Ha. So we've got in this concurrent session.
I don't know how I pulled the short straw and got immediately after life.
I'll talk in your sleep if you have, but I'm Jim Reed.
I'm from Winnipeg.
I'm glad to see you all.
And I have copies of the text here number around.
And you're you're welcome to it.
If you wanted copy of it and there aren't enough copies, just let me know.
There's an email address.
I'm happy to send it to you, so long as you understand.
My background is philosophy.
It's not theology.
It's not historical theology.
I do ethics for my living.
And so I'm trying out some things here.
I hope it's a bit of exploration.
Maybe it'll trigger some ideas.
And I hope some here know kind of the
history of the church and theology better than I do.
And I can learn some things.
But I'd like to try some ideas out with you that I think are pertinent to the
subject here, and we'll try it after lunch.
Anyway.
So I have written this text out because,
trained in philosophy, it's hard for me to even give my name in 40 minutes.
I am going to try, for Steve's sake and
yours, to get through this in about 20 minutes.
I hope it's not get through in a bad time to go through this and hope it'll give us
maybe 15 minutes for a bit of conversation.
Okay, so here we go.
So the program is announced in the next 40 minutes that we're going to explore
experience in a Wesleyan approach to ethics.
But immediately we're confronted with two
concepts that have multiple means ethics and experience.
And the multiplicity of meanings in these
terms threatens misunderstanding and people talking by each other.
So I want to begin this time with a little conceptual clarification.
First, ethics.
Well, ethics I give three sort of three kinds of things that are called ethics.
First, there's ethics is another name for moral theology or moral philosophy.
Look in the dictionary.
It gives you that briefly, that means theorizing about a certain kind of right
and wrong or rights and wrongs of good and bad, ascertaining whether there are
principles of moral behavior, and if so, what those principles are, and whether or
there are some that take precedence over others.
And exploring loads of reasoning
appropriate to morality, or arguing that morality is not a matter of reasoning at
all and unpacking the notion of moral agency and how moral agency is nurtured.
And what sorts of beings have moral agency and trying to determine whether anything
in morality can actually be known and if so, how it can be known.
And connecting the dots between God and morality and on and on.
And I take it that people in the crowd are familiar with theorizing.
So that's ethics, one sense of ethics.
And it energizes weird people like me who like to theorize.
But much of my day job is spent in a different way.
I do ethics.
People say, what do you do?
Well, I do ethics.
By that I mean that
ethics is unlike some other parts of theorizing in that it is,
in part at least, to guide action, not just theorizing for its own sake.
And a major part of my life is spent trying to advise others on difficult
social issues and complex policy alternatives.
Lastly, I call this cleverly ethics.
Three might have to do with the evaluation.
So it's a different this comes down to the
level of particular judgments we talk about.
Well, that wasn't very ethical in talking
about somebody's behavior or we say about somebody, well, they're really an ethical
person, or some adjective that goes along with that.
And so that might be, if you want the
third sense as I'll use it today, okay, that's one side.
Now, experience.
How about experience?
I don't know.
Some of you might know. Right?
I see Dr. Dayton here.
He probably has memorized John Wesley's corpus.
I don't know.
But I don't know if he ever used the word ethics as a matter of fact.
But we do know that he used the word experience.
We know, we're told that experience was
the fourth leg that Wesley added to Anglicanism's theological three legged
stool, giving us the Wesleyan quadrilateral.
And we know that John Wesley was well, he was seldom semantically rigorous.
What does that mean?
Like, sometimes he used the words to mean
one thing in one context, something else in a different context.
So with experience, I think he used the term rather differently.
And so what does experience mean?
There are books in Wesleyan studies on what Wesley meant by experience.
I'm not going to try to cover those, but to in some way simplify our task today.
I want to distinguish two meanings of
experience that I find in Wesley and Wesleyan theology.
The first use of experience I sometimes call public experience.
It refers to events or states of affairs in the external world.
That's the kind of phrase that was used in John An exploring of the external world
and the things that people could observe with their bodily senses.
Hear, see, touch, taste, so on.
So sentences like, the snow is drier in Winnipeg than it is in Toronto.
