Perspectives on Theology & Church Vol. 1 No. 1

Perspectives on Theology and Church

No. 1 | November 2012

Uniformity versus Independence: Reflections on Theology for a Global United Methodist Church Robert Cummings Neville Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology Boston University

PREAMBLE

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he United Methodist Church has become a global denomination through a history that I shall sketch shortly. In practical effect this means that the great cultural and social diversity of the populations of the world are united in a centralized organization whose structure is dictated by a General Conference. Long priding itself in a democratic structure, The United Methodist Church has a complex arrangement by which representatives from the many central conferences around the globe participate in the determinations of the General Conference, along with the annual conferences of the United States. The result, however, is a somewhat imperial determination of prescribed belief and practice for the whole, with some variations allowed for the central conferences. My programmatic remarks here are intended to promote discussion of the shape that theological thinking and imagination should take for this increasingly global denomination in the first half of the twenty-first century.

My remarks presuppose (with little exposition) general knowledge of the history of Christian theology and of distinctly Wesleyan themes. The specific context of these remarks is the consideration of the changing history of The United Methodist Church, including its move into being a global denomination.

In this context I shall stress the genius in Methodism, beginning with Wesley, for adapting forms of Christian belief and practice to different cultural situations. A global United Methodist Church has many such different cultural situations in which Christian life needs to become incarnate, and I shall gesture at several of these. Then I shall argue that contemporary United Methodist theology should be engaged with sufficient independence in these different settings that their specific needs can be addressed without the pretense that those needs are the same as those in other contexts. The other side of that coin, however, is that the beliefs and practices favored in some of those contexts should not be forced on others, even if supported by the majority. Theological attitudes toward homosexuality will be the test case in this discussion.

Robert Cummings Neville its own congregations, pastors, district superintendents, and bishops—a segregation that lasted until the formation of The United Methodist Church in 1968. In 1870, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, had removed its African-American constituency, which then established a new separate church, The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, remaining today as The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

The establishment of The Methodist Church in 1939 included not only the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, but also the Methodist Protestant Church, which had separated from the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1830 over its desire to have lay representation in its General Conferences. So the 1939 Methodist Church had strong lay representation in its governance. The United Methodist union of 1968 included Evangelical and United Brethren denominations, which earlier had united to form the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1946; and both of these churches had complicated expansive histories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All of these denominations had sponsored foreign missions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and so The United Methodist Church could be called a global church from its founding in 1968.

The model of American colonialism for foreign missions gave way in the second half of the twentieth century to a more truly global model for The United Methodist Church, which means that the overseas missions were reorganized into central conferences on their own. These were simply added to the United States annual conferences to provide representation to the General Conferences. Although the United States annual conferences remain the most powerful and the richest, as well as the most influential, because their history largely has determined the current shape of things, the General Conferences are changing into law-making meetings that are coming more and more to represent a global denomination.

From the beginnings of the Methodist movement in England, preachers traveled across the globe with John Wesley’s ideas and enthusiasms, planting church communities or significantly affecting already established churches.

In that sense, Methodism has been a global movement since the eighteenth century.1 The United Methodist Church, however, is heir to a specifically American church, begun by Wesley after the American Revolution, which caused many Anglicans to leave America. Wesley ordained ministers and bishops (1784) for North America, thus breaking the apostolic succession that until that time had made American Methodism a renewal movement within American Anglicanism, or Episcopalianism.2 American Methodism in the nineteenth century was expansive and creative, playing important roles in the extension of the culture of the United States across the continent. Although not as spectacularly original as the contemporary movements that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the Seventh Day Adventists, it was part of that enthusiastic fecundity of religious expansion. Among its distinctive hallmarks, building on Wesley’s own enthusiasm, was great energy expended on education from grade schools through colleges and universities.

The downside of nineteenth-century American Methodism was its participation in slavery and racism.

The inhospitality of the Methodist Episcopal Church to African slaves and freed persons prompted the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion, with their own distinguished leadership. The white Methodist Episcopal Church divided over the slavery issue before the Civil War (1844−45) into the pro-slavery Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the anti-slavery Methodist Episcopal Church. This division lasted nearly a century, until the reunion of these two denominations in 1939 as The Methodist Church.The 1939 agreement of union still segregated African Americans in The Methodist Church into a separate central jurisdiction with

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Uniformity versus Independence them that serve as common references in the hermeneutical developments of them into different cultural circumstances.The Bible is a set of somewhat different interpretations of the religious significance of Jesus.

The early church grew in many directions with different interpretations of various parts of the Bible.The councils of later antiquity were interpretations of different forms of the church. Subsequent developments interpreted the councils, and so on. Wesley’s theology was an interpretation of the Anglican tradition and German Pietism for the needs of his day. The Bible, as much as any past cultural embodiment of Christianity such as the councils of late antiquity or Wesley’s own active decision-making for his movement, needs constant reinterpretation into relevance for the circumstances of various cultural situations. To be sure, not all hermeneutical extension of Christianity into new situations is well done, true, or authentic. Most of us would say that Nazi Christianity was a very bad mistake and so were the Christian cultures of slavery, including that defended by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the locus around which tests for the validity of the translation of Christianity into new situations have been developed and debated. The Methodist movement, including The United Methodist Church with its emblem of cross and flame, has kept that doctrine front and center. Few would question Paul’s translation of the life of Jesus, a rural Galilean, into a religion for urban Gentile Christians around the Mediterranean; after all, the New Testament was largely written after that translation took place (only Paul’s letters predate the destruction of the Temple). The Roman persecution of Jews around the 60s and 70s killed off most of the Jewish Christians who sided with Jesus’ family (such as James, his brother) and were resistant to the Gentiles. A quite different judgment might be made today about the great ecumenical councils such as Nicaea and Chalcedon, which established what many in the

The most striking feature of this global denomination is not its common root in John Wesley (which is to be expected) but rather its extraordinary cultural diversity. This diversity poses the main problems for the reshaping of United Methodist theology for the first half of the twenty-first century, and my remarks will focus on some of these problems.

