Methodist vs Baptist Political Theology

(I shared these remarks on February 8 with the Richard Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.)

There’s never been a greater time when the political theology of the major Protestant traditions has been more needed. American Christianity is fast becoming post denominational. Even devout members of denominations are less and less shaped by their particularities. The rootlessness of todays USA Christianity maybe explains a lot about where we are culturally and politically.

Baptists are like Methodists in having a huge social and political impact on America without having a deeply articulated political theology. Their political impact comes from assumptions and intuitions rather than specified theories. Discerning their traditions requires identifying underlying political understandings that emerge from their theology.

If I understand correctly, Baptist social and political engagement deduces from its commitment to soul liberty, the purity of the church and evangelism. Its congregationalism and democratic governance, without bishops or presbyteries, surely also are important. They all fed a zeal for religious liberty, for free speech, for aversion to centralized authorities, for commoners over aristocrats. Commitment to the Bible’s straightforward authority unmediated by ecclesial tradition perhaps also fuels commitment to strict constitutionalism.

All of these Baptist assumptions have guided their devotion to and impact on American democracy.

As Andrew Walker and Paul Miller conclude in their important forthcoming book on Baptist public theology:

Republicanism (with a small “r”) is our social theory. We did not invent it (pagan Greeks and Renaissance Italian Catholics were republicans long before we were), but we adopted it and made it our own. Baptists—in making common cause with Cromwell and Parliament against the king; with the Patriots and revolutionaries against the Tories and the Crown; and with the United States against the kaiser, the Nazis, and the Soviets—have consistently identified the survival and success of republicanism with the cause of justice and peace in this world.

Classically, republicanism consisted in popular sovereignty, majoritarian government, minority protections, the rule of law, checks and balances among independent branches of government, and the priority of the common good—the “public thing” or res publica—over private gain. Baptists have understood these institutions as the best available political outworking of justice, biblically understood. We love our neighbors politically when we build, maintain, participate in, and defend institutions, norms, polities, and constitutions that reflect a broadly republican orientation.

Identifying republicanism as the center of our political vision raises another possible difficulty. Republicanism may be our social theory, but twenty-first century American democracy has departed from the republican vision in many ways—especially in republicanism’s cultural component. Republicanism is not just a set of political institutions. Republicanism rightly understood also has a cultural content and cultural theory to it. It is a culture engendered by an educated and informed citizenry, a spirit of fraternity among coequal citizens, a healthy patriotism and gratitude for the blessings of public life, a sense of honor for public service, and—above all—a vigilance against corruption, self-dealing, and the temptation to abuse the public trust for private gain.

Baptists and Methodists, both committed to republicanism, have been America’s largest Protestant forces for most of 200 years. Their mutual rejection of established religion in favor of democratic revivalism deeply shaped America’s character. Their insistence both on conversion and new life created a country that is future-oriented, dynamic, and constantly reinventing itself.

But there are differences. Methodists emerged from a state church and so are not so separationist. Methodists usually have bishops, are governed by conferences, and don’t own their church property. This makes them perhaps friendlier to central authority and more supportive of government action.

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut about a “wall of separation,” which is unmentioned in his otherwise similar letter to Connecticut Methodists:

No provision in our constitution ought to be dearer to man, than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprizes of the civil authority. It has not left the religion of its citizens under the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these should consider a conquest over the consciences of men either attainable, or applicable to any desirable purpose. To me, no information could be more welcome than that the minutes of the several religious societies should prove, of late, larger additions than have been usual, to their several associations. And I trust that the whole course of my life has proved me a sincere friend to religious, as well as civil liberty.

Although personally disagreeing with them theologically, Jefferson saw Methodists and Baptists as friends of democracy and religious freedom. But there are theological differences between the two, with social impact. Methodists, like Baptists, believe in conversion and in confidence about salvation. But Methodists have a special focus on holiness, entire sanctification and perfection. This belief in personal perfection has transposed into forms of soaring political perfection that can be idealistic, ambitious and fraught with danger.