Just come to Winnipeg, you'll hear that it's cold, but it's a dry cold.
So those are the things.
Those kinds of senses are verifiable by observation.
Maybe you haven't been in both cities and
you don't know firsthand whether the sentence is true.
But in principle, you could have been in both places and could have tested it out.
We all know that empirical verification
has its complexities, but we also know that the heart of it is that anybody
suitably situated with the properly adjusted equipment could observe.
So you may not have been to Winnipeg, but you think, well, if I went to Winnipeg, I
could test this sentence out and tell whether it's true or not.
And it's not because I'm special.
It's rather because I have eyes and you have eyes and you see what I see, right?
Something that anybody could well, there's a second sense.
And in some ways, I think this is what this other sense of experience is.
Maybe what Wesley and Wesleyanism get their special significance for and maybe
want to talk about it more than I talk about it in the paper.
But I call this, in contrast, a public experience.
I call this private experience.
So the second use of the word experience
refers to events or states of affairs that are not public in the same way that the
snow and Winnipeg and the awareness of which is not available to all observers.
In the same way, some events and states of affairs are such
that they cannot be validated firsthand by everyone.
Like the sentence, I am in pain.
If I were, I said, I am in pain, that
would report what I'm calling a private experience.
Now, saying it's private doesn't mean that
you can't verify it, but you do so on a different basis from the ones I use.
You will verify it on the basis of seeing
me wits forever, for instance, or holding my head or whatever.
But I feel the pain itself, and I know the
truth of the sentence on a very different basis from you.
This is not rocket science.
You've all had pain.
You know what it is to feel them and be
around people who don't sympathize because they don't believe you.
Right?
I don't have to see myself wince to know that I'm in pain, right?
Okay.
That's preamble nine minutes and 34 seconds.
Okay. John Wesley when John Wesley said, as he
does in his sermon on the use of money, he says this that I used in the title of
my talk, whatever it is, which reason or experience shows to be destructive of
health and which sense of experience of my two, which sense is he employed?
Well, I think pretty clearly he's using
the first sense of experience, public experience.
John Wesley is saying to the hearers of
his sermon, you and I may not know right now what sorts of activities cause illness
and hurt or, on the other hand, create general prosperity, but we could find out.
We could find out, for instance, by asking doctors and businessmen what makes people
sick and well and what makes people wealthy or poor.
They have seen things that you and I well,
we could have seen them for ourselves if we taken the time.
I think I'm supposed to be on another
slide when in the same sermon,
Wesley says, you should be continually learning from the experience of others or
from your own experience reading and reflection to do everything.
You have to do better today than you did yesterday.
He is doing ethics.
He's doing ethics in the sense of guiding action,
the ethical principles or rules, as he calls them, and he has this great one gain
all you can, save all you can, give all you can.
That's Wesley's three point sermon before
the altar called in use of money that he grounds in experience.
I mean, he grounds those principles in Scripture experience, that is, the
publicly accessible observations that can be made that he's talking about.
That's what links Scripture to the living out the rules in particular situations.
It's the kind of doing ethics from
Scripture, discovering the principles, applying them in practice.
Experience is the link.
The same sense of experience that is public experience is at play when John
Wesley examines the question of whether anyone is perfected in love.
Such a condition is possible, according to
Wesley, that people, someone could be perfected in love.
But he wonders if you read plain account of Christian perfection, you see several
times he wonders like, I believe this is true, certain this is
true, but does anybody actually is anybody actually perfected in love?
And he wonders about this.
And why does he wonder?
Well, on the basis of I haven't yet seen it.
By saying that he hasn't seen it, he
doesn't mean he has some special antenna that nobody else has that could find it.
He means, well, look for yourself.
Have you seen somebody who is perfected in love?
So experience means the same thing in these two contexts for Wesley.
In one case,
he is meaning to move from Scripture rules to practice experiencing, being the link.
And in this other case, he's using
experience to validate certain ethical judgments.
He's not counseling any action, but he's
evaluating the character of people that he is frankly presented with in his community
character ethics, or what some today call virtue ethics.
Character ethics plays a big part in Western ethics.
And I want to return to the subject in a few minutes.
I better move it. I'm going to get there.