PROBLEMS OF THEOLOGICAL AFFINITIES DIVERSE CULTURAL CONTEXTS

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Part of the genius of Christian movements, especially the Wesleyan ones, is the ready practice of adapting the gospel and its expression in church life to the various cultures in which it becomes embodied.Theologically, this is the central doctrine of incarnation: God, the agencies of salvation, and the ways of being holy come into the flesh of life in the world—and there are many kinds of flesh. The point can be made in bold historical strokes, noting that Christmas is a Christianization of the Roman Saturnalia and that Easter was a Norse goddess. Wesley invented a church without fully legitimate apostolic succession for America because that was more appropriate; he sponsored ill-educated clergy as well as the building of educational institutions to educate them (despite the fact he was such an Oxford snob that he was reputed to be unwilling to enter the city of Cambridge). A careful look at the contemporary scene in North America shows that there are many different cultures in which American United Methodism is resident, and that Methodism generally, though not always, has adapted itself to those different cultures.

Some people think that there is some “core” of Christianity that resides in these various cultural affinities and that the specifically diverse adaptations are merely relative to the cultural differences.3 But I suspect that there is no core to Christianity or to the gospel, or even to the specifically Methodist heritage.

Rather, there are only the past cultural incarnations of

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Robert Cummings Neville Constantinople (553),Third Council of Constantinople (680-81), and the Second Council of Nicea (787).

From a global perspective, however, by drumming out the Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites, and various smaller groups of Christians, European Christianity isolated itself from the vast majority of Christians.6 Non-European Christianity was rarely a majority or state religion in those lands in which it flourished until the colonization of the Americas. By the beginning of the second millennium, it was being compromised and crushed, especially in China and Muslim lands.7 The missionary expansion of European Christianity after 1500 throughout Africa and Asia overlaid and sometimes suppressed the remainders of the original Christian expansion.8 The moral of this brief historical account is that Christianity originally unfolded as a global religion (except in the Americas) and flourished for over a thousand years before being suppressed or seriously diminished in lands outside of Europe; and then was spread again across the globe by European missionaries beginning around 1500. The moral for United Methodists is that our expanding denomination is an expression of Christianity reintroduced into many lands as a form of Euro-American missionary effort, closely tied to Euro-American colonialism.

With this historical perspective we can understand the global United Methodist Church to be a Protestant American missionary endeavor imposed on top of a hugely more diverse and culturally rich subsoil of previous Christian forms. So the cultural diversity in the different central conferences of The United Methodist Church is not merely a function of different places, but of different histories of Christianity in those places, onto which a somewhat biblicistic, historically naïve, enthusiastic evangelical Methodism has been grafted. Not to admit this is to say that the global United Methodist Church is understood only, or at least principally, from the perspective of the American missionary movements so closely associated with co-

Western Christian churches have taken to be settled orthodoxy, but which is largely irrelevant to current theology. The Arians, Nestorians, and Monophysites, who were drummed out as heretical, were far more numerous than the “Catholics” who accepted those councils. In retrospect, those councils were more a function of imperial politics than ecumenical dialogue involving the whole church; to wit, the Arians were Goths, the Nestorians were mostly Asians (Persian and eastward), and the Monophysites were mostly Egyptians and Africans. By the eighth century, there were more Nestorian Christians in China (not to speak of Persia and India) than there were people in Europe.

In our own time, anyone interested in the historical Jesus would be far more sympathetic to the Arians and Nestorians than to the Catholic Chalcedonians, who said Jesus was fully divine, fully human, not mixing those two natures, and thus an internal contradiction!

Now, the view of Christian history reflected in the previous paragraph might be strange to people who are accustomed to a Protestant perspective in which the important history is that of Western Europe that led to the Reformation, and in which even that history is not as important as it might be because we can quickly leap back to the biblical first century. We Methodist Protestants tend to forget that during the first thousand years of Christianity the Asian developments were far more numerous, creative, and vigorous in dealing with diverse cultural contexts than the European (Byzantine and Catholic). Therefore, it is important to enrich our imagination of Christianity’s global diversity with serious study of its Asian history.4 The history of Christianity in northern Africa is included in that of Christianity in the Roman and Byzantine Empires.5 Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians tend to give great weight to the early councils for determining the orthodox character of Christianity: First Council of Nicea (325), First Council of Constantinople (381), Council of Ephesus (431), Council of Chalcedon (451), Second Council of

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Uniformity versus Independence American United Methodist progressivism. In each instance, United States Methodist theologians need to be in collaboration with theologians indigenous to those cultural contexts. In each instance, it is imperative that United States United Methodist theologians not simply acquiesce to the visions of the indigenous theologians, because of the danger of reducing Christianity to the existent cultural themes now clothed in Christian language. In each instance, it is imperative that United States United Methodist theologians use the problems of translating the gospel into forms with proper affinities for those cultures to inquire into what is authentically Christian in the American forms that might be translated across.Translation is the best venue for asking what is the authentic gospel in any culture that relates to others. But the translation needs to be complete, with forms of theology and practice with proper affinities to the new situation, not necessarily to

lonialism and the enterprise of economic, military, and cultural empire.

