3] The Anglican Vision, by James E. Griffiss, page 27.

[4] Early Christian Traditions, by Rebecca Lyman, page 4.

[5] The Faith of the Church, by James A. Pike and W. Norman Pittenger, page 17.

[6] Reformed Spirituality, by Howard L. Rice, page 27.

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