At this point, it's sufficient to note how
John Wesley connects experience to characteristics.
Now, I speak as jump forward number of years.
I speak as a Salvationist salvation army member.
And I come to this through founders of the
Salvation Army, catherine and William Booth.
Most of you will not be familiar with them.
Let me just give you access to a couple of their works.
William Booth's book.
Pivotal Book in Darkest England and the Way Out, he calls it 1890 publication.
It's a significant work, as I see it in Wesleyan's social and political ethics.
Boo himself takes empirical claims
publicly, observable claims, very seriously.
At one point in this big book, he calls for the establishment of an intelligence
department which was not Salvation Army CIA.
He's saying that if we want we're to effectually deal with the forces of social
evil, we must have ready at our fingers and the accumulated experience and
information of the whole world on this subject.
His point is that you need good data to do good ethics.
The nature of the argument he uses is
encapsulated in something he called the Cab Horses Charter.
First, he recalls, scripture says, Give us this day our daily bread.
Booth takes that as a prayer to God and as
a moral principle directed to God's people.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Scripture beginning,
Booth contends that unless we look then at what's happening in the world, the
citation of Scripture and any professions of care are just empty phrases.
So he turns to what is the publicly observable world of the late 19th century.
Here's a quote when in the streets of
London, a cab horse, weary or careless or stupid, trips and falls and lies stretched
out in the midst of traffic, there's no question of debating how he came to strum
stumble before we try to get him on his lights again.
These are the two points of the cab horses charter.
When he's down, he's helped up.
While he lives, he has food, shelter and
work that, although a humble standard, is at present, he says, on the basis of
publicly available experience and observation, that is a standard at present
absolutely unattainable by millions of our fellow men and women in this country.
Can the Cap heart horse charter began it for human beings?
I answer yes.
So from Scripture, experience leverage to guiding action.
Catherine Booth, William's wife, was as much a Wesleyan moralist as William was.
Her way of connecting experience and ethics goes in a different direction.
She wrote a book.
Female Ministry.
Subtitled woman's Right to Preach the Gospel.
The question at issue then, like now, is
whether it's permissible for a woman ever to teach or preach to men.
The argument against it in 1859 was that
it opposes a standard revealed in Scripture.
So when Catherine Booth appeals to empirically verifiable experience, it's
not in order to apply a scriptural principle, but rather to use experience to
disclose a more faithful understanding of what scriptures actually teach.
Listen to.
Whether the church will allow women to
speak in or her assemblies can only be a question of time.
Common sense, public opinion, and the
blessed results of female agency will force the church to give us an honest and
impartial rendering of the solitary text on which she grounds her prohibitions.
Then, when the true light shines and God's words take the place of man's traditions,
the doctor of divinity who shall teach that Paul commands woman to be silent when
God's spirit urges her to speak will be regarded much the same as we would now
regard an astronomer who would teach that the sunny is the earth's satellite.
Catch what she said?
She said it with a real gusto.
It took a special man to be married to such a woman.
Yes, dear was a favorite line of this.
It would misrepresent Catherine Booth to
say her only argument in this book is to pit the evidence of the ministry of.
And then she cites none.
The sainted Madame Guillaume.
Lady Maxwell, the talented mother of the Wesley.
Mrs. Fletcher, Mrs.
Elizabeth Fry, mrs. Smith, mrs.
Whiteman, miss Marsh.
Every one of them expounding and
exhorting, from the scriptures to mixed companies of men and women.
She says,
what can we pit against that prohibition of prohibitionist reading of Scripture?
Well, she has various arguments, but one
she takes is this incontestable experience.
Look at Susannah Wesley.
Can you doubt that she, in fact, has the gift of the Spirit?
That she would be gifted to preach, and to
prevent her from doing so would be to stand opposite the Spirit?
If that's the case, then the reading of Paul in the way in which males would want
to at that time is a misreading of Scripture.
So for her, she's arguing the Bible does
not actually teach what many up to that time.
Something similar is happening, I believe, today, concerning the ethics of Christian
same sex relationships in the center of what is a
multidimensional and often schismatic controversy.
Many are appealing to experience,
saying the issue cannot be settled without experiential knowledge.