My theological point is that the process of developing forms of United Methodism with separate affinities for significantly different cultural situations has the extremely tense task of balancing relevance with faithfulness. An irrelevant church would be . . . irrelevant. But a church that conforms itself to the norms of a culture without being able to redefine the heart of the faith and its critical, transformative message for persons and cultures is equally irrelevant, and a sellout of Christianity. A theological task that remains ignorant of the layers of culture, not merely contemporary social expressions, mistakes the issues involved in cultural diversity.

So I suggest that the principal theological task for United Methodism in respect to its becoming a global church is to attend to the differences that ought to be developed with integrity for different cultural situations that are now included within its scope. The Holy Spirit needs to work overtime, and we need to be able to tell whether what is at work is the Holy Spirit or some other spirit. After all, we have no lack of spirits . . .

The “new� contexts for United States United Methodist theologians to consider include Russia and other Eastern European countries that have lived under Communism for most of the twentieth century; Western Europe, where Methodism represents a kind of underside of the great nineteenth and twentieth century Protestant movements; East Asia, especially China, where religion’s relation to the government is unlike anything Methodism has faced before, and Korea where Christianity is so successful; Latin America, where Methodism is in deeply contradictory situations, serving liberation purposes, on the one hand, and elevation of the poor, on the other; and most problematically Africa, where the cultural underlayments of tribal and Islamic religions, as well as ancient Christian traditions, are directly oppositional to many aspects of

the old situation from which the missions were sent.9

GLOBAL UNITED METHODIST CULTURAL AGENDAS My remarks thus far on the differences in theological agenda for the different new cultures brought into global United Methodism are schematic, almost impressionistic and anecdotal, and far too general. (Many of these remarks come from my travels to these places, often for conversation with United Methodists and their seminary leaders.) But they are a start for the conversation.Their point is to indicate to some degree just how different the theological problems are in the different venues. Let me illustrate with a few examples.

The Communist years in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union did some things right. Among them was the education of a large percentage of the population into disciplined professions such as the sciences, technologies, medicine, and scientific agriculture. This education was given to women as well as men and for the most part created a generally literate population that is aware of the global situation. The

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Robert Cummings Neville tianity—is common among the educated classes, although it is common also to claim to be spiritual.

United Methodism finds its niche among people who look for more enthusiastic religion than is common in established churches but who are also socially liberal, for the most part. The challenges for United Methodist theology in Western Europe (though it is hard to make such sweeping generalizations) are to connect theologically with the great sophisticated traditions of European Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican theology while sustaining an understanding of the legitimacy of experiential religion in the Wesleyan (and, for instance, Moravian) senses.

Protestantism in China is a surging movement, although United Methodism is not there in its usual official “annual conference” form. Some Chinese sociologists suggest that there are 130 million Christians (Protestants and Roman Catholics) in China, making it one of the largest Christian nations, even if Christians are yet a small minority. Protestants worship in both state-approved churches and underground house churches. By and large Chinese Protestants are extremely conservative by American standards, living by the Bible interpreted in ways they think of as literal, and identifying themselves as a kind of beleaguered protest movement against a militantly secular, Marxist, society. I have a number of Chinese students who take their job to be the learning first of elementary, and then of somewhat more sophisticated, theology so as to give guidance to Chinese Christians. China has a long set of traditions of beleaguered revolutionary religious movements; Daoists, Buddhists, and Confucians have played those roles at various times. Sometimes, as is the case with contemporary Christians, they are affiliated with a vigorous shamanistic under-culture. The theological task for United Methodists working in China is radically different from that in the Western European situation, namely, to think through how Christianity relates to the Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist, and shamanist traditions that are so powerful in Chinese cul-

government was, and in many places still is, dictatorial and not entirely acceptable to this educated section of the population; and there have been many lean years where the economies could not support the professionals in their educated roles. Most of the people attracted to United Methodism come from this educated class. They view much of the Eastern, especially Russian Orthodox, religion as superstitious and are contemptuous of many of the Orthodox clergy who have at most a high school education. Their attraction to Methodism is first of all to its non-literal or antifundamentalistic approach to the Bible; they are educated to a level where historical criticism makes sense.

So they want a religious life that is intelligent, wellconnected with science and technology, and at home with a cosmopolitan view of the world. The Eastern European people who want what in the United States would be viewed as conservative-evangelical religion would not look to United Methodism. For those attracted to it, United Methodism represents educated, sophisticated, but deeply emotional, commitments to holiness. The emotional depths come from the ancient habits of Orthodoxy, but require a sophisticated expression that common Orthodoxy seems not to supply. Therefore, the United Methodist theological agenda for the former Communist countries needs to be centered on conveying vital piety in highly educated ways. The development of seminaries with high intellectual standards is crucial. Theology needs cosmopolitan expressions, as well as orientations to the existential economic situations of underutilized educated people.