Like Baptist political theology, but in somewhat different ways, Wesleyan political theology, although rarely articulated in theory, offers a unique Christian message about God-ordained human dignity, equality and responsibility in government and society.

This message is premised on Methodism’s understanding of each person bearing God’s political image, on a trinitarian concept of political power, and on a “graced understanding of nature.”  Wesleyan political theology is realist because it is Augustinian and readily admits to human depravity. Yet it is also optimistic, more so than other orthodox Protestant traditions, because it appreciates that divine grace, which calls individuals towards perfection, can also summon societies to greater righteousness. It is also very socially egalitarian, maybe more so than any other Christian tradition than Quakerism.

Methodist perfectionism, optimism and egalitarianism have led to mistakes.

In the late 20th century United Methodism often succumbed to extreme forms of Liberation Theology supporting globally a Marxist political theology as the Christian solution to poverty and injustice.  This commitment ignored human rights abuses and infringements on religious liberty, even as many Christians and others suffered for their faith under regimes United Methodism extolled.  This public theology was essentially materialist, focusing on expanding centralized state power to guarantee food, housing and health care, at the expense of liberty and human dignity, and in the process, failing to successfully provide even those material basics.  It also was false eschatologically.  History and Marxism were not aligned.

Methodism’s confusion was eschatological.  Wesley was arguably a very measured postmillennial, and he often acted as an amillennial.  Perhaps his best remembered political call is his 1763 admonition “to reform the nation, more particularly the Church; to spread scriptural holiness over the land.” His 19th century successors were much more confident about the church’s ability to usher in the Kingdom. Much of Methodism led the way starting early in the last century with an aggressively human-driven versus God-centered public theology, propelled forward by the Social Gospel’s sweeping vision of a society without poverty and pain. While Methodism was liberalizing theologically, it was successfully persuading America to adopt Prohibition, portrayed as a panacea for most national ills.  Prohibition’s dozen years were the apex of Methodism’s social witness in America and also the source of its downfall, as Methodism never politically recovered after its failure.

Methodists across the theological spectrum rallied to Prohibition.  After its failure, Methodism’s social witness, having learned the wrong lessons, became more utopian. Mainline Methodism in the 1930s renounced capitalism and war and imagined society liberated from sin and frailty. Denominational stances on economics, foreign policy, the environment and criminal justice became increasingly ideological in the 1960s and 1970s, literally becoming revolutionary during the Cold War’s final years as church agencies backed Marxist revolutionary regimes and military insurgencies globally. These causes created estrangement between the local church and national church structures.

Meanwhile, smaller forms of Wesleyan expression typically lacked a formal, sustained denominational political witness.  Several of these denominations, like the Free Methodists, the Wesleyans, the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army and Pentecostal churches, joined the National Association of Evangelicals, which issued its own political pronouncements that were, until recent years, invariably on the right, such as affirming capital punishment, backing school prayer, and urging vigorous U.S. defense and foreign policies against the Soviet Bloc.  Some members of these Wesleyan bodies became leaders in the Religious Right emerging in the late 1970s.  They did not offer a specifically Methodist perspective on political theology, only a generically American conservative Christian one.

Most of the original modern Religious Right was Calvinist influenced.  Francis Schaeffer, a conservative Presbyterian from Westminster Seminary, artfully welded traditional American post WWII Cold War conservatism with a Calvinistic critique of society and history. Some Wesleyans relied on the Schaeffer-inspired narrative for their public theology.

That vision is fading. Calvinism remains the dominant intellectual force in orthodox American Protestant and Evangelical life.  But many Calvinists are divided, disenchanted by the old Religious Right formula, tempted by social withdrawal, but also compelled by their tradition, however dourly, to confront society with the Gospel’s demands for divine justice.