It's being said by Anglicans like Oliver O'Donovan, like Southern Baptists like
David Gushy, and Methodists like Richard Hayes.
Everybody's become one at West David Gushy the Baptist in recent I mean,
it's significant book and the impact it's having.
David Gushy says
the methodological questions here is what to make of the extraordinary power
of transformative encounters with oneself or a loved one as a sexual minority.
Is perspective shifting sympathy with the suffering of one's child attempting
seduction from God's truth, or is it a path into God's truth?
Do we read ourselves and other people
through the lens of sacred Scriptures that we love?
Or do we read texts of Scripture through the lens of sacred people that we love?
He says this is what happened in the early church.
People encountered Jesus and think the Emmaus road story.
People encountering Jesus unequivocally,
having an encounter with this man, then read Scriptures differently after that.
Some of us believe that in our time, an older destructive
paradigm based on a particular way of connecting the biblical dots has not
survived the transformative encounters we're having with LGBT fellow Christians.
Just a moment to summarize
here we've seen public experience being used by John Wesley and William Booth to
apply general ethical principles to specific situations.
What I at the beginning called ethics.
Two We've seen experience used by Wesley to verify virtue claims.
What I at the beginning called ethics.
Three and in this last used by Catherine Booth and David Gushy to settle a dispute
as to what the fundamental ethical principles really are.
What I call Ethics One, experience and
ethics connecting in this multifaceted, multidimensional way.
So that's one. Okay.
Shall I soldier on?
We're going to go.
I think that's significant.
But if we're going to learn as much as we can
from Wesleyan approach to ethics, I think we need to push a little further and ask
some questions about experiencers as well as experiences.
We need to ask some questions about the
observers as well as the observations about the reports of the observers.
And so it's a bit like this.
So I want to begin with an analogy.
How many of you have seen a fetal ultrasound?
What do you see?
Okay. Can you tell if it's a boy or a girl?
Me neither.
Can you tell whether its fetal development is concerning or not?
But if you can't, why take the ultrasound?
Well, see, as we look at this, many of us
are looking at it, and we're seeing something.
We're having an experience, if you want, and we are seeing the same image.
But we take these ultrasounds because not everybody sees the same thing, right?
If you've got a skilled obstetrician, that
person is going to look at this and be able to make kind of sense of it.
But it's informative to them because their
observational equipment is attuned to see what is really there.
It's not they impose something.
It's rather that they have the skill to see what you and I can't see, right?
I mean, all of their arguments.
Now, I think that's an analogy for
something that's happening in Wesleyan teaching.
If we turn back to ethics, we want to ask
whether everyone's perceptual equipment is equally good, whether every ethically
relevant observation report is equally reliable.
John Wesley himself would say, no, that's not the case.
Listen to a sample of what he has to say in his sermon Original Sin.
Here he's talking about the Depravity.
The ancient heathens, he says, were wholly
ignorant of the entire deprivation of the whole human nature.
Love of the world is now as natural to every man as to love his own will.
What's more natural to us than to seek
happiness in the creature instead of the Creator?
What's more natural than the desire of the
flesh, that is, of this pleasure sense in every kind?
Or again, the desire of the pleasures of
the imagination arise either from great or beautiful or uncommon objects.
That is, we're inspired by great art, but
neither grand nor beautiful objects please us any longer than they're new.
We're actually attracted to their novelty.
And when the novelty is over, the greatest
part, at least, of the pleasure is given over last.
This seems to me from that sermon we learned this concerning man in his
natural state, unassisted by the grace of God.
All the imaginations of the thoughts of
his heart are still evil, only evil, and that continually.
And this account of the present state of man is confirmed by daily experience.
It is true notice it is true that the natural man discerns it not.
The natural man does not know his or her sinfulness.
This is not to be wondered at.
So long as a man born blind continues, so he is scarcely sensible of his want.
That is the absence of his head, what he's missing.
Much less could we suppose a place
much less could we suppose a place where all were born without sight.
Would they be sensible of the want of what we see?
In like manner, so long as men remain in their natural blindness of understanding,
they're not sensible of their spiritual wants and of this in particular.
But as soon as God opens the eyes of their
understanding, they see the state that they were in before then.