The situation in Western Europe is slightly different (judging by my experience in Germany and the United Kingdom). Many colleges and universities have state-sponsored faculties in Roman Catholic and State-Church Protestant theologies. In several countries there are legal requirements to train teachers for grade schools and high schools to teach world religions. Secularism—that is, anti-institutional Chris-

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Uniformity versus Independence logians, the grass-roots theology for Latin American Methodists looks very conservative and unsophisticated, but it is obviously appropriate. The theological task for United Methodism in that situation is to build bridges between that popular Christianity and the more sophisticated forms of theology that the people will discover as they become more educated and drawn to middle-class opportunities for health care, professional work, and religious reflection. Part of the Methodist genius, seeming to be illustrated again in Latin America, is to turn lower-class people into middle-class people, improving their situation socially and religiously.

The theological situation in Africa for United Methodists is somewhat similar to that in Latin America in that Methodism appeals to the most desperate class of people. The Methodist educational mission in Africa is well-advanced by the new Africa University, located in Zimbabwe, which rests atop efforts at gradeschool and high-school education. But the situation in Africa is radically different because of the strong presence of ethnic or tribal or traditional religions and Islam.11 Just as the emerging Christianity in China is a Buddhist, shamanist, or Confucian Christianity, so the emerging African Christianity has African traditional and Islamic influences. How is this to be conceived?

Comparative Islamic−Christian theology is fairly well advanced in the American academy, although not so far along as comparative Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and Hindu theological dialogues. But comparative ethnic/traditional−Christian theologies have hardly begun, part of the reason being that tribal leaders are only now finding their academic voice and most knowledge of tribal thinking comes not from theologians but from anthropologists, who deal with first-order theological issues.12 So, much theological work lies ahead in understanding the force of the tribal ideas that might prove to be the contexts for understanding the Christian gospel. In most parts of Africa, the situation for United Methodism has passed the cusp where indigenous Af-

ture. This requires serious comparative theology based on careful knowledge of those other world religions, as well as sensitive social analysis of just what those cultures mean in particular situations across China.

(The plurality in cultural situations is illustrated by the fact that the Boston University chaplaincy has separate organizations for Mandarin-speaking and Cantonesespeaking Christian students.) Christian theology in China needs to be deeply involved in such cultural translations in order to effect any serious hermeneutical development of Chinese Christian theology in the neighborhood of the Methodist tradition.

The theological situation for United Methodists in Latin America is extremely complicated. There are no official annual conferences there, although The United Methodist Church cooperates with autonomous Methodist bodies. Distinguished Methodist theologians such as José Míguez Bonino, long-time director of ISEDET (Instituto Superior Evangelico de Estudios Teologicos), have been associated with liberation theology and the ecumenical movement. Grassroots Latin American forms of Protestantism, including Methodism, however, have been associated with the lowest classes and have served to bring organization and economic order to people’s lives, people who have little sympathy for “liberation theology.” The situation for Protestants in many places in Latin America is perhaps closest to Wesley’s own situation in eighteenthcentury England, where Methodism addressed the plight of the poorest people, neglected or abused by the established church (Roman Catholic and Anglican in the respective cultures), with strategies of uplift and self-help, mainly through education. Religious practice is more like taking on a whole new life— the born-again theme—than adapting older forms of Christianity to a somewhat new situation. The new life mobilizes many elements of pop culture, things others might view as superstition, to create a sense of hope for a community committed to God together.10 From the standpoint of many North American theo-

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Robert Cummings Neville should be taken up to reinterpret and improve upon the “sent” gospel. In all these contexts the situation is fluid.

On the one hand, it is legitimate and important for trained theologians, often from the sending culture or those educated in the sending culture, to raise questions about what the gospel means for the situation at hand and how that situation should be changed. The newly translated gospel asks questions of cultures that they had not asked before. Fear of charges of colonialism should not make American United Methodist theologians, for instance, hesitant to attempt to extend the Methodist message to new forms in the new situation.

On the other hand, it is equally legitimate— and more important—for people within the receiving culture to articulate appreciation of their own “pre-Methodist” culture and to find ways of asking questions about the theological “imports” that those imports had not been asked before. Theology, of course, is an elite enterprise, regardless of how much we honor the wisdom of people whose thinking is limited to their own contexts. Theology requires thinking from the positions of other people with other positions, thinking in ways that allow the comparisons of contexts, thinking with a sense of diverse intellectual histories, and the rest. So where United Methodism is most alive with people of the most desperate classes, it takes time to develop a theological elite from that population; and doing so is likely not the most important thing for United Methodism to be doing in that situation. Nevertheless, as things change, a truly relevant theology will be needed to guide institutionalizations and transitions, as well as to interpret the gospel for daily life. So, part of a United Methodist theology for a global church is to foster the independent and integral theologies that address the various situations of different cultural contexts, a process with different forms and different time-tables in different contexts.

rican leadership has taken over from missionaries and their Western Christian theological mentality.

THE INDEPENDENCE AND INTEGRITY THEOLOGICAL AGENDAS

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These quick sketches of different cultural contexts for United Methodist theology in a global denomination are not meant to be comprehensive—I made no mention of India, Korea, Japan, Oceania, for example.

Moreover, they have grossly oversimplified the contexts discussed. But they do serve to make the point that United Methodist theology needs to do different things in different contexts in order to express the nature of God, articulate the meaning and means of salvation in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and to order the religious lives of United Methodists.

The lesson to draw from this is to pay very close attention to the independence and integrity of theological agendas in each context, not only those mentioned here but any others as well. To identify and respect the independence and integrity of each context for a theological agenda is extremely problematic. On the one hand, the Christian movement, or the Methodist one, comes into a new situation with the terms of the sending culture, intending to make changes either to non-Christian peoples or to situations perceived to be deficiently Christian, such as that of the Orthodox in Russia; the Lutherans, Anglicans, and Reformed churches in Western Europe; or the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America.