There was never a Methodist modern equivalent of Francis Schaeffer to inspire a Wesleyan political activism.  Maybe Harry Ward of the Methodist Federation for Social Action in the early and mid 20th century was the closest equivalent though he was more activist than theorist.  Thanks partly to him, Mainline Methodist social witness was ideologically leftist starting in the 1930s. Arguably it began to leave historic Christian moral orthodoxy in 1956 when it endorsed contraception without serious qualifications.  More decisively it left it when endorsing, after a 20-minute debate, unrestricted abortion at the 1970 General Conference, over strong objections from Methodism’s then most prominent theologian Albert Outler and most prominent ethicist, Paul Ramsey. This departure from Christian moral consensus of course facilitated the formal debate over homosexuality beginning in 1972.

Also significant is the proliferation of political issues United Methodism began addressing with the 1968 General Conference, before which there typically were only a half dozen or so political resolutions printed at the end of the Book of Discipline.  After 1968 there emerged the Book of Resolutions, at first a few dozen pages and later approaching 1000 pages, with hundreds of pronouncements, few of which ever known at the local church level. This Book of Resolutions empowered United Methodism’s Washington, D.C. political witness office to lobby on scores of political issues across five decades, largely without informed engagement from most church members or any strong sense of hierarchy or priority regarding the relative importance of these issues.  The lack of focus and local level support made this scattershot political witness ineffective with legislators and policy makers.

Although professing to speak for originally 11 million church members, United Methodism’s political witness, headquartered in the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, built by the old Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, became indistinguishable from secular left-wing activism. United Methodism’s political witness, which included advocacy by the New York missions board and Council of Bishops pronouncements lacked uniquely Methodist public theology. This political advocacy echoed other liberal mainline Protestant denominations and merged into generic Religious Left activism. It offered a mostly materialistic political theology invested in centralized government’s expansive social welfare and regulatory state, rejecting or minimizing the state’s vocation for police and military powers, and ratifying the Sexual Revolution by accepting its anthropology of atomized, self-empowered individuals liberated from nature, natural law and traditional Christian teaching.

With smaller Wesleyan denominations outsourcing their political witness to the National Association of Evangelicals, there is today very little on which to model a comprehensive, thoughtful Wesleyan political and social witness. The fault is perhaps traceable to Wesley himself, who unlike John Calvin and John Knox, who guide their Reformed descendants, did not fully articulate any distinctive theory of the state. There are Calvinist, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox traditions of political theology.  It’s less clear whether there is a definite Wesleyan one.  Methodists have traditionally been more renown as doers than theorists, so the absence is not surprising if still unhelpful.  Other church political theology traditions offer centuries of guidance.  Methodism’s understanding of political witness often seems to skip from Wesley in 18th century England to the Social Gospel activism of the early 20th century, which was mostly crafted by non-Wesleyans.

Nineteenth century Methodism was a surging powerful social force deeply shaping an emerging democratic ethos.  But there seem to have been few recalled Methodist thinkers who articulated a Wesleyan statecraft. Methodists were thick in all the major political controversies and social reform movements.  But again, they were activists and apparently not theorists. They left an example of action but not a political theory for our tradition.  Leaders like Bishop Matthew Simpson of the Civil War era, a doer and sometimes theorist, seemed to conflate the church’s purpose with the nation.

The Temperance and Prohibition movements were the political fruit of that era’s Methodist piety. They adopted the Calvinist Puritan view of America as a called-out nation providentially summoned to greatness and holiness.  In their eschatology, God’s Kingdom is realized through American democracy, a view Bishop Simpson shared.  But they importantly added Methodism’s distinct, hopeful confidence in perfecting a holy society that successfully conquers social vices. The original Methodist Prohibitionists were mostly theologically orthodox and believed in the power of human sin and the need for personal repentance.  But they assumed the Holy Spirit could conquer all social sin just as the Spirit could perfect the individual believer.  Methodist perfectionism created and doomed Prohibition.