They are deeply convinced that every man,
living themselves especially, are by nature altogether vanity.
That is, folly and ignorant, sin and wickedness.
Now, appreciate what Wesley is saying here.
Not everybody desires what is actually desirable.
Not everyone values what is objectively
valuable, or at least they don't value it for its truly valuable quality.
Not everyone sees the truth.
Not everyone is even capable of seeing the truth.
In other words, human nature untransformed
perceives human nature untransformed perceives a very different world from the
world seen by those whom God has sanctified.
The analogy right.
Experts in ultrasound see something different here.
They don't see something that's not there.
They see things there that you and I don't see.
Analogously, I think Wesley is saying God's spirit gets in.
Transforming the human heart creates the capacity to see things that
are really there that are not seen by those who are not so transformed.
If this is true, then I suggest that a Wesleyan approach in ethics
would not, in general, ask for the views of just anybody and everybody.
When an ethical claim is disputed, that is
not ask anybody and everybody, well, what's your experience of it?
A wesling approach would rather seek out the people whose affections God had
transformed and whose eyes God it would want to know how they saw things,
what they thought of them, because genuinely good people, being perfected in
love, have different and more accurate experiential capacities.
In conclusion, I suggest a double Wesleyan contribution to ethics.
They're probably more, but I'm getting at two here short time.
The first contribution that Wesleyan
thinking contribution has to make to the field of ethics, Christian ethics, is to
contend that experience has an assured place at the table of ethical discernment.
And that's an argument, I think, that Wesley, if he had to win it, has won it.
You find this in Anglicans.
Now they've given up their three legged stool.
They've got a fourth two.
We find it in Southern Baptist like Gushy, we find it in Methodist, so on.
But little is attended to this second.
And the second, I think, is to connect the ethical significance of a reported
experience to the character of those reporting.
That's an argument still being debated.
So, for instance, I hear what David Gushy
is saying in our context about are we reading scripturally when we put it
against our experience of the life of people who are gay Christians?
The Wesleyan would want to hear that, but
would want to ask about the person making the observation that is, observing that
these people are mature Christians who are gay or whatever.
It might want to ask, so how reliable is that observational report?
And asking how accurate that is, want to know how well tuned by the Spirit of God
the observational equipment is of the person making the report?
What do you think does that?
We're talking a lot about athletics and
experience, but I also would say that Leslie, the
first thing he's going to look at is the scripture
says, right then those experiences should come in line with the scripture, not
making the scripture come in line with the experience.
So I don't know enough.
Wetley I'm sort of nervous because I've got Dr.
Dayton here in the room and his book Discovering an Evangelical Heritage.
My wife, in reading a draft of this, said,
but you need to put in something about slavery, and I don't have that.
And the abolitionist tradition in North
America of those who are in a Wesley tradition, really important.
But Wesley himself, John Wesley, was against slavery.
So I don't know enough.
Maybe you do, but I might look there to
see whether see, I see cases in which use of Scripture, he says, here's the
scriptural principle, experience leads us to the action.
Or he says, here's someone who presents themselves as being perfected in love.
Let's have the experience of it.
I think there may be cases in which he
says, we have an awareness of something or other, and that's the basis on which we
determine that that's what Scripture is teaching.
That certainly is the way in which a Catherine Booth or a David Gushy is going.
The experience in front of us is being
used by God to help us discern what it is scripture is actually teaching.
That reason and all the other what you're talking about with the ultrasound, if you
go back to the ultrasound and you say, like, here public experience has a seat at
the table, so that would say, is that okay?
This is my wife, she's pregnant, her ultrasound.
So now you have a qualified doctor or team of qualified doctors who can read that.
But then we have 15 friends and they say, yeah, the doctor is saying this.
But listen, don't you worry because this.
Is what we did.
Our experience is that these doctors are wrong half the time.
So then we forget the doctors and.
We go with.
To me is the trained eye first and the Holy Spirit, which illuminates us.
Well, just illuminates.
That's the key point.
The idea is that the Holy Spirit takes a hold of people and changes them, right?
So changes them now that when they look, they actually see features of the
situation that without that transformation of their character, they did not see.