Remember that in many of these lands there have been Christians before, and their legacy is not entirely dead. In the past century we have become sensitized to the differences between the sending cultures and the receiving cultures, at least on a superficial level. On a deeper level, however, we have not gotten much beyond academic comparative theology, which itself is still in its infancy. So it is hard to say in many of these contexts which elements of the “preMethodist” culture should be opposed and which

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Uniformity versus Independence That the theological questions and categories should begin from the United States perspective is inevitable and not to be decried. True, this is a form of colonialism, but then the expansion of the church is a form of colonialism. What is needed is the transformation of theology as theological issues come to consciousness in the various contexts so that independent and integral theologies, with attendant religious practices and lives, can arise and flourish. After a century of Western anti-colonialist scholarship, it is not difficult to see the colonialism in economic, military, and political moves toward dominance. Subtler issues are harder to discern when it comes to the colonialism involved in American United Methodism becoming a global church. Two examples make my point.

Liberation theology in its many forms has been the leading edge of anti-colonialism in theology during the past century. Perhaps it sounds odd to speak of the feminist movement as anti-colonialist; but there is an extended analogical sense in which women were treated as colonial dependents in need of supervision in their own culture. It is much less odd to speak of African-American liberation theology as anti-colonialist. Then there is Minjung liberation theology in Korea and the famous Latin-American liberation theology movements, and now many more: in the United States alone, Womanist, Latino/a, LGBT, and migrant worker liberation.

What is important to realize about liberation theologies is that they are formulated from the standpoint of the colonizers or “oppressors” on behalf of the colonized. They analyze the oppressed or colonized populations in terms of their oppression, that is, in terms of their relation to the oppressors or colonizers. Marx long ago noted that seriously oppressed or “alienated” people often do not have much of their own voice, or at least cannot communicate that in a more than local context. He said that the lower-class oppressed people need to have enlightened sons of the bourgeoi-

sie explain their oppression to them and lead them to action. His was an overly chauvinistic and patronizing way of thinking about it, but the point has some truth.

The very concepts of social oppression and colonization come from Western philosophical thinking, especially Hegelian historicism and Marxist economic and social theory. The force of this point is brought home when we remember that the New Testament writers, and Jesus as portrayed, had no concept of structural social change; even when Jesus was “queering” social institutions such as marriage, to use the language of gay liberation, he did not put the matter in terms of social oppression. Interestingly, John Wesley was one of the first to think about Christian freedom and flourishing as requiring important structural social changes.

To be sure, as the liberation movements come more under the leadership of the colonized or oppressed peoples, the Western categories are re-expressed in more indigenous ways and are modified to reflect more of the culture of the oppressed. The colonized people speak for themselves in most instances now. Nevertheless, this is different from a theology that would arise from their own needs, reflecting their own cultural strengths and values. It is different from a gospel that is defined in terms of embodiment in their own cultural flesh, rather than in terms of their power relations with others. However necessary it might be for the gospel to take root in these new cultures by means of opposition to oppression and colonization, theology in those cultures cannot be independent and have integrity until it breaks the power of the power analysis and finds its own heart.

My second illustration of the difficulty of becoming aware of imposing American theological suppositions on cultures within global United Methodism is a touchy one in the present context. The whole idea of a global United Methodist denomination is a colonialist project. Why in the world would anyone think that there should be a unified global organization of United Methodists? When the organization reports to

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Robert Cummings Neville lars in farmers’ pockets in Costa Rica. The downside of this point is that empire also is destructive of cultures that do not conduce to the economic efficiencies. Moreover, despite their powers to keep the peace, empires make ready to go to war to maintain economic interests: bananas in Chicago require control of the oil in the Middle East needed to fly them here.

The second argument in favor of empire is the universality of its institutions of justice so that the vagaries of local cultures can be mitigated. Remember how proud St. Paul was of his Roman citizenship, which allowed him to appeal his Palestinian conviction to Rome. Empire was crucial to the rise of civilization because it employed power from the top to put the lid on tribal warfare and blood feuds.13 Related to this is the third argument in favor of empire: Empire can suppress barbaric practices that can take place in small groups but that appear truly wicked when seen from a more cosmopolitan vantage point. The British Empire suppressed the practice in India of wives immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres.

The American will for empire was formed in the crucible of the Civil War when the Union took up arms to suppress the Confederacy from becoming a separate country in which slavery could be practiced: economic control and righteousness were enforced from above.