But Methodist Prohibitionists and their socially reforming predecessors, starting with Wesley himself, offer important counsel for crafting a new Wesleyan social and political theology that is both relevant today and firmly rooted to our tradition.  This process should replicate their moral enthusiasm while mindful that society this side of the eschaton will not be completely perfected. Wesley acknowledged as much.  Sinful though his Britain was, he thought the British constitutional system, based on the great political Whig compromise of 1688, the greatest in secular history.  As William Abraham recalled:

Wesley was a constitutionalist not a doctrinaire Tory. He believed in the monarchy, the established church, the confessional character of the universities, and the parliament of the day. He believed in liberty, but liberty not as unbridled liberty but a liberty built in an organic way into the laws of the day and the constraints of morality. He believed in the rights of citizens, but not Thomas Paine’s rights of man but in Burke’s rights of an Englishman that had been given him not as an abstract human agent but as one born into the liberties of English society. With rights came duties that needed to be taught and learned. Moreover, Wesley was ready to deploy the resources of natural law, logic, and common sense in order to engage those who disagreed with him in the public square. He recognized the need for economic intervention on behalf of the poor, in the encouragement and enforcement of morality, in education to civility, and in the maintenance of true morality.

Methodism’s founder firmly rejected the millenarianism and revolutionary spirit of the Puritans in the previous century.  His supposed postmillennialism was cautious.  He was an incremental social reformer.  Sometimes he’s portrayed as an autocratic Tory whose political theology traced authority directly from God to the crown and parliament, without any democratic ethos.

But as Theodore Weber, in his Politics in the Order of Salvation:  Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics, explained, Wesley’s soteriology inevitably has political implications that are ultimately egalitarian and that democratize political authority.  Divine grace for all arguably leads, whether intended by Wesley or not, to a wider political empowerment for all inherently subversive to the traditional political hierarchy that he professed to support.

Weber identified within Wesley’s theology, however embedded, a political image of God that is a framework for Methodist public theology.  It understands all persons as image bearers of God and divine agents in earthly governance.  This vocation is not exclusively assigned to a narrow elect but is, like divine grace, a universal assignment.

Wesley proposed a holistic image of God that included the natural, political and moral, according to Weber.  His failure more fully to develop the divine political image left Methodist political theology undeveloped but not nonexistent.

As Weber noted, the United Methodist Bishops’s anti-nuclear 1986 declaration, “In Defense of Creation,” one of contemporary Methodism’s most important political statements, barely cited Wesley and certainly claimed no specifically Methodist political tradition beyond broad pursuit of peace with justice. The main critic of that statement, ordained United Methodist and Princeton ethicist Paul Ramsey, in his response to the bishops, did reference Wesley’s view of sinful humanity but likewise did not cite or offer a Methodist political theology.  It was maybe a missed opportunity, but Ramsey can’t be faulted for missing what nearly everyone else has missed, at least according to Weber, whose work strives to bring “Wesley’s politics into the order of salvation of his evangelical theology.”

In Weber’s view, humans bear God’s political image, giving them, in Wesley’s words, “dominion over the fishes of the sea, and over all the earth.”  Man is “God’s vicegerent upon earth, the prince and governor of this lower world; and all the blessings of God flowed through him to the inferior creatures. Man was the channel of conveyance between his Creator and the whole brute creation.”  This human dominion over creation is corrupted by the fall but God’s political image is not discontinued, notes Weber, though needing redemption.

Weber said the Wesleyan concept of the political image of God is wholly trinitarian, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit “in being and action” collectively govern creation. When rightly ordered, humans as stewards of creation “image the government of God,” in “imitation of God,” and “informed by analogy of God.”  Weber contrasted Wesley’s “political image informed by a trinitarian ethics” that is transformational with Martin Luther’s view that the Gospel has no direct political implication. Luther grimly saw government’s purpose narrowly as restraining human depravity. The Wesleyan perspective sees government more cheerfully as “drawn from the knowledge of the work of God and not from the problem that humankind has become.”