They were really there, but they didn't see them.
So that's why, again, align my wife, wonderful wife said, Take that out.
I said, there's a way in which Wesley I don't know Wesley, but Wesleyan
ethics is aristocratic rather than democratic.
That is, it doesn't take 40 people and said, let's get where's the average in
terms of whether there's problems with this fetal development, right?
No, it appears especially to the reports and assessments of certain people.
The trained doctors, and similarly in ethics, might say, we don't want
everybody's report of what they think is right.
If you want, we want to look to those who, in one way or other have had their eyes
attuned by the Holy Spirit, so they see more.
Accurately, probably many of us have connections or gain.
Connections.
But the Scripture, we believe in the inherent Scripture.
So Romans One makes it very clear that it's unethical and wrong.
So we could get in trouble if we left the
Scripture and just go by experiences there.
Yeah, absolutely. But could I call we have a few minutes.
In some senses, I don't have a skin in
this game in the same way in which others do.
I think it's a very important moment.
Some of what we're being called upon to do is this say Romans One.
What is Romans One really teach,
and how do we ascertain what it is really teaching?
Okay, now just sort of methodologically, I
think, that people like David Cushing are saying, we have this experience.
Like, look for yourself. Look at this person.
Would you actually say this person who self identifies as gay,
would you say that she shows the fruit of the spirit, shows
the maturity that we would expect, makes all professions of Christians?
And if you say yes, then we've got a challenge here.
Do we say that our reading of our
understanding of her must be faulty because Scripture says that can't be?
Or do we say, no, we believe our observations are accurate, so we have to
ask hard questions about what is Romans One really saying?
A lot of years trying to
get the right message, and it seemed very, very clear to me in Scripture.
So I love everyone.
We have to really reach out to the gays, and we love them.
I have a brother who's gay, and I have several brothers, and I love him and pray
for him, but no, he doesn't accept fruit of the spirit in any way.
It just seems so clear to me on that issue.
The tough ones are people who are, boy, I would trust my life into their hands.
They show all sorts of attributes of being Christlike.
Those are the cases that are challenging.
Yes, I appreciate all that, but I think that thorough investigation
would reveal that there are some lack of things lacking in.
I think we need to have a better answer than that for the issue, because we just
blindly say, well, that's what the Scripture says.
Well, the Scripture also says women should keep silent.
The Scripture also says they shouldn't teach men.
And yet Catherine Booth says she saw so powerfully that the Spirit came upon her.
Who were we to fight against that?
So we changed our understanding of those verses.
So we are not being reasonable when we
say, well, the Scripture says it clearly in Romans one.
It also seems to say it clearly about women.
Homosexuality is wrong, but I need a better explanation.
See, this is the challenge.
And I think a Wesleyan approach is in a way, trying to help us.
First of all, say that there are other cases in which we believe.
Let's see, Nick Walterscorp is
he said, not everything scripture says does it teach?
Right? So we can know what scripture says.
The hard thing is to discern what scripture is teaching.
So you get people like a Catherine Booth and others in the churches and Nazarene
and so on who say, we have you cannot contest this experience.
Holy people say about this woman, the
Spirit has gifted her, which means not that Scripture is to be cast aside, but
let us figure out what scripture is really teaching.
And I think that's what we are being challenged with today.
And I say just a little bit
right now in the hot debate, the schismatic debate over same sex
relationships, we are tending in the direction of accepting the testimony
experience without sufficiently asking so what is the quality of the observational
equipment of the people who are reporting the experience?
And I say let's ask the people that on
other grounds we know to be the really holy people in our midst.
Ask them, do you too see this person who professes to be both gay and Christian?
Do you see them too, as mature in Christ?
That for me is then I have to take that rather than say a million people.
Yes, because our mistake is just openly
saying, well, the Scripture is clear about it.
Well, it also says you should hate your mother and father.
It also says it's a shame for a man to have long hair.
It also says, so you have to have better explanations than that the church.
Has got in the context of what.
Is written as well, right?
Of course, when you take something out.
Of context that makes it really easy to make it say what you want to say.
We, that my little role is one thing.
To have the last word.
I'm going to get the hook here.
1 minute and 15 seconds.