The negative side of empire, of course, is precisely the curtailment of freedom in the name of social efficiency, the imposition of the standards of justice defined by the powerful, and the definition at hand of barbarous wickedness. Now I do not mean to suggest for a moment that freedom is not under obligation to do the good and the right. I don’t see how Christians can say that any culture is as good as any other. But how do we articulate the distinctions between good and evil and the moral meaning of the gospel of salvation, or even what salvation means in an incarnational sense, when the global group of cultures has such diversity within it? Freedom is not a given: freedom is a personal and social state that is achieved and that

Nashville or to the United States-based General Conference, this obviously mirrors an American hegemony of enterprise, embodied in American missionary enterprises. For the time being it might be in the interest of the leaders in the distant conferences to look to the relatively rich United States church for financial and educational aid. But if the gospel is in fact indigenized in many different cultural settings, then each can have its own organizations, ecclesial philosophy, and theological ways of re-incarnating the great historical expressions of the gospel. What need is there at all for a global United Methodist Church beyond simple recognition of a complex global set of historical developments? Are not the American Methodist missionary movements rightly fulfilled by developing their missions to maturity and then pushing them out of the house so that they can build their own, reconnecting with their past? To be sure, the vast majority of theological considerations already have cross-cultural expressions, and in this age of global communications and education in foreign lands, the integral conversations will take place. But the point remains: for theology to be relevant, it needs to take on the flesh of its separate contexts, and this means finding ways of recognizing and fostering local theological creativity and autonomy. Alas, the arguments for a structurally unified global church are the same as the morally ambiguous arguments for empire, I suspect.

THEOLOGICAL FREEDOM My final topic is theological freedom in a global United Methodist Church. I begin by rehearsing, though not affirming, some of the arguments in favor of empire. First of all is the obvious economic one that empire, meaning a centralized control of economic activities, allows for great efficiency and the flourishing of different enterprises in areas where they are most appropriate. The American quasi-empire so long emblematized by the United Fruit Company puts bananas on the breakfast table in Chicago and dol-

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Uniformity versus Independence my part of the country (the Northeast), many young people are refusing to affiliate with The United Methodist Church because of what they view as its barbaric legalized prejudices against LGBT people.Why should anyone even think about affiliating with a religious denomination that denies the full humanity of whole classes of people? It’s like the old arguments that Africans are inferior and deserve to be slaves all over again.

Despite the “official” United Methodist Church positions, however, serious progress is being made in the United States with regard to the acceptance of homosexual people without regard for their sexuality, acceptance at all levels of Christian involvements.

Because of what we know now, I believe that religious bigotry against LGBT people is simply unacceptable and immoral, like bigotry against African Americans.

I myself would not attend a Christian congregation that is unwelcoming to LGBT people in all aspects of Christian life, just as I would not attend a congregation that is unwelcoming to African Americans. How can I stand with my gay brothers and sisters and participate in a church that says there is something wrong with them because of their sexuality when there isn’t?

Bigotry against gays is the civil rights issue of our place and time.

I am proud to be a United Methodist because of the power of the progressive stands so many United Methodists and United Methodist congregations have taken to welcome gays and to attempt to undo the effects of the persecutions of the past. The drumbeat against the immoral official stand of The United Methodist Church on homosexuality is steady and increasing in many parts of the United States. Gay liberation is part of the larger sexual liberation movement focused first on women; and I am proud of American Methodism’s progressive stands there as well. But the rate of progress is not uniform across the global United Methodist Church. The Western European United Methodists are more progressive than those in the United States, but just about all the other cultural areas

requires being recognized. A global United Methodist theology ought to recognize the freedom of different cultural settings to think through theology in ways that incarnate the gospel in their own situations. This is especially true in matters of moral theology, where deep conflicts can arise between cultures.

Let me illustrate this with attitudes toward homosexual people that turned out to be the elephant in the room at the 2012 General Conference recently in Tampa. Whether to accept homosexuals is an issue much discussed in most American churches, including Jewish and Muslim organizations. After some decades of debate in scientific circles, in the public sphere, and in churches (including The United Methodist Church), it has become clear beyond a reasonable doubt that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality. It simply is a sexual orientation for about one in twenty men and one in thirty women—minorities, to be sure, but large enough ones to be significantly represented in most communities. There are no good scriptural arguments against it; there are no good scientific arguments that it is a disease or a disability; the traditional philosophical arguments that it is “unnatural” simply do not hold up; and the moral issues of homosexuality are only the same as those for heterosexuality. Furthermore, great harm, including legalized murder, has been done to homosexuals over the centuries because of bigotry against them, often motivated by church teachings and practices. The suicide rate among gay teenagers is far higher than the average, because they so often are taught to hate themselves.

Just as in my youth many white people had disgust reactions against sharing bathrooms and water fountains with African Americans, so many people today have disgust reactions against the very thought of homosexuality or gay sexual acts.14 The disgust reactions are all culturally learned; and in the United States progress is being made to unlearn such visceral bigotry.

The current younger generation is not learning those reactions with the intensity of previous generations. In

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Robert Cummings Neville and depraved. They then argue that in the African context a person and his or her body belong not to themselves but to the social group, and so homosexuality should be extinguished, not even talked about. Of course, in the United States context women recognize this argument as the grounds for limiting them to socially defined inferior roles. Owning one’s own body is an elementary kind of freedom for most Americans other than some conservative Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics. The irony is that the African position represented by the Mwitis is a justification for slavery so long as the social group defines some people as worthy of slavery. A huge cultural gulf exists within the global United Methodist Church between its progressive United States-based and its conservative African delegates to the imperially powerful General Conference. This is a much greater cultural gulf than that which exists between progressive and conservative people within the United Methodist Church in the United States. But when the African delegates to the General Conference join with the United States conservatives, they can impose an anti-homosexual agenda on the global United Methodist Church, including those American annual conferences that might be progressive enough to eliminate all reference to sexual orientation with regard to the participation of people in all aspects of the church’s ministries. Unless there really is something wrong with being homosexual—for which there is no evidence except for cultural bias—this global alliance forces the progressive parts of the church to participate in a set of attitudes and practices that are seriously harmful to sexual minorities and incompatible with the hospitality and love manifested and advocated by Jesus.