And Weber contrasted the Wesleyan perspective with the Thomistic natural law tradition “that derives government from the social and rational character of human nature.” Wesley’s idea of government is not so anthropological but is based more directly on Trinitarian divine agency and through a notion of nature infused by divine grace. Weber also contrasted Wesley with Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who originated government “in Christ,” creating an expectation that government will model the Beatitudes, while Wesley integrates all three Persons of the Godhead into the political image. Wesley himself was hierarchal. But Wesleyan political theology is implicitly not “from God and therefore not from the people” but “from God and therefore through the people.”  This Wesleyan notion of universal political responsibility expands the opportunity and duty of governance collectively to all divine image bearers, irrespective of office.  Wesley himself maybe surprised that his theology did not necessarily privilege monarchy or any specific political system. Although not his preference for Britain, his theological assumptions pointed towards some form of participatory democracy, as Weber believed.

As Weber described Wesley’s concept of God’s political image, humans participate in divine agency when they participate politically, and “surrender it when they decline to accept political responsibility.” People do not confer authority on their rulers, who are ordained by God, as Wesley certainly insisted, but are divinely “deputized” to govern by authorizing their rulers.  As Weber describes:  “No one can govern authoritatively apart from this process of consent.” Weber quoted Wesley: “God’s image upon man consists…in his place of authority.  Let us make man in our image, and let him have dominion. As he has the government of the inferior creatures, he is as it were God’s representative on earth. Yet his government of himself by the freedom of his will, has in it more of God’s image, than his government of the creatures.”

Wesley did not believe the Fall cancelled this self-government, because humans retain God’s political image. And their political institutions, if functional, imitate God’s governance in caring for all. States and societies that seek the common good best image God.  Weber insisted the Wesleyan view of “political image keeps the focus of political institutions and their operators on God’s political work, not on themselves.” And the vocation is assigned not just to Christians but to all image bearers, though premised on trinitarianism, not natural law or “common agreement.”

Weber posited that government based on divine political image subordinates power to law and counters capricious force under any statecraft. A legitimate government partners with all people under its rule in fulfillment of their political vocation, as enacted in particular times and places. States and societies that seek to imitate God are examples of prevenient grace “overcoming the distortions of sin.”  There’s no guaranteed political progress, but the political image and light of God are never extinguished. Justifying grace “includes the renewal of political vocation.” And sanctification enables societies to progress away from force towards loving consent and stewardship.

For Weber, “earnestly striving” is a call to political involvement and “to participation in the common human responsibility for the care of creation, that is, to the imaging of God in our shared, interactive, public existence.” It is not a call to political revolution per se, nor is it a call to reactionary satisfaction with the status quo. Instead it is a persevering quest for a society going on to perfection by seeking to recognize and live out the image of God in all persons, and to realize in all persons the empowering political image of God.

The Trinitarian Wesleyan understanding of God’s political image, as Weber understands it, offers a grace-filled and theologically rich alternative to the hyperbolically perfectionist-utopian Methodist political activism of much of the last century if not before.  It also rejects brutalist contemporary interpretations of Luther’s Two Kingdoms, which imply often with moral detachment that government is only about effective force against gross evil, and plays no role in seeking to elevate society through increased appreciation of God’s image in each person.

Methodist political theology, compared to other Protestant traditions, is optimistic.  As Dale Coulter has noted, “Wesleyanism retained an optimism about reform and the human person through its commitment to a graced understanding of nature, [although] this optimism remained tempered by a kind of political realism.”  Such optimistic realism “emerged from a basic commitment to human liberty and an interventionist account of divine providence.”  After all, the “work of grace in nature created both the freedom to pursue the moral life, but also the capacity to sear the conscience.” Coulter said the Wesleyan view of justice is eschatological for both individuals and society. Weber agreed that the Wesleyan perspective assumes that societies, like persons, can move towards perfection, but tempered by eschatological realism.

This Wesleyan eschatological realism and optimism, understanding God’s political image on each person, offers a distinctly Wesleyan political theology that might serve other Christians more widely. Likewise, uniquely Baptist political theology can and should serve the broader church in America, which is more unmoored from tradition and denominational distinctives than ever before.