Therefore, theology for the global United Methodist Church should maintain the independence of the United States annual conferences to move progressively far ahead of the conferences in other parts of the world that would slow or reverse progress. The theology involved in moral analysis of issues, such as whether

of the denomination are less progressive. This is especially so of the African United Methodists, who reflect a conservative dissonance relative to the progressive forces in United Methodism in the United States rather similar to the more celebrated African conservatism on LGBT issues in the Anglican Communion.

To be sure, conflict between conservative antigay forces and progressive forces is very strong simply within United Methodist annual conferences in the United States. Since 1972 the disputes over homosexual ordination and marriage, and over whether homosexual practice is compatible with Christianity, have been a divisive factor within American United Methodism. But the 2012 General Conference achieved distressing new lows in civility over the matter. On the conference floor, an African delegate likened homosexuality to bestiality. A moderating motion to say that United Methodists disagree on the issues of homosexuality was defeated, with the implication that only the anti-homosexual agenda represents global United Methodism, an affirmation of centralized imperialism.

A powerful force was attached to the conservative side in that debate that is well expressed earlier by Gershon and Gladys Mwiti in their article, “The Incompatibility of Homosexuality and the Church: Thoughts from the Church in the Developing World”: Homosexuality is not the only depravity the church has to look into in this context. Each immorality has other related evils that go with it. Homosexuality in churches therefore is a reflection of deeper problems in a church that has been undermining spiritual nourishment of her sheep. It reflects a culture of rationalism, pluralism, enlightenment, and excessive freedom all aping modern civilization.15 The Mwitis never provide an argument that homosexuality is wrong, only that it is obviously sinful

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Uniformity versus Independence of the denomination involves very different cultural situations, so that what is practical in one might be slightly irrelevant or wholly so in another. Third, the development of United Methodist theology explicitly should be pluralized so as to incarnate the gospel in different cultural settings, finding independence and integrity with regard to its historical development in each place and finding the freedom to attend to the demands in each setting. We need to ask, of course, what theological points unite us across the global landscape.

This question is itself is a kind of contextual question, where the context in question is that of a plurality of contexts. It needs to be addressed alongside of, and not before or after, addressing what the relevant theological questions and positions are in each context.

By now, the delicacy and studied ambiguity of theology for a global United Methodist Church should be evident. On the one hand, we are all against any serious in-group/out-group distinction. All people are the family of God; no one is outside; and the world is our parish. On the other hand, the global cultures of the denomination are significantly different such that theologies arising with integrity within each culture are likely to be at odds in some respects with one another, sometimes to the point of hostility, as in the case of sexuality. Those are in-group/outgroup distinctions.

To impose globally a dominant theology on controversial matters from headquarters—even if the headquarters is a democratic, majority-ruled General Conference—is a form of imperialism. The disillusionment of so many participants in the 2012 General Conference is a manifestation of the downside of the imperial model for the global denomination. Global United Methodism needs desperately to abandon that model and find collegial ways of promoting the incarnate relevance of theology in each place. To make The United Methodist Church in the United States a central conference like all the others, with the right to establish its own Discipline that might differ from

LGBT people should be stigmatized by the policy of saying that homosexual practice is “incompatible” with Christianity or by the rules that homosexuals should not marry or serve as clergy, should have the freedom to develop in each cultural setting of the global denomination, including the contexts that are conservative on this matter. In the United States cultural setting, where among progressive United Methodists biblical historical criticism, science, and equality before the law are taken seriously, theological interpretations of sexuality are likely to be very different from cultural settings where those elements seem like luxuries. The point could be put the opposite way as well: the theological integrity and independence of the more conservative cultural setting need to find their own ways through the issues.

Whereas the progressive wing of United Methodism in the United States feels itself constrained and pulled back by the influence of the African cultural sensibilities, the Africans are likely to feel themselves pulled toward perdition by the more progressive Americans.

None of this is to suggest that theologians from each of the cultural settings in global United Methodism should not try to persuade others of their theological convictions—only that each should understand the relevance of theology in their own contexts and work through their issues with independence and integrity.

The last thing the progressive United States annual conferences should do is abandon LGBT people anywhere to the horrendous malice of those who think they should be excluded, stigmatized, or killed in accordance with the biblical directive in Leviticus 20.

CONCLUSIONS My cumulative point in this brief essay is that theology for a global United Methodist Church needs to recognize three things. First, theology should be practical; that is, it should be relevant to the dispositions of belief, Christian life, and especially ecclesiastical structures in every cultural context in which United Methodism incarnates Christianity. Second, the global reach

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Robert Cummings Neville Because the evolution of a global United Methodist Church has been an historical and political process more than a theological one, the theological aspects of our current ecclesiology need to be explored in much greater depth and detail. These aspects include the nature of translation of the gospel in the missionary development of the church and the nature of contextual theology when the missionary movement is over or is retained only in a colonialist imperial fashion. The global context of United Methodism is at this juncture right now.

the Disciplines of the other central conferences, is one possibility that has long been discussed. In this way the General Conference would become an occasion for United Methodists from around the world to gather for worship, encouragement, and conversation but not to decide legislation. Perhaps United Methodists in the United States could have several central conferences, thereby relaxing tensions.

My discussion here has been in that branch of theology known as ecclesiology—theology aimed at understanding and providing guidance for the ordering of the church, specifically The United Methodist Church. The principal theological points have been: 1. United Methodist theology should be aimed at incarnating the gospel in people’s lives in their various cultural settings. This pushes back against the approach that theology should be vague and symbolic enough so as to not make much of a difference to specific lives.

2. Because the global United Methodist Church has such different cultural contexts, each should be encouraged to develop a theology with incarnational force for its own context.This pushes back against the approach that United Methodists should have a one-size-fits-all theology.

3. No majority or coalition of cultural settings should be able to force its theological convictions on others who are attempting to be incarnationally relevant to their settings. This pushes back against attempts to define United Methodism by uniform doctrinal or moral theology.

4. These three points lead to a fourth: The imperial model for global United Methodism, in which the General Conference legislates for the whole denomination, needs to be changed to allow for the diverse theological settings to have their own relevant theologies and not be coerced into what they take to be bad theology, as in the disputes over homosexuality.

ENDNOTES 1. For a panoramic history, see David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2006).

2. The historical sketch in the remainder of this section reflects the self-understanding of The United Methodist Church and is taken from the “Historical Statement” at the beginning of The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church (2008).

3. A common model for understanding the diversity of forms of Christianity (or any religion for that matter) is that there is an essential core to be found in all the diverse forms and that the diversity itself comes from different historical and cultural circumstances. Perhaps the most sophisticated defense of this model was made by Adolf von Harnack in his What is Christianity?, translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders with an Introduction by Rudolf Bultmann (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957; original German edition 1900). For Harnack, the core of Christianity is the ethical teachings of Jesus.There have been many candidates for the essential core, however, including devotion to the Eucharist, commitment to the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, a spirituality centered in theosis or becoming God-like, and acceptance of Jesus Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior. That so many things have seemed to be the essential core suggests that there is something wrong with the essential core/culturally relative diversity.

4. The state of the art study is Samuel Hugh Moffett’s two-volume A History of Christianity In Asia:Volume I: Beginnings to 1500; Volume II: 1500-1900 (Vol. I: San Fran-

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Uniformity versus Independence cisco: Harper/Collins, 1992;Vol. II: Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,

roots, with the consequences that it promoted

2005). A briefer history is Ian Gillman and Hans-Joachim

significant aspects of those roots. The other part

Klimkett’s Christians in Asia before 1500 (Ann Arbor, MI:

was the destigmatization of Gentile culture by

University of Michigan Press, 1999).

adopting that culture as a natural extension of

5. See Kwame Bediako, Christianity In Africa: The

the life of the new religion. (p. 1)

Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

10. After meeting with Professor Bonino in Argentina, who admitted that there are only a couple of thousand

University Press, 1995; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995).

6. The councils usually had a great deal to do with

Methodists in the country, I met with Methodist leaders

Roman imperial politics. For a fascinating study of this, see

in Brazil (not United Methodists) who introduced us to

Philip Jenkins’s Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs,Three Queens,

thousands and thousands of enthusiastic Methodists. The

and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for

episcopal leader in Brazil was famous for exhorting his fol-

the Next 1,500 Years (New York: Harper/Collins, 2010).

lowers to pray for growth of new teeth that had been lost

7. See Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity:

to accident or disease, claiming to have grown some of his

The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church In the Middle

own by faith. A few months later I met him in Cambridge

East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died (New York: Harper/

University, where he was doing graduate work. He under-

Collins, 2008). In many ways, this volume is a companion

stood the difference between theological needs in Cam-

to his Jesus Wars. It is also a fine history of pre-colonial Af-

bridge and those in San Paulo.

11. Note that Bediako chose “The Renewal of a Non-

rican Christianity.

Western Religion” as the subtitle for his book Christianity

8. For the connection of the European missionary

In Africa.

expansion across the globe with European colonialism, see Charles Corn, The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade

12. For an important recent study, see Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter, eds., The Changing Face of Christian-

(New York: Kodansha International, 1999).

9.

ity: Africa, The West, and the World (New York: Oxford Uni-

The “translation” of the gospel antedates the texts

versity Press, 2005).

of the New Testament, because Paul translated the meaning of the life of a rural Galilean to the Gentile world of the

13. A delightful read on this point is Jared Diamond’s

Mediterranean to which his letters were written. The most

Germs, Guns, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New

important recent text on the “translation” of the gospel as

York: W.W. Norton, 1999).

the heart of Christian mission is Lamin Sanneh’s Translating

14. See the analysis of such disgust reactions in relation

the Message The Missionary Impact on Culture, 2nd ed. (Mary-

to “impurity” in Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why

knoll, NY: Orbis, 2009). Sanneh begins his introduction:

Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012).

[F]rom its origins, Christianity identified itself with the need to translate out of Aramaic and

15. In Staying the Course: Supporting the Church’s Posi-

Hebrew, and from that position came to exert

tion on Homosexuality, ed. Maxie D. Dunnam and H. New-

a dual force in its historical development. One

ton Malony, with a Foreword by Bishop G. Lindsey Davis

part of that was the resolve to relativize its Judaic

(Nashville: Abingdon, 2003), pp. 159-60.

ABOUT

THE

AUTHOR:

Robert Cummings Neville is Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University. He has written twenty-two books, edited a further eleven, and has contributed numerous articles to scholarly and church publications. He served as dean of the United Methodist-related School of Theology at Boston University from 1988 to 2003 and as dean of the university’s Marsh Chapel from 2003 to 2006. He is an ordained elder in the Missouri Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church